God’s Glorious Church
Shattering Myths about the Unchurched: Part One
John 4:35
Woodlawn Baptist Church
February 13, 2005
Introduction (See endnote)
You are probably familiar with the chapter in which our text is found. Jesus had been speaking with the woman at the well, had led her to saving faith, and had watched her walk back to town from the place where they sat. In the meantime, the disciples had just come from town, where they had gone for food, and when they got back to the well Jesus was speaking with this woman of ill-repute, a Samaritan woman, and what was worse was that she was of the wrong race. Even then, just as it still is today, followers of Christ could not accept those who were not like them.
Although they didn’t talk to Jesus about their concerns, Jesus knew their hearts. These guys were still along for the ride. They enjoyed Jesus’ fellowship; they enjoyed His teaching; they enjoyed the miracles, but they still were not in tune with His overriding mission of seeking and saving those who were lost. Jesus told the disciples why He was here, and He wanted them not only to understand His mission, but to make it theirs as well, so He said in verse 35,
“Lift up your eyes, and look on the fields; for they are white already to harvest.”
What did He want them to see? The fields! And what were the fields? The masses of people who were just waiting to be reached. Listen, the problem is still the same today. While we enjoy the fellowship and the teaching and the preaching the fields are waiting to be harvested. It is not a problem for our associational work. It is not a problem for our missionaries. It is our problem – it is our harvest – those are our fields, and this is our work.
Tonight I want to talk to you for a few minutes about the unchurched. Like the disciples, we make preconceived judgments about who or what they are. When those men walked up on Jesus that day, they weren’t concerned with getting to know this woman. They weren’t interested in her condition or her heart and soul – they had already made up their minds about her and so far as they were concerned she had been written off.
When it comes to the unchurched in our community, we can either try to gain and understanding of who they are, or we can continue to dismiss them like the disciples did. We know what we should do – we too should lift up our eyes unto our field – Denison and the surrounding area, and see the harvest that is awaiting our laboring hands.
Who are the unchurched? And what are they like? As we consider these questions, I want us to take a look at nine common myths that people hold about unchurched people. We are going to deal with four of these tonight, and the next five in a couple of weeks. The myths I am going to share with you are the result of research done by Thom Rainer , who is the founding dean of the Billy Graham School of Missions, Evangelism and Church Growth at the SBC Seminary in Louisville, KY. He is also the president of the Rainer Group, a church and denominational consulting firm. These myths are the result of hundreds of hours of interviews with several hundred people who were at one time unchurched, and are now attending a place of worship. I say all of that simply to say that I’m not making these myths up; they are legitimate things that you and I believe, either consciously or unconsciously about those in our community who do not go to church, and it is important to realize that before we can ever hope to have the opportunity to change their lives, we must first change our attitudes and beliefs about who they are.
Myth #1 – Most unchurched think and act like white, middle-class suburbanites with no church background.
Why do you suppose that we would believe that about those who are unchurched? Why would we think that most of the unchurched think and act like white, middle-class people? Because we are white middle-class people! Even though a casual walk through the mall or Wal-Mart tells us differently, we assume that most people are just like us.
If you were to spend much time looking at church strategies for reaching their communities, many of them look the same. It is like we take a cookie-cutter approach to reaching the unchurched without ever considering that those we’re trying to reach may not respond to our “one size fits all” mentality.
Have you ever (and I know you have) been in the store and thought to yourselves…
• Why doesn’t he pull his pants up? I’d like to go over there and pull them up for him.
• What is that music she’s listening to?
• How in the world can they act like that? Don’t they know better?
• What do you mean you don’t need church? You can’t be happy without God.
There are a thousand ways we do it, but what we’re doing is assuming that everyone should think and act like we do. Do you know why they wear their pants like that? Because they think differently than you. Do you know why people are happy outside of church? Because they think different than you do. Are they wrong?
Let me give you something that may come as a surprise to you: in many instances, the differences we share with other people have little to do with right or wrong. Instead, they are issues of personal preference, generational attitudes, and social upbringing, and until we come to the place where we are willing to admit that the people “out there” don’t think and act like white, middle-class people with no church background, we are going to be poorly prepared to reach them.
Myth #2: The unchurched are turned off by denominational names in the church name.
One of the biggest movements in recent years has been the abandonment of denominational titles in church names. Baptist churches all over the nation are dropping Baptist from their names, but it’s not just the Baptists. Churches of all sorts of denominations have been doing it because they fear the stigma that goes along with a name.
Is it wrong to drop your affiliation from your name? Is it wrong to take Baptist out of the name? While there are a good many Missionary Baptist brethren who would fight over this, it is not wrong to do so, but it may be absolutely unnecessary. When interviewed, most of the people in the Rainer study not only didn’t care about the church name, they didn’t understand why the question would even be asked. Over 80% of the formerly unchurched said that the church name had little or no influence upon their joining a particular church.
I have personally found this to be true. Many of our own people will say that the name matters, but when they leave they do not necessarily seek out a Missionary Baptist church – they have looked for churches with good preaching, good fellowship and good children’s ministries, and denominational affiliation takes a back seat to the other issues. I’m not saying that’s right, but that’s what happens.
Now this ought to mean a couple of things to us:
1. We need to quit thinking like “Baptists” and begin thinking like normal, caring people. I don’t mean we shouldn’t be proud of our heritage, but that the unchurched, by and large are not interested in our heritage. They are however interested in whether we care, whether we are sincere, whether we are willing to minister to their needs and help them to grow in their relationships with Christ. In the words of one of the ladies in the study, “I could have cared less what the name of the church was. I was lonely and hurting and needed to find a community that cared.”
Too often we (and I speak of we in general) go out in the name of our church, or in the name of our association to reach people, but we are never taught that in the Scriptures. The early church was not known by any denominational affiliation – they were known as followers of Christ, thus being tagged with the name Christians.
2. Having said all of that – it is perfectly all right to be proud of our Baptist heritage, so long as that pride is healthy and is not filled with arrogance or a “better than you” attitude.
Myth #3: The unchurched never attend church
The word unchurched may seem to imply that a person has no interest in church and never attends one. However, there are relatively few Americans who never attend church. To say that someone is unchurched simply means that they are people who do not attend with any regularity or consistency. An unchurched person might attend once a quarter, or on holidays. Many of you have unchurched family members, kids or grandkids who have quit attending church, but they’ll come with you occasionally. Some have moved away, and only attend when they come to town. They do not attend regularly, but it isn’t as though they never attend.
I was reading the other day that on Easter Sunday in 1999, 12% of atheists and agnostics attended a Christian church service. That 12% comes out to nearly one million adults who attended church that day.
Because we wrongly think that the people “out there” never attend church, they are ignorant about biblical or church matters, but that is completely untrue. They may not be as familiar with the routine of our services, but they are not ignorant of them either.
Because we are guilty of believing this particular myth, we can get the wrong idea that the unchurched are unconcerned about spiritual matters. I cannot think of many people I have ever met who had no concern for spiritual matters. They may think of them on different terms than you, and they may have different ways of expressing them and trying to meet them, but unchurched people by and large do think about spiritual matters, do want answers, do want the truth, but may just not attend a church to find them.
Myth #4: The unchurched cannot be reached by direct personal evangelism
How do you think most people who join a church heard the gospel? Go ahead and answer that question. Did they hear it from an individual, from the television, in a church service? Modern teaching through seminars and books has led us to believe that we would do better to engage in what some would call friendship evangelism, or garage-door evangelism. In other words, we need to fellowship the unchurched into our churches where they can hear the gospel preached and be saved.
There are probably many reasons we have abandoned personal evangelism, and you probably have your own reasons for why you do not share your faith or ask people about their relationships with God. You may feel as though you don’t know enough, or that it is none of your business. You may feel afraid or apprehensive about talking to them about God, or fear that you wouldn’t know what to say if they started asking you questions. The point though is that most believers today and even most churches have abandoned direct, personal evangelism as a means of reaching the unchurched.
The interesting thing about this though is that in the Rainer Group’s survey, it was discovered that 53% of those who joined a church did so after someone from the church they joined came and shared Christ with them. Another 12% said that someone else shared Christ with them personally, even though they didn’t join that particular church. Only 1/3 of the unchurched said that no one made an attempt to share Christ one-on-one. While building relationships is vital, direct personal evangelism will often make the biggest difference.
Conclusion
While the disciples were in town buying lunch, they were surrounded by unchurched, unreached people and never thought about it, not because they didn’t know better, but because in this particular case their preconceived ideas about these people prevented them from even wanting to reach them.
I hope the same is not true of our church. While we talk about the unchurched, the number of people who are continuing to be unreached climbs. Truth be told, most of us simply do not realize how unevangelized and unchurched our country, and more importantly for us perhaps, how unevangelized and unchurched our own community has become. Only 41% of Americans attend church services on a typical weekend, and that means any kind of church. Every week more churches are being built, but the number of people attending them is going down.
Is it possible that we’ve been asking the wrong questions because we too have the wrong idea about who it is we’re trying to reach? Are we involved in activities and ministries designed to reach people, when the people we’re trying to reach are different than we expected? I think probably so, and so I ask you, just as the Lord asked His disciples to lift up your eyes and see the fields. I want you to do more than look at them, I want you to see them, really see them: see them as Jesus sees them.
The only way to do that is to allow the Lord God to shatter your preconceived ideas about the fields, about the people we need to reach. It is absolutely necessary that we take a fresh look at the unchurched in our community and begin asking the tough questions about who they are and whether we are really interested in reaching them. Are we going to be the church that is only interested in white, middle-class, suburbanite type folk who think and act like us, or are we willing to look beyond them to see the rest of our community? Are we willing to look at the 4,000 people who are not white? Are we willing to look at those who are single, divorced, hurting, and trying to get off dope? Are we willing to look at those who cannot attend on Sunday mornings because of work, those who do not like southern gospel music, and those who carry NIV Bibles or no Bibles at all?
Do you see the fields? They are greater and broader than we have been conditioned to see, but tonight I ask you to beg God to help you see them, to help you recognize them, to give you a burden for them, to keep you awake at night thinking of them, weeping over them, and to be heartbroken for them. You may very well need to begin by repenting of your own sinful thinking toward some of the fields. Ask God to forgive you for dismissing some of the harvest because they are not like you. Ask God to forgive you for not having a heart for the unchurched, unreached people of Denison, and let the change begin with you.
Works Cited:
1. The title and main points in this message are taken from the chapter titled Shattering Myths about the Unchurched in Thom Rainer’s book Surprising Insights From The Unchurched (Zondervan: Grand Rapids, MI 2001). The content of each point has been changed to fit our church. Members of Woodlawn Baptist Church are encouraged to read Rainer’s book for greater insight on this subject and may check it out of the church office.
