In this special episode, co-hosts Joel Southerland and Scott Smith discuss how, when the church acts on the consumer mentality of the Church, it accomplishes less. You will hear illustrations about the importance of choosing the best options for your church and on how to limit those options to focus more on evangelism.

What do you need to take away from the church to make it more evangelistic?

To learn more, visit the Evangelism blog at www.namb.net/yourchurchonmission. You can also email us at evangelism@namb.net.    

Additional resources:

Start with Why: How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone to Take Action

Transcript

Announcer: Presented by the Evangelism Department of the North American Mission Board, this is Your Church on Mission Evangelism Podcast, the podcast to help pastors be on mission in their local communities. Here's your host, Joel Southerland.

Joel S.: Welcome to Your Church on Mission. I'm your host, Joel Southerland, and this is the Evangelism Podcast of the North American Mission Board. Hey, recently I read an article by Simon Sinek who wrote the book, Start with Why. He wrote this article several years ago, but I thought it was really important to maybe mention it today as we talk about evangelism.

Joel S.: In the article, he talks about a shoe salesman in the 1950s named Ben Prober who went on to own a very, very successful chain of women's shoe stores. The prices at his store weren't the cheapest. The selections weren't that different than any other store in town. The stores themselves were pretty basic. They were nice, but nothing that our design and experience obsessed era would consider any kind of competitive advantage, so with no apparent superior offering or value added, Prober Shoes managed to outsell their competition year after year after year.

Joel S.: When Ben was asked, "What's your secret to success?", here's what he always said, "Two, not three. Two, not three." Ben understood something about human beings that modern businesses and even churches have forgotten, and here's what it is, "More choice is bad." Let me tell you how he fleshed it out.

Joel S.: When a lady came into one of his shops, the odds were good that she would want to try on more than one pair of shoes. If she already had two styles to choose from and she asked for a third option, here's what Ben would say. I love this. He would say, "Of course, madame, I'd be happy to fit you the style of your choice. Now, which one would you like for me to take away?" What Ben learned is that, when his customer had two options, they could easily make a choice about which style they preferred. However, when they had three or more to choose from, they had more trouble making a decision and, more often than not, left the store without any shoes.

Joel S.: Here's the truth. Even in business, even if customers think they want more choice, the facts are overwhelmingly against them. Not only are we more likely to make a purchase with fewer options, but the confidence we have in our choices and satisfaction we get from these choices is considerably higher than if we're forced to choose from a larger selection. In other words, the only result of competing with more is you do less, you sell less. I want to compare that and bring that into church world in this podcast because what happens is, in churches, we wind up offering so much to meet the consumer mentality of our members, we actually wind up accomplishing less.

Joel S.: I'm joined by my co-host today, Scott Smith, who's an evangelism consultant with the Georgia Baptist Mission Board. Scott, most churches need to simplify a little bit, don't they?

Scott Smith: Yeah, they really do. It's kind of like government regulations. We add them, and we typically don't take the old ones away, so it becomes burdensome after a while. It becomes too heavy-laden with too many options. It's a frog in a kettle thing, right? It doesn't happen overnight. It's slow so we don't notice that we've just got too much on the agenda or just simply [inaudible 00:03:51] we're trying to funnel our visitors and our members into.

Joel S.: I think that ... I love the frog in the kettle analogy for this because I think that's what happens. Over time, in the life of a minister of a church, we added a lot of good ministries, and we added ministries when they were hot, when it fit the culture of the time, when it fits the context of the time, and then what we never did was take away any of the other options. Not only do we have the best current cutting-edge ministry going on at our church, we also have the ministry that worked 20 years ago going on at our church.

Scott Smith: I think one of the core problems, though, is that we don't have a system whereby we evaluate, not only the new ideas, but whether or not the old ideas are still working so, without any kind of a litmus test or a filter or checklist or evaluation assessment system in place, things tend to stay on the registry of options.

Joel S.: Yeah. That's also ... Man, I think since both of us are in evangelism, we both would argue that the litmus test perhaps you ought to consider is how many people are coming across through that ministry. That's not a bad gauge for is a ministry working or not, right?

Scott Smith: Exactly. At the end of the day, I mean, the Great Commission is really the great filter for what we endorse as a worthwhile idea in a church. I know we'll say more about this in some future podcasts that we're kind of kicking around with conversations. I think there's a lot to say about that, but I think back down to brass tacks is, at the end of the day, we have to evaluate our evangelists' effectiveness first, and that means every program in the church and every option that we give our people, ultimately, is traced back to how it impacts our evangelistic effectiveness.

Joel S.: What's going wrong in most churches is and, Scott, you preach in a lot of churches and I have over the years, as well, so you go to announcement time. You go to the average church, Scott, and you open up a bulletin, and it's probably a tri-fold document that has tons of options in it. I mean, we're seeing multiple kid, multiple student, multiple adults, senior adults, ministries on Sunday, Wednesday, Monday, Thursday.

Joel S.: At the end of the day, though it sounds okay, like, "Well, we want a ministry for everybody in the church," really, in all probability, you're giving them three pairs of shoes instead of two, and most people are going to walk away not having made a purchase. They're going to walk away and not engage with anything you have going on because they can't figure out what should they engage with, this [inaudible 00:06:50], so when you throw in another announcement about a new ministry you're starting, I think sometimes it just cripples people, doesn't it?

Scott Smith: It does. I think we forget that everything communicates. Everything communicates. Your announcements really communicate what your church is really about, what's the heartbeat of your church, your brochure, the website, the different things that are listing all these options, where we're finding out about them, they're communicating what is the heartbeat of your church. I think a lot of ministries can be directly traced back to evangelism. A lot of servant ministry opportunities and things like that, because of the way it's phrased or worded or what it's called but, for most churches, at least in my experience, for most churches, our announcements basically say, "We like to keep people busy. We like to keep people busy."

Scott Smith: Some churches, if you look at the menu, it's all about going deeper, right? You're communicating, "We are a church that likes to go deeper. We're a church that likes to really focus on discipleship, and its classes and small groups and on everything under the sun. Nothing wrong with that by any stretch, but there are those church, when you go into a highly evangelistic church, one that's really getting it done in evangelism, you don't have to have anybody interpret it to you.

Scott Smith: As a matter of fact, the very person who's making the announcements, if that is a part of their service, invariably communicates something about so that people can be saved, even if they're saying, "Look, we did this last year and, man, we had 18 people saved and we're excited about what's going to happen this year." Evangelism bleeds out when evangelism is the driver of the activities.

Joel S.: Yeah, so you can't have ... This is great, great wording. What that means is, you can't have all these activities going on that are non-evangelistic because when you give them options, too many options, I mean, here's what we know. Experience tells us and observation tells us people will choose the non-evangelistic option.

Scott Smith: Right, right. This conversation assumes that we're really talking about assimilation, and I think that's what keeps a lot of us up at night is, how do we assimilate, how do we get people from being a nominal member to really involved and being a tither and a worker and really using their gifts? It's almost like spray and pray. The more options I put out there for our people to plug into, they're going to plug into something.

Scott Smith: Surely, the longer the menu, they're going to find something, right, but it kind of goes back to would you rather go to cheesecake factory where it takes 40 minutes to order because you literally have to read through countless different types of food and one menu to even make a choice or do you just want to the best barbecue place in town where you know you're going to have your order in in ten minutes and enjoy the meal.

Scott Smith: It goes back to exactly what you were saying earlier. We do want to assimilate but, ultimately, every believer is to be assimilated into disciple-making, but Biblical disciple-making has evangelism at its core so, at the end of the day, it's not just, "Do I get

Episode ID: 1000421530789

GUID: https://sub.namb.net/feed/your-church-on-mission-podcast/15191

Release Date: 10/10/2018, 18:34:47