Tearing down walls and building bridges

One of my doctoral classes was on church growth taught by Elmer Towns. One day in class he asked each student to tell the class how high the walls were around their churches from 1-10. He explained that every church has built walls, often unintentionally but sometimes on purpose, to keep out the people they do not want in their church. Each student had to give him a number. Most of us gave a number between 3-5. When we finished he told us if we wanted to grow our churches we had to remove those walls and begin to build bridges into our communities. I've never forgot that lesson.

Dr. Towns was right...every church has walls that often keep new people away from the church. Those walls may be the way we treat first-time guests. They may be in the way our church is structured. These walls could be the appearance of the church property that sends the wrong signals to observers. They could be the reputation the church has for the way it treats its pastors or members. The style of worship in the church can be a wall that keeps people out. Our traditions often becomes walls that divide "us" from "them." Frankly, anything can become a wall that excludes people.

One problem with walls is that we are often not aware they exist. We become so comfortable doing church the same way we always have that we don't notice that our traditional ways of doing things tell people they are not welcome. Having served in denominational work for 14 years I visited a lot of churches that did a very poor job welcoming guests. In fact, some were so bad that I developed a workshop on church hospitality that I presented to a number of churches. From the moment a first-time guest enters the church property that person will make a decision within 10 minutes as to whether or not they will return. They make that decision based on the walls they encounter.

It's vital that churches begin to identify any walls that exist in their churches and begin to remove them immediately. Yes, some of those walls may be sacred to some members, but if they are a barrier to people experiencing God in our churches, they need to be removed. In 1995 Bill Easum wrote a great book titled Sacred Cows Make Gourmet Burgers that addresses the need to remove some of the sacred cows found in many of our churches, and he points out how leadership can make this happen.

The cross of Jesus Christ should be the only stumbling block the unchurched should experience in any of our churches (1 Cor. 1: 23). We never compromise the gospel in order to appease others, but we do need to remove our man-made walls that keep people from hearing the good news of Jesus Christ. Instead of building walls, let's build bridges into our communities to help make it easier for others to experience what our church has to offer and the message we have to share.