When I visit a church, I’ll typically check out their worship folder. And something I’ve noticed is many churches include an attendance and giving summary … a practice that has always bothered me, and I have always resisted, in the churches I pastored.
Let me tell you why.
First—many people’s attendance patterns are so sporadic to where providing that information doesn’t give them an accurate picture. For instance, in one church I pastored, a number of people got paid once a month. Because of that, the third Sunday of the month tended to be higher giving. If you, as a parishioner, were present on a couple of Sundays when the offering total was below the weekly need and not present on the Sunday when the third Sunday report was posted, you’d come away thinking the church was struggling financially when, in fact, that wasn’t the case. This incomplete picture sometimes created an unnecessary sense of worry and/or hysteria.
But second, and more important—I’ve always believed the worship folder shouldn’t be targeted at the regular church attender, but at the new person … as it was typically the first printed piece from the church that he/she was going to examine to form an opinion. That’s why I was very persnickety when it came to the wording of blurbs in the worship folder. I always wrote them with the idea the reader was a first-time guest. I wrote them so if a new person wanted to respond and take a step toward heightened engagement, the information presented would allow him/her to do so. There’s nothing worse than a new person who is interested in joining the softball team but can’t follow through because the blurb says, “If interested see Joe Blow” and he/she doesn’t know who Joe Blow is. I also hated language that said “you are welcome to join us” for so-and-so. I thought it was much better to say, “Lets come together” for so-and-so.
If there’s an attendance and financial summary in the worship folder, new people can easily conclude that attendance and giving is what the church values most. When it comes to what I wanted for people, it was certainly much more than getting them to attend and give. I wanted them to experience personal transformation—to encounter and respond to a resource for living that would cause them to modify the path they were on and alter their destiny. I wanted them to adjust their priorities to where they’d more fully embrace the mission and call of Jesus. I wanted them to be a part of something that captured the entirety of their lives and couldn’t be accomplished in a couple of hours on Sunday.
Not to downplay or denigrate church attendance or giving—there certainly isn’t anything wrong with encouraging people to meet consistently with others for worship or challenging them to entrust back to God a portion of the blessings He’s entrusted to them. As a pastor, you can’t impact a community if you don’t have people that are willing to do that. But at the same time, what it means to embrace the lordship of Jesus is so much more than church attendance and financial support. It can’t be reduced to showing up on a regular basis and giving a percentage of your income. There is so much more to being aligned with the mission of God in this world than bolstering the institution with your attendance and offerings.
I’m often reminded some of the harshest words Jesus had for people were for those who, when it came to church attendance and giving, were exceptional. The Pharisees were stellar by those standards—they had the church attendance and giving thing down! But Jesus said they missed what it was all about—that their lives were misaligned and out of sync with the things that really mattered and really evidenced whether or not a person was part of God’s family.
So—how did I keep people informed financially? In my last church, we put together a simple one-page summary every quarter and placed it in the lobby where interested people could pick it up. We’d run an announcement in the worship folder that said something like, “October marks the end of six months of our church’s fiscal year. If you’d like an update as to current financial reality, a brief report has been prepared and can be picked up at the Info Center in the lobby.” That way we were hopefully communicating what needed to be passed along without unintentionally sending a message to people that sitting on their fanny and periodically putting some money in the plate was the sum total of what it meant to be a follower of Jesus.
Granted—I believe when someone makes a genuine commitment to Jesus, he or she will have to connect with a group of believers in order to thrive and grow in that relationship. But I also believe that’s a secondary thing—not primary! When it comes to what we put in the worship folder, we need to include things that cast a more compelling vision for what it means to be a follower of Jesus—developing open and sincere relationships with others who are on the same journey … serving the broken, disillusioned, and disadvantaged people in our community … using what God has built into us to make a difference in someone else’s life … respecting and valuing people for whom Christ died. We need to stop doing some senseless, mindless things that reduces engagement in the ongoing mission of God to sitting in weekly meetings and paying your dues and the belief that, by doing so, you’ve met your spiritual obligation.