If I could I would hire one person per week who was a professional mystery shopper to come to our church to do an evaluation. No one would know who they were, not even the pastor.
They would come early, participate in the service, drink a cup of coffee and leave. That afternoon he or she would be debriefed. A report would be written. Given to all the leadership and staff. No names. That would be on record in case anyone doubted the veracity of the report.
That would uncover the parts of what happens in Churchianity that isn't working, is confusing, difficult to grasp, banal, irrelevant and downright irritating.
That might be the pastors sermon or the music or who knows.
In any case, I would hope that just the fact that the Mystery Shopper could be in the building would cause everyone to start looking around for things we can do better.
Maybe then we might get back to the basics again as Spurgeon said in the post below. Tough to fake reality isn't it?
2 comments:
An old idea used by growing churches and consultants for years.
...AND this would only work IF the leaders cared about fixing something in the first place (save yourself the thousands of $$$ for a consultant-it's all the same thing and nothing ever comes of it unless the church is REALLY serious. Few are). Most live the lie that things are just fine and they don't need any advise or wisdom, especially from someone outside their opinions. This is probably why churches repeat their past over and over and over, doing the same mistakes. Nobody should ever stop learning, especially a church leader. There's so many wise and gifted people out there that church leaders could learn from. Instead they're ignored or shunned. Well, you reap what is sown. If it's put on bad soil, it dies. The ugly part is some refuse to learn from their past. Eventually the ball stops.
Do it another way.
Leader - Sometimes look at things from a visitors viewpoint. Are you speaking above their head, or worse, their heart? If so, then all you accomplished was to give them a lot of info. Keep it simple. Jesus did, and does. We're the ones making things way too hard.
Start by loving that person right in front of you this Sunday.
Selah
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