Acts 17: 1-9 – Reaching the non-practicing Christian with community that works

In this passage, Paul heads over to Thessalonica, and follows a well-worn path.

We’ve already well established that Paul’s go-to strategy of evangelism is not to go to those furthest from God, but to those closest – the Jews. Now we know from the epistles that Paul’s mission was “first for the Jew, then for the Gentile”, which suggests that he was doing it on spiritual rather than strategic grounds, but there’s no doubt that there is a strategic advantage by going first to the Jew.

Who are the equivalent of the Jews in this passage (those that are closest to God without accepting him) for us in the 21^st Western World? It's the non-practicing Christian. 

Look at this tweet by Peter Lynas from November 2022, just after the release in the results of the 2021 UK Census.

https://twitter.com/peterlynas/status/1597949106559029251?s=46&t=n1Hvhh_zKVrSiiYLxEJiBA

The amount of people listing themselves as Christian fell from 10 years previously to 46.2% of the population of England and Wales – 27.5 million, but only 3.6 million actually consider themselves practicing Christians. That means that there are 23.9 million non-practicing Christians.

If we’re going see a nation re-evangelised for Christ, we’d be well advised to seek to reach the non-practicing Christians. I think that it’s who Paul would seek to reach. Could you imagine how the nation would change if 27.5 million people were in church on Sunday? If 27.5 million people were reading the Bible and living by its teachings? If 27.5 million people were regularly praying? What kind of nation would that be?

Paul’s first priority was to reach those who knew God but didn’t know Jesus, and reasoned with them.

How can we reach the non-practicing Christians in our community?

 To answer that question, we need to ask why people aren’t practicing Christians.

This links into a 2018 study undertaken in the USA by Pew Research. They identified the top 9 reasons people don’t attend church:

1. They practice their faith in "other ways." (37%)
2. They are not believers. (28%)
3. No reason is "very important." (26%)
4. They haven't found a house of worship they like. (23%)
5. They don't like the sermons. (18%)
6. They don't feel welcome. (14%)
7. They don't have the time. (12%)
8. Poor health or mobility. (9%)
9. No house of worship in their area. (7%)

Some of these are becoming easier to overcome.  “No house of worship in their area” and “Poor health and mobility” are already able to be overcome because of Churxh Planting and Online Church. We can also get rid of “they are not believers” because in this instance, we’re trying to reach people who believe, but don’t practice their faith. That changes the top 9 to a top 6:

1. They practice their faith in "other ways." (37%)
2. No reason is "very important." (26%)
3. They haven't found a house of worship they like. (23%)
4. They don't like the sermons. (18%)
5. They don't feel welcome. (14%)
6. They don't have the time. (12%)

The article, by ABC Action News, goes on to say: “More than half the people who believe but don't attend religious services regularly are women, and they are more likely than men to say they haven't found a house of worship they like and have found other ways to put their faith into practice.

And why haven't these women found a house of worship they like? More than 6 in 10 said it's because they have poor health or difficulty getting around, and more than half (54%) said it's because they haven't felt welcomed by congregations.”

The big one here is feeling welcomed. So how can we help people to feel welcomed in our churches?

It’s worth saying that the phrase “people turn up for the content and stay for the community” is true. I don’t need to speak to the quality of services, as there are a million and one different websites and blogs that will help you upgrade your website, sound, lighting, preaching, worship and more. The keys to remember is: Do things excellently, do it authentically, and don’t be shallow.

Figure2: You need all three to have an effective service 

So let’s figure out community. Community starts from the very first moment the person interacts with your church. Let’s work out the steps:

1.  Social Media

Today, community starts online. This is not just about your church’s social media account, although that’s important too. It’s about every member of your church and how they act online. If someone considers themselves a member of your church, then how they act online is crucial to how that person will feel welcomed into a community. If there are people who are rude or disrespectful online who attend your church, you’ve lost people already.  

2.  Car Park

After you’ve got over the hurdle of social media, someone may decide to pluck up the courage to come to your church service, and there is a myriad of ways we can put people off. The car park is the next stop on the journey towards community. The key here is to use people who are warm and friendly.

3.  Front Door

Same rules apply with the front door. The type of people you use are vital. If you don’t get the right personality type, you’ll lose people. Think about it, if you were to come to my house and I was to open the door and say nothing to you, you’d feel really odd. You’d also feel really odd if I was too over-the-top, giving you high-fives for walking through the door and shouting at you excitedly. Unfortunately, these are oftentimes the types of people that haunt our front doors.

In his book Excellence Wins, Horst Schulze, the former CEO of Ritz-Carlton Hotels explains how he wanted his hotel guests to feel like they were at their mother’s house. What does it feel like to be at your mother’s house. Well, that’s different for everyone, but what I think he means is that sense of warmth, care and hospitality. It’s for this reason that older members of your congregation can be the best people on your front door. They make it feel like you’re at your mother’s house.

The best example of this I can think of is a lady in my church called Marion. Marion is an elderly lady who embodies what it means to be warm, inviting, and hospitable. She’s not cold and she’s not overbearing, she has the innate ability to make you feel truly welcomed. New people love her, and members can’t wait to give her a hug!

4.  The Tea & Coffee Area

We often think of tea and coffee areas as a place to – get tea and coffee! But there’s so much more going on than that. A refreshments area creates social space, which is different from the crowd space of the auditorium. A social space is a space that is anywhere from 10 to 50 people where small conversations can take place. The best example of this is a house party. In a house party, you have a large group but everyone splits off into little groups to chat. Its in these environments where friendships are started. It’s where you end up having “a good chat” with someone you didn’t expect.

Your tea and coffee area provides the potential for this to be social space. You’ll need to think carefully about how you lay out your space that creates enough pockets of space that aren’t too big. That might mean using clever ways to zone off larger areas. Then make the space suitable for conversations to happen. Make sure the music isn’t too loud, the lighting is right (not too bright, not too dim) and the ceilings are lower. These things create a fantastic environment. Ellen Kurtz, an interior design blogger, suggests:

“The golden rule here is to keep everything at talking distance. 

Generally, you’d want to avoid spacing seats any further than what can allow for easy, low-volume conversation — so a maximum of 7 to 9 feet apart, although I’d urge you try to keep seats closer than that.… you can be creative in your seating choices. Traditional armchairs or sofas offer a more conventional and streamlined look, but don’t be afraid to experiment with poufs and stools and other versatile seating. Just be sure to follow the same spacing rule. 

Additionally, try to keep everything at the same height. Guests may feel uncomfortable talking to someone who isn’t at eye level with them.”

5.  Assimilation

Assimilation is the process that starts after the service ends and goes all the way through until they have decided to take the step of “membership” – whether official or unofficial. If the car park, front door and tea and coffee are like dating, Assimilation is a bit like engagement. It’s the process of someone deciding that this is the community that they’d like to belong to.

Just like with an engagement, you need to balance romance and practicalities. When me and my wife got engaged, we undertook a marriage preparation course with our pastors as a structured way to help us overcome some of the potential pinch points in marriage, like money, expectations and personality differences. That course was vital for giving us a good springboard into marriage, but we also had time to be together and go on dates to keep the romance alive.

It's the same with your church. You need to have a flow that allows all the good things to keep growing like friendships, but also there are some serious things that need to be communicated so that people know expectations, what you believe and more.

6.  Discipleship community

Once someone has assimilated into your church, its vital that each person is in a community that is based around discipleship. That’s not the same as small groups, but it can include small groups. It could also include teams, leadership development courses and more. The main point is that the community is small enough (Jesus only had 12 disciples) and focuses on purpose.

I’m not convinced that just assigning people to small groups is a good system of discipleship. Jesus called people around purpose (“I will make you fishers of men”), there’s action (sending out the 12 and 70), and there’s a sense of doing life with the discipler (Jesus’s disciples travelled around Galilee with Jesus and then went to Jerusalem with him; Paul takes Silas and Timothy with him on his missionary journey). We need those elements. That purpose can come from the purpose of a team, or the subject of a course. It just can’t be aimless.

There’s also got to be a focus of putting learning into action and doing life with the leader and learning from them in the process. The old rabbinic tradition of being “covered in the dust of the rabbi” is helpful here. We want people to really do life with their leader, where it becomes more than just group leadership. Now I know some people may push back and say that Jesus is our rabbi and not team or small group leaders, but I think that we lose something when we reduce our leaders down to only programme leaders. Our job is model Jesus by having disciples just as Jesus had disciples, just as Paul had disciples, all in service of the one true teacher – Christ.

Reaching the Non-Practising

If we want to achieve the goal of seeing more people become practising Christians, we need to help them overcome the hurdle of the welcome. If we can become masters in welcoming people into real, authentic, discipling communities, we can start to start to close the gap between non-practising and practising in the next Census.