Tag: 52 Churches

When Not to Change Churches

Post author By Peter DeHaan
Post date April 29, 2018
2 Comments on When Not to Change Churches

When We Go Church Shopping We Behave as Consumers and Don’t Honor God

In today’s practice of retail religion, we pursue faith has a consumer and miss the purpose of church. We’re quick to change churches over the smallest of issues. Yet, usually the best action to take is no action: Don’t change churches.

Often we should stay where we are and not go church shopping.

52 Churches: A Yearlong Journey Encountering God, His Church, and Our Common Faith

Yes, there’s a right time and a wrong time to change churches. We need to discern between the two and act accordingly. Here are some reasons not to change churches.

Don’t Change Churches If You’re Angry

Did your church do something to hurt you? Are you angry over something that someone did or said? Though the impulse to change churches is understandable, this is the wrong time to do it.

Don’t leave mad because you’ll hurt others in the process.

And don’t leave hurt, because you’ll carry baggage to your new church. Instead, seek reconciliation with your church and its people. Then you can switch with a clear conscience, but if you patch things up, why not stick around?

Don’t Change Churches If You’re Not Being Fed

It sounds spiritual to say you’re switching churches because you’re “just not being fed.” This sounds virtuous, but it’s really a sign of laziness. It’s not church’s job to feed us spiritually. This is the wrong expectation.

Yes, church aids in spiritual growth, but they shouldn’t be the primary provider of our faith nourishment.

Spiritual growth is our responsibility. We need to feed ourselves and not expect a minister to do our job for us. Changing churches so we can be fed only masks the real problem.

Don’t Change Churches If You’re Not Getting Anything Out of It

In today’s culture, too many people view church participation as a transaction. They put in their time expecting something in return.

They donate their money and look for a return on their investment. This, however, reduces church to a commodity that we shop for.

This is the epitome of retail religion, and it misses the point.

The truth is, we only get out of church what we put into it. So, if you’re not getting anything out of church, the problem falls on you and not church.

Don’t Change Churches If You Fear Heresy

Another spiritually-sounding complaint about church is heresy. Yet disagreement over theology is why we have 42,000 denominations in our world today and not the one, unified church that Jesus prayed for.

When we charge our minister with heresy, the implication is that we know what is correct and they don’t. We need to embrace the possibility that we might be wrong.

Instead, we squabble over things that don’t matter and leave the church. What does matter? Jesus. Everything else is secondary.

We need to acknowledge that we can have differences of opinion over matters of faith and still get along.

Don’t Change Churches If You Don’t Like the Music or the Message

Another side effect of retail religion is changing churches because we don’t like the worship service or the sermon. Again, this is consumerism infiltrating church.

All music can praise and worship God. Just because we don’t like the tone or tempo—or volume—it isn’t worth changing churches. Instead, seek to worship God regardless of the musical style or the performers’ ability.

Remember, we’re not there as consumers seeking entertainment; we’re there as followers of Jesus to worship God in spirit and truth (John 4:24).

The same applies to the message. Yes, some speakers are gifted, and others aren’t; some presenters are entertaining, and others are boring. But every message has something we can learn from it, if we’re willing to listen and look for it.

Don’t Change Churches If You Have No Friends

If your church lacks community or you have no friends there, who’s fault is that? Yes, some people are easier to connect with then others, but that’s no excuse to give up.

In fact, the problem might be in us. If we have no friends at church it might be because we’re not approachable or don’t make ourselves available.

The best time to make friends at church is before the service starts and after it ends, but too many people miss these opportunities by arriving at the last moment and leaving as soon as possible.

If you have no friends at church, seek to change that.

There are many reasons to change churches, but most of these are selfish, shortsighted, and reflect a consumer mindset. This displeases God and serves to divide his church.

If you don’t like your church, the better approach is to stick around and be a catalyst for change.

Seek to make the church where you’re at become a better one and don’t take your problems someplace else.

My wife and I visited a different Christian Church every Sunday for a year. This is our story. Get your copy of 52 Churches today, available in ebook, paperback, hardcover, and audiobook.

Peter DeHaan writes about biblical Christianity to confront status quo religion and live a life that matters. He seeks a fresh approach to following Jesus through the lens of Scripture, without the baggage of made-up traditions and meaningless practices.

Read more in his books, blog, and weekly email updates.

Tags 52 Churches, church, church attendance, church baggage, church services

Visiting Churches

Do We Need to Listen to a Lecture Each Sunday at Church?

Post author By Peter DeHaan
Post date March 13, 2016
4 Comments on Do We Need to Listen to a Lecture Each Sunday at Church?

Can You Have a Church Service Without Hearing a Preacher Speak?

My wife and I recently visited a church. Though we didn’t know it before we walked in, their service would be different that week. There was no sermon.

The church used the normal sermon time to talk about the missionaries their church supported.

They explained each missionary’s focus and updated us on their status. They shared the joys and concerns of their missionaries.

People on the mission’s committee prayed. Then the service ended. The lead pastor didn’t say a word.

Several people apologized for there being no sermon and invited us back to hear their minister speak.

I shook my head. “Don’t apologize. This was better than a sermon.”

But they didn’t get it.

From my perspective it was a profound, meaningful service. We need more like this.

As I understand it, the Reformation removed the communion table (The Lord’s Supper, Holy Communion, the Eucharist) as the focus of the Sunday service and replaced it with the sermon.

I get why they did it, but it was a mistake – a grave one.

Frankly I see more biblical support for celebrating communion every Sunday than I do for giving a lecture (that is, delivering a sermon) as part of our Sunday meetings.

Though the New Testament does talk about giving messages to local congregations, I think it is always a traveling missionary who speaks on his way through town.

I don’t recall an instance in the New Testament where a local pastor (an elder) gives a talk every Sunday.

I can’t remember any commands to preach a sermon to the believers during each weekly meeting.

Yet we view sermons today with the conviction that it must happen. We select ministers for their public speaking ability. And we expect to listen to a lecture each Sunday as we sit passively in our pews.

Most people feel cheated if they go to church and don’t hear a sermon. Never mind that few can remember it by the time they reach home.

This fixation on the sermon is wrong.

Though instruction has its place, teaching doesn’t facilitate community. It doesn’t allow us to minister to one another (as we should), and it doesn’t serve the world around us (as we ought).

While listening to an overly educated person detail the minutia of scripture every week may have intellectual appeal, it does little in a practical sense to deepen our community and advance our faith in action.

Let us dare to envision a church service without a sermon. Let us reimagine our weekly gatherings as a place to foster spiritual community and promote the love of Jesus to those outside the church.

It starts when we kill the sermon. Will you dare to do it?

My wife and I visited a different Christian Church every Sunday for a year. This is our story. Get your copy of 52 Churches today, available in ebook, paperback, hardcover, and audiobook.

Read more in his books, blog, and weekly email updates.

Tags 52 Churches, church services, good sermon

Visiting Churches

Are Visitors Welcome at Your Church?

Post author By Peter DeHaan
Post date August 16, 2015

Embrace Those Who Are Checking Out Your Church

For the past several months, a roadside sign at a church proclaims “Visitors Welcome.” This amuses me. Isn’t that assumed? Doesn’t every church want to grow? I’ve never been to a church that had a “no visitors” policy.

Why does this church need to advertise their desire for visitors?

My first thought is that their sign is a poor attempt at marketing. My second is that they may be trying to overcome a negative reputation.

Another idea is that they want people to notice their church because the building is set off the road a bit.

Other churches have signs that talk about how friendly they are. They should let their actions speak for them. If they feel a need to claim that they’re friendly, they probably aren’t.

Friends once visited a church that maintained, “You will never find a friendlier church.” They didn’t go back. Marketers know not to make such statements; it’s called an “unsubstantiated claim.” I call it lying.

To all these churches: Stop talking about how welcoming and friendly you are. Start acting like it.

In doing research for my books, my wife and I visited over eighty churches. None of them said, “You’re not welcome here,” but too many acted that way.

We’ve been to churches where no one talked to us, no one greeted us at the door, no one even smiled or nodded. It’s as if we didn’t exist; we were invisible.

Other places had only one or two welcoming folks out of hundreds, but sometimes one nice person is enough to make a difference.

Other churches excelled in their welcome. They greeted us before the service, affirmed us during it, and embraced us afterwards.

Sometimes we stuck around for an hour or more after its conclusion because they were such gracious folks who received us so well.

Church is about community. If it wasn’t, we could stay home and worship God in our recliner. Great churches provide a welcoming, friendly atmosphere.

They are winsome and inviting. Visitors are welcome—and the church’s actions remove the need to talk about it.

My wife and I visited a different Christian Church every Sunday for a year. This is our story. Get your copy of 52 Churches today, available in ebook, paperback, hardcover, and audiobook.

Read more in his books, blog, and weekly email updates.

Tags 52 Churches, friendly church

Visiting Churches

Can You Be Evangelical and Charismatic?

Post author By Peter DeHaan
Post date August 2, 2015

My wife and I recently visited a church near our home. Their website said they were a charismatic church.

This would make them a refreshing anomaly in an area filled with mainline churches and a sprinkling of evangelical ones. I anticipated what we would find.

However, when we arrived, I was dismayed to read their bulletin, which proclaimed them as an evangelical church. Which was right, their online presence or their printed material?

Were they charismatic or evangelical? Soon I would find out.

As the service unfolded, they were clearly evangelical. Though their worship was a bit more exuberant than typical for fundamental churches, there were no indications of the Holy Spirit’s presence or of the supernatural.

Despite what their website claimed, their bulletin was correct. By their actions and their worship, they were, without a doubt, an evangelical congregation.

Having anticipated a charismatic experience, I was disappointed. Still I enjoyed my time there and lobbied for a return trip, but my wife felt that once was enough.

My wife was unaware of the inconsistency between their website and bulletin. When I shared my frustration over the mixed message, she shook her head in confusion. “Can’t they be both evangelical and charismatic?”

“Of course they can,” I answered, “but few churches are. They tend to be one or the other but not both.” She disagreed with me, but I’m having trouble thinking of an example. (A third option is mainline/liberal.)

However, assuming they embrace the good parts of both perspectives, I’d love to find such a place. I’d feel right at home.

My wife and I visited a different Christian Church every Sunday for a year. This is our story. Get your copy of 52 Churches today, available in ebook, paperback, hardcover, and audiobook.

Read more in his books, blog, and weekly email updates.

Tags 52 Churches, charismatic, church services, evangelical, fundamental church, supernatural

Visiting Churches

An Epic Fail in Church Promotion

Post author By Peter DeHaan
Post date May 11, 2015

Church Marketing

Easter this year was a few weeks ago, on April 5. A week and a half later, on April 15, I received a postcard inviting me to attend a church’s Easter service.

Aside from arriving too late to do any good, the church wasn’t even nearby; it was an hour’s drive away.

What were they thinking? Obviously they weren’t. The problems didn’t stop there. The postcard gave the address of one location and a map to another, which aren’t even close to one another. Where do they meet, anyway?

The postcard also included social media info for Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter.

Each one was for their parent church in California, with no reference to this (nearly) local congregation they wanted me to visit at an indeterminate location ten days too late.

Only HQ’s website made any mention of the church in question, but it was minimal. To further frustrate matters, they provided no phone number or email address. Their epic marketing fail still confounds me.

Too, often, this is how we invite people to church: haphazardly and without thinking things through.

What we need to do is make our invitation timely, personal, and relevant. What could be easier? Go out and try it.

My wife and I visited a different Christian Church every Sunday for a year. This is our story. Get your copy of 52 Churches today, available in ebook, paperback, hardcover, and audiobook.

Read more in his books, blog, and weekly email updates.

Tags 52 Churches, church services

Visiting Churches

What Time is Church?

Adjusting to an Ever Varying Sunday Schedule

When my wife and I started our journey of visiting fifty-two churches in a year, one variable seemed trivial at first but had wide ramifications. That item was service times.

With church starting times as early as 8 a.m. and as late as 11:30 a.m., our Sundays looked quite different each week. As bedtime loomed each Saturday night, the common question became, “What time is Church tomorrow?”

The answer determined when we got up in the morning, how much free time we had before church, when we could expect to eat lunch, and what we had time to do in the afternoon.

Factor in services lasting between one hour and two and half hours, with up to two hours of informal community afterwards, we had no idea when we might return home.

Including drive time, our Sunday morning church experience would take between seventy minutes and three and a half hours.

For a person who likes the rhythm of a regular schedule, my Sunday routine was thrown into disarray.

While assaulting my status quo wasn’t all bad, sometimes my time with God was the casualty of this ever-changing timetable. Isn’t that ironic?

[Read about our journey of visiting 52 churches.]

My wife and I visited a different Christian Church every Sunday for a year. This is our story. Get your copy of 52 Churches today, available in ebook, paperback, hardcover, and audiobook.

Read more in his books, blog, and weekly email updates.

Tags 52 Churches, Sunday

Visiting Churches

Praying for Church

Say a Pre-Church Prayer

One of the practices my wife and I followed when we visited 52 churches was to pray before we headed out the door.

This seems simple enough and something we should have always done, but praying prior to church was a practice we seldom did, more likely skipping it than remembering.

However, one year of visiting a different church every week taught us to embrace this practice; we depended on it. Indeed, without prayer to prepare the way, disaster would have surely resulted on more than one occasion.

Almost every week we prayed we would hear what God wanted to teach us. Often we prayed for ways to give back to the people at the churches we visited.

Sometimes we’d pray against fear or apprehension—or even that we could find the church. A few times, I needed to pray for a good attitude. And towards the end, we prayed to fight fatigue and to keep an open mind.

For the 52 churches, we remembered to pray 51 times. (The time we forgot was in rushing to Saturday Mass after squeezing in time with family.)

After experiencing firsthand the benefits of praying before church, we’ve continued this practice, remembering most Sundays. When we expect much at church and pray for it, we usually experience much. The opposite is also true.

If we take the time to go to church, shouldn’t we also take time to pray for a great experience?

[Read about our journey of visiting 52 churches.]

My wife and I visited a different Christian Church every Sunday for a year. This is our story. Get your copy of 52 Churches today, available in ebook, paperback, hardcover, and audiobook.

Read more in his books, blog, and weekly email updates.

Tags 52 Churches, church, family, Mass, prayer

Visiting Churches

52 Churches: Wrap-up and Reboot

Post author By Peter DeHaan
Post date April 1, 2013
2 Comments on 52 Churches: Wrap-up and Reboot

Between last Easter and this Easter, my wife and I visited fifty-two churches. Today marks the end of that adventure but also the beginning of a new one.

52 Churches Wrap-up

Our journey is over. I’m sad and excited at the same time. Our spiritual sojourn of fifty-two churches has ended; reunion with our community looms large.

We rejoin them for Holy Week, first for Good Friday and then for the Easter celebration.

On purpose, I leave my journal at home. There will be no more note taking. Documenting my observations isn’t the point: experience is, community is, family is, and especially God.

We sing in jubilant celebration, enjoying community before and after each event. Hugs abound as I reconnect with friends.

Both services surpass my expectations, as I enjoy an amazing reunion, encounter a grand celebration, and experience a fitting conclusion to our yearlong pilgrimage.

We learned much on our journey and expanded our understanding of worshiping God, but it’s good to be back, home where we belong.

52 Churches Reboot

Though our trek is complete, writing about it isn’t. Beginning next Monday, I will repost our journeey, one church per week, adding new information and providing updates.

For those who followed us on our journey, this will be a great recap. While for those who joined us midway through, this will be a chance to follow along from start to finish.

The Book 52 Churches

As I update and repost, I will also finalize the book that chronicles this awesome adventure. Currently standing at 70,000 words, my posts are only a fraction of what’s in the book.

As they say, stay tuned for more information.

My wife and I visited a different Christian Church every Sunday for a year. This is our story. Get your copy of 52 Churches today, available in ebook, paperback, hardcover, and audiobook.

Read more in his books, blog, and weekly email updates.

Tags 52 Churches, Holy Week, spiritual journey

Visiting Churches

Why is Community Important at Church?

Post author By Peter DeHaan
Post date August 26, 2012

For the past 19 weeks, my bride and I have been visiting different churches to expand our understanding of how others worship and understand God.

We call this initiative “52 Churches” and I blog about the experience each Monday morning.

However, friends frequently ask for more: “What are you learning,” “Is your journey changing,” or “Have you found any churches you want to revisit?” The short answers are

We’re learning a great deal,
the vision for our sojourn is unchanged, and
there are several churches we’d like to revisit.

A key realization at this point is that it’s not about the teaching or the music; it’s about the community.

We’ve heard messages from gifted speakers and not so gifted. We’ve been taught by the formally trained and the self-trained. We’ve been presented with deep thoughts and entertaining anecdotes.

In all cases, we’ve received a worthwhile word from God. I suspect as long as we’re open to hear and expectantly pray for that to happen, it will.

Similarly, we’ve sung traditional hymns, contemporary songs, and modern praise choruses. We’ve been led by accomplished vocalists and struggling crooners.

There have been worship bands, pipe organs, and pianos, accompaniment tracks, and even a capella.

In all cases, as long as we’re willing to focus on the words, God is there.

Message and music, I’m sad to report, are not important.

The big variable is the community. Community is that time of interaction with others (aside from that awkward official greeting time). This is when connections are made and God is shared.

God seems more present in these informal interactions before and after the service than in the planned and carefully prepped moments during the service.

In a few churches, there is no community. People come, people sit, and people leave, with nary a word exchanged.

Fortunately, most churches have community and some excel at it. These are the churches I want to return to; these are the experiences that excite me; these are the moments when God is most powerfully present.

Community is church at its best.

My wife and I visited a different Christian Church every Sunday for a year. This is our story. Get your copy of 52 Churches today, available in ebook, paperback, hardcover, and audiobook.

Read more in his books, blog, and weekly email updates.

Tags 52 Churches, church, community, good music, good sermon

Visiting Churches

An Intriguing Consideration, But We’ll Pass

Post author By Peter DeHaan
Post date June 12, 2012

When we made our list of churches to visit, we included everything found under the heading of “churches,” which we would adjust as needed. Next up is a “meditation group of self-realization fellowship.”

Since our mission is to visit Christian churches, if there’s any evidence of this being a Christian community, we’ll check them out.

According to their website the Sunday meeting is a “reading service.”

It includes devotional chanting, short meditations, and readings from the Bible and Bhagavad Gita, which Wikipedia indicates is “a 700-verse Hindu scripture.”

There’s also mention of Kriya Yoga.

I conclude they’re essentially an Eastern religion, with a touch of the Bible thrown in. There’s seemingly nothing Christian there and we decide not to visit.

Nevertheless, I wonder if a Christian could attend and experience a connection with the God who is revealed in the Bible. I suspect so, but caution would be warranted, guarding against spiritual forces not conducive to the Christian faith.

However, my ponderings will likely never go beyond the theoretical, but it is an intriguing consideration nonetheless.

My wife and I visited a different Christian Church every Sunday for a year. This is our story. Get your copy of 52 Churches today, available in ebook, paperback, hardcover, and audiobook.

Read more in his books, blog, and weekly email updates.

Tags 52 Churches, church services