Worship as Evangelism: Is It Working?

Below are a few selected quotes from “Worship As Evangelism”, an article by Sally Morgenthaler, in which she tries to answer the question, “Are worship-driven churches really attracting the unchurched?” If you have anything to do with church planting, planning, or mission/outreach, I would urge you to prayerfully read this article and join me in asking some tough questions. Specifically, the question I need to ask myself is, “Are the strategies I am attempting to use in my own church reflecting the true nature of the mission to which we have been called?”

Location, Location, Location is a common cliche used when describing the important principles of marketing, but I am beginning to recognize more and more, that if we do not attend to the first principles of evangelism – Relationships, Relationships, Relationships – then the rest really doesn’t matter very much.

Below are the quotes to get you started:

Were these worship-driven churches really attracting the unchurched? Most of their pastors truly believed they were. And in a few cases, they were right. The worship in their congregations was inclusive, and their people were working hard to meet the needs of the neighborhood. Yet those churches whose emphasis was dual—celebrated worship inside, lived worship outside—were the minority. In 2001 a worship-driven congregation in my area finally did a survey as to who they were really reaching, and they were shocked. They’d thought their congregation was at least 50 percent unchurched. The real number was 3 percent.

By 2002 a few pastors of praise and worship churches began admitting to me that they weren’t making much of a dent in the surrounding non-Christian population, even though their services were packed and they were known for the best worship
production in town.

For all the money, time, and effort we’ve spent on cultural relevance—and that includes culturally relevant worship—it seems we came through the last 15 years with a significant net loss in churchgoers, proliferation of megachurches and all.

Some newfangled worship service wasn’t going to save their church, and it wasn’t going to build God’s kingdom. It wasn’t going to attract the strange neighbors who had moved into their communities or the generations they had managed to ignore for the last 39 years.

Read the entire article at here.