Should we make our church harder to join?

“Yes and no”

The question is raised by Tim Suffield here. Or rather, Tim answers the question from his perspective with a hard “yes”. He argues that we shouldn’t be too easy to join, that “welcome requires walls” and that this means a church should be clear in communicating what makes it distinctive and what is expected of those who join, as opposed to merely look in regarding doctrine and culture.

I’m pretty much in agreement with Tim on those points and have recently written about how we communicate our DNA as churches.  So, why the “yes and no” answer to the question? Well, I think the question goes back a little further than Tim’s blog, whether or not Tim has these things in mind. 

A little while back, there was a heavy focus on “seeker sensitive” church services.  There was a feeling that this often went beyond being alert to visitors and communicating what you were doing and why clearly towards allowing people to get involved in church without setting a high barrier.  You made a barrier as low as possible, not asking too much of members when they joined in terms of commitments to ministries or too long a list of doctrines to sign up for. In fact, some have dispensed with any concept of membership whatsoever for fear of putting people off.

The reaction to that has been what we might call “High Bar membership.”   The argument is that something that is difficult to join is harder to leave and that it communicates to the mildly  interested that this is something worthwhile investing in.  After all, we tend to be suspicious of things that look to be free and too easy to sign up to.  This can communicate that those pushing it don’t take it seriously or value it themselves and/or that they are desperate for your custom.  Again, you can see immediately why the high bar argument wins hands down.

So, why “yes and no”?  Well, my point is that we should make it as hard as Jesus does and as easy as Jesus does too.  So, Jesus unashamedly called on his disciples to leave everything, take up their cross, not turn back and to follow him.  Discipleship was costly for his first followers.    Jesus would also tell parables that instead of making his message easy to understand seemed to do the opposite, providing a filter so that many would not understand what he had to say. Jesus made it hard to join him.

Yet, Jesus was also the one who offered “rest” and who said “my yoke is easy and my burden is light.” Jesus told parables about shepherds not waiting for their sheep to come back but actively going looking for them.  Jesus sat and talked to vulnerable people with questionable sexual history, had meals with those excluded from polite society, reached to touch the unclean and let people simply follow after him once he had healed them, without checks and interviews.

Jesus made it easy for those who were genuinely spiritually hungry, needy and vulnerable to come to him.  He made it hard for those who were merely intrigued, looking for entertainment and religiously proud and self-sufficient.

So, the answer depends on who we make it hard and easy for. It also depends on “how.” For Jesus, it was simply that discipleship meant leaving  temptations and idols behind and it meant probable persecution.  What it didn’t mean was making things as weird as possible.  I note that Tim talks about us “eating Jesus” but in John 6, it is obvious that the call is metaphorical.  Jesus’ opponents, I submit, wilfully take him literally and find it weird and offensive because they know full well the hard thing he is asking of them, that they leave behind their trust in past rituals and find satisfaction, forgiveness and hope in him alone.  Nor, does Jesus demand paperwork, tests, forms and interviews. If your church is a bit, unnecessarily weird and/or if it makes it hard for people to join by putting in its own bureaucratic hurdles, then it has missed the point.

We want our churches to be hard to join for those who just love to church hop. We definitely want them to be hard for false teachers to join and those with their own agendas.  However, we want them to be easy to join for those who are seeking Jesus for real.