Controversial Title? Not Click-bait though. I want you to think about this for a few minutes: Can a church end up chasing both the potential new Christian AND the committed believer away by being too pragmatic about their approach to packaging the Gospel?
Think about it? - Perhaps there is something to that. I've talked to hundreds, maybe even several hundreds of people who have expressed frustration with their church, saying "I just am not growing there...because the focus is too much on the people who AREN"T there..." Maybe somehow, in an attempt to get the lost to the Father, the church has lost its way, and no longer is a powerful force for sustained discipleship.

In an attempt to fulfill the great commission, are we committing the great OMISSION? Leaving important parts out of the Gospel message in order to somehow sell the lost on making a decision to take the salvation deal God is offering? And by leaving out important aspects and impacts of the Gospel, are we making it impossible to keep committed believers growing in their own faith? I think these questions need to be asked quickly to the church today. Because, today's church is hurtling itself along a path of chasing the next cultural interface all the while bemoaning that culture is getting worse and worse. Today's church is trying to make ways for the culture they are reaching to "interface" with them in some way. They (Church leaders) want the culture to like them. agree with them, or at least think they can relate. So - the church chases creating different "relational connections" to culture. What may start as desiring to be relatable can quickly devolve into being afraid to stand for some Biblical truth because it is culturally unacceptable. As Aaron Renn so clearly has described, we have entered a season in time were the predominant popular culture thinks it is a negative thing to identify as Christian.

Oh - we can still fool ourselves and insulate ourselves in a suburban neighborhood, trying to claim that we are attempting to reach suburban neighborhood moms and kids, who still have at least a neutral view of church and Christianity. Or we can realize that by catering our messages, our culture and our mission to a specific group is just the first step toward making a church more of a marketing and sales organization and way less than Jesus intended a church to be. Jesus always knew the context in which he was ministering. He always understood the cultural challenges in every situation. Surprisingly, though, Jesus more often than not was somehow able to both condemn the religious culture while loving the marginalized, the lost and forgotten. Today, we are reaping the whirlwind of seventy years of "rebel" culture that has replaced a community that makes disciples with glorifying individual choice and self will. It has sucked a large chunk of the church right into becoming a trailing indicator of every trend, all the while losing ground in areas of truth and discipleship. Go into most any church today and you will see pastors trying to be hip and relevant (usually about five years behind the trends). You will see programs trying to be attractional to certain demographic groups, you will see messages catered to offer hopeful, motivational-speaker style Ted talks with Scripture used to bolster the theme or the idea. Music that is chasing five to ten-year-behind style trends and making each church chase copying what the "successful" church is doing. Programs are more often borrowed or outright plagiarized from other churches. Unfortunately, very little unique creativity goes on anymore in the church. I would argue that this chasing being like the other "successful?" church is making the uniqueness of each church go away. No longer is the creative expression of the people in one church valuable. Instead, it is the ability to execute a replica model, or a canned program. Church becomes performance and execution geared toward attracting the lost and getting them to make a decision to be a part of that church, and hopefully also come to Christ.
Discipleship goes out the door and truth may soon follow. When the Truth is outright rejected by popular culture, and not even tolerated, what is a church to do? Being liked and tolerated has been the goal of churches for the past 70 years, chasing changes, trends, adjusting values, and eventually, with well-intentioned hearts, losing ground to the very people they set out to bring change to.

If we have to package the truth so that it is acceptable, what are we stripping away from the truth? What we do now is split the truth up into smaller, acceptable choices, each standing on their own. You can choose to accept Jesus as your friend, because He loves you. You, over there, can accept Jesus as the warrior of societal change and justice. Oh, you? - accept Jesus as the one who never judges and loves everyone and would never ask anyone to give up their sin, because we all know now that sin comes from identity, and Jesus would not ask us to give that up. Others are sold on an aspect of Jesus that He is powerful, and if you accept Him, you too can become powerful. All partial, sections of truth, but not the whole Truth. Maybe in stripping away the difficult parts of the truth, we end up chasing away real seekers of truth AND people who already know it? Both sides end up not getting what they really need. So we drive both the real seeker and the honest disciple away ultimately.

If a person "buys" the reduced truth message, is it truly transformational, or merely attractive? A message that only sells part of the real deal ends up being powerless to change. Because we think the person is one who does the change by "buying" the message instead of acknowledging the real source of change - The Lord - we end up selling a powerless gospel and dooming a "buyer" into a life of trying to be holy with no power, except in their own selves. This misunderstanding of who is doing the change is at the core of the weakness of the church to influence culture and shift the balance of influence. If it is up to us, we ourselves don't have the power to change apart from the regenerating power of God. But instead, we convince ourselves that we MUST have that power, and create "discipleship" that is merely socialization into conforming with a certain set of behaviors. If we LOOK like we are holy, we must be holy... The outside, unbeliever can smell an actor a mile away, and shies away from buying into the actor's message. The believer that has been transformed and regenerated likewise has a discernment that sees a difference between behavior that comes from a changed heart within, and behavior that is put on like clothing. It makes a transformed believer uncomfortable and they go away, looking for a community of the regenerated.