Ask the Pastors S6 E4: "What should we sacrifice as a church to win more souls to Christ?"
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Welcome to Ask the Pastors a segment of the West Hills Podcast where you have the opportunity to ask your questions and receive biblically grounded, pastorally sensitive answers from our pastoral staff. My name is Brian and I'm back as your host. Welcome back. Thank you. It's good to have you back. One of the Pastors on staff, and I'm joined by our lead pastor. Will. Hey, that's me, pastor Thad. Hey everyone. And Pastor Austin.
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Hello.
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It's good to be back with you. Thanks for listening. Thanks for watching on Facebook. Those of you that are watching live, I've got a great question today that's kind of continuing our top 10 New Year's resolutions from the past few weeks. Joseph has split this last one into its own episode just because it was such a great question and a lot to talk about.
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Well, it's my number one, your number one area of focus for 2025 and every year anyway.
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Absolutely.
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So
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Yeah, the question for today, the talking conversation will be centered around the question, what are we willing to sacrifice to wind souls to Christ at West Hills?
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So it's kind of a combination of the question we got from a couple weeks ago about the diversity push, if you want to call it day. We talked about praying and pursuing more, becoming a more diverse church, and someone rightfully pointed out, okay, there's always unintended consequences to any prayerful pursuit as a church or an institution. And so if you don't change anything, nothing's going to change. If you do change things, things are going to change. So you start making changes to try and become more diverse, things are going to change. Same thing. And so we just talked about, hey, let's apply that same philosophy of thinking and question to the soul winning point specifically because if we really were to get just incredibly serious as a church about seeing Souls one to Christ at West Hills, it's possible that we might now, some people would say, what do you mean we're not that serious about it?
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How so? I mean, that's part of what we need to talk about here on the podcast is just do a really, really critical kind of self-evaluation of our ministry as a church and try and really wrestle with, again, we got to celebrate just this past Sunday Dreka’s baptism and celebrate seeing someone who has come in the last year to saving faith by her own testimony through the ministry of this church, which is what we're praying for. To me, part of even in the celebration of that this past Sunday and baptizing her and not to take anything away from that. I mean, Jesus says there's more rejoicing in heaven over just one soul, one lost sheep that comes, that Jesus brings back to the fold. There's more rejoicing in heaven than 99 who don't think they need that. But so not to take anything away from that andr it, but to me it also a little bit can't help but be a little bit of a reminder of how rare that is at West Hills. I mean, it's very rare that we might do how many baptisms last year? Eight, something like that. And I mean, were seven of them people who hadn't been baptized as an adult, as a believer and wanted to join the church. I don't know. I mean, probably
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Two U students
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Who, yeah, okay. So had, yeah, maybe again, it is rare and even there again, rejoicing over the one, the two, whatever it is per year that we're seeing come to Christ. But we want more. I mean, we want more, don't we pray? We have to, I mean, we have to pray that we would see more than one to this kind of trickle of souls coming into the kingdom through the ministry. Yes, you're right. Yeah. And so maybe some of it too is it gets to even a administrative sort of question of how do we do a better job of recognizing and celebrating that the young adult ministry and some of the folks or the youth ministry and youth camp, that these are not just these fringe things. We need to probably do a better job of shining the spotlight on what's happening within these sometimes two siloed off ministries and saying, no, no, this is all a part of the ministry of our church.
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And because we want everybody to be able to, and obviously baptism is a great way of doing that. I mean, so when those students get baptized and hopefully when the young adult gets baptized, then it's a way of putting that spotlight. But anyway, whatever it is, even if it is a trickle of one or two or four or five, it's still not what I mean, especially at churches as quickly growing as ours in terms of membership and stuff like that. Again, you just look at it and you say, alright, clearly most of the growth at West Hills is what in the church world we call transfer growth. It's folks coming over from other churches who have been believers for a long time and it's a beautiful thing. We would never, well, not never. I mean sometimes we tell people, you should go back and reconcile with your church and leave on the right terms of maybe not leave at all you need to.
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Sometimes we do, but we rarely, most of the time we welcome transfer growth and sheep from other flocks. We welcome them here with open arms. Every sheep needs a flock. And so we're happy to be those sheep flock. We love those sheep. It's great. And there's great, we always have very an abundance of riches when it comes to for pooling for deacons and elders and small group leaders and Sunday school teachers. We have very mature believers here because of this. So there's great things that come with that. And also the church is called to reach the lost and are we doing that? And I mean that's really kind of what we're getting at here. And maybe specifically with the question, the way it's phrased is if we're not firing on all cylinders when it comes to reaching the lost, how could we, what would and should and could we be doing to fire on more cylinders? And then if we actually did those things practically, like which practical changes could we and maybe should we implement, how would they then potentially affect the culture, the ethos, the style, the preferences, whatever of our church? And again, what are we willing to give up sacrifice? Compromise is maybe a bad word depending on how you think about compromise.
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I would say compromise is the key to healthy marriage and relationship. And so that's what we're talking about here to me. And I think to maybe set the stage to, it's maybe helpful to give some context and say there really are differing philosophies of ministry here, very starkly, differing philosophies of ministries that different churches have. And a lot of churches over the last 30 plus years have been very influenced by what sometimes derisively kind of gets called the seeker driven or seeker. I mean, we should all be seeker sensitive. We should all be sensitive to the fact that there could be people who are not Christians who are searching for truth, who stumble in on a Sunday, and we shouldn't want to run them out. So we should be sensitive to the fact that, hey, there are unbelievers there on Sunday. So I don't like the seeker sensitive being used in a derisive way.
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If you're not seeker sensitive, then you're just doing it badly wrong, but seeker driven. So there are churches that a lot of folks will blame and call it the Willow Creek model of church, Willow Creek, big mega church in Chicago that in the nineties really I think piloted a lot of this kind of approach of we're going to do the real ministry, not real. They would say, we're going to do the discipleship stuff for the already Christians on Wednesday nights. So if you're a Christian and you really want to get expository preaching and go deeper in the word or whatever, you come on Wednesday nights, Sunday mornings are evangelistic, Sunday mornings are bring your friend to church. And we're going to assume that most of the folks there are not Christians. And that's who we're preaching to. That's who we're seeking to minister to mostly on Sunday mornings and a lot of churches. And again, we can, if it's appropriate to, maybe that's a different podcast, but I think it's at least related here just to name it that that's not West Hills
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And that I don't think we have any desire to be that church. Our philosophy of ministry is less church as evangelism and more of church as discipleship. And I unapologetically view my role, I think y'all do too as pastors in that Ephesians four 12 kind of way that our calling is God gives the leaders of the church, the apostles, prophets, teachers shepherds for the work of equipping the saints for the work of ministry. So I view my role on Sundays as an equipping role. The saints are gathered here on Sunday. My job is to equip them to better empower, equip them for the work of ministry to one another. That's a lot of the context of what Paul's actually talking about in Ephesians four is the body building itself up. So I'm equipping the saints to care for one another better and use their gifts and stuff, but also for the work of ministry in their houses with their unbelieving kids and their workplaces, their communities, their neighborhoods. So ministering to the lost. And so again, thinking less of Sunday as the evangelism, you guys invite your friends to hear me lead them to Christ. And so I get the credit and we get to count pledge cards and win souls as a church and more of I'm here to minister to the saints. And then you're sent back out every week to go and do that ministry in the trenches.
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And in that regard, hopefully there's a lot of souls that if they haven't been outright one to Christ, have at least been touched, seeds are planted, there's watering going on's, those kinds of evangelistic ministry happening that we'll never even know about as a church because again, we're one degree removed from the front lines. This is like you're in the trenches Monday through Saturday, you come on Sunday and it's a equip, it's a regroup, it's reenergize and all of that to be able to go back out and fight those battles another week. So all of that to say, I am just trying to give context before we even maybe start to answer the question for why it's a relevant question, I think because it really is true. I think it's an appropriate, we talked about even before we click play like is sacrifice the best word? And I was like, well, I think it's a good, are we willing to sacrifice? What will we sacrifice to win souls? Yeah, maybe a little bit of a clickbait thing, but also just a very biblical thing. I mean obviously sacrifice, but I think also just a very honest thing to be honest about is that we could probably do ministry very differently if our only concern was as a church counting pledge cards and counting how many people we baptized each year. If that was the thing, we'd probably make decisions very differently.
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And
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Our worship services on Sundays would probably be and feel very different at the same time, if we have no concern for that, if it's just the culture of discipleship and not any concern for evangelism, not any concern for people. I just was very convicted and I wrote a piece for the Gospel coalition years ago about why I lead our church through the center's prayer or some version of the sinner's prayer. Every single Sunday, every single Sunday after I pray, I always share the gospel every Sunday and I always afterward give an invitation for folks to give their lives to Christ. And why do I do that? And one of the really influential things for me was hearing Mark Dever reflect on that and this story of this congregant he had had who came to their church and shared, this is like the fifth or sixth church I've tried in the last couple of weeks I've been struggling.
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I've been feeling there's a void. I want to know God, I want to know the answers. And I've gone to these church and church and church and I haven't been told what it is that I need. And it's like we know the cure. I mean we know the disease is sin that we all suffer from. We know the cure Jesus. And heaven forbid that someone would stumble into our church on any given Sunday and hear nothing but this good self felt, whatever practical wisdom from numbers chapter three about how to get your life bet more in order and be a priest and serve the Lord, that's all good stuff. But if at some point in that service we don't introduce them to the cure and tell them how they can be safe from their sins and escape hell and have a relationship with living God, then we've done something wrong.
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So I'm always going to share the gospel. I'm going to find a way to do it. And I mean Jesus said all the scripture points to me so we shouldn't have to shoehorn him into it too much if we're reading the text rightly so I do that every Sunday. But again, it's just, if that was the only concern, then I probably wouldn't preach through books like numbers. Numbers is probably not the best way to win souls to Christ. I mean if that's really your only primary objective. So anyway, I've talked a lot. Let me stop and kick it to y'all and I mean, what do y'all think about this? And to me, I think we have to start by looking at our own current culture and maybe it is, I don't know if it's diagnosing and maybe it is thinking a little bit about the question of why don't we possibly see more souls one to Christ at and through our church? And again, at the end of the day, it's like Paul says in one Corinthians three, I mean, we are called to plant in water and only God gives the growth. And if God is just saying, that's not how I want to use this church in your particular ministry that I've given you here, but I mean we know that God wants to bring people into his kingdom.
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We know he wants to save souls. So I think at some point we do have to really ask the question, why aren't we seeing more of that? Are we doing something to get in the way of that? And again, I think are very specific things that we probably
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Need
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To think somewhat self critically about and say, yeah, are we willing to lay those down? Is it worth it? Whether it's our liturgy and being too inaccessible, whether it's our music, our songs that we are talking about raising ebenezer and this and that, it is just inaccessible and people feel completely out of place and it's a barrier to them just hearing the simple gospel or whether it's preaching through numbers. And again, then you kick it back to, well, what are you going to do? Are you just going to sing joy of M? Are you just going to preach the gospel and do the self-help thing? Sorry, the baptized Ted talk, like you said, really water it down and preach to the lowest common denominator and just stay away from, I'm getting ready this Sunday to talk about numbers five and the test that God gives him for cases of adultery and it sounds a lot like a witch hunt, and that's just a passage I would never preach if the number one and only goal was to get somebody saved.
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Is that something that, and to me, I want to believe that as much as there might be a tension between these two things, all out evangelism, all out discipleship and you really, it's very, very hard to preach to everybody. I mean, it's not unlike, I was off the charts in math growing up and it's like I was frustrated when the math teacher would slow it down and water it down for the kids that were not off the charts in math. And it's like, who are you teaching to here? And I mean, that's something that I have to deal with in preaching. It's like, who am I really preaching? And you're trying to preach to both the Austin and Thas and these guys who know theology better than Me, while also trying to preach to the Dika ANDA's brother who was there this past Sunday for her baptism who maybe in some of those cases, some of these people have never stepped foot in church and not even an Ebenezer. I mean they don't know who the Apostle Paul is. So you're like, well, do I stop and do a
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Define 30
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32nd introduction? I mean we've talked about this in the past with one of our pastor friends down the road here in his church and kind of joked about he really does that. I mean when he comes to a text and he's like, okay, now I need to not assume that these people know who the Apostle Paul is. And so let me give them the 32nd version. And again, for our people that would feel very patronizing. I think that would feel, again, even just the fact that I'm stopping to do that if I did out of a real genuine desire to make our church feel more accessible for people and then there'd have to be a serious conversation about that or you just lose people and you probably lose people anyway. But I'd have to be very open and say, Hey, look, we're going to change some things culturally around here. I'm going to stop assuming that the people I'm preaching to are 98%
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Christians.
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So I thought you all have, I haven't even answered the question or begun to, but
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Yeah, I think there's a bunch of different places we could start. I think the first just obvious one of what are we willing to sacrifice in order to see souls come to Christ would just be the ministries and programs that we have. I'm not saying we have to necessarily slash them, but ask the real hard questions of are these ministries existing to support West Hills vision that we believe God has given us to make disciples here and beyond with the good news of Jesus? And asking that question are our men's women's kids youth young adult mercy missions, which we don't have as many programs as other churches do, but just asking and evaluating them and say, what would it take for this ministry to equip or make it possible for someone to participate in an event and someone to be able to hear the gospel and become a believer?
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I did this a little bit with pseudo ministry, just painting a vision for, Hey, here's our focus for this next year. One of those was seeking the loss and just very openly to the students just saying, Hey, I'm thinking of two groups of people here. I'm thinking of those of you who are here and have yet to believe the gospel of Jesus and those of you who have come to believe the gospel and yet you have people who don't know Jesus. And to just name that and be very intentional with, Hey, here's what we're going to be doing on Wednesdays and here's what we're going to be teaching through and doing that with all of our ministries though of asking, are these ministries equipping people either for the work of evangelism or to make it accessible so someone can come participate and join in those events to hear the gospel.
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So I think that's one. Just a general speaking, are we willing to sacrifice ministries or at least how ministries are currently being run in order to do that? I think second for me would be comfort to just remove certain levels of comfort among our people that evangelism is a spiritual discipline and it seems as though we either as a church have not produced disciples that view evangelism as a part of the Christian life or we are receiving into our church those who are Christians who have received inadequate discipleship towards what it means to evangelize and ensure their lost. Don Whitney says that evangelism is the natural overflow of the Christian life. We should all be able to talk about what the Lord has done for us and what he means to us and being willing to give up some comfort. And I don't know if that looks like putting cards in front of people and having them write names of individuals.
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This is someone who I want to share the gospel with and doing more than filling it out, doing more than praying, but having more intentional processes to follow up with. And it doesn't have not to be a shame tactic of we're going to shame you when I ask, Hey, have you shared the gospel with so-and-so yet? But it could be an opportunity. You mentioned just not perhaps the church knowing enough of we begin our all church members meetings and asking the question, Hey, who has a time this last quarter that they've had the opportunity to share the gospel with someone and using that to be a celebratory thing but also make it a little bit uncomfortable if
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We show up at these meetings and someone doesn't have something. And I would put comfort in with our community aspect of it. That's good. A couple of years ago we had a pastor friend come speak at our young adult ministry and he said at his church that their philosophy of Bible reading is that you're always reading the Bible with an unbeliever and making our life groups, discipleship groups, our community that we cherish a lot, community is a big aspect distinctive of our church. And I think a willingness to sacrifice some of the closeness that we have for conversations with unbelievers centered around the Bible. Is your group willing to have someone who doesn't know anything about the Bible to walk very slowly through the gospel of Mark answering all the questions that everyone in your group already knows and probably all the children in your group already know so that this person can spend time with the Bible? Or are you willing to leave the community you're super comfortable with in order to go read the Bible with someone else?
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And I would argue at least the opportunities I've had for that kind of ministry to others, actually, the more missional your community is collectively together, the more tightly knit and bound together the community becomes that you really only get so close with people when it's just sort of a Christian country club kind thing as opposed to, no, actually this feels like the tightest communities on the planet are the military. I mean it's when you're fighting in the trenches, I mean that's why you talk about a band of brothers, others, there's something that bonds people together when you're doing life and death stuff
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Together, which is what we would say
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Is exactly, which is what that is. And when you have it right in your face like that where it's not just, and it's great. I mean we should be taking prayer requests and praying for one another's unbelieving spouses, kids and siblings and this and that, but when one of those unbelievers is right there at the table and when, like you said, you're reading through that scripture with them together and then maybe offline behind their back praying with the believers in the group, I think that yeah, it does. It makes that community even more bonded. Anyway,
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Sorry, I'll share just one more and then let you guys jump in. The other one would be classrooms. Just as we think of our Sunday discipleship, I think there's a lot to celebrate with our Sunday classes that they went from, even in my time here and even before I got here of not being super well attended to very well attended and yet previously not the religions of St. Louis, which is intended for equipping people for evangelism, but previously doing an evangelism 1 0 1 bootcamp kind of thing and it being the lowest attended class in a long time. And I think of some of the other classes that we have, some of the ones that I've taught and we've had lots of people come for a study of a book of the Bible, which is great and want that to continue to happen. A class on theology well attended, great want more people to attend. But the classes that seem to get the least amount of traction are prayer, which I think is a reason perhaps for the evangelism. And then the evangelism classes themselves are our lowest attended classes here at West Hills. And if we are going to sacrifice something, it might mean we sacrifice some of the studies that we think are important for equipping people and going deeper in different books of the Bible or theology or cultural matters so that we can ensure that everyone who's participating in those classes are equipped to share the gospel.
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We might just have a cycle of classes at some point that we got the three class options or two class options, and they're all evangelism, different aspects of apologetics and evangelism. So you're going to be trained for evangelism. It's just what specific, whether it's in the workplace or the religious St. Louis and more unapologetics kind of flavor. But anyway, to emphasize how important that is and train people,
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I think the point on bringing people into our circles I think is just so compelling. That's what you were alluding to with your small groups. We want to take care of ourselves 100%, but among the things that we are willing to sacrifice, it's kind of an obvious and easy way because part of the Willow Creek going all the way back to the beginning matter was in part that they existed in a social time and location where you could do that kind of thing. You could have big worship, lots of lights, lots of sound, and you could invite people to church and they would come.
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Now I can imagine a lot of our congregants listening and say, I can't get anybody to come to a church on a Sunday morning now you're never going to hear me say stop inviting your say people to come to church always do because we believe in a high level of the preaching of God's word. At the same time, we understand that particularly for skeptical people, meaning it's a hard sell, it's a hard sell. And I'm not talking about Muslims, Hindu, Jewish and so forth that has an externalized religion and they already really have an imagination that is shaped by transcendence and imagination that is shaped by God. They're usually a lot easier to talk to because at least there's that common ground where they don't feel so much skepticism,
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Whereas with a lot of us. But what about all of my postmodern western the nuns, the N-O-N-E-S folks, sometimes that's a harder one to get into, but to come to your home and sit in a Bible study, they may be far more open to do. And a lot of us have studies here, they might be willing to come here, but it's not a sermon to listen to. But also they might just be willing to be around when your life group and your deep group, and we kind of talked on this last week, so I know I'm microwaving last week sales pitch, but I kind of want to say it again. You guys go and do something together. It's perfectly appropriate to start bringing lost people into your midst so that you can build.
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And that was Dre's story of how God used the life group experience to feel loved and cared for and receive the gospel.
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And I had a couple other things I wanted just to, I agree with everything that y'all has said so far
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And also real quick on that and also used it to bring her to church in the first place. I wouldn't have invited her to the life group if she hadn't actually followed up on my invitation and come on that Sunday, which I do think is point. The flip side a little bit of what Austin was saying is that we're reading through the great Churching book as a staff still and 40 million Americans have left the church and the last 25 years greatest religious, greatest sociological demographic shift in US history, but 80% of them surveyed who have left the church in the last 25 years were regularly attending church now are not 80% of them surveyed said I would come back, I would probably come back to church or strongly consider it. I can't remember how they asked the survey. I would probably come back if someone invited
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Me
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Personally. So I mean to your point about don't hear me saying don't invite, it's like, no, no, no. You need to personally invite
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You,
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Your friends, your coworkers, your neighbors, your mechanic, I mean, because it might just take that personal invite and then they come. And again, that's what it was for Dika.
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I
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Mean, she came to Easter to get free candy and I just said, Hey, come back tomorrow. She came. And then the rest is history.
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Real quick on that as far as inviting people to church to put it on a comfort and then get right back to Austin, I've heard several people over, I've been here a little over five years at times, propose an excuse of, well, I'm worried what they might hear or what the subject matter is of the sermon. And I would just like to push back on that because if there is at least one thing that's presented at West Hills Weekly, regardless of who's in the pulpit, it's the gospel. And if you're worried about an individual being offended by coming back to church, in one aspect the gospel is very offensive,
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But it also brings the best news with it. And so to just push back a little bit about the, well, I'm worried what they'll think they'll hear at the church service because at West Hills, at least in the Sunday morning worship gathering in our sanctuary, they will hear the gospel. It might be through the book of numbers or Leviticus or Hebrews. And regardless of the book or the topic, they will hear the gospel. And what they do with that is on them and between them and God. But don't let that be an excuse to not invite someone because you're worried about them being offended because the gospel's offensive.
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Now, at the same time, I will also give the counterpoint to that, which is I will confess that I have not historically and even still, I could probably go through line by line of last week's sermon for instance and say, I have not always done the best job of one of the things that occurred to me in terms of practical things we could and should be doing as a church to better reach people is I need to be far more, I think attentive to how an unbeliever and unchurched person could and likely will hear this sermon or even this line from this sermon. And I know I've had specific examples of conversations I've had with congregants here that I was very thankful for who came into my office or called me on Sunday afternoon or whatever it is, and said, Hey, you said that thing in the sermon this morning.
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And if I'm honest, it really kind of upset me and here's why. Not because I disagree with you, but because I've been inviting my transgender coworker to come to church for months now. I've been inviting my whatever, angry at God son to come with me to church and fill in the blank of description of person who is unchurched who I'd been inviting. And they say, had this been the Sunday that they had come and they had heard you say that one line from that sermon, they'd never come to church ever again because it would confirm everything that they thought they believe about how judgmental Christians are. And so again, that's not to say that we ever compromise on the truth, but part of the question is how you communicate truth is always going to be very dependent on the context and who's listening.
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And I will just be the first to confess that all too often I can fall into the trap of believing that I'm preaching to the choir on Sunday mornings. And just assuming that there's a difference between, again, the church has evangelism, church's discipleship culture of evangel culture, there's a difference between having a philosophical belief in what we're doing here is equipping the saints for the work of ministry primarily, but also recognizing that there's unbelievers here, there's a difference between that. And then just preaching the choir and just having really a blatant disregard for the fact that there not only could be, but they're in all statistical likelihood when we're reaching 400 people a Sunday these days, and I know enough about even five or 10 of 'em personally to know you're not safe. You think you are, but you're not saved that are there every week that we know that there are unbelievers there. We know that there are people who are unsaved there every Sunday. And so I should not ever be falling into that trap, even if it's 99% at West Hills who are saved. Heaven forbid that I let that become a mentality of preaching to the choir and forgetting about even if it is those four or five who aren't saved who you can, here's what I'm trying to say, you can reach the 396 without just completely disregarding the five
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And still do it in a way that doesn't feel, and that's not to even say anything of the transgender coworker who's not there every Sunday who if they stumble in and this is the one sermon they hear, how do I preach it in a way that doesn't yet turn them off to God forever? And so just I think part of that, some of the words that get tossed around in our circles or words like winsome and literally kind of meaning tending toward winning people over. How do you preach in a way that people have enough of the combative us versus them polarized tribal stuff on social media anyway, they get that enough during the week, they don't need to come on Sunday and hear me paint these things. Even we do talk and we're not going to pull punches, we're not going to not talk about the real issues of the day and all of that, but to do it in a way that again, doesn't have that feeling of us versus them doesn't have that feeling of rallying the base in a way that belittles and condemns the people of the world because, but for the grace of God, I believe all the same lies that they believe and I'd be woke and I'd be whatever.
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So yeah, I can score cheap points with the Christian base by making fun of the woke people and how silly things they believe are, but that's not what it's about. It's about about trying to preach in a way that equips our people to go reach those woke people Monday through Saturday, but also in a way that if one of those people stumbled in this Sunday or got invited and actually came or whatever, again, they're not going to be completely turned off. So anyway, I said enough about that.
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Can I add two things to that? One is that going back earlier, and I touched on it here, is when you're speaking to sort of the hard hearted non-Christian or the soft hearted non-Christian or something, and we talked about, yeah, if we go to the least common denominator, do we drive people out of the building? And I think that you swing the penguin too far in either direction, you get a problem. The one upside I think to doing some of those ways of adjusting phraseology so that other than Christian person can understand it, is that for all of the seasoned Christians in the room, it does also categorize them for how to have that kind conversation on their own so that they don't use words like sanctification and w imputation when they're talking to someone that doesn't know who Moses is. So there is some role for that, but I think also in a church, to your point, if you swung the pendulum to the other side where you're going to completely replace the vocabulary, it would be probably too weird of a switch. But I do also want to talk about, and this is the one that when we brought this question up last week that was probably most on my mind was kind of your bit on the tribal stuff and what would be willing to sacrifice as a church. And I got to thinking about the email you sent a couple of weeks ago that Carrie company with his last name nwo,
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Okay, Kerry n sent about how, and the statistician in me is screaming right now to say Austin correlation is not causation, but I think it has to be said that in 2015 poll congregate churches asked what was your church's effectiveness in reaching the lost? And in 2015, that number was 13%. In 2023 it was one. So we've gone down from 13% to 1% of Christians say that their churches are effective at reaching the lost, and I just can't help that. It doesn't have anything to do with a broader culture in which is incredibly divisive and people are into their identity politics or whatever it is.
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Just real quick, how would you answer that question all of you for West Hills, if we got asked that poll question, how effective is West Hills at reaching the loss?
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Are we effective or not? The answer? Are we one
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Of the 1%? I would say so
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I was absolutely,
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I'd say we're in the 99% of, we're not that effective, not effective at reaching the lost.
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So I would say
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Hence the podcast.
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Yeah, hence the podcast. So your sermon's about 40, 43 minutes a week and I know we got bible studies and other stuff as well out of the 168 hours available, it's not a gigantic amount of spiritual formation time. The information that we receive through much of the rest of the time is incredibly formative. I think in the way that someone who has had a long and hard time abusing alcohol should not spend time at a bar. I worry that those of us who get on our phones and on our computers and read the news and in our hearts take a position that is not like the position of the heart of Jesus towards other people need to refrain from that kind of activity. And I know you're thinking, but Austin, the problems in the world are just too big and it's just too important. And I just have to know the answer's probably not.
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I'll use myself as I had to get off Facebook back in 2020. I have it for our group and marketplace if I got to buy something, but I haven't scrolled a nude feed in five years because back during that whole election cycle, I saw too many people that I liked and loved and respected saying things that I just found tragic. And I will tell you it has been better for my soul. And I would encourage a lot of our people that if you can't look across at somebody like you mentioned poking fun at or hating another group, and you might think, I don't hate in my heart the biblical language surrounding hate for another person is a far lower barrier than we like to think that it is incredibly low. I would rather our hearts weep for those that we see that are causing all the problems in our country so to speak, then want to say that they're the reason our flourishing isn't coming to what needs to be and the best way to do it's to get power and to get them out of the way.
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If that's your heart, you've adopted a view of the culture that really comes out in nietzche several hundred years ago and not one of the gospel of Jesus. So when I'm asking or trying to answer the question, what is it that we need to sacrifice? Part of it is things that we need to do with our hands, like okay, being comfortable and we need to be able to be willing to let people that are lost come into our spaces. Some of it's with our head, we don't know information about classes and evangelism and we probably need to all need to sharpen up our tool, but a little bit. But I also question the matter of the heart, is it how many of us have spent too much time festering in that fear and anger that the culture is so swimming in and it's being an impediment to our ability to want to see people save because we love them. And the good news also is that Jesus loves the loss far more than we do.
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He is far more intent on reaching the loss than we are. And when we go and do the work of evangelism, we don't do it without him. You mentioned spiritual disciplines earlier. One of my favorite parts about Don Whitney's book is he outlines the beginning. Something that I think is often forgotten in spiritual disciplines is that they are not merely for conformity to Christ. They are that, but they're also the means of communion with Christ. So you have, I really believe that for many of us, like some of the best communion we can have with Jesus is sitting across the table from someone and explaining the gospel. There's few moments in my life where I feel like the presence of God is more with me than in those times. And so that's a selfish reason, but it's also a wonderful experience to have. So I say all that to say if you go in the task of evangelism, you don't go by yourself, you go in the power of God.
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Can I ask you all, we've talked around a few of these, can I ask you all some specific yes or no questions about possible things that we could consider sacrificing or changing that, again, some of this is going to be hypothetical, but if a survey showed us that churches that refrain from singing songs that have include words of seven or more letters and talk about ebenezer and sanctification and double imputation have a three times more likelihood of reaching the lost, is that something we would consider doing? Brian, we'll start with you since you're the worship. I mean if we could do that research and figure out, okay, here are the churches that the 1% here carry according to Carrie's thing. It's 1% or less of churches that are effectively reaching the lost. If we could discover that one thing all those churches have in common is they sing joy of M. That's not joy of M, love joy. But that's different than what we sing on Sundays in our worship. We're trying to theologically shape people. Is that something we're willing to change and give up?
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Teresa lost As long as the things aren't true Gospel centered. That's something. Yes. Others,
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Everything's on the table. I think Brian's point is true. Yes, yes. But yes, we would. But as long as it's theologically true and we still don't go straight to least common denominator so to speak, because a lot of these songs too in the past couple of years have become simple to sing and theologically rich at the same time. And I know we're a bunch of swayers, there's no dominant seventh anywhere to be had, which that would be what I would be more interested in personally, stylistically. Yeah, but there are stuff that's not as empty headed as it was in the nineties and two thousands.
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What about sermon length? If we saw that churches that keep their services to a tight hour are more attractive, visitors are more likely to say yes to an invitation, it's only an hour and we got to trim the sermon length to 25, 30 minutes instead of 40, 45 minutes. Is that something we should put on the table?
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Yeah, I think so.
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Possibly. I'm going to say, say you're giving not real
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Statistics stuff. I'm giving hypothetical just hypotheticals. I don't know that any of
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These are true. Would I be willing to change the sermon length? Yes. I don't think I just have such a high view of people and their ability to listen to longer things than 25 minutes.
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Amen. Joe Rogan,
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Number one podcast, I'm three hours long.
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Just
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Would I change the the sermon length to longer if people thought it was more compelling? Yes. I don't think three hours
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Don't do that to me, Seth.
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I write enough. Perfect. There's probably a happy medium somewhere in there. I don't think sermon length necessarily dictates quality of the sermon, but if the quality of the sermon is good, the length doesn't matter. People stick around for good quality regardless of whether or not they believe it. If you can present a good argument, people will listen.
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What about our specific liturgical elements that we include in our services? If again, if some survey showed that you know what calls to confession and repentance and responsive prayers and longer form prayers, pastoral prayer and these types of things, doing communion every week is off-putting to visitors who are specifically told, unless you're a Christian, this isn't for you. Is there any number of things we could look at outside of the sermon too? And then let's look at, let's go even deeper on the sermon, not necessarily just the quality, but what about the accessibility? I mean you touched on your answer to it a little bit, but again, if the survey said that churches that stop and pause and explain who the apostle Paul is every single time, every single Sunday you're going to mention 'em, you got to explain to make it accessible, are any and all of those things, things that we'd be willing to compromises, again a loaded word, but to sacrifice or to make adjustments to in our culture and how we practice church?
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I do think on, and this is somewhat related to all matters of it is, and I don't remember where I was reading this lately, that there has been kind of an uptick in interest in some churches because of the need to have a rootedness to history. And so I think that trying to make it cool to be the short version of we're going to get different colored lights and it's going to be really jazzy music, not jazzy, but whatever actually has kind of lost its course because it ends up kind of fizzled and everything's ethereal and weird is that people want to feel rootedness to an ancientness because modern stoicism is a thing right now. People are reading Marcus Aurelius because really honestly, they're just looking for meaning, not something else. But there's reason guys like Jordan Peterson is incredibly popular right now is because
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We
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Went from the epicureans of the millennials to a guy like Peterson that says, but have you forgotten strength in virtue and honor? So I think we're in a moment. So you ask about pastoral prayer and the liturgy and the very formalness of it. I actually think in today's cultural moment we're actually probably better suited to maintain that kind thing.
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Yeah, that was the Driscoll like young Russell's reform thing, like man getting the liturgy back in there and the ancient prayers and ripping the lights out. Yeah. Anyway, I think it is appealing.
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Yeah, I'd add just you mentioned all the different aspects, liturgy and stuff. Something that we practically could change very easily would be in the pastoral prayers of specifically praying for the salvations of right now we are getting more prayer requests submitted, but there's still a handful who submit the same prayer request for the salvation of someone. And as long
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As they don't market confidential,
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As long as they don't mark confidential and they do, and that's good and we don't want to violate that. But if someone were to submit publicly, I would like prayer for the salvation of so-and-so. I don't know when we've specifically done that in a pastoral prayer of naming someone apart from generally our kids' ministry or our student ministry or our lost family and friends, but being more specific, naming the person who has a soul that's going to spend eternity somewhere and modeling that for the church.
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Yeah. Okay. How about one more because I think you both hadn't Austin mention this one and I did too already, but what about our community and our ministries and our, I don't want to say that we're inherently insular, but just we've all said many times, I think we do community with one another very well here. If again, there was a study survey, whatever that said, okay, that's actually a tension with being outward focused and reaching the lost we is that something we sacrifice? Carrie knew off another article that I didn't send y'all that is titled Seven Things Christians Should Give Up to Reach Unchurched People. One of 'em is our little Christian bubbles and he says One of the best ways to encourage people to build relationships with unchurched people is to stop running ministries in your church every night of the week.
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Encourage the Christians in your church to get involved in their kids' schools, to play sports in a community league and to get to know their neighbors, pick a few ministries and do 'em well. He says at our church we encourage people to serve on Sundays and be in community group one night a week. That's about it. Salt only realizes its purpose if it gets out of the box and into the food that it needs to season. You can't influence people you don't know. So are we guilty of doubt at West Hills of running a ministry every night of the week of enabling Christians to stay in their bubbles and not pushing them harder to pop the bubble and get out and be the salt and spill out of the box and influence and know the community, et cetera, et cetera? And again, do you see those two things in tension?
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How should or could we do? I've had these conversations and I can see it both ways. I remember a mutual friend who's no longer at the church who, anyway, as I was coming in as lead pastor and we really at one point in this church, I will say back eight, nine years ago in my view, weren't necessarily knocking it out of the park with either mission or community. And I think we kind of just did Sunday mornings. Well, and we didn't even put that much of a focus on the small group, much less we didn't have a men's ministry, we didn't have a women's ministry. So as we tried to get more serious and ramp those things up, I had someone come to me and say, Hey look, I'm concerned about this because I think we're getting over programmed. I think we're encouraging, enabling people at this church to just hang out with their Christian buddies all the time and I want to see him and I want, he said for my family, he said, I'm just going to tell you if this is what it means to be on the inside circle here, the inner circle at West Hills, count us out.
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We're not going to be inner circle because we're too committed to having our unsafe neighbors around our dinner table. And so we're going to miss the church potluck to do that instead. And so I see that and I see that potential and that argument. The flip side of that is, I just had a conversation this morning with Alison Webster about friends of she and Ewen that were friends from their time at Maryville in college that have been out not really ever, I don't think, been churched who they have started inviting to church and inviting to life group. And these friends are like, yeah, I think that could be something that could be good for us in our new marriage here. And as we start to think about and how we want to raise our kids and whatever and give 'em that rootedness and all that I think about. But when you don't have the community to invite 'em into, like you said, the small group, when you don't think about what a beauty that is that, I mean they've got the Websters, the Demmings, the Gentiles, I mean
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Mature people,
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All these very spiritually mature in their twenties, wonderful couples that I'm like, man, give me any couple young married couple in their twenties and I'll send 'em into that group and they'll probably want to be a Christian within a couple of weeks because they'll be like, these are great people. I want a marriage like theirs. But again, that requires a little bit of the Christian bubble. So I can see that both ways. Thoughts on that and again, from us as pastors and church leadership, how heavy handed you are in saying, Hey, we're going to start Slashing Ministries to free up nights of the week to really push you out of the bubble to go join your PTA board and do that.
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I think I could make the argument for the most part there is not programming every night of the week.
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Yeah, I don't think we do.
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We don't have that. And I'm thankful, and I don't want to start that there are different weeks where there is more or less programming, but I think where I would land on are we willing to cut programs maybe, but I would start back to where I began of how can we evaluate and leverage those programs that we have? And again, I hate calling them programs, ministries, whatever we want to call 'em. How can we leverage those? Because I would say most of them are good. I don't think we have any sacred cow ministries that actually aren't equipping people, discipling people, ministering to people. I don't think we have those, but are they focused, centered around seeing people come to Christ and leveraging those ministries? We have those structures or being willing to change those structures so that they do have that emphasis. And
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Maybe we can do a better job of reminding people of that even in our promotion of events of saying like, Hey, there's a women's coffee thing coming up this Saturday. That's a great, you don't have to be a Christian to come to that.
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It's just coffee
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And conversations, all that stuff. If there is a woman in your life, your next door neighbor that y'all have been talking about, we should go grab coffee for weeks and weeks, months and months and months. Maybe this is the time. Like, hey, come grab coffee. Not just with me, but I'd love to introduce you to some other friends. And anyway,
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I think having the structure there to invite people into because I agree, you can't overdo it where there's so many programs and there's no margin in anyone's life anymore. On the other hand, I think sometimes the assumption is placed that you can only have one or the other, and I just don't think that's true. I think that we try to build out, to your point, programming that your non-Christian friends', family, whatever, coworkers can come into those and that it's not only Sunday morning, again, those 80% we wanted to come isn't going to come back, but like coffee connection, men's breakfast yam, whatever it is that y'all do and all that stuff. I don't think any of those are such that unless it's evangelism specifically, well obviously they're not going to be equipped for that task, but just about any of them should otherwise be possible. And maybe people just need to know that they have permission to do that. If they're thinking, oh, I didn't know that that was something that was allowed your life group when your D group meets, just bring 'em along. They might be confused for half of it, but they might not.
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And not just permission, but encouragement, like explicit encouragement. Do this, this is really important.
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And I would add to that, we've named this before of it's a going into unique season of our church of not going to be in our usual building, but I using our homes as places where we can invite people in or intentionally meeting somewhere where there are unbelievers. For me, I have a discipleship group that meets at a Panera now on Thursday mornings and it meets at six 15, and yet I show up there at six o'clock so I can meet the regular people who are there every single day to just begin conversations. Because I'm a pastor, I spend a of time in the church building around Christians, and that is a dedicated time where I know I'm going to be able to have some conversations and I've started to of why do you meet with these guys every morning? I was like, well, we talk about God's word and okay, well where do you go to church? And it's opened some conversations with them and to, not that every group has to meet at a Panera, but I'm just saying use different things that we have to be around unbelievers, maybe it looks like going. And if you can work at a place where you'll be surrounded by unbelievers, if you work from home all the time and you're able to like, Hey, I can go work from, not a Starbucks anywhere, but Starbucks, Starbucks. But go to those places so you're at least surrounded by unbelievers and
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You can use your homes for ministry, but also get outside of your homes.
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That's
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Good. That's good.
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Anything else y'all got?
(01:04:55):
No, I have one thing. For anyone who either comments on this video or submits a really good ask the pastors question, I have a free book for you on the subject of evangelism. So regardless of whether or not your question is on evangelism, you have one week from the air date of this to either send myself the office, one of the pastors or comment on this video, a really good, ask the pastors question, and I will give you a book. We'll announce it on the podcast too. Love it. Who the winners are. I want to know what the
(01:05:32):
Book is. Just submit a question. You got to submit a question. Alright, well that's it for this week's episode of Ask the Pastors. Remember that you can submit your questions by visiting the info bar at West Hills or by asking them online through our website at www.westhillssst.org, and join us next week as we address the question, when do I, if ever apply Matthew 10, 14 to 16 and stop preaching the gospel to family members who don't want to talk about God. That's a great question.
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And Matthew 10, 14 to 15 got it for reference, is when Jesus tells, sends out his 12 apostles and says, if anyone won't listen to you, preach to the gospel of the kingdom. If they won't listen, shake the dust off your feet when you leave that house or town. So do we ever do that with our lost loved ones? Shake our dust off, turn 'em over to say,
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If you enjoyed this week's episode, hit that like button, subscribe and share it with a friend and leave a comment. Send us an email to find out what Thad's secret Folk on Evangelism is. Thanks so much for listening, and we'll catch you next week.