Pastor's Pastor

Pastor's Pastor: Friendraising

Pastor's Pastor: Friendraising

Church growth studies show three components that are essential for new members to remain within the fellowship of a church: ability to articulate their beliefs, active relationships with friends, and meaningful personal ministry. With one of these missing, the member may survive in a weakened state. If two, the new member will already be moving out of the fellowship they had readily embraced.

James A. Cress is the Ministerial Secretary of the General Conference of Seventh-day Adventists.

A mother asked her little boy how he liked his first day of school. “I hated it,” he said. “They put me in a room full of kids all by myself.” Suddenly this new scholar had discovered that he could be lonely in a crowd. Individuals who join a church in which they do not participate soon feel that they have entered a lonely crowd.

Church growth studies show three components that are essential for new members to remain within the fellowship of a church: ability to articulate their beliefs, active relationships with friends, and meaningful personal ministry. With one of these missing, the member may survive in a weakened state. If two, the new member will already be moving out of the fellowship they had readily embraced.

Tragedy. A new member without a friend is a tragedy—merely a statistic— and, far too often, this statistic becomes a reality in Seventh-day Adventist churches. While the tragedy of new members without friends concerns every denomination, Adventists have a greater challenge than most others because of unique factors surrounding the doctrinal instruction presented to potential members.

Typical recruitment of new members by Adventist evangelism has emphasized the unique theological positions of the church in comparison with “others” who either lack “full truth” or are unwilling to follow what they know. Thus, Adventists experience the theologically convicted individual who embraces the doctrinal positions of the church and sometimes joins a local congregation on the basis of theological convictions alone.

Reaction to rejection. While theological convictions remain necessary, beliefs alone are insufficient to keep new members bonded to their new congregation. Because the high level of confidence in the “truthfulness” of Adventist doctrine may not have been matched with high levels of fellowship and involvement, expectations have been dashed. As a result, new believers may well experience rejection, pain, and anger at the very moment they need love, acceptance, and forgiveness. When they experience this pain, these new members cut themselves off from committing themselves to one another.

John Savage, Methodist pastor and president of LEAD Consultants, interviewed a group of inactive members regarding their reasons for leaving the church. He noted, “Each of the 23 persons interviewed in the non-active group indicated that no one from the church had ever come to find out why they were losing interest or had dropped out. . . .One third of this group cried during the interview, indicating the intensity of unresolved feelings.”1

Believing they are unwanted and unneeded, these new members easily develop an attitude of indifference rather than risk rejection. Ken Abraham says, “Most psychologists agree that the opposite of love is not hate; it’s indifference. For example, a couple having marital problems has a better chance of reconciliation if there are feelings between them, regardless how negative or bitter those feelings are. But if the couple is indifferent in their feelings, it will take serious, long-term work to recapture the love they once knew. . . . The same is true spiritually. Indifference is a killer. Even negative reactions are better than no reaction. If you sense yourself sliding toward spiritual indifference, you must take radical corrective action immediately!”2

Reaction to reaction.However, rather than recognizing their own acts of abandonment or the subsequent reaction of indifference by new members, longer-term members may conclude that the new member’s process of indoctrination was insufficient and that this is the cause of their apostasy.

Furthermore, those pastors or members whose energies are directed to ongoing recruitment of new members are labeled as interested only in “numbers.” Such destructive blame-placing negates the very mandate of the gospel commission to take the good news to every creature under heaven.

People are no longer numbers when we love them, value them, pray for and with them, and minister to them. Bailey Smith recounts the story of a Sunday School teacher who responded to a criticism of numbers with determination to emphasize quality. Next week he arrived at class to discover several of his youngsters missing. Then his love for them and concern for their souls led him on an all-out effort to get them back to class. He concluded, “Shall we strive for numbers— Yes, O Yes! When it is my boys, let’s have numbers—all eleven of them!”3

Numbers, then, are important only because they represent individuals who need to be reached for Christ. In fact, when we understand numbers from this perspective, we realize that an individual remains only a number until someone becomes their friend and takes a personal interest. Making friends becomes not only a much-needed and excellent method of assimilating new members but also an effective evangelistic strategy

1 John S. Savage, The Apathetic and Bored Church Member (Reynoldsburg, OH: LEAD Consultants, 1981), 57.
2 Ken Abraham, The Disillusioned Christian (San Bernardino, CA: Here’s Life Publishers, 1991), 127.
3 Bailey Smith, Real Evangelism (Nashville, TN: Thomas Nelson, 1999), 123.

 

 


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James A. Cress is the Ministerial Secretary of the General Conference of Seventh-day Adventists.

June 2007

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