The Swimming Club Parable: Why Effective Evangelism Is Nearly Impossible Today

Here's a parable. Let's say that you love swimming. You love swimming so much in fact that you are part of a swim club. You believe that swimming is the healthiest thing a person could do, and you feel stronger and more vibrant when you are actively swimming. Every week, you meet with your swim club to do laps together and then go out for drinks. It's one of the most enjoyable parts of your week, and you see this as incredibly important.

You and I are good friends, in this parable at least. And as an advocate for swimming as the key to a healthy life, you keep inviting me to the swim club. You use various enticements to get me to go. You even introduce me to another swim club member in the hopes it will push me over the edge. Do you know where this parable is going? Read on for the conclusion.

(from www.goodlife.org.au/squads)

Clear of Covid, I have resumed my planned sabbatical schedule. It was hard to let go of the planned visits in Hamburg and Frankfurt, but the wise path was to lie low. (I'll pick up some of what I missed via Skype, but it won't be the same.)

Yesterday, we arrived at London Heathrow Airport and boarded a bus for transfer over to Oxford. The "magic" that happens at London's airports is remarkable. The British free-enterprise system allows dozens of companies to shuttle tens of thousands of passengers in an incredibly efficient manner. Finding our bus and buying our tickets were easy. Our biggest issue was knowing where to get off the bus!

Why am I here? What exactly am I hoping to learn? There are basic problems in the American church for which I am seeking workarounds.

The first is that most churches are stuck. And by stuck, I mean not just treading water. I mean that churches are in decline and have no idea what to do about it. Oh sure, there are ideas, but most of these ideas are about either (a) going back to a more glorious past, or (b) borrowing from a seemingly successful church down the road. These kinds of ideas are worse than placebos. They are deadly because they tend to accelerate decline, not fix it. Explaining that requires a bit more space than I have in this post.

The second major problem is that churches don't know how to reach out to the truly unchurched. Most "church growth strategies" are in fact marketing ploys aimed at recycling the saints. Even church plants tend to drift into attracting disaffected church folks rather than making a measurable impact on the unchurched. Church plants also tend to be prohibitively expensive. And those that do work are often impossible to reproduce for a variety of reasons.

The number of people with no interest in church grows each year, yet churches do the same things. Into this void of ineffective outreach, people keep saying: "You just have to show how much you care." "Your church just needs to preach better, worship better and serve better before people will come." "It's all about leadership. You just need healthy leaders and then people will come." "Narrow is the way that leads to salvation."  All of these statements are true, but they will not fix the most basic problem with the church's inability to reach the lost.

Why do I believe this? For starters, every choice a church makes limits who will participate. The meeting time. The building location. The style of worship. The preacher's personality. The denominational ties. Choices about gender equity. Or about welcoming and affirming LGBT folks. Or about dozens of other more or less obscure items. Every single choice excludes someone.

Yet the church of Jesus Christ is supposed to welcome people, not exclude them. We are to enfold people into the kingdom, not push them away. How do we rectify the fact that our God-given mission is compromised by the countless choices we make?

You can't fix this by adding a worship service. If you do this, you are only opening the door to an additional tiny fragment of people.

And to top it all off, an enormous number of people have no interest in attending church at all, no matter how you window-dress it. The obstacles are enormous.

Back to our parable. Your swim club is the best thing in your life. As my friend, you want me to experience it, too.

Here is the problem. I hate swimming. Just don't like it. I know how to swim, but I don't enjoy it. Don't like the smell of chlorine. Don't enjoy going back and forth in a big pool. It's not for me.

Because of this, there is nothing you could do to get me to join a swim club with you. It's possible that you might entice me to meet your clubmates for drinks one time after your weekly swim, but that would be very awkward for me and might even damage our friendship. Swimming isn't for me. Period. End of story.

This is the challenge we face with "inviting people to church" with us. A growing majority of people have simply decided that church is not for them. They may have their facts wrong. They may not know what they're missing. Any number of things. But you are not going to get them to show up on a Sunday for your church service, no matter how long or how hard you try.

Simply put, this is why I am here in England asking questions and listening to stories. This problem has existed in the UK for much longer than in the US. Smart church folks here have been trying to address this with new ways of doing and being church. There are very interesting things happening. Instead of closing churches, new Christian communities are forming, sometimes in church parishes that look as if they are dying. I'm so excited for the conversations ahead, and I look forward to sharing some of them with you in the next posts.