A Deep Dive on Discipleship First versus Worship First

In an earlier article, I wrote about a key discovery from my recent sabbatical. It's that we need to start leaning into DISCIPLESHIP FIRST methods of reaching out rather than solely relying on WORSHIP FIRST approaches. A worship-first approach works fine in a world where people are looking to belong to a church, but this method becomes increasingly futile in a society where most could care less about attending a formal worship service.

You can read my article about this here. But just what does it look like? Why is this important?

I was a college student at a state university in the 1980s. I was one of the key leaders in our campus ministry there, and we had tremendous success in growing the campus ministry and affecting change. Then I worked as a campus minister at a different state university in the 2000s, hoping to see the same kinds of positive results. In the decade or more in between, however, a monumental change was occurring that would deeply affect ministry in the US. This change affects all parts of church life, but it's clearly evident in a place like a campus ministry.

Moving into adulthood has always been difficult. Young adults tend to question their faith in one way or another. Some sow their wild oats for a season. Some hold the straight and narrow. This hasn't changed. Young people are still young people.

What has changed is the new fact that most young adults no longer return to church as they grow older. For as long as people can remember, many young people who grew up in church have often fallen away for a season. As they settled down and had families, most eventually returned to worshiping communities. This is what we have always known to be true. 

But by the early 2000s, this trend was ending. For various reasons, young adults who have grown up participating in church life tend not just to leave for a season. They never come back. A simple Google search will turn up many good (as well as garbage) articles written about the multiple reasons for this.

Our old Christian Student Center building by the campus of West Virginia University

This change was a real problem for me. I served as the Church of Christ campus minister at West Virginia University from 2001 to 2009. Since the 1970s when Churches of Christ began a campus ministry work at the now 25,000-student university, the local church and its campus minister could count on a steady stream of newcomers from regional Churches of Christ. These Christian students would form the core group from which they could reach out to friends, roommates, classmates and so forth. The work had various ups and downs, but the methods were easy enough to understand.

The benefits for the local church were tangible and visible. While not every active member of the campus ministry would roll out of bed in time for Sunday morning worship, enough did to be seen and appreciated. Church members felt invigorated by a constant stream of young people who helped with various ministries and whom the church could spoil with hospitality and special events. It was a great arrangement.

There was an unspoken contract in this arrangement between the church and the campus ministry they supported. The ministry could do almost whatever it wanted to connect with college students as long as students also attended the Sunday worship service. This may not have been the spoken goal, but it was often the metric that mattered the most.

an example of how to map out a DISCIPLESHIP FIRST strategy

This is the measurement most American Christians tend to care about: Sunday morning attendance. "How many people attend your church?" is a very common question I hear. To put it more crudely in the language of many church staff meetings: Butts in the pews are what matters.

To state the obvious, this is a WORSHIP FIRST approach to Christianity. A worship-first approach is when the ultimate goal of evangelism or outreach is to lead other people to a worship service. A worship-first approach is when the jobs of ministers and ministry staff are evaluated based on how many people they bring into the church's worship service. A worship-first approach is when a large portion of a church's budget is directed toward producing a worship gathering.

There's nothing inherently sinister about this. Most church leaders see Sunday morning attendance as the baseline commitment for a follower of Jesus. But in today's world, the implications of this thinking are profoundly negative for the church in the US, Canada and Europe.

The WORSHIP FIRST approach inadvertently minimizes what faith is all about. Jesus never held a worship service, at least not according to our definition of the word. He never invited anyone to church. What Jesus did (over and over) was call people to follow him as he healed, taught and went about.

In 1980s America and before, the WORSHIP FIRST approach worked because most people wanted to participate in church. Lots of factors contributed to this. Young adults, for example, might disappear for a season but they would usually come back to church, perhaps after they married or had kids. (In Europe, you'd have to look back a few decades earlier to find such a trend.)

The problem is that most people today have zero interest in attending a worship service, and there's very little you can do to change that. I wrote about this a few weeks ago, and you can read it here. Some churches try to mitigate this by offering a variety of worship services: traditional, contemporary, jazz, hipster, Saturday-evening, etc. While such options may keep some church-goers from leaving their churches, they do little to bring in the 80% of Americans who just aren't into official church worship gatherings.

In my work as a campus minister, this trend hit hard. We were still reaching new people. My ministry certainly had an impact that I could see and feel. The problem was that my supporting church could no longer see it and feel it. It didn't help that the church had relocated to a new building quite distant from campus. But I still tried to cajole and convince students to come to the worship service. Very few took me up on that offer.

Occasionally, one of our new Christian students would decide to give it a try. Like Von, not his real name, who came one Sunday and sat near the back. During worship, we came to song that was often used in our campus ministry. As we sang it, Von joined in and even clapped at the spots where our students would clap along with the singing. That morning, he happened to be sitting behind an older lady who turned to him and remarked, "This isn't the clapping section."

In all fairness to that dear sister who has since gone on to be with the Lord, she was probably trying to be funny. But to that student who had made a huge effort to show up and for whom a formal church service was already a risky proposition, it was confirmation that this wasn't the place for him. I could tell more stories like this.

The truth is that my church and my church leaders didn't know how to give permission for our ministry to focus on a DISCIPLESHIP FIRST approach. In fairness, I also had no other framework. I simply knew I was in part failing at what was expected. Even though I could see lives changing and the kingdom advancing, I also felt the pressure of failing to deliver. If I had had the understanding then that I do now, perhaps we could have put our heads together and given permission to a whole new way of forming Christian community ... one that would have blessed both the church and the ministry to college students.

Campus ministers and youth ministers should be well positioned to understand this necessary shift away from a worship-first way of thinking. But it isn't easy for the rest of us to grasp. This is the challenge of moving from a purely WORSHIP FIRST approach to strategies that prioritize DISCIPLESHIP FIRST.