Mobilizing Christians

Brad Hightower argues that a common method of doing church in the USA, one focused on bringing people to slick worship services, produces little fruit other than bringing more and more people to these slick events:

We try to draw people to church by having a well crafted church service. It is the craft of the service that is to create an inspirational moment for the observer and bring them back next week. There are endless reasons why this approach to church is just plain wrong. I simply ask pastors to consider, if we are nervous about whether we will preach a good sermon on Sunday morning, then we got it all wrong. If we focus on improving the “flow” of the service, then we are dead wrong. This approach produces all the wrong results no matter how big our churches are. Such practices produce many shallow results. . . . this method produces spectator Christian.

So how should we doing church? Brad argues for small groups and a missionary outlook for all Christians.