A great deal of effort, ink and money has gone into helping the local church determine how to "put our best foot forward" when visitors attend our church services. We're given guidance about parking lot activities, facility signage, welcome teams, and key approach phrases. From advice as to when and how coffee should be offered to best practices for demonstrating childcare safety and everything in between, no issue is left unaddressed. None of this is intrinsically bad.It does, however, ignore the one critical element in the entire equation. That element affects, indeed impacts, all of the others.A cake baked from scratch without sugar will look just like a cake that includes it. But cakes are not designed to be admired from afar for their appearance. To rework an old adage, the proof of the cake is in the eating. The sugar of the Christian ekklesia is in its relationships. Relationships, and perhaps most especially the relationships we build to introduce the message of the Gospel, are (or, at least, should be) the bedrock of everything the Church does, whether outside or inside its walls. The life of a congregation rises and falls on the vibrancy of its relationships. They are the glue that hold a congregation together. They are all too often the reason people leave one congregation to seek another.The seeker sensitive approach also assumes what it is trying to prove. It starts at the assumption that people ought to come seeking Christ. My goal is to demonstrate, in an admittedly whimsical manner, the fallacy of this assumption. And then to present an encouragement to a biblical alternative.
