Scrambled eggs and evangelism?

My one true culinary accomplishment is scrambled eggs. I am, given a microwave, a Pyrex bowl, a fork and the ingredients, dare I say it, a master of the art.

This ability was honed over years of cooking Sunday breakfast for hungry children. The resulting repast needs to be fluffy, moderately moist, well seasoned and topped off with black pepper. But the cooking time and the proportions of constituents must be just right.

Mistimed outreach

And church is similar. The essential ingredients are worship and prayer, fellowship and nurture, evangelism and service. But it is possible to get them out of balance, miscalculate and make it tasteless and chewy. With the UK in a desperate condition spiritually, are we in danger of overcooking and mistiming outreach? The ‘seeker-friendly service’ approach to Sundays isn’t a NT concept as far as I can see. And the church itself gets burnt. Although, of course, outsiders are welcome, church is for the church and for God.

It’s one thing to be welcoming and caring to non-Christians who visit, but it is another thing to constantly shape our meetings to suit the outsider. Here are some worries.

Covenant renewal

First, the ‘If you are a visitor here, it’s wonderful to see you. Please stay afterwards for a cup of our excellent coffee,’ opening to proceedings tends to set the wrong tone. In his book A Better Way: rediscovering the drama of Christ-centred worship, Michael Horton calls us, as new-covenant believers, to see our Sunday services as a ‘covenant renewal ceremony’ with the focus on God. He writes: ‘Whenever we gather for public worship, it is because we have been summoned. That is what ‘church’ means: ekklesia, ‘called out’ … We gather each Lord’s Day not merely out of habit, social custom, or felt needs, but because God has chosen this weekly festival as a foretaste of the everlasting Sabbath day that will be enjoyed fully at the marriage supper of the Lamb. God has called us out of the world and into his marvellous light. That is why we gather.’ We do not need dry, dead formality, but I feel a tragic dissonance between Horton’s weighty understanding of what we are about and the customer-oriented kick-off to Sundays.

Dumbing down

Second, with a continual concern to explain Christian truth to those with no Bible background, sermons get dumbed down. The church may face a constant diet of ‘milk, rather than solid food’ from the pulpit (1 Cor. 3.2). Some of the truths of Christianity that are less acceptable to today’s secular mindset may be skated over or even avoided. There is no depth, no seasoning with salt. The gospel is perpetually simplistic. It becomes distastefully undercooked for mature Christians. The sheep go away hungry. They can be alienated, feeling the service wasn’t really for them.

Too worried about image

Third, we can become far too sensitive about how we look in the eyes of non-Christians. How does church come across? We become more concerned about the image of our congregation than we should do. We mutate into evangelical Pharisees. A dish can look good yet taste bad. It’s all garnish and no savour. ‘Man looks on the outward appearance, but the LORD looks on the heart’ (1 Sam. 16.7). In the teaching, the struggles and agonies which God’s people may sometimes experience can get sidelined. Psalm 88, ending on ‘darkness is my only friend,’ doesn’t play well to non-Christians. But sometimes believers going through the mill need to hear that.

Guest services

Fourth, there’s nothing wrong with the occasional guest service (though really I would prefer a church which is so good that people just want to bring their non-Christian friends to all services – simply because God is there). But sometimes the guest service is so re-shaped as to bear little resemblance to a normal service, and really we are selling church as something it is not.

Church services should have an evangelistic edge, but evangelism is surely not their main regular function. I might get egg on my face for saying all this (!) but, for evangelism, don’t we need to get out more?