What Do the Unchurched Want?

By J. Matthew Pinson

Ultimately the question of what unchurched people want in a church is very unimportant compared to what the Bible says people need in a church. But over 25 years ago, some church growth experts began telling pastors the main impediment to growth was their lack of consumer orientation or cultural relevance or, for lack of a better word, “coolness.” This advice was associated with what was known as the seeker-sensitive or attractional movement.

Many pastors began an “extreme makeover” of their churches to rid them of any vestige of Christian tradition. While a small minority of these churches experienced growth, most did not. And recent data reveals most of the growth occurring in churches of all sizes is transfer growth, not conversion of the unchurched through evangelism.

From Attractional to Missional

This phenomenon led many ministry practitioners to question the received wisdom of the church growth movement and refocus the emphasis on church health. Some have labeled this as a shift from an attractional church model (How can we best attract customers?) to a missional model (How can we best embody the mission of God?). It has also coincided with the preferences of the Millennial generation and Generation Z for the authenticity of a community boutique shop or locally owned restaurant over Walmart and Red Robin.

This growing dissatisfaction with the answers of the church growth movement, which many pastors of typical churches have tried to no avail, surfaced in several things I encountered recently. This included a book by Jared C. Wilson, The Gospel-Driven Church: Uniting Church-Growth Dreams With the Metrics of Grace. Wilson started his ministry in the seeker-sensitive megachurch world but quickly burned out. Since then, he has written several books presenting a gospel-driven approach (characteristic of Mark Dever’s 9Marks and other increasingly popular church health ministries) to other church leaders who have grown weary of the seeker-sensitive or market-driven approach to church life.

My reading coincided with seminars presented at the recent Free Will Baptist Leadership Conference by Gordon Penfold, an expert in turnarounds and revitalizations of what he describes as “the typical neighborhood church.” It is interesting that Dr. Penfold, while (rightly) stressing the need to avoid “business as usual” in dysfunctional churches that have lost their desire to evangelize and grow, did not outline the same, worn-out “seven steps to achieve quick growth in your church by stylistic tinkering” we have grown accustomed to hearing.

He focused more on church leaders understanding themselves and the dysfunctional systems causing churches to stagnate and decline. He suggested the need for a more holistic, church health model rather than the corporate and consumer-driven models often heralded as the “silver-bullet” solution for the plateaued church: “If you just make your church more appealing to your customer base and their consumer tastes, more people will come and the church will explode.”

In his own way, Dr. Penfold was echoing what we’ve been hearing more and more from church health advocates such as Mark Dever, Harry Reeder, Mike McKinley, Jared Wilson, Colin Marshall, Tony Payne, and Brian Croft, who are experiencing growth in various demographic settings while utilizing the ordinary means of grace found in the Bible.

Studies Show…

Reading and hearing these things caused me to think back over some of the studies over the last two decades regarding the unchurched and what they look for in a church. It has always puzzled me that actual studies of the unchurched almost always reveal the style of a church or the way a church appeals to its “consumers” is not what is important to them.

Despite these studies, over and over again, I hear pastors in our denomination express discouragement because their churches are not relevant, cool, or entertaining enough, and worrying that these characteristics are needed to bring about growth. In contrast, studies consistently revealed that, while these characteristics are important for transfer members from other evangelical churches, they are not generally important to the unchurched.

Unfortunately, people were in such panic because of our rapidly changing, secularizing culture, they were willing to take whatever trendy method they could find and “throw it against the wall” to see if it might stick. Yet they never really knew (and still don’t know) the long-term consequences of using these tactics that had never been tried in the 2,000-year history of the Church.
In view of this ongoing problem, I was prompted to reflect on several related studies from the last couple of decades:

Barna. In the late 1990s, the Barna Group studied what was most important to unchurched people when visiting a church. Of the 22 most important things that attracted people to a church, the study found the top five were:

1. Theological beliefs or doctrine of the church
   

2. How much the people seem to care about each other
   

3. Quality of the sermons preached
   

4. Friendliness of the people in the church to visitors
   

5. How much the church is involved in helping poor and disadvantaged people.

Things related to worship, style, and music ranked only 12, 13, and 15. (Source: “Americans Describe Their Ideal Church,” Barna Research Online, October 1998.)

Rainer, Surprising Insights From the Unchurched. Thom Rainer and Lifeway have studied this question repeatedly, always with the same results: substantive things are what attract people to church rather than cultural trends and consumer preferences. This is summed up in Rainer’s book Surprising Insights From the Unchurched, which revealed the top ten reasons the previously unchurched joined:

1. The pastor and his preaching (90%)
   

2. The church’s doctrines (88%)
   

3. Friendliness of the members (49%)
   

4. Other Issues (42%)
   

5. Someone from the church witnessed to the individual (41%)
   

6. A family member attended the church (38%)
   

7. Sensed God’s presence/atmosphere of the church (37%)
   

8. Relationship with someone in the church who wasn’t family (25%)
   

9. Sunday School class (25%)
   

10. Children’s or youth ministry (25%)
    

Worship style, music, and other stylistic or consumer-oriented factors were named by only 11% of the respondents as having anything to do with why they joined a church. Also interesting, Rainer describes the “myth” that the unchurched are turned off by denominational church names. Only 4% indicated a denominational name had a negative influence on their search for a church home. (Thom Rainer, Surprising Insights from the Unchurched, 21, 38).

Rainer, Ham, and Kinnaman on Why Young People Are Leaving the Church. The same basic insights hold true for the question of why young people leave the church, as seen in Thom Rainer’s Essential Church, Ken Ham’s Already Gone, and David Kinnaman’s You Lost Me. Young people are leaving all sorts of churches at the same rates—large and small, urban and rural, contemporary and traditional, charismatic and liturgical. These studies show the reason young people are leaving the church has nothing to do with stylistic factors and everything to do with the lack of solid teaching, the lack of intergenerational relationships and mentoring across the generations, the lack of love and community, and perceived hypocrisy in the church. Church style is far down the list and usually not listed as a factor. These studies are undergirded by more serious sociological studies by scholars such as Christian Smith and Melinda Lundquist Denton, whose results undergird Barna Group CEO David Kinnaman’s conclusion that “After countless interviews and conversations, I am convinced that historic and traditional practices, and orthodox and wisdom-laden ways of believing, are what the next generation really needs.”

Millennial Preferences in Church Architecture. A few years ago the Barna Group conducted a study for one of the largest church architectural firms in the country regarding the style of church architecture Millennials preferred. Two-thirds of Millennials preferred traditional structures over modern ones. This is not to argue, of course, for a “sanctified” architecture; it simply illustrates that assumptions about what “young people” prefer have been overturned by Millennials and the even more secularized Generation Z. This confirms earlier studies by the Cornerstone Knowledge Network and Christianity Today and Lifeway

Research revealing that new church buildings most evangelical pastors desired were the exact opposite of the more traditional structures with which two-thirds of the unchurched were most comfortable.

Fuller Youth Institute, Growing Young. These responses continue to be borne out by research. For example, Fuller Youth Institute’s latest study, Growing Young: 6 Essential Strategies to Help Young People Discover and Love Your Church, lists the top ten qualities churches don’t need to “grow young”:

1. A certain size
   

2. A trendy location or region
   

3. An exact age (old or newly planted)
   

4. A popular denomination or lack of denomination
   

5. A high “cool” quotient (Relational warmth is the new cool.)
   

6. A big, modern building
   

7. A big budget
   

8. A contemporary worship service
   

9. A watered-down teaching style
   

10. A hyper-entertaining ministry program
    

Conclusion

We have many dysfunctional churches. Many have lost interest in evangelism and are more about internal dynamics than reaching out with the gospel. They need the sort of revitalization being promoted by Eddie Moody, Danny Dwyer, and David Crowe in the Refresh church revitalization program through the Free Will Baptist Executive Office and North American Ministries. This program is built on rich, biblical church revitalization strategies.

I also talk with many Free Will Baptist pastors seeing steady, if modest, evangelistic fruit and gospel growth in their churches. Yet, so many of these decent, faithful men are utterly discouraged because they compare themselves to celebrity pastors and consumer church growth methods that don’t and can’t work for most churches and most pastors. These pastors need to compare themselves to the New Testament, not to contemporary trends more concerned about consumer marketing than solid biblical teaching, zealous evangelism, and rich community and koinonia we see in Scripture. According to the studies examined within this article, these are the things are the unchurched really want when they get serious about finding a church.

About the Writer: Dr. J. Matthew Pinson is president of Welch College. Learn more about the college: www.Welch.edu or visit his blog at matthewpinson.com.