Discussion Jumpstarter
Study leader reference - not a definitive answer
Question 6
Dan critiques pressure to “make it more attractive” and warns that pleasing people is a “dead-end road”; what modern church assumptions about growth, relevance, and effectiveness are being confronted here, and which ones do you personally feel tempted to defend?
Another way to ask: When Dan warns against trying to “make church attractive” just to please people, what ideas about church growth and being “relevant” is he pushing back on? Which of those ideas do you feel most tempted to defend?
Discussion Jumpstarter
Direct Answer
The speaker confronts the assumption that if a church is faithful it should quickly become large, and that the fix for slow growth is to adjust the church to people’s preferences. He argues instead for “patience, faithfulness” and a stable witness, which challenges our tendency to equate effectiveness with rapid numerical growth and constant adaptation.
- Dan observes that some expect a new work to reach “50 or 100” quickly, like in places “more open to the gospel message.”
- He names the pressure: “what’s wrong with us?… we need to change… make it more attractive.”
- He has seen churches accommodate desires to make it “more plattable,” and asks, “if we do everything people want, we end up with… not much of anything.”
- He concludes: trying to please people is a “dead-end road.”
- His alternative metric is long-term stability: “patience faithfulness, year after year” shows something “stable… not shifting quickly.”