Entertaining the saints

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Korry posted this thoughtful comment over on Matt Casper’s Lakewood Church Rating.

Hey Everyone and Matt,

I love all this conversation…it’s all very challenging for me right now. First things first, I’m a Christ follower, but I’m having my doubts about my association with the Christian religion right about now. Matt your book is more than intriguing to me because I’m a newer Christ follower (5 years) who works in a mega-church in the Midwest. I understand your points completely about the ‘lights, camera, action’ approach to a church service. I’m the guy in my church who’s in charge of making sure that all those things work each Sunday. In all honesty, I pushed to have a lot of those things installed in our building. I love production…what else can I say? I honestly believed when I was pushing the budget to the elders so that these things would do something ‘good’ for the church and it’s ability to reach non-believers. I thought I was going to take all those media elements and create an environment that would create a ‘this isn’t church’ feeling to non-Christians leading them to give the message a chance. The irony is that I created a great ‘performance’ that the traditional church people hated at first. I thought I was on the right track…they hated it, so the non-believer might give us a chance now! The reality is that the traditional members came around pretty quickly and (along with the rest of the church) almost ‘demanded’ a new and more innovative program each week…with more ’special’ elements to keep them entertained. My goal was to entertain the average atheist, agnostic, and seeker enough that they would hear a message that I believe with all of my heart…now, I spend my days ‘entertaining the saints’…a group of Christians that come each week to be entertained, not to become equipped with the message that Christ came here with…a message of loving and building a relationship all the ‘average’ people out there.

I look forward to reading your book. My executive pastor is doing a book study on your book with about half our staff. I can’t wait to hear what type of conversation is brought up. I’m just finished with the introduction and came to check out the site…I’m a little timid to see what you said about Mosaic…I love that church…I hope it made sense to you because it seems to make sense to me:-)

Thanks for being so willing to put all of your thoughts about there like this. I think a lot of us ‘Christians’ could learn a lot from you.

thanks,

Korry