Natural Steps, and showing up

Pastor and overall stud (stud here meaning cool, smart guy not virile attractive guy) Andy Stanley espouses an idea I’ve long agreed with. The idea is that we ought to think in terms of steps, not programs in the church. An important aspect of these steps is that they are easy, strategic, and obvious.
The church, for Stanley, is not a hodge-podge buffet of different things for Christians to do based on their mood or outside interests. His ideal church wouldn’t be this place that Christians can go and do Christianized versions of all the things the secular things they’d rather be doing.
His idea is basically that we identify where people are, what we want them to become, and then figure out how we get them from point A to point B. We don’t give people stuff to do (programs) we recognize the next things they need to experience (steps).

Here’s how this looks on the ground: our church has decided that small groups are the places where people are most likely to experience growth. If people aren’t joining our small groups, our job becomes figuring out a way to get people into them: giving them intermediate steps that will ease them toward this destination.
Stanley talks about how these steps need to be easy, strategic, and obvious.
I’ve recently come to a realization about these ideas. This realization is probably incredibly obvious. I bet Stanley figured it out years ago. But I haven’t seen anybody express this idea, so I thought it was worth while for me to.
My realization is that their is a flip side to all this.
If we begin with the premise that a church is obliged to set up easy, strategic, and obvious steps in the direction it wants to lead members, then a second idea follows.
The implication:
we need to beware of accidentally setting up easy and obvious steps in the direction that are opposite of where we want to go.
If I was cutting a path in a jungle, I’d want to be wary of an animal path that looked like the real path and which lead to a lion’s den. I’d want not only for my path to lead people toward the destination I hope for them: I’d want to be sure that they didn’t accidentally end up in a bad place. And maybe the fake trail wouldn’t even lead to somewhere dangerous, maybe it would only lead away from the best destination, maybe it would just peter out into nothing. This still wastes time, enthusiasm, and faith in my ability as a leader.
On a concrete level, what does all this mean?
Well, if I begin with the idea that mantaining membership within the same small group is an important step in spiritual growth, I want to do my best to eliminate any accidental but easy steps away from this goal.
Transitions in leadership, for example, are times when it is natural for people to say “hmmm, I was about ready for a break, anyway.” There are larger issues involved, of course… These include how well the group was run previously, how well people expect the new leader to do, and perhaps most of all, what sort of things people think they will be able to do with the night they currently spend at small group.
Sometimes it’s really hard, setting regular time aside to meet. It’s common to rationalize that we’ll continue to see people, that if we left the small group we’d actually have more time to meet with people, to fellowship and evangelize.
It’s a bit like attending a Sunday church service. I hear many, many people say “I don’t need to go to church to worship God. And it’s shallow to think we’re only supposed to worship for a couple hours a week.”
The fallacy of this thinking lies in the assumption that attending a small group or a weekly church service set an upper limit on our worship, fellowship, etc. The reason that attendance is so valuable is that it sets a lower limit.
Committed attendance to these things guarentee that we’ll spend atleast a few hours, not at most a few hours, worshipping, fellowshipping, etc.
Maybe this is more clear if we think about the promising high school graduate many of us have known. It makes me crazy to hear somebody say “What? Couldn’t I go back to school later? I don’t ever want to stop learning. If I go to college and get a degree it’ll be like I’ve stopped learning.”
Most of us would agree that a person certainly could go back later. But the question that hasn’t been answered, often, is why not do it now?
Similarly, I totally agree that we shouldn’t limit our worship or fellowship to a couple hours a week. But I think we should certainly prioritize for these things. We should guarentee that they happen, by scheduling them.
I’ve gotten off on a tiny bit of a tangent, but only a bit of one. In a way it does come back to easy, strategic steps.
We can only move one step at a time. And we generally move in the direction that seems like the most easy and most natural.
Outlining steps that are easy and natural is incredibly important.
But the thing that I’m learning is that it’s just as important to recognize the steps that people might take in other directions, away from the destination that I hope and pray for them. Paths occur naturally. Some of them lead nowhere. Others lead to dangerous places. Leading means both leading toward the good and leading away from the bad and the meaningless.
And my thoughts here are really only the tiniest step. It’s much easier to see these paths than to figure out how to keep people off of them.