I’ve heard this statement uttered in several church contexts over the years, and it never felt right to me.
While it is always good and right to contextualize the gospel for your particular setting (Paul becomes all things to all people, for example), it is dangerous to dance near sin’s line.
We are not to even have the appearance of evil, and the Bible is clear that we are called to live holy, set apart lives. So to blur the line between sin and non-sin is problematic. Jesus did not sin, but began the most powerful movement on earth. And when we place sin as the center of our strategy (or coming close to it), it becomes easier and easier to justify wrongful actions and motivations. “Oh, we are doing this iffy thing because it will win people.” That’s a dangerous place to be.
The deeper issue is our obsession with numbers, which seems to have come from the church growth movement that originated in the 90s, as far as I can tell. There, numbers became the sole determinant of growth, and if you weren’t growing, something was wrong with you. We created systems (baseball diamonds, for one) to measure our growth and ensure people who came through our doors started a journey of discipleship.
Problem is, discipleship is hard to measure. It’s personal. It’s one-on-one. It’s relational. When Willow Creek went through their “why aren’t our people growing in Christ” study several years ago, the result was jarring. They were a mile wide and an inch deep. And when people started growing in Christ, they left because there was nowhere in their existing model to really grow as a disciple.
Jesus didn’t call us to make converts, according to Matthew 28:18-20. He called us to make disciples—which means we sacrifice for the sake of others. We pour into people. We watch ourselves and our own proclivity to sin. Discipleship is messy. It’s not easily programmed on a Sunday event. It’s difficult to measure, nor is it flashy. But it’s good.
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