Self worth & the Church

One of the many incredible blessings I have been given here in Malaysia is the opportunity to engage in continuing education with pastors from very diverse backgrounds. Together we have learned (and reviewed) confessional texts, the sacraments, and ecclesiology. This week I had the opportunity to sit in a counseling/family systems seminar where we talked about different family system theories and what they look like in our contexts.

The first session explored the work of Adlerian and Satir who focused a lot on self-worth and a sense of inferiority respectively. They found in the families they observed, where there was most dysfunction was where there was a distorted or lower sense of self-worth (something that tends to compound with more dysfunction). But where people were encouraged to explore their potential, have genuine connection with people, and gain more self-awareness, they flourished and created more functional, nurturing families because of it.

And it got me thinking about a type of family system that deals directly with these two issues: the church.

Suspending the pitfalls that come with equating the church or a particular church community with a family, we can see some very obvious similarities (and dysfunctions). Even Jesus and Paul talk about the body of Christ in similar verbiage used to talk about the family unit (Hebrews 10, Romans 12, Matthew 12, Acts 2).

And realizing that the "goal" or "purpose" of the body of Christ is not to "make people feel good," but to bring about a wholeness and shalom, we can start to make connections between this seemingly secular social science and how we do ministry. 

How does the church inform people's self-worth? 
What do our sermons or our bible studies covey to members about their potential in this world? 
Do we, as a congregation, encourage people to gain more self-awareness? 
Are there genuine connections happening between people within our congregations? 

About a year ago, I studied a large, complex church organization called NewSpring in Columbia, South Carolina. Overall, the church has probably hundreds of thousands of members, but the campus we were studying only had a couple thousand people regularly attending. And their numbers were growing every year with no indication of slowing down. 

You might think (as we did) that a congregation like this could only keep growing because they were "selling" something that people wanted or felt they needed to "buy." While this might be true to some extent, we also found something else while studying the "strategies" of this church organization. 

They make people feel like they matter. 

From even before joining the worship service, we were greeted as if we were vital to the ministry there. We received special parking for being visitors, we were ushered into a green room and given swag, and we were given a tour of the whole facility afterwards. People who noticed we were visitors greeted us warmly with smiles and genuine "we are so glad you're here." Somehow, for some reason, we mattered to these people, we mattered to this church. It was a refreshing feeling, honestly. And they knew we weren't looking to change congregations. They knew were we attending for research and not for worship. And they still wanted us to know that we were worthy of their time and love.

Now I am not endorsing raffling off cars or even providing visitors with swag on their way into the church, but it is something to take note of.

I've been a visitor in way too many congregations where I have been ignored. Sometimes it's worse than being ignored - I was actively stared at for being a visitor. I remember "taking" a member's pew one Sunday and actually being asked to move back a row!

I can go on and into the true, deep life of the church and how it often lacks this sense of "worthiness" for the congregant, but I think talking about how we greet our visitors is a good enough place to start.

Do we usher them in with smiles and conversation or simply thrust a bulletin into their hands?
Could we pick them our in group after the service and remember their names?
Do we make the time to follow up with them afterwards? Invite them to dinner? Ask how we might be praying for them?
Do we learn about them first before trying to "sell" the congregation's programs to them?

How do we provide hospitality in a way that says, "we want you here, we think your gifts are a perfect match for our passions" instead of, "we need you here to pay our bills with your tithe - what's the minimum we have to do to keep you coming?"

While I don't think it's the whole story, I believe that thinking about the role of people's sense of self-worth is an important building block of how we do ministry together. Shalom, I believe, starts with a person's own identity and self-worth. How then, as bringers of shalom, can we nurture and ignite a more holy sense of self-worth for everyone who walks through the doors of our congregation?