Creating Fans Of Our Worship Gatherings

Someone recently said to me — if our church would select more (fill-in-the-blank) types of songs, we’d create more fans.

Fans?

Call them fans, advocates, supporters, admirers, or whatever you’d like. Sure. I’d like more of them. Wouldn’t you? Get past the word “fan” — and look at the deeper issue.

Should one of our goals be to create fans/supporters/admirers? I’ll argue that fans ought to be a by-product of something else — not something we ought to try to do in a worship setting.

So what’s more important than creating fans/supporters/admirers?

Creating worshippers who respond to God regardless of the environment they find themselves in. That’s a great goal. If a worshiper dislikes a song, yet decides to worship anyway — that’s a huge win. On the contrary, having a worshiper who loves the music style to 1 out of 4 songs — and focuses in on the style-ratio not being equal (or a quota not being met), is a big loss. Shouldn’t we be more worried about moving worshippers to a deeper place of worship – rather than wondering if they like what we’re doing?

Creating fans would be easier. Radio stations do it all the time with music styles. We’d poll the church, find out what everyone likes, group them into units based on their likes and dislikes, then create 3-4 different worship environments that they are fans of. There, that was easy. Helping people mature deeper in this regard is more difficult than creating fans.

Does catering to the preferences of people call people to follow Christ at a deeper level? Not in my opinion. It communicates, “Listen, tell me what you like and let’s keep you happy…and I hope this makes Jesus happy too.” Keeping the peace ought not to be the default here. It’s easier to keep the peace, but that’s not what we are called to, is it? We are called to lead people to a deeper life in Christ. Let’s take the challenge. Let’s not take the easy road and create a fan-base. Let’s create mature followers of Christ. Surely these mature followers will respond to God, instead of waiting for all the songs to be their favorites.

So what does a mature (or maturing) worshipper look like? It might look something like this. Let’s say a worship environment has only 1 out of 4 songs that someone prefers. If the worshipper takes personal responsibility, and doesn’t wait for the planets-to-align to decide to worship, and worships regardless of the 3 songs they don’t like — that’s mature. Instead, they see past their own preferences of style, volume, dress, lighting, jokes, personalities, etc. — and see God Himself, and respond with an authentic expression.