Mike Lueken, pastor of Oak Hills Church and author of Renovation of the Church, joined the Pastor's Circle to talk about how his church switched from being seeker-friendly to emphasizing spiritual formation.
Talk to us about your church.
The church started back in 1984. It started as a typical church plant. There wasn't any planning about what we wanted to do.
In 2000...the decision was made to become a seeker-friendly church.
We went through the 90's as a seeker church.
We've had three significant shifts. One was when we started, then in the 90's when we decided to be a seeker church, and in the 2000's we became more focused on spiritual formation.
What didn't feel right?
We had a couple of things coalesce around the same time. One of which I attended a doctoral class.
Through that my own heart got gripped with questions like what is the gospel?...does my church function appropriately?
Around the same time Kent (co-pastor) was feeling the same thing.
We went away on a retreat in the summer of 2000, and God spoke to us and told us to do something new.
What does a church look like that used to be seeker-sensitive, now discipleship-focused?
We lost a ton of people. We lost approximately 1,000 people over the ten years we've been doing this.
We attempted to structure our church services around what people wanted.
When we started moving towards the idea of what is the gospel, it changed dynamics of our service...as a result they voted with their feet and left the church.
As an example, we would talk openly after we made this change about worship being what I want. And if I want is coming from the stage, I leave the room thinking it wasn't that great.
Maybe instead we should leave the room asking if we were good worshippers.
We started to emphasize over and over again what people have to do.
In general what we discovered was that there were a lot of people sitting in church, but they weren't interesting in being transformed. That was one of the eye-opening things.
As we began to change that...a lot of people woke up and decided that's not what they wanted to do.
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