STORY OF THE WEEK: The Church Asked Us To Volunteer — There Was Just One Problem
Random Email Exposes the Church’s Blindspot
My wife received an email from the church the other day asking her if she would like to volunteer. Now, on the surface, that might seem like a fairly innocuous thing for the church to do. But, well… the thing is, we only went to that church once.
Yes, just once.
Three years ago.
Not only does the church not realize that we don’t actually attend their church, but they clearly know nothing about us or our lives. And why would they?
We only went there once.
If they knew something about our lives, they might know that my wife has Stage 4 cancer and, even if she did want to volunteer at the church, she couldn’t physically do it. They might have known that if they had attempted to make a connection with us at the beginning… you know, prior to when they realized they were short of volunteers and sent out an SOS to pretty much every contact they had in their database.
Heck, we might have gone back to that church if we received a different kind of email, say, immediately after we attended for the first and last time three years ago— one that said something like, “It was nice to have you, and we’d love to see you again.”
But there was nothing, despite the fact that, evidently, we gave them our email address. Nothing, that is, until they needed more people to join their volunteer workforce. Then, they reached out.
Call me cynical, if you like, but the message I’m getting from this particular church is that they don’t particularly want to know us, but they would like to use us. Instead of becoming part of a community that values people for who they are, it felt like we were just potential cogs in the volunteer machine.
And that’s the problem with many churches.
The Evolution of Worship Spaces
In the early days of the church, followers gathered in regular households, typically gatherings of 10–20 individuals seated in a space reminiscent of today’s common living rooms.
The benefits of such gatherings were many.
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