Welcome. You have found One Hundred-Fold Ministries, and specifically, what you’ve found is our podcast environment called Kingdom Offerings.

We talk a lot about the gospel of the Kingdom, which in my mind is underutilized, it’s misunderstood, it’s a doctrine of hope and power and peace that we get too little coverage on. We talk a lot about the Gospel of the Kingdom here. But we also wander sometimes a little bit to chat about some other important thoughts – like today. Let’s talk about going out to eat. I’m generally a pretty big fan of the theologian and author Scot McKnight.

He writes quite a bit on the Kingdom of God, and I like that he likes what I like. And on his daily email newsletter that goes out to his kind of his thought audience, one of his cohorts, a fellow named Mike Glenn, recently sat in for Scot, and he offered some, I think, compelling thoughts. My apologies to Mike in that I wasn’t that familiar with him prior to reading this recent May 31st, 2024 post.

But I don’t think he knows me either. And so I did some research on him. He’s clearly a successful pastor. He has a church of 10,000 plus people on eight campuses in Tennessee. He’s a look to author and he’s an in-demand speaker. And in this particular blog that he writes on Scot McKnight’s newsletter, he makes an analogy or he creates a metaphor between successful restaurants and successful churches.

So I want to read a little bit of it to you, and then I just want to comment for a moment. I think we’ll both find that there is a Kingdom concern in this metaphor that Mike Glenn comes up with. Let me quote from Mike Glenn and his blog on Scot McKnight’s monthly newsletter. He says this:

When you think about it, churches and restaurants have a lot in common.

First, we both depend on volunteer traffic. No one has to come to your restaurant, just like no one has to come to your church. To get there, a person has to make a decision. First, they have to decide to get up and go out instead of ordering in. And just like a person has to decide to get up and go to church rather than to sit down on a couch and watch a service that’s being streamed live.

Second, everyone’s looking for quality food. So when I go to a restaurant, I’m looking for the full experience. I want good food in a good atmosphere with a good service. Funny, but that’s the same thing I want when I go to church. I want some deep, challenging teaching, some good food. I want people around me who care that I’m there. Bonus if someone knows my name.

So if you think about it, if our church were a restaurant, what kind of restaurant would it be? Would it be a fast food joint? You know, not really nourishing or even good for you, but it’ll keep you filled up for the rest of the day. Or maybe we would be an elegant dine-in experience where customers dress up and plan to stay for most of the night. How would our customers, how would our congregants find us – on an app, driving by, word of mouth? Here’s the deal. Most of us in church leadership never think about these things, and it shows.

Mike Glenn goes on to say:

Because we don’t know what kind of restaurant we are, we end up trying to serve everything. That, of course, means that we do everything poorly rather than doing one thing well. How do we treat our guests when they come? Do we offer them something worth coming in for? Do we act like we expect to see them again? Do we bother to learn their names?

Too many churches wrongly assume people want to come to church. Some do, but then they can’t figure out a way to make church work in their schedule and lives. They assume that church is a nice thing to do, but not a necessary thing to do. They aren’t convinced going to church, being a part of a church, adds anything of value to their lives. More people than ever have decided going to church, being a part of a church, actually doesn’t add any value to their lives, and they aren’t going to church.

He goes on to say,

How do we get customers to come to the restaurant? First, we make sure we’re serving what the customers need and want. I’m not suggesting we don’t preach the gospel, not at all. I’m saying there’s more than one way to preach, more than one way to teach. People change, their needs change. Churches, like restaurants, have to change in order to better meet the needs of their people. The message doesn’t change. Methods are interchangeable.

So Mike Glenn asked the question,

Do our methods match the needs of our community? Are we giving them the good news of Jesus in a way that they can understand and remember? Are we serving good food?

Do we make our customers feel valued? Welcomed? The hardest thing in the world is to go to church when you don’t know anyone. How long does someone come to our church before they have a friend?

He wraps up by saying :

In churches, as in restaurants, the same things keep them coming back. Good food and good service. Restaurants that offer this stay in business, and so do churches.

So those are the words of Pastor Mike Glenn, and I want to offer two thoughts. First one, we ought not to get too deep in the weeds when it comes to interpreting and applying some of the comparisons that come out in these analogies and metaphors.

It turns out even in the scriptures, the parables were told in real time by Jesus, usually to a specific audience in a specific context, sometimes responding to a question or addressing a confrontation or a pharaoh Pharisaical trap. When we start trying to make large, sweeping applications that don’t fit the story setting, this is a formula for bad things. It’s bad theology can even become heresy.

One of the reasons that the Gospel of the Kingdom has become so confused is that we have taken some of the Kingdom parables or teachings out of context. Therefore, we’ve messed up the underlying principles, the underlying doctrine. So, all that said, we need to be careful with metaphors. I don’t really like this metaphor. There are two things about it that I don’t feel comfortable with.

First, I feel like the theology gets a little squishy when the church is compared with a business setting. Squishy, not angry. There are parts of the church business comparison that I think have traction. In every church, there’s at least one person who has the gift of administration who will walk up to the pastor and say, “Well,, the church is a business too, and we should run it like a business.” And yes, as far as that makes sense, I suppose it’s true. We ought to have a clearly defined set of position descriptions and clean financial books. It’d be great if we had strategic plans for implementing our values. That sounds like a really valuable business set of objectives that also work for the local church.

But to be clear, in the scriptures, it’s never referred to the church, that is, with a business model analogy. And they had businesses in the first century. To read about the Church were represented as a body in 1 Corinthians 12, with many diverse parts and one unifying body with Christ as her head.

We also read about the Church being referred to in terms of family, in numerous places, even saying that those who find themselves losing family members for the cause of Christ will receive back 100-fold in family blessings. That’s Jesus talking in Matthew 19.

Then, of course, the church is seen as sheep in need of a shepherd. And we remember that Christ restores Peter to his ministry after the resurrection, and Peter’s betrayal of Christ, by saying to Peter, “Feed and take care of my sheep,” as found in John 21.

I hear lots of relational word pictures, but I never hear a business model. Businesses are not alive, they come and go. In fact, a third of new small businesses die in the first two years. Seventy percent of new business starts are gone completely after ten. Seventy percent.

But in contrast, they call the bride of Christ the Church Eternal. Nothing can or will stand in the way of the divinely called Church of Jesus Christ.

Second thing I don’t like about this metaphor that Pastor Glenn comes up with is it feels like that we’re competing with other churches and that we will win that competition by offering, I don’t know, bigger and better goods and services.

Our services are truth and love, divine truth, divine love. Our competition is with the Prince of the Power of the Air. He’s the liar. He is our adversary.

In the false promises of this worldly Kingdom that’s passing away, that’s our competition. It’s filled with death and despair.

We are not competing with other churches. Except sometimes it feels like we are. Pastors are human too, I guess, and congregations even tend to make comparisons about other churches and try to make themselves look bigger and better by making another church look smaller and worse.

We can fall into a trap of bad theology and pride when members of our church leave to go shopping, church shopping somewhere else. I have to admit that after pastoring for almost 20 years, I found it difficult not to take it personally when someone who I had poured my life into, sometimes for many years, and have them just get up and leave for another church without a word of explanation. It’s kind of hard on a guy.

So here’s what I’m saying.

Churches do, in fact, need to be great. I agree with Pastor Glenn on this. But by that, I mean excellently administered, welcoming and winsome, unswerving in the presentation of the gospel truths, done in a clean and pure manifestation of love. We do that, and someone still goes somewhere else to eat, so to speak? That is now officially Jesus’ problem.

My job is to be faithful and obey and present a clear message of the love of Jesus, and then get over it. In the transcript of this podcast found at our Hundred-Fold Ministries, you’ll find a link to Scot McKnight’s daily newsletter with the full transcript of Pastor Glenn’s thoughts. You can check it out for yourself if you’d like to, by checking out that transcript.

In doing so, let me just encourage you. You should sign up for Scot McKnight’s newsletter. You can just Google that, I’m sure, and find it. His daily reminders of the Kingdom in thought and practice are a welcome addition to my life. Still, we have to take every thought captive, and we have to test it against the true truths of Scripture. I also suspect, just to be nice, that if your research Pastor Mike Glenn, you’d also find many helpful resources there with his work as well.

So I hope you will check out any number of the resources on our webpage at 100foldministries.org. Perhaps connect with me directly at Dave@100foldMinistries.org (no spaces). That’s my email address, and I’d love to hear from you.

So let’s be careful where we go eat, but let’s certainly eat. Let’s take our time, let’s find a church fellowship, and let’s settle in.

Peace to you and yours.