Love takes planning

One of the great recurring church discussions/debates/flameouts is whether welcoming and follow-up should be entrusted to the spontaneous exhibition of love by Christians. It’s always amazed me how strongly many of my brothers and sisters react to the idea of a Welcoming Team or follow-up systems and strangers.

I don’t buy it. I’m as much a product of the Romantic/Existentialist movement (spontaneity=authenticity) as anyone, but the sad truth is that many churches depend upon off-the-cuff engagement, not because they love too much, but because they love too little to get their finger out and plan.

If I’m in a church and it catches fire (one of the beauties of working at Barneys is that I can raise this example without being accused of deploying a hyberbolic rhetorical device) I don’t care how many of the congregation are willing to throw their bodies out of the window to create a cushion for my safe descent. I want to know that some paper-pusher has ensured their building is compliant with the latest fire-safety codes. I love paper-pushers.

God tells us to ‘consider how we may spur one another on toward love and good deeds’ (Heb 10.24). The Greek word for ‘consider’ means to ‘to give careful, proper and decisive thought about something.’ Love is not just to be spontaneous – it is to be intentional and thought out in advance wherever possible. After all, spontaneity is only a matter of perspective – the only good works we do are the ones which God has prepared in advance for us to do (Eph 2.10).

For the last 10 years, Barneys has been operating a substantial ‘business’ (currently around $1M p.a.) off the back of Microsoft Access. Now, Access isn’t the work of the devil. I’ve got verses. But it is no longer sufficient to support the kind of internal processes that we need to implement in order to demonstrate considered love to the outsider. Access isn’t a tool which can help us at both the front and back door. And so we’ve decided to put our money where our love is and invest in a web-based church management system. It looks a little like Facebook, and I think it rocks.

What we hope this system will help us to do is plug some of the gaps. For a start, it will put all of the leaders, and ultimately all of our church, into an online community. It will enable growth group leaders to manage their groups online and for groups to have their own web pages to communicate and share. It will help us to track visitors and help move people along the path to being fully integrated and fruitful members of the community. No more missed emails and lost scraps of paper. It will facilitate information flow, which becomes more and more important as a church will grow.

However, it won’t tell our friends about Jesus. Which is cool, because there are some things only people should get to do.