To hopefully clarify a few things

As I mentioned in my previous post, I'm not a big fan of the seeker sensitive movement (or whatever it's called these days), because I think that at the core they have things backwards. Their focus is to make everything as appealing as possible to cause people to want to come to church. They appeal to the "felt needs" of the world to compel them to come. I'm sure that most pastors and churches who do this have a right motive-I just feel that it's a wrong method and a dangerous one. I believe that church services should be focused on worshiping God and we should make sure that the things we do in them are pleasing to God, not to the sinful world. I then believe that the church as a body of believers is to go out from the church services and witness to the world. This I believe is the Biblical method of church growth (although I don't claim to have reached this point yet with my church).

Anyways, this doesn't mean that there are not some things we do as a church that needs to go or that we can't improve on. I do believe that visitors ought to be made to feel as welcome and as comfortable as possible in our services (without compromising the Truth of course). There are some things we do in our churches services that are mere tradition that at times we need rethink and maybe get rid of. For instance, when I was a kid our church had people come to the front on their birthdays and "pay" for a pencil to celebrate their birthday (they would put a a little piggy bank that looked like a church and the person who was celebrating their birthday was expected to put some money in the bank and they were then given a pencil - yipee!) This definitely had to go!

I've also been to churches where they embarrass the snot out of any new people who come by making them stand, testify, introduce themselves, etc.

As the video demonstrates below, there might be a few other things we (I) could improve upon as well...I don't want to go too far down this road, but there just might be some lessons we (I) could learn from this video. (Hopefully this will make my marketing and somewhat seeker sensitive friends happy) ;-) LOL