Five Reasons Not to Audition

As a pastor I am very tempted to spend my Sunday mornings auditioning. I want for people to like me and to like our church enough to make it their own, and that's understandable. But spending Sunday morning in an effort to woo potential parishioners into giving us the part represents not only a missed opportunity, but a real failure.

1. Auditioning is exhausting.
     It's not just that auditioning is wearisome, but in the case of a church which will face, potentially, a new set of prospective worshipers each Sunday it means a future of perpetual auditioning, all "once more with feeling," never moving on. That is an unendurable prospect.

2. Someone is always doing it better.
      Whether it's the preaching, the music, or the coffee there is always going to be someone local doing at least one thing (if not everything) better than we are doing it. We can't afford to audition because we can't afford to encourage the assumption that churches should be evaluated on the merits of their production.

3. Auditioning misses the point.
       We call it a worship service because it is a service to God. It's effect as a worship service needs to be judged on the basis of how well God is served. That's a simple point, but judging by how often I seem to forget it, it deserves some emphatic repeating.

4. It's an unattractive quality to the right people.
         All of this needy auditioning expresses a fundamental insecurity. And it's not that insecurity is always wrong, but in the case of the Bride of Christ it is, at the very least, hard to account for. The sweaty anxiety of an auditioning church is going to be a turn off to many people, people like me, people who are looking for an awesome God and the victorious citizens of his coming Kingdom.

5. It is an attractive quality to the wrong people.
        That insecurity, the insecurity of an auditioning church, might put me off but it's catnip to the manipulators, the ambitious, and the advantage-seeking. To those who want influence, position and authority a Sunday morning designed to get their approval is the same thing as an invitation to mischief. And to the spiritually complacent an auditioning church is the safest place in the world. But God wants church to be dangerous, a strait door through which lies the way to adventure and life everlasting.