Why Don't People Like Church?

As kind of a follow-up to my last post, today I’m going to tackle a question that most churches have probably asked, and that I know our church has been asking: Why don’t people like church? LifePoint in particular is interested in the answer to this question because we want to be a church “for people who don’t like church,” but that can be incredibly difficult to do unless we know why, exactly, people don’t like church. And this can be particularly challenging because we all may come up with different answers to this question. I think that a lot of times our own personal beliefs about why people don’t like church are colored by own experiences with church as well as the experiences of our family members, friends, and acquaintances. So the reasons that I see may be completely different from the reasons you see—and yet all our reasons are probably true for at least some people.

Obviously my perspective is limited; there is just no way for one person to sit down and come up with every possible reason that people don’t like church. So I encourage you to share your thoughts on the subject as well; my hope is that if enough of us with different experiences and perspectives contribute to the conversation, we may all be able to walk away with a more complete understanding. And if we have a better understanding, we may have a better chance of being a church for people who don’t like church. That being said, here are three of the reasons I think people don’t like church.

1. Churches often create expectations, sometimes spoken, sometimes unspoken, that in order to really belong there you have to look/dress/act/talk/think a certain way. It can come across as though what’s on the outside has to be cleaned up or changed or hidden in order to fit some standard, when actually what is important is accepting people as they are, loving them, and letting God work on what’s inside. And not just what’s inside of other people, but what’s inside of us as well.

2. Some people don’t like the service itself—although I will be the first to say that this is relative, since what works for one person may be torture to another. There are a lot of ways the structure of a service can actually put up barriers. Some people aren’t comfortable with feeling like they have to stand up and sing. Others hate to be called out as first-time visitors. Some find your typical service to be impersonal, while others would be scared away by something more personal and intimate. Sometimes the service is set up in such a way that the church can feel more like a place for all the “good Christians” to get together and hang out and not have to be around all those “wordly” people for a few hours; obviously this can cause people to put up walls pretty quickly. Some people can’t stand how cliché it all seems…“Turn to the person next to you and say, ‘God loves you!’” or “Somebody say amen!” or (my personal least favorite) “Let’s all give the Lord a handclap of praise!”

3. They’ve been hurt. Somewhere along the way, they’ve been wounded by another Christian’s words or actions—so much so that they have been turned off by church altogether. Maybe there is something in their life that they’re struggling with and they’ve been negatively labeled and shunned because of it. Maybe they have been gossiped about. Maybe they have simply come to church again and again and no one has ever even bothered to get to know them. And they’ve finally walked away from it all hurt and angry, and feeling like Christians don’t really care about other people like they say they do.

So what do you think? In your experience, why don't people like church?