Letter No. 7: How to Choose a Church

A reader asks how to pick a church. My answer isn't about the music.

Dear Friend,

A reader wrote to me recently — he used the “Suggest a Letter” feature here at The Pastor’s Hearth — with a question I have been turning over ever since. He asked, simply, how a person ought to go about choosing a church. I’m certain he is not the only one wondering about this. And I will tip my hand at the outset: my answer may not be the one most would offer.

I am not going to tell you to find a large church or a small one. I am not going to steer you toward modern worship or toward the old hymns, toward a service that follows the liturgy like a well-worn path or one that runs free and loose. I have my own preferences in all of these things, and yes, they matter to me. But I have come to believe those preferences are not the point. They are the wallpaper. They are not the house.

When Jesus left His disciples, He did not hand them a style to preserve. He handed them a mission to finish. Standing on a mountain in Galilee, He told them to go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them and teaching them to observe everything He had commanded (Matthew 28:19–20). That is the assignment. Everything else a church does is meant to serve it.

You may have heard the line — it gets repeated in a hundred pulpits — that the local church is God’s Plan A for reaching the world, and there is no Plan B. I don’t know who said it first, but it certainly rings true. The church, for all her wrinkles, is who Christ chose. He did not entrust His mission to a program or a platform, or a personality. He entrusted it to His people, gathered. The late Dr. Ralph Winter said, “God does not have a mission for His church; He has a church for His mission.”

So if you asked me to help you choose a church, I would not begin with the facility or the song list or the coffee service. I would begin with one question: Is this church taking the Great Commission seriously?

Does it work to see unbelievers come to know Christ — that new believers are being brought in and baptized? And if a particular congregation is not built for the front-line work of evangelism, does it at least lock arms with those who are? Some churches are not wired to be the tip of the spear, and that is all right — but a healthy one still puts its shoulder to the work through others: supporting missionaries overseas, funding church planters, coming alongside a campus or youth ministry, backing a rescue mission or a pregnancy center, running the recovery group, going on short-term mission trips, feeding the hungry with the gospel attached. It gives, it prays, it sends. Then comes the second half of the Commission: does it teach people not merely to know Christian things, but to obey them — to observe all that Christ commanded? This is discipleship: a disciple is simply one who follows Christ and does what He says. The definition could not be plainer. The real challenge is in carrying it out. Conversion and obedience. New believers born, and believers being made into disciples. New births and changed lives. That is the evidence of a church that follows Jesus.

If we are honest, many churches drift from it. God set each congregation down in a particular corner of the world, in a particular slice of time, on purpose — and it can be easy to forget why. A church can slowly stop looking like a body on mission and start looking like something else: a pleasant club for people who already believe, a comfortable room where the like-minded gather to feel warm.

I do not say that to sneer at struggling churches, and I am certainly not throwing stones at congregations that are weak or wandering. Every church is made of sinners, mine included, and grace is the only reason any of us are standing. But when people go looking for a church, many begin with an understandable list — but perhaps not the most important list.

They ask: Do I like the music? Do I enjoy the preaching? Is it comfortable here? Is there something for each of my kids? Will I find friends who are like me? None of those questions are foolish. Every one of them may describe something healthy. But notice — they are all questions about me. What I like, what I enjoy, what suits me and mine. The better question turns the other way: do these things serve the making of disciples (it is possible they do), or do they only make a nice place for Christians to sit?

Because a church is not a hot tub. It was never meant to be a warm basin where believers lower themselves in, sigh, and soak. It is meant to be a birthplace for the newly saved, a nursery for the young in faith, a training ground for the growing, a working ministry, and a sending station for the work of Christ. Every good thing under its roof — the music, the teaching, the fellowship, the programs — ought to point, somehow, toward that.

Here is a snare worth naming. It hides in every tradition, though it tends to be most present in the more formal ones. It is possible to sit through a service, recite the right words, follow the liturgy from start to finish, and walk out convinced you are square with God — when all you have really done is complete a ritual. I say this gently, because I have felt that very comfort myself, and I know how easily it can settle over a sincere heart. But being right with God has nothing to do with whether the service is high or low, or which color the hymnal is, or how faithfully you have kept a list of religious do’s and don’ts. It has to do with your relationship with Him — whether you actually know Christ and are following Him. The forms the service takes can help us worship, or they can lull us to sleep. So it is worth asking, tenderly and without fear, which one they are doing in your own heart.

And while your eye is open, keep it open toward the front of the room, too. I have heard it said that one of the gravest problems facing the church today is narcissism in its leadership — pastors and leaders who have made the ministry about themselves: their platform, their brand, their applause. The attitude says, I must increase so that Christ may increase — a perversion of John the Baptist’s humble confession, “He must increase, but I must decrease.” (John 3:30). It is a hard thing to say and a harder thing to see, because gifted people are magnetic, and a crowd will follow charisma a long way before it asks where it is being led. But the Great Commission was never about building a following for a man. Watch for a leader who points past himself to Christ, who will be questioned willingly, who serves rather than consumes the people. I do not say this to make you cynical, or to send you hunting for flaws in good and faithful pastors who are simply human. Most shepherds I have known love their people dearly and carry burdens you will never see. A church can survive a leader who is weak; we are all weak somewhere. What it struggles to survive is a leader who has increasingly fallen in love with himself. Pray for the ones who lead you, and look, with hope, for the humble.

And there is one more mark I would look for, maybe the plainest of all. Jesus said the world would know His followers by one thing: their love for one another (John 13:35). So when you visit a church, do not only watch what happens on the platform. Watch the hallways. Watch the parking lot. Watch how they speak of the ones who are not in the room. Do these people carry each other’s burdens? Do they forgive quickly, show up in the hard weeks, feed each other, pray like they mean it? Does any of it remind you, even faintly, of that first fellowship described at the end of Acts 2 and 4, where they broke bread house to house and no one among them was left in need? A church can have flawless music but thin love. But where love is real, the life of Christ is usually at work, even in the middle of weakness.

Now, once we have shined that light on a church, fairness demands we turn it around and let it fall on ourselves. Because here is something that must be remembered: the church is not an it. The church is a we. It has no arms but ours, no welcome but the one we offer, no love in its hallways except the love the people carry in with them. If the people will not obey Christ’s commands, the church will not stay on mission — it cannot, any more than a body can walk with no legs willing to move.

So the honest questions come home again, and they center on discipleship. If you have walked with the Lord for many years, are you actively helping someone younger learn to follow Him — are you within reach to encourage, to teach, to warn, to steady? And if you are young in the faith, are you letting yourself be taught, corrected, strengthened, formed?

Which brings me to something I did not expect to write, but I think it may be the most important line in this letter.

The best church for you may very well be the one you are already in.

Even if it falls short. Even if it has grown a little sleepy, a little inward, a little too fond of its own comfort. It may not need you to leave it; it may need you to love it enough to help it remember why it exists. I think of my own little home fellowship — the one that carried Sherry and me through the years after my brain surgeries, the people who shoveled our snow and cut our grass, prayed over us, and fasted before God on our behalf. Our church is not perfect. No church is. But it is alive because its people show up in love. The life is in the loving. And here is a thought worth considering: if your church is not yet functioning the way it should, it may be that God has given you a hunger for the very thing it is missing. That ache you feel for deeper prayer, or real discipleship, or care for the lost, or honest fellowship — what if it is not a reason to leave, but a calling to build? God often plants the hunger in the person He means to use to feed others. The thing you wish your church had may be the thing He is asking you to help foster within it.

It has been said that the best ability is availability. I like that. Most of what a church becomes, it becomes through ordinary people who simply made themselves available — who taught the class no one wanted, who sat with the grieving, who kept the nursery, who welcomed the stranger, who went where others wouldn’t. Is it possible that God has placed you in your church, in this season, not so you can grade it, but so you can help it work — in your neighborhood, and out into the world He so loves?

And here I must say the thing that holds all the rest together, or none of it will stand. We do not manufacture any of this by willpower. A church is not renewed, and a servant is not made useful, by gritted teeth and good intentions. It is the Holy Spirit who forms us, prepares us, and guides us into the work — who takes ordinary, available people and slowly grows in them what Paul called the fruit of the Spirit: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control (Galatians 5:22–23). Those are the very qualities a church runs on. You cannot schedule them onto the agenda or vote them into office; they are grown, not installed. So before you go looking for the perfect place to serve, ask the Spirit to make you the kind of person a healthy church is made of. Yield to Him. Let Him prune what needs pruning. He is the One who makes the church what it is meant to be, and He does it through people who have first let Him have His way in them.

So how should you choose a church? Gently, prayerfully, and with patience for yourself — but not by asking first, “Is this place built around what I like?” Ask instead: Is it taking Christ’s mission seriously? Is it making disciples? Is it teaching people to obey Jesus? Is love visible in the ordinary corners of it? And — the hardest question — am I willing not only to attend, but to give myself to it? Those are better questions. They are more searching ones. Because the church we need may not be the one that entertains us best, but the one that most faithfully calls us to follow Christ — and then hands us a place to serve.

So let me leave you with a few questions, and I would love to hear your answers in the Chat: When you picture the church you are looking for, what kind of ministry do you most hope it has — and be honest — are you hoping to serve in that ministry, or hoping to benefit from it? Both can be right, but it is worth knowing which one is driving you. And this: If God is calling you to help your church live out its mission more faithfully, what is the one small, available thing He might be asking you to do next? Tell me. Let’s chat about it.

Grace and peace,

Pastor Neal Letteney <><
The Pastor’s Hearth

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