Sheep Rustlers

I usually skim the articles in the newsletter from my alma mater, but I was captured by the latest cover article: Stealing Sheep: A Study in Church Growth Ethics, by William Chadwick. Since we want to be a church that evangelizes and disciples unchurched and dechurched people, it might be interesting to see how we stack up!

The author gives five tests to detect Sheep Rustlers. I'll give you the categories with my summary definitions:
1. Advertising/Marketing - are we intentionally promoting ourselves to the Christian subculture rather than non-Christians?
2. Networking - are we inviting our converted friends and family or maintaining a "positive secular network of friends"?
3. Gross mistrust between ministries - is there a sense of cooperation between churches and ministries in our city or do we ignore everyone else?
4. In-house dissension - do we have a lot of high maintenance spiritual pygmies bringing their baggage to our church from the one they just left?
5. Emphasis on secondary pursuits - do we feel the pull to water down our message to avoid the reality that no one is coming to Christ?

Here is how I see us stacking up:
1. We intentionally don't advertise on the local Christian radio station for this very reason. We don't want Christians!
2. Part of our monthly Newcomers orientation is teaching people how to invite their unsaved friends and neighbors. We especially emphasize this for special services like Christmas Eve and Easter.
3. The churches I know that are cooperating with each other are all intentionally (...as evidenced by their programming!!) seeking to reach lost people. The institutional/denominational churches seem to me the least likely to be communicate with other ministries in the area.
4. Everyone is going to get some high maintenance people from time to time. Shallow people are going to hop around, but currently, we don't have an issue with lots of this.
5. Every Sunday there is an opportunity for people to come to Christ...and it's happening almost every week.

Well, there you go. So how about you? Are you a shepherd or a rustler!