Are We Out of the Locker Room?

Imagine the church as a professional football team. The team meets in the locker room every week. In fact, the team is so used to locker room, they never get on field. Each week, when they leave the team meeting, they walk past the field on the way home, but they never play the game.

Even though they have no intention of playing, the team talks about new plays, studies the game film, talks about the legendary players who have passed on, and gives huge pep talks. They’ve gotten to the point they believe the “game” is in the locker room.

They get excited about the new pep-band songs. They honor “perfect locker room attendance” with pins. They give plaques for twenty years of Locker Room Superintendent service. It’s a major event when someone brings a visitor to the locker room –in fact, it is applauded as a “good hustle.”

One of the highlights of the season is viewing the new game day program. Everyone remarks, “isn’t this great! Surely this will bring more people in.” Of course from time to time squabbles arise. Perhaps its over the team meal, new locker room decorations, or uniforms. Sometimes debate rages over what plays the team will practice. Players have even been known to nit-pick over meaningless details about how each play works. For some reason the debate never surrounds getting on the field. Occasionally, these riffs send players packing their bags and heading for a new team. At this time, it is not uncommon to overhear a player remark, “we’re running low on players… let’s get some more from another team’s locker room… I heard the team across town is having trouble… maybe we’ll get some of their players!”

Once, a fairly young player asked “why don’t we recruit some rookies?” Quickly he was reprimanded and informed that recruiting takes too much time and energy. “Besides,” an assistant coach told him, “if I ask our existing players to help recruit, they might get scared and leave because they will think we have a “work based” team…” imagine that!

To everyone’s surprise the young player responded, “But isn’t that what we’re supposed to be doing?”

Struggling to find a reasonable answer, an old veteran gave comforting advice. “You’re right, let’s get a new drill to train and get started.” Sadly, after weeks of practicing the new drill, it became evident that all is vain. The new drill becomes just as unsuccessful in recruiting new players as the old ones. Perhaps it is because the drill was never executed on the field.
However, the constant drill work did provide great conversation when the owner called to check on the team’s progress. Or maybe it just made the team feel like they were doing something important.

Over the years, more efforts have been made to bring people into the locker room. A new stadium was built, new equipment was purchased, a state-of-the-art halftime show was produced, giveaways were offered, and a new scoreboard was installed. And for a while, some of these ideas worked. But none of the effects lasted. Somehow, people got a sense that the team was too “fake” and would eventually leave. Surprisingly, no one could figure out why.

One day, a player from a very successful team in a neighboring town was called in to consult on the recent attendance problems. After days of analysis, his report shocked the team. According to the consultant, the team wasn’t much of a team at all. He explained that one of the major marks of a football team is actually playing the game!

Likewise, evangelism is a major mark of the church. The problem lies in the fact that very few churches are evangelizing. Instead, they huddle in their locker room each week for team meetings without ever stepping out on the field. The irony is that they take themselves very seriously –even though they don’t take God’s command seriously.

Here’s the scary part: Pastors are the coaches who enable this. Some even hope their members aren’t evangelistically-minded, so they won’t have to participate! Maybe they are scared they will lose their job if they rally they begin to expect evangelism from their congregation. Maybe they are simply too lazy to evangelize.