Do whatever it takes…just get em through the doors, God will do the rest.

I have found myself recently talking about setting and meeting expectations because while the quote, which I’ve heard plenty of times before, sounds good…it simply isn’t how it works.

We see it in children…they raise the level of expectations.
We see it in movies…they flop when they don’t match the hype.
We see it in the church…when we fail to deliver.

Setting expectations that you can deliver on is important. Just ask Todd Davis.

The first way we fail to deliver is in how we are marketing the church. If we promote your church as the trendy and hip church and you deliver traditional worship, it’s not going to matter how many people we get through the doors, you’ve let them down by failing to setup an accurate expectation. Be honest, if you’re traditional…don’t pretend to be something else, you won’t fool anyone.

The other way we fail to deliver is how we set people up. “Every day with you Lord is sweeter than the day before.” Really? Tell that to the guy who just lost his job, or the parent who just lost his child. Stop telling people that the sun will start shining as soon as they call Christ lord…because that expectation is going to fail. Yes, eventually even our dark days will be okay because we know God is there, we know He is watching over us.

We also fail to deliver in how we position salvation. “If you want to except Christ raise your hand and say this prayer. Amen.” Maybe my bible is missing pages but I don’t remember that being the way it works. Are you looking for results or change? Are you looking for a way to measure the success of your sermon, play, etc. or are you using it as a first step to something much bigger than a one time action?

Before you send out a postcard, create a new logo or preach a new sermon think about the expectation you are setting up and make sure you can fill it. If you don’t, not only will it be ineffective, but you lose permission to ask again.

Tags: expectations, positioning, salvation

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 22nd, 2008 at 1:51 pm and is filed under relevance . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.