Church Engagement: What story are we telling ourselves about the Church? 

When most people begin mobilizing churches to care for vulnerable children and families, they don’t start out frustrated with the Church.

They usually begin with a deep sense of hope. They see needs that matter, believe the Church has an important role to play in addressing them and genuinely want to help churches step into meaningful opportunities to serve. They assume that if a pastor understands the need, sees the biblical connection and is presented with a clear opportunity to respond, engagement will naturally follow.

The tension most church engagement leaders eventually feel

It doesn’t take long for many leaders to discover that reality is more complicated than they expected.

Emails go unanswered. Conversations that seemed promising fail to produce movement. Meetings end with enthusiasm but little follow-through. Churches that appeared ready to engage never quite take the next step. 

These experiences have a cumulative effect, and what starts as optimism can gradually become frustration. Patience can become disappointment. Curiosity can become skepticism. 

The shift rarely happens all at once. Most people do not wake up one day suddenly cynical toward the Church. Rather, it develops slowly through a collection of experiences that begin influencing the stories we tell ourselves about why things are or are not happening.

A pastor who does not return a call may initially be viewed as busy, but after enough similar experiences, that same lack of response may begin to feel like apathy. A church that hesitates to move forward may first be perceived as cautious, but over time, that hesitation can start to look like resistance. Without realizing it, our interpretations begin changing, and those interpretations influence how we engage.

This is why effective church engagement requires more than strategy. It requires self-awareness.

Over the years, I have become convinced that beneath nearly every engagement philosophy, ministry model and organizational approach are two questions that quietly shape everything else. We may not consciously ask them every day, but our answers influence our expectations, our posture and the way we interact with churches.

The first question is: What do you believe about the Church?

The second is: What do you feel about the Church?

These questions are deeply connected. What we believe provides a framework for understanding the Church. What we feel often determines how we engage it. Together, they shape the lens through which we interpret our experiences and the assumptions we carry into every conversation.

Question 1: What do you believe about the Church?

The first question is fundamentally theological. It isn’t necessarily what your statement of faith says about the Church or what answer you would give in a theology class. It’s what you actually believe in practice.

Because our beliefs inevitably influence our behavior.

If we believe the Church is primarily a means to an end, we will tend to engage it transactionally. Churches become vehicles for accomplishing organizational goals. Success becomes measured primarily by participation, activity and outcomes.

If we believe the Church is primarily an institution, we will often approach it functionally. We focus on systems, structures, processes and decision-making mechanisms. While these things matter, they can easily become the dominant lens through which we view engagement.

But if we believe the Church is fundamentally a people, everything begins to shift. We stop viewing engagement primarily as organizational influence and begin seeing it as relational stewardship. We recognize that every church is made up of people carrying unique stories, pressures, fears, hopes, responsibilities and opportunities. We understand that every interaction with a church is ultimately an interaction with human beings.

And through it, we discover we are not first engaging an institution, we are building trust with people.

That distinction may seem subtle, but it influences everything from how we communicate to how we define success. If the Church is a people, then engagement becomes less about gaining access and more about earning trust. It becomes less about getting churches to do something and more about helping people discern what faithfulness looks like within their own context.

Question 2: What do you feel about the Church?

The second question is more personal: What do you feel about the Church?

This question is often harder to answer because emotions rarely announce themselves clearly. Instead, they accumulate under the surface and over time through experience. Encouraging experiences create hope. Difficult experiences create frustration. Repeated disappointments can create weariness. Unmet expectations often produce skepticism.

None of these emotions is inherently wrong. In many cases, they are understandable responses to real experiences. The challenge comes when those emotions begin shaping our interpretations without us even knowing it.

Over time, we begin to see what we expect to see.

If frustration becomes the dominant emotion, we may begin interpreting hesitation as resistance. If disappointment becomes the dominant emotion, we may mistake overwhelm for apathy. If exhaustion begins driving our perspective, we may dismiss complexity and conclude that churches do not care.

This is one of the reasons self-awareness matters so much in church engagement work. The stories we tell ourselves about churches often reveal as much about our own emotional state as they do about the churches we are engaging.

When frustration begins shaping engagement

One of the challenges with frustration is that it rarely stays under the surface. 

It slowly transforms into a narrative we craft that justifies our feelings and acts as a filter through which we interpret what’s going on around us. 

We begin talking about churches collectively rather than personally. “Churches don’t care.” “Pastors aren’t interested.” “Nobody wants to engage anymore.”

Of course, none of those statements is entirely true. But our frustration starts leaking out into our relationships.

I learned something about this during the early years of pastoring our young church plant. One of our elders, a particularly wise man who cared deeply about both me and our church, pulled me aside and told me something I’ve never forgotten. He said, “You need to understand that our people can sense and feel whatever frustration or exhaustion you’re carrying — even when you think you’re hiding it well.”

That caught my attention because, like most leaders, I thought I was pretty good at hiding it.

His point was that frustration doesn’t always express itself in obvious ways. I didn’t have to stand on stage and tell everyone I was exhausted or frustrated for them to feel it. It could show up in my tone, my patience, the way I responded to people, the assumptions I made or the energy I carried into a room. People could sense far more than I realized.

His words weren’t condemnatory. They were actually intended for my benefit in two important ways.

First, he gave me permission to stop pretending. If I was tired, I was tired. If I was frustrated, I was frustrated. That didn’t make me a bad pastor; it made me human. And sometimes one of the healthiest things people can see in their pastor is an appropriate expression of human vulnerability. “You don’t have to fake it,” he told me. In part because pretending wasn’t healthy, but also because I probably wasn’t nearly as good at hiding it as I thought I was.

Second, his words were protective. He wanted me to know that our elders were committed to helping ensure I remained healthy and strong — not perpetually tired, depleted and frustrated. That mattered for my own good, but it also mattered for the good of our church. His point was simple: it does no one any good for the leader to be unhealthy. Whatever I was carrying would inevitably find its way into the people and culture I was helping lead.

I’ve thought about his words often in the context of church engagement.

What we carry into our work eventually makes its way into our work. We may think we’re hiding our frustration with pastors who don’t return our calls, churches that don’t follow through or partnerships that aren’t progressing as quickly as we’d hoped. But the people we’re engaging can feel it, even if they may not be able to name exactly what they’re sensing.

That’s why tending to our own health isn’t separate from the work of healthy engagement. It’s part of it. 

Frustration tends to make us increasingly transactional. We become more focused on outcomes than relationships, more concerned with activity than formation and more interested in movement than understanding. Because we care deeply about the needs we are addressing, urgency begins pushing us toward efficiency. We feel pressure to convince, pressure to persuade and pressure to generate results.

The irony is that these responses often create the very resistance we are trying to overcome, perpetuating the disappointment and frustration and driving us further down a path toward disillusionment and burnout.

When hope shapes engagement

However, feeling hope about the Church creates a very different posture.

This is not the same thing as naïve optimism. Hope does not ignore challenges, overlook obstacles or pretend that engagement work is easy. Rather, hope allows us to write a different narrative and interpret those realities through a different lens.

Hope remains curious. It assumes there may be factors we do not yet understand. It recognizes that pastors and church leaders are often carrying far more than is visible on the surface. It leaves room for complexity. It seeks understanding before judgment.

Leaders who engage from a posture of hope tend to ask different questions. Rather than wondering why a church is not moving, they become curious about what may be creating hesitation. Rather than immediately focusing on what needs to change, they spend time understanding the context in which decisions are being made.

Hope also produces patience. Not passive patience, but the kind of patience that comes from trusting that God is still at work in His Church. Even when movement feels slow. Even when progress is difficult to measure. Even when outcomes do not happen according to our preferred timeline.

Hope allows us to remain faithful without becoming cynical. And, after all, faithfulness is the goal. 

As you take an honest assessment of your answers to those two fundamental questions right now, where do you find yourself? On the edge of frustration, filled with hope or somewhere in the middle — learning to hold the tension of those two together? 

The good news is the Church is a people, a people created by God and formed by God. Just like you, and just like me. 

We are invited into His redemptive work in the world as co-laborers with Him and with one another. And that changes both what we believe and what we feel about the Church as we invite people to love their neighbors in new and deeper ways.

– Jason Johnson is the National Director of Church Engagement and Mobilization at CAFO.