Wednesday Planter: Personal Transition #9: People attend where they prefer, not where they are impressed.

I like cool stuff. I've always liked the bleeding edge of creativity. I like being unique. I like doing things that make other people just go "huh?"

I was pushing Saturday evening service as an outreach more than 20 years ago, and the congregation I proposed it to (the one I was pastoring at the time) nearly lynched me. One guy - an elder and a local school district administrator - actually asked me if I really thought the apostles (or any early Christians) would have ever gone to church on Saturday night. So much for the state of public education. :) That's how it's always been for me - a square peg in a round hole.

When I came to Davenport to plant, I was given more freedom than most pastor-types can even imagine in their wildest dreams...and with that came the freedom to be so novel and to be so *"purple" that people would flinch. I still like being that way, but I've learned that being novel and getting people to look at what you're doing and listen to what you saying isn't the same thing as reaching people. It's also not really that good of a goal.

A lot of people knew who we were, but they didn't love us. Being purple got us known, but I still wanted people to prefer us...I wanted them to want to be here with us. We had people, no doubt, but it wasn't until things got boring to me and people still kept on coming that I started to get it.

We were so broke at the time that we kinda gave up on being so unique and just tried to pay the bills. Then when I'd ask new people how they heard about us, it wasn't the direct mail, the (serious waste of money on) TV ads, or even our special events. The truth was that out best outreach was the changed lives they saw in their friends - and it was those changed lives that gave the personal invitation from their friends actual credibility. It was actually accomplishing our goal that made us purple.

That realization caused me to focus more on meeting basic personal needs via our teaching from God's Word and other ministries than worry about being unique. I still like uniqueness (that's part of how God has gifted me), but it's actually about people, about meeting their needs, about seeing their lives changed for the better, and about keeping the focus on those things instead. And now, there's been a different by-product: people not only love our uniqueness, they contribute to it! But better yet, they love us.

And they continue to choose us over many other things they could be doing or places they could be going!

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*Godin, Seth (2009). The Purple Cow: Transform Your Business by Being Remarkable. NY: Portfolio. ISBN-10: 1591843170 / ISBN-13: 978-1591843177