Why McDonald's Succeeds Where Church Fails

An old friend recently shared this meme. We agree on so much, it’s hard to say, “Au contraire, mon frere.” ("Exactly the opposite, my brother.") Admittedly, though, I too want the failures of The Church to be someone else’s fault. But “It’s me. Hi. I’m the problem; it’s me.” And you, too, probably.

The key to success for McDonald's is their consistency. A Big Mac is a Big Mac is a Big Mac. If they forget to put something you ordered in your bag, then you tell them, and they fix it.

The key failing of The Church is that Jesus isn't even the toy in the Happy Meal. I speak from personal experience: If that Happy Meal toy is missing, you'll know about it as soon as your kid (or grandkid) opens the box. Also from personal experience: Most churches actually run better without the inconvenience of Jesus being in their box.

To be clear:

Consistently living up to expectations is what keeps McDonald's in business.

Constantly chasing the "fun new things that will make our church grow" is just one part of the disease killing churches (at least in the past four decades of my ministry career).

The meme is wrong. People are hungry enough. In fact, most know that they are starving. They recognize a famine when they see one.

 And even in the midst of blaming them, we offer "everything else" in addition to (or instead of) The Bread of Life and The Spring of Living Water. Worse than burying our toy-version of Jesus beneath greasy salted starch sticks, we withhold the entire meal from those we blame. Why do we hide what we expect them to find? Because they do not first pledge their allegiance to our ever-shifting worship focus, our self-contradicting theology, or our personality-of-the-month-club. We make them come to church to find Jesus, instead of delivering Him to their doorstep, their tent-village, their cardboard box beneath the overpass, or their workplace where they may spend forty-hours a week next to a Christian…and never once see Jesus.

To those of us in The Church who criticize these hungry others: It would probably help if we could try to see ourselves through their eyes. But that’s unlikely to happen. It would require us to talk with them, instead of ignorantly talking about them. 

Perhaps a good first step would be to talk less about them, and more about Jesus.