People decryption...10 sample questions you need to ask your congregants before your next worship service… 

The Toyota Car Company has been faced with the worst possible crisis that a major corporation can experience—a lack of credibility. You can't recall thousands of cars without suggesting to your clients that you don't know what you're doing. Toyota's problem isn't the result of not doing good market research. Rather, their issues are mostly about engineering goofs. For a car manufacturer, that's embarrassing!

In the American church—most often—it's the exact opposite, our "Product" is flawless (and I mean flawless), but our market research is usually lousy. That, too, is embarrassing! After all, George Barna can't be expected to do it all! :-) There are a couple of things that would help this situation and they both involve a really honest discussion. 

I've always been a strong advocate of "the meaningful debrief." This is where a church staff and some leaders sit around and go back over main events in the life of the community of believers, such as a major celebration of an anniversary or a strategic gathering to cast new vision. Everybody gets to give praise for the things they thought went particularly well, while envisioning how something might have been added to give the event even more meaning. My personal opinion has always been, it should also be done after every worship service.

Beyond the debrief, another helpful device for improving and making your worship services more meaningful is to ask questions of the people who sit through them. This must seem obvious, but, unless we know our people at a deeper level and understand them, we can't hope to speak to them in our worship experiences. So, here are some sample questions—each "ask" should start with "Be honest,..."                                                                                                                                                           

These are not magical questions. You could probably write better ones, but these kinds of questions might give us a better dialogue with our folks so that we have a cleaner shot at engaging their hearts and minds—simply because we know how they think. They have lives and values, and those lives and values sometimes have almost nothing in common with the institutional reasoning we use to do most everything. Often our mistakes in attracting people (and keeping them) come from not really understanding how they think, act, and live. You can't engage the attention of someone you haven't "decrypted."