Resort/Leisure Missions Stimulate Church Growth

Chuck Clayton

Yes, it is true! Resort and leisure missions can stimulate  church growth. By resort and leisure missions I am talking about  the total ministry of the gospel of Jesus Christ using whatever  means, tool, or method that may be needed to speak to people  who, because of residence, employment, or temporary presence,  are in a setting devoted mainly to leisure and recreational  activities. Frequently in conferences that I have led, I have suggested a  simple outline of resort and leisure missions strategy. Through  prayer, hard work, and the leadership of the Holy Spirit:

1. Get to know who and what is in the area.
2. Discover the unmet needs and aspirations.
3. Envision ministries that will speak to these needs.
4. Determine priorities.
5. Consider resources.
6. Consult with missions administrators.
7. Structure ministry with flexibility.
8. Assemble materials.
9. Train workers.
10. Execute ministries.
11. Provide follow-up.
12. Evaluate.
13. Do long-range planning.

Those of us in resort and leisure missions are probably  perceived as being okay in terms of evangelism and ministry.  Most resort and leisure projects I know anything about are  highly committed to proclamation of the gospel in whatever  idioms are necessary for clear communication. We major on the  tools of ministry and proclamation. We have been pretty open to  trying new approaches in resort and leisure evangelism.

Let us face it—folk concerts, puppet shows, day camping,  coffeehouses, street and beach witnessing are all a far cry from  the traditional two-week revival service. But they are  essentially sound evangelism methods. I think there is a wide  spread acceptance among the "brethren" for these innovative  means of proclamation.

And we do an excellent job of ministering in resort and leisure  settings. We meet the needs of hurting and seeking persons  through many effective ministries that validate the reality of  the good news in all sorts of places.

However, in the area of congregationalizing, those of us in  resort and leisure missions are not perceived as doing nearly as  well by many who judge the effectiveness and validity of mission  ministries.

Perhaps this is largely due to the highly mobile nature of the  visitors in resort and leisure settings, including overnighters,  one-to-two week vacationers, and seasonal employees. Perhaps  this has led many to feel that stable congregations cannot be  built in essentially resort and leisure settings.

Maybe it is because few people who are permanent or long term  residents in resort and leisure communities come from old-South  traditional Southern Baptist backgrounds. Instead, they tend to  be people whose different life styles, traditions, values,  ethnic roots, and religious orientations may well seem to be  very poor ground for building self-sufficient Southern Baptist  churches.

Consciously or unconsciously, this has led some mission  strategies to place resort and leisure settings in a low  priority when allocating ministry resources, even though great  numbers of people in these areas need to be reached with the  gospel.

Every resort and leisure setting is unique. However, basic  characteristics are commonly found in most leisure-oriented  settings in our contemporary society. And if these do not seem  to be the most likely places to grow evangelical, New Testament  congregations, it is important to remember that neither was the  Gentile culture of the Greco-Roman world of the first century.

1. The culture is totally secular. Spiritual and religious  considerations have very little visibility.

2. The getting or holding onto things is of major concern.  Materialism is a driving force in the typical value structure  of this culture.

3. The pursuit of pleasure or hedonism is another predominate  force or concern.

4. Institutional organizations and activities are frequently  viewed in the same light as the plague. There are many people,  even professing Christians, hiding behind their pine tree or  sand dune in most resort and leisure areas.

5. Pantheism or the worship of creation and nature is the  frequent spiritual orientation of many in resort and leisure  areas.

The composite resident of the typical resort and leisure  community (whom and where you probably will never find) is a 28- year-old male, single or divorced, living with a person to whom  he is not married, a college graduate in business  administration, part owner of a small resort/ leisure-related  business, up to his eyeballs in debt, and who jogs, skis, plays  golf and tennis, backpacks, drinks frequently, and uses drugs  occasionally in social settings. He is an agnostic whose parents  were nominal Catholics. He attended a couple of years of  parochial school, is turned off to what he thinks is the  institutional church, knows more about Krishna consciousness  than he does about the Spirit-filled life, and thinks of the  natural setting of the resort and leisure area as having a  mystical presence. And on we could go.

I am well aware that there are often more women than men in many  resort and leisure areas; that some areas are predominately  populated by senior adults; that other areas have a high  percentage of school dropouts; and I also know that there are  some fine Christians to be found in most resort and leisure  areas. But, the overall situation still holds: secular,  materialistic, hedonistic, non-involved, and pantheistic.

Let us face it, the Southern Baptist preacher trained to have a  standard Sunday School and to parse the Greek will probably feel  not any too comfortable around our typical, though hypothetical,  resort and leisure resident.

But keep some other things in mind. The typical resident of most  resort/leisure settings is also very likely quite lonely. He is  likely consumed with self and with image, and is very insecure.  He wears the mask of a beautiful person, but inside he is empty  and frightened. He finds it very difficult to maintain  meaningful relationships. He is cynical and suspicious of the  motives of others.

Other types of people in a resort and leisure oriented community  feel the same: the college drop out following seasonal  employment, the retired couple living in their camper, the  family that has lived in the community since before its was  discovered as a resort or leisure paradise, the Forest Service  or National Park ranger, the new divorcee and her three kids who  have no supervision while Mama works as a cocktail waitress at  the lodge, and many, many more.

How can the resort and leisure missionary break through all of  this? How can he or she bring these people into a meaningful  relationship with Christ? How can a congregation be developed in  which new Christians out of such backgrounds and lifestyles will  find nurture and fellowship? By sensitively responding to the  guidance of the Holy Spirit!

Ministering to the people who are found in resort/leisure  settings, introducing them to the redemptive work of Jesus  Christ, and bringing them to maturity in a family of faith is  what resort and leisure congregationalizing is all about.

In all honesty, some of us who serve in leadership capacities in  resort and leisure missions have contributed to the problem of  poor resort/leisure congregationalizing concepts. In some areas,  resort and leisure work and congregationalizing have not  historically been related.

Occasionally resort and leisure ministry activities have been  carried on by state conventions or associations apart from the  local churches in the area. The churches in those settings may  have been established for a long time and they might resent the  intrusion of the seemingly godless vacationers into their  community. Therefore, any resort and leisure ministry is carried  on completely separate from the local churches rather than as an  integral part of their ministry.

I am not saying this is necessarily wrong. It may not be  possible for the long-term resident of these areas to  effectively communicate the Christian gospel to the affluent,  urban, secular vacationer or new resident. And so, in such  places as this, it may be seem that separating resort/leisure  missions and congregationalizing is necessary in order to reach  the leisure-oriented part of the population. (However, I  personally feel resort and leisure mission projects should be  based in a local church.)

I fear that frequently the separation of congregationalizing  from resort/leisure missions has been projected as the norm.  However, as it has been discovered in the West, the two cannot  and must not be separated. There are no old, established,  traditional local Southern Baptist churches in western resort  and leisure communities. If a church or mission exists at all,  it is likely to be young in age, small in membership, struggling  for its existence, and perhaps uncertain of its identity. If  resort and leisure work is to be done in such a community,  congregationalizing must be a major part of its focus.

Nevertheless, there often seems to be an insistence on  separating the two. A mission leader may say, "We have to build  a strong congregation before we can become involved in resort  and leisure ministries." Some resort missionaries say, "I'm not  here to build a church, I'm here to do resort and leisure work."  However, they are both wrong! You cannot build a congregation in  a resort and leisure community without ministering to resort- related people, which means resort and leisure ministries. But  neither can resort and leisure ministries effectively be carried  on in a resort/leisure-oriented community without establishing  the base of a New Testament congregation.

There may be some isolated western resort or leisure settings,  i.e., Carlsbad Caverns, Mesa Verde, or Glacier National Park,  without any year-round community directly adjacent in which a  congregational base can be established. But even in such cases  as these, there is usually a nearby support community. However,  even lacking this, a ministry needs to be conducted by  Christians oriented toward New Testament congregational life as  the norm for Christian experience or the result of the resort  and leisure mission work will not be true to New Testament  principles. But that raises a very important question. If resort and leisure  missions are going to stimulate church growth, what exactly is  it going to stimulate the growth of? What is this church in the  resort and leisure community going to be? If any denomination  ought to know what a church is, Southern Baptists should be the  one. However, sometimes we do not act like we do.

Many early Southern Baptist churches in the West were begun by  people who wanted churches like the ones they remembered back  home. In my wanderings I have encountered some of those "back  home" churches. Some of them have strange ideas about what the  church is. For some the church is a building, usually brick,  frequently with white pillars and some sort of steeple. For  others, the church exists primarily as a place to bury people.  And for still others, the church is largely a family tradition.  Its members were practically born into it. Nearly everyone who  is a member is related by birth or marriage to everyone else in  it.

I am not saying these are biblical definitions of the church. I  am just reporting that a sizeable number of people in some  cultural settings see the church these ways. I doubt if many  here would insist that such concepts of the church be imposed on  any western-or eastern-congregation. For even as ethnic churches  must be permitted to assume their own ethnic expression of  church form and operation, and just as a church in a military  community or an inner city setting must have its own unique  expression, so too must a church in a resort and leisure  community be allowed to be distinctive.

Individual growth and church growth can take place only in those  situations where both the individual and the church have the  freedom to become the distinctively unique creation that God  wants each of them to be in the power of the Holy Spirit.  Therefore, in order for its members to be properly nurtured into  maturity, it is important that each resort/ leisure congregation  be permitted to grow and develop in such a way as to become  whatever God wants it to be.

When folks like most of those typically found in resort and  leisure settings come to faith in Christ, they do not need the  you-all club that someone remembers from First Church of a  county seat town back in the South. They do not need a church  that is like someone thinks it was 30 years ago in Missouri or  North Carolina. They do not need anybody else's anything.

Resort and leisure missions can stimulate church growth if and  only if the church is free to find distinctiveness of expression  in each resort and leisure setting. I am not talking about  digression from Baptist principles of ecclesiology. I am not  talking about permitting deviation from Biblical doctrine. I am  not talking about tolerating attitudes of non-cooperation with  other Southern Baptist churches.

However, how much of what we do is determined by tradition,  habit, or culture? Can a resort/leisure church be a cooperating  Southern Baptist congregation and meet some time other than  11:00 a.m. on Sunday? Is a free form of worship okay? Must the  congregation always meet in an auditorium setting? I am not  saying that no resort/leisure congregation should ever meet at  11:00 a.m., nor that an auditorium setting is always  inappropriate, or that free worship forms are always the best.  But can't there be some latitude? One missionary who met at 8:00  p.m. on Sunday evening in a Ramada Inn hospitality room for  prayer, singing with a guitar, Bible study and sharing was told  that this could not qualify as a beginning step in  congregationalizing.

Another resort church I know about chose to be very traditional  at 11:00 a.m. on Sunday mornings. There were a number of people  in that congregation who came from very traditional backgrounds.  They needed and wanted a dignified, well-planned, structured,  formal service. The Sunday evening service, on the other hand,  was a happening. Extremely casual dress, free worship forms, a  lot of serendipity with no two services ever the same was the  pattern. In that particular setting, this blend, along with the  employment throughout the resort season of appropriate  resort/leisure ministry programs, produced the right atmosphere  for impressive church growth.

Now what worked in that setting at that time is not the final  formula for resort/leisure church growth, but it does teach a  valuable lesson. At the beginning of the resort and leisure  ministry effort at Lake Tahoe, there were three churches and one  mission around the 80 miles of lake shore. Different blends of  tradition and innovation were used in each of the congregations.  Different expressions of congregational style have been  attempted from time to time. The important thing has been that  each congregation could express itself in healthy ways that bore  testimony to the entire Tahoe community of Christ's relevancy in  a leisure setting. Today there are a number of ministry points around the lake.  Church growth has taken place. It is my opinion that when  resort/leisure ministry tools were used in that resort and  leisure setting, church growth accelerated. When resort and  leisure tools and ministries were ignored, church growth  declined.

Church growth is not just a growing of an organization, of  buildings, of a denomination or an institution. There are three  Greek words that express what the church must be. Beyond these I  do not feel we have to fret much about what form of expression  is taken.

1. suma, the word for body, the concept of the church as a  living, vital organism with Jesus Christ as Head and Lord. The  individual members relating to the lordship of their common  Head, each giving expression to their unique function within  the body in a cooperative way.

2. ekklesia, the congregation of called out ones assembled or  gathered together. This points out a prerequisite of new birth  and of entering into a lifestyle of obedient discipleship to  Jesus Christ. Congregationalizing does necessitate the coming  together of the members of the body from time to time for  mutual upholding, enabling, equipping, and for group  expression of common faith and commitment.

3. koinonia, the participating together with one another.  Congregationalizing does not mean just the joining of the same  religious organization or fraternity. Nor is it simply the  tolerating of other people who call themselves Christians  while I do my own thing. Rather there is the absolute  necessity for involvement together toward common goals under  the headship of Christ.

Whatever forms are used to give expression to the suma, the  ekklesia, and the koinonia are not matters of supreme  importance. The resort and leisure church should find the forms,  the tools, and the ministries that will best enable them to be  the church in their setting.

Yes, I believe the New Testament gives us direction, and is the  authority against which we need to check what we understand  Christ's lordship to be. But I find a whole lot more diversity  in form, practice, and even church government than we are  frequently willing to admit.

Resort and leisure ministries can stimulate church growth if:

• They are designed to reach the people who are there, rather  than the people who exist somewhere else. 
• They say to the people, we Christians love you, care about  you, and accept you. 
• They say the faith we proclaim is alive, vital, and  relevant. 
• They meet real needs that actually exist. 
• They are operated on God's timetable. 
• They do not isolate the pastor or missionary from the  established Christians who need nurturing and growing, too. 
• And most importantly, if they are biblically sound, Spirit  directed, prayerfully executed, and Christ centered. 

Based on a presentation made by Chuck Clayton at the National  Resort Missions Conference, Grand Canyon, Arizona, 1978, as  edited and revised by Sam Schlegel. Used by permission.