CREEDE HINSHAW: Take a survey? Nope, not interested

I was paying my bill at Applebee’s the other day. The food was excellent and so was the service. This restaurant has a checkout terminal on every table where the customer swipes a credit card and enters the tip. When I was finished up popped a dialogue box inviting me to complete a three-minute survey about Applebee’s.

I quickly punched “no” and gave the server a generous tip. That’s my feedback.

One can hardly make a commercial transaction without being asked to complete a customer service survey. Who has time for these surveys? The few I have completed never ask the right questions anyway.

What if religious organizations instituted a “customer survey” for each worshiper to complete at the conclusion of each sermon, each hymn or prayer, solo or choir anthem?

What a silly idea this would be. First of all, public worship is not primarily about pleasing those in the pew. Public worship is not entertainment. Although it appears that many churches plan worship services that will be popular crowd pleasers such a strategy misses the whole point.

One of the hardest tasks for those who preach or lead worship is to find the courage to speak or pray hard words, to convey thoughts and moods that will probably offend members of a congregation. The prophets in the Old Testament won no popularity contests as they confronted the Hebrew people with God’s truth.

Jesus, who drew mobs of people wherever he went, never worried about whether his teaching went down well with the Jewish or Roman authorities. Same with John the Baptist. Same with the apostle Paul. Practically every major religious leader has met fierce opposition and mob violence.

Of course, those who plan worship must do so with one eye on the congregation. Some leaders seem to go out of their way to offend their adherents.

One cannot ignore elements of worship that are pleasing to the congregation. But the other eye of the pastor or worship leader must focus on the Lord God Almighty, meaning that honest worship pleasing God may not always garner happy customer opinion surveys.

People already fill out surveys about their appreciation of the weekly worship service anyway. They do so in at least three ways:

(1) They vote with their feet. There is no stronger signal to church leaders than that of strong or weak attendance;

(2) They vote with their pocketbooks. A strife-filled congregation will not long sustain its financial health;

(3) They vote with their hallway conversation. People who profess to be happy in their congregation will tell the real story in the hallway or parking lot.

I hesitate to add that unhappy (and often unbalanced) people also express themselves via the cowardly, venomous anonymous letter. Every pastor soon learns to ignore this kind of customer feedback.

Considering that everyone is using customer surveys these days, I guess we’ll soon reach the golden age of supreme satisfaction. This may work very well for a corporation, but it’s a lousy way to run the church.

Email columnist Creede Hinshaw, a retired Methodist minister, at [email protected].