I still remember my first lock in.
Pizza and sodas all night. A prize if you brought a friend. Games till 11 pm, worship at midnight, a movie at 2 am. Somebody playing music thru the sound system in the gym like it was a concert. Lots of kids, lots of energy.
And sure, Jesus was in there. Usually around the time everyone was tired enough to sit still.
That was the deal, and nobody hid it.
Get them in the door with the fun. Slip in the gospel once you had their attention.
It worked. I know it worked, because it worked on me and my friends.
And since then, I’ve watched that exact strategy walk straight out of the youth room and onto the main stage of churches.
Come be entertained. Jesus is there somewhere.
Except now it’s not a strategy for a lock-in once a semester. It’s a plan used for one hour, every single week. It’s a plan to grow churches and build more campuses.
bait and switch faith
Nobody sat in a meeting and decided to model church off of a lock-in strategy.
It happened one decision at a time, and every decision probably made sense on its own.
The band got better musicians because a great band honors God (oh, and draws a bigger crowd).
The lighting and screens were upgraded to provide an easier way for the congregation to sing along (oh, and a more exciting experience).
Someone noticed attendance always spikes for the series with the movie-trailer-style promo video which means more people could hear the Gospel (so they started making more of those to draw more people).
The greeters got a script. The coffee became fair trade. The lobby got re-named and re-modeled as a “gathering space.” And whether anyone said it out loud or not, churches started modeling themselves after lock-ins…
Every single one of those moves made sense at the time. And yet together, they built a machine. A machine built to get people in the door and keep them coming back.
A bigger version of the same machine youth ministry leaders began building prototypes for decades ago.
we traded formation for attraction
We didn’t set out to replace discipleship with entertainment. We set out to remove barriers. And somewhere the barrier-removing became the whole job.
We started asking “how many people showed up” instead of “how did that form them.”
We started measuring the wrong things because they were the things we could quickly and easily measure.
Attendance.
Salvations.
Baptisms.
How many people volunteered for the second service.
We stopped asking harder questions because they didn’t show up on the scorecard.
Did anyone repent of anything significant this year?
Did anyone learn to actually pray or read the Scriptures for themselves?
Did anyone get discipled by a person, instead of only by a stage and a public speaker?
A lock-in never had to answer those questions. It had one job: keep a hundred teenagers occupied and safe until their parents came back in the morning, and try to sneak in Jesus. Fun was really the main assignment, not discipleship.
“Big church” was never supposed to copy that assignment.
the add-on became optional
Unfortunately, what happens when Jesus is the add-on instead of the whole point is eventually you don’t actually need Him at all.
You can run an excellent Sunday morning service – moving music, an impactful communicator, a well-produced series with a good hook – and never actually lead anyone to repentance, confession, or a lifetime relationship with Jesus. You can hold a packed room’s attention for ninety minutes purely on production value.
We know this is true because plenty of arenas do it every weekend for sports or music with no gospel in the building at all.
If the thing that makes your church different from a well-run concert or sporting event is a forty-minute public speaker and a response time at the end, you haven’t built a church. You’ve built a very good show, with a chaplain.
not anti-excellence
I want to be careful here too, because it would be easy to hear this as turn off the lights, kill the band, sing four hymns off key and call it holy.
That’s not it.
Excellence isn’t the problem. A great band isn’t the problem. A technology-filled room isn’t the problem.
The problem is what this version of excellence that is being celebrated actually results in.
A lock-in’s excellence was in service of getting as many teenagers to show up as possible, helping them to think youth group is fun and cool, and keeping them busy till morning.
If a church’s excellence is in service of the exact same kind of thing — getting people to show up, keeping them spiritually entertained, and getting them to come back — then it doesn’t matter if Jesus is included or not, the results will never be about Him.
We will have built a very well-run version of the wrong version of excellence.
what it would actually take to fix this
We are at the point that it would take an major shift, not just a slight modification, to correct course.
It would mean the “invitation” isn’t the last thing you do as a part of a well-produced religious hour. It has to be built into the structure of the service itself — real space for confession, for actual response, not a swelling instrumental track cueing people toward a decision they’ll forget by lunch.
It means whoever plans the service asks a different first question. Not “how do we hook people,” but “what would actually need to happen in this hour for someone to walk out more formed than they walked in.” Sometimes that still means a great band. It just stops being the whole strategy.
It means real follow-up when someone does respond — a person calling them that week, not a name added to a database. A lock-in never had to follow up with anyone after Saturday morning. A church does.
And it means being willing to measure something harder than attendance: are the people who’ve been here five years actually more like Jesus than they were five years ago? If nobody can answer that question, the production was working. The church wasn’t.
questions worth sitting with
- Have we confused a full room with a formed people?
- Have we made actual relationship with Jesus the smallest, quietest part of the hour?
- Would this Sunday still be worth it if the lights never came up, the band never played, the world-class communicator never spoke, and you weren’t served good coffee?
I don’t know a pastor who set out to build a lock-in that never ends. But I know a lot of them who have unfortunately inherited and perpetuated a system originally built for attracting teenagers and never asked whether it was unfortunately built for the wrong job all along.
The add-on was never supposed to be the add-on. He was always supposed to be the whole point.
This post is a part of the “Big Church, Same Games” series. The next post is “Mountaintop Worship.”
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