The strategy and tactics of love are the backbone of most storytelling.

Here is the standard scenario.

Boy sees girl or girl sees boy. They want to get together. (Strategy)  They plot to be together, surmounting one obstacle after another until they are happily and forever in each other’s arms. (Tactics)

Is this not like the longed-for scenario of church work?

In the Church, achieving togetherness (oneness with God) is the strategy. Tactics are the methods used to reach this goal.

Too often in church work, we employ tactic after tactic with no clear strategy. Strategy starts to stray — usually in the direction of making a traditional budget.

We write mission statements to remind us that the strategy of the Church is to reach God’s people with the message of love.

What follows should be an examination of tactics. Too often it is simply putting into place the tactics of the past.

Typical tactics include:

• Membership drives
• Pot luck dinners and seasonal festivals
• Visitation
• Worship innovations
• Educational and social opportunities
• Newsletters
• Sermons
• Service projects

There are new tactics that the Church has not yet conquered.

• Social media

This contains a host of sub-tactics — blogging, Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram, YouTube, podcasting, video, etc.

But what is the strategy?

The message of the church is love. The strategy never changes.

The strategy is engagement.

Jesus engaged people.

He approached them as individuals.

• The woman at the well
• The midnight lesson with Nicodemus
• The paralytic by the pool of Bethesda

He engaged them in groups.

• The wedding guests
• The disciples
• The multitudes on the mountainside
• The people in the temple
• The family of Lazarus at the graveside

Once engaged, Jesus employed tactics.

• Miracles
• Rituals and observances
• Personal conversations that often had a supernatural nature
• Teaching
• Storytelling
• Protesting (clearing the temple)
• Service (blessing the children, feeding the hungry, curing the ill)

We must emulate these tactics. We must teach and serve, pray and worship. We must do some things in a traditional way and we must do many things in more modern ways. To some extent we must do them simultaneously because we live in transitional age.

A common tactic employed by regional bodies is to close churches on older memberships — expecting elderly members to assimilate into other congregations that might also be forced to close within a few years. This is a cruel and dead-end tactic because it has lost view of the overall strategy of the church. The strategy of engagement has been overtaken by the strategy of economics.

The rut which is engulfing the Church is that we have become accustomed to people coming to us. We expect this and even demand it—without success, but we keep doing it anyway! This expectation is becoming less realistic with every passing day. The problems we face today are because the tactic of neglect has been employed for decades.

And so we must adjust our engagement tactics.

If people are not going to come to us, how are we going to reach them? How do we engage God’s people today?