Recently I took my wife to a restaurant. It wasn’t just any restaurant, it was our favourite. It is one of those restaurants that has it all: It has the view: overlooking the harbour. The vibe: the low lights, the white cotton table cloths. The service: friendly but not too intrusive. But most of all it has the food. Nothing from the main course to the taste of the butter was left to chance. Every moment is a delight to the palate.

It is very different to another restaurant we used to go to. This one was also good. In fact, it was so good I made my parents come. But there was no vibe: I think it was under fluorescent lights. There as no view: we had to go up a questionable set of stairs from an equally questionable lane way. The service was functional, the tables were plastic with plastic red and white checked table cloths. However, it also had the food. Italian food prepared the way I imagine Italian nonnas would grudgingly concede was as good as theirs. 

But that’s the thing that really makes a restaurant isn’t it? The food. You can have the view, the vibe and the service (or not). But these are merely cosmetic. They matter, but only as far as it makes you expect the food to be great. The purpose of a restaurant is to give you food and good food at that. The difference between a great restaurant is its understanding that food is its core business and everything else is cosmetic. It’s not that cosmetics don’t matter, the first restaurant charged a lot more than the second. But both would be closed by now if they were not paying attention to the core business of great meals.

What would your church be rated like if it was a restaurant? Let’s up the pressure: what would Gordon Ramsay say if he came to visit? Would you be getting the Ramsay burns (see what I did there!) like “this chicken is so rubbery Goodyear asked for the recipe” or “this lamb is so rare it’s still going to school with Mary”.  Or would there be the understated “well done, good job”?

One of the mistakes that restaurants make, at least in my experience of both eating at and watching Ramsay at work, is to focus more on the cosmetics than core business. The vibe and the service becomes more important than the food. You expect so much because of the cosmetics and experience so little. When Ramsay stings it is almost always about the food because that’s what matters.

And it is not just restaurants that make this mistake. Churches do the same. Church leaders are looking for that one silver bullet, that one cosmetic thing that will make the ministry hum. Some examples of cosmetic things I can see people investing in is:

• Good signage
• Good contact events
• Good design
• Entertaining sermons

Don’t get me wrong. These things matter. But they aren’t core business and when they take time and resources that should be poured into the core business of making and growing disciples there is a problem. It’s like a restaurant that invested so much into its lighting that it can’t afford good ingredients.

• Good signage is only good if it points to a mature community.
• Good contact events are only good if they lead to discipleship moments.
• Good design is important if you have good things to say.
• Entertaining sermons get people’s attention, but if you have not done the hard work of seating it in biblical truth what’s the point? 

Are you paying attention to your core business or has cosmetics taken over?

Let me come back to asking you what would Gordon say if he visited your church: “This church is so busy it’s like a treadmill—lots of movement, zero progress.” or  “This church is so unfocused it’s like a compass in a blender—spinning hard, going nowhere.”  Or would you get “well done good and faithful servant” from another church reviewer who is more important. If your church shut down tomorrow would they miss what they can learn from God, or the atmosphere that you have created.