Josh Hunt speaking at a recent All Star Sunday School Training Event

Most of the material in this article comes from the book Contageous. I highly recommend this book.

How to stop kids from abusing alcohol and get people to come to church

Between 1998 and 2004 your government spent nearly a billion dollars on an ad campaign to keep kids from taking drugs. It was called the National Youth Anti-Drug Campaign. The result? Drug use went up. Not only did drug use go up over all, scientists were able to demonstrate that kids who saw the ads were more likely to take drugs.

How can this be? And what does it have to do with getting people to go to church? Keep reading.

Teasing out the answer the why question is always a little tricky, but here is the best answer we have. Try to get inside a teenager’s mind as he watches commercial after commercial encouraging him not to do drugs. Here is the flow of thought:

• Wow! There sure are a lot of these anti-drug commercials.
• Somebody is spending a lot of money on these commercials.
• Drug use must be a big problem.
• There must be lots of people doing drugs.
• I heard Jamie was doing drugs. I bet lots of kids do drugs.
• I bet everyone uses drugs.
• I bet I am the only one in my school not doing drugs.
• I should try drugs and see what all the fuss is about. If everyone is doing it, how bad could it be?

OK, you want to know something that is really frustrating? We know of a different approach that actually works.

Aside: here is the lesson behind the lesson. What should have been done was to roll out a small campaign and test it. Or, roll out multiple campaigns in different cities and test them all. Consider the words of the wisest man who ever lived:

Sow your seed in the morning, and at evening let not your hands be idle, for you do not know which will succeed, whether this or that, or whether both will do equally well.

Ecclesiastes 11:6 (NIV)

Here is the plan that worked. See if you can find the lesson on how to get people to go to church. It actually wasn’t getting kids of drugs; it was getting them to stop binge drinking.

1800 college students in the U.S. die every year from alcohol related injuries. Another 600,000 are injured. Forty-four percent of college students binge drink. A Harvard study reports that binge drinking is the #1 health issue for college students. It is huge.  

Koreen Johannessen wanted to do something about it. She started at the University of Arizona. She did the usual stuff. Flyers. Ads. She even went so far as to put a coffin at the Student Center with stats on how many kids are killed in alcohol related injuries. As you can expect by now, she didn’t see any results.

She started talking to students about this—always a good idea. What she found surprised her. Most students said they were not comfortable with the drinking habit of their peers. Sure, they might have an occasional drink from time to time, but they were not into binge drinking. It actually repulsed them. So Johannessen created a different campaign. A campaign that centered on the fact that most college students didn’t binge drink. Most had only a beer or two. Sixty-nine percent have four or fewer drinks when they party. Many didn’t party all that much. She didn’t talk about the health consequences of binge-drinking. She didn’t say drinking kills. There were no coffins in the student center in the campaign. She just reported the facts: most college students don’t drink all that much.

And heavy drinking dropped by 30%.

Let’s talk about getting people to go to church.

How many people would you guess go to church, say, compared to how many people watch the Super Bowl? Would you say more people watch the Super Bowl or more people go to church?

Here are the facts. About 20% of Americans go to church every Sunday. That is a little past 60 million each weekend. 108 million watched the Baltimore Ravens beat the Forty-niners in Super Bowl XLVII. This means that every month there are more than twice as many people in church than watch the Super Bowl every year.

Question: why does this not feel right? Why does it feel like more people watch the Super Bowl than go to church? For the same reason if doesn’t feel right to say most college students don’t binge drink and are, in fact, turned off by people who do binge drink. Watching the Super Bowl is public. So is binge drinking. People have tail gate parties. They talk about how wasted they got. They talk about the game around the water cooler. They wear T-shirts with their favorite team’s logo on them. They don’t talk about church. The go and quietly go home.

So, if we want more people to go to church, we do well to make it more visible. Here are three ideas. I’d be curious to hear yours.

• Find every excuse to get shirts with your church’s logo on it. VBS, Father’s Day, Christmas musical. . . any excuse to get shirts will do. Expensive shirts. Cheap T-Shirts. . . anything with your church’s name on it.
• Bumper stickers.
• Facebook. Have a Facebook moment in every service. Have everyone check in and say, “Great to be at church today.” A lot of us have 1000 friends or more. Do the math.

Imagine every church did this Some 60 million of us go to church every Sunday. Imagine every one of them posted on Facebook, “Great to be worshiping our great God at church today.” 60 million times 1000 friends every week. . . Wow!

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