The Psychology Of A New Church Experience
Research-Backed Social Phobias Leaders Can Judo For Jesus
I’ll never forget joining a new hockey league when I was 12. It was hell. Didn’t know anyone—these guys had been playing together since they were 5. It was the greatest worst experience of my life: I learned social resilience.
Or there was the time I had to switch high schools in my last year. Talk about brutal. Stuff like that makes you or breaks you. But you never go into an unfamiliar space in the same way again.
When I joined Hillsong NYC as a 27-year-old, it felt the same—a whole new world. Hillsong was so strict on their culture back then—you couldn’t say a word out of turn without having your wrists slapped by some cultural fractal demanding that the other fractals embody the necessary shape.
As we get older, this type of radical social experimentation is less inviting. But there are people like me—firstborns with ants in their pants—that love exploring. Our brains throw a party on the other side of the initial shock, and that’s the serotonin we are living for. Discovery lowers our cortisol. We feel like we’ve achieved. We literally sleep better at night after having done something new that day.
But most people aren’t like that.
There’s been a bunch of research done on How People Experience New Things. And I think it’s worth considering these things as church leaders and atmosphere curators, particularly this week of all weeks, because our churches will be full of new people looking for all kinds of things. God, friends, help, reward, ability to self-discipline and regulate, kindness, grace, forgiveness—a plethora of things.
And here’s how their brains will work as they file into our pews, and what I think we can easily do to set them up for the biggest win of their lives:
