Doing Church Differently?

Being a church today isn’t easy.  Things have changed. 

I now live the city where my wife and I lived when we were first married.  When I drive through familiar neighborhoods, I often notice how many of the churches have different signs in front of them than I recall. Some buildings are now owned by other churches.  Some have become restaurants or stores.  Some simply sit vacant. 

In the past, local congregations rarely had to wrestle with challenges like this.   In the years following World War II many churches thrived with numerous young families heading to the suburbs, their baby boom children flocking to local schools during the week and Sunday schools on the weekend.  That generation simply did church, they didn’t worry too much about why they went to church.

The 1960’s generation brought plenty of change, but fortunately for the churches most of that change happened a long way away from home.  Turmoil in the college campuses, a war in Viet Nam, but at least people kept coming to church, even if their kids didn’t always come with them.

Then, of course, things got complicated.  Churches like Willow Creek and Saddleback emerged and raised a new question: what if church could be relevant?  Young baby boomers stopped attending the church with the organ and started attending the church with the killer band. 

In recent years some of the mega-church buzz has begun to wear off.  Finding a church that’s relevant loses some of its urgency when you’re less sure that you really need to find a church at all.  COVID, of course, made that even more complicated, breaking people of the rhythm of Sunday attendance. 

As a result, churches no longer experience the automatic growth that they might have in previous generations.  A church is no longer guaranteed attenders simply by having its doors open on Sunday. This is all happening as the older generations who have been the pillars of those local churches continue to age and decline.  As a result, many congregations are finding their attendance numbers declining.  Some prefer to avoid talking about it.  Some pressure their pastors to leave, hoping to find a replacement who will do a better job of somehow bringing young families back to church.

This trend seems ominous, on the face of it.  At the same time, I find it more than a little encouraging, given some room for our Risen Lord to do what he does best. 

Let me explain. 

Beyond Easy

Ministry has never been about plucking low-hanging fruit.  Providing a nurturing place for our children and grandchildren has value, but it’s not central to what Christ was all about.  Jesus often bothered people when he would explain that of the 100 sheep in the flock, it was the one lost sheep he worried about most (Luke 15:3-7) That was his mission. 

However, it can be easy for our churches to allow our priorities to drift away from outsiders toward insiders.  Over time churches tend to shape ministries around the needs and preferences of those who already attend (and already give in offering plates to help pay the bills).   Over time churches can begin to view ministry to outsiders as some sort of “extra credit” function they might do on top of their regular ministry.  Author George Barna and others have long referred to a frog in a kettle to demonstrate how it can be easy to miss a pattern of change until the day comes when our approach is no longer working. I believe the church in North American has reached that point. 

The resulting crisis presents us with a choice:  will we panic or will we listen more closely to the Lord of our church?   I've noticed that many of Jesus’ best teaching moments came when his disciples were terrified:  in a storm or facing thousands of hungry listeners in the wilderness.  Their anxiety led them to ask questions that might not have surfaced on an easier day. And without the right questions, even Jesus’ best answers often made little sense. 

Asking the Right Questions

What is God’s specific purpose for our church?  
When a church finds itself facing questions about its survival, it’s being offered an opportunity to begin asking different questions about God’s plans: His specific purposes for their congregation.  Instead of asking preservation questions (how can we get our kids to come back?  Why don’t we see more newcomers?) our crises offer a chance to start asking mission questions about what God might be seeking to do in our corner of the world.   What might He have in mind for which He may need a church like ours as part of His work?  Granted, God doesn’t need any of us to accomplish His purposes, but He graciously includes us in His work, like those reluctant fishermen who became His disciples.  For what kind of specific purpose does God seem to have positioned us in our exact time and place?   Most churches have some kind of purpose statement, usually printed somewhere in the design of the Sunday bulletin.  This is a great way to double-check the relevance of that statement.  Does that statement really bubble up in us as we pray together about this?  This search could be called prayerful searching, and it can take a long time. 

If this was our purpose, what would we actually focus on?  
If a church family slowly begins to sense a larger purpose for which God has established their church, they can begin asking the next question:  what would we really need to do to accomplish that purpose for God during the next season or two?  Here’s where this process can contrast with the instincts of a struggling church. When a church is facing an uncertain future it can be easy to begin fretting about how to maintain the current programs and ministry approach: how to fund the building or pay the pastor, etc.  This leads many such churches to conclude that they “can’t afford” to keep their doors open.  While such a numerical or financial decline may be part of God’s signal that their story is concluding, church leaders should first consider whether God’s point is that the current approach to ministry needs to end.  More about that later.  This involves prayerful reflection about God’s specific mission for your church.  This, also, can take a long time with plenty of the Holy Spirit’s involvement. 

If that were our mission, what specific action steps would we take? 
At this point it’s time to think about action steps.  Leaders should ask themselves:  what would we realistically need to do in order to in some way accomplish that purpose, even if our approach tomorrow looked nothing like our ministry did yesterday? What are the minimum events or programs that we would insist on doing?  How might we streamline our existing ministry efforts to return more ministry bang for our buck?  This involves translating our mission into a strategy, which should be the main thing for our next ministry season. 

What might we measure in order to hold ourselves accountable for taking these steps?
Now it’s time to figure out how to track your progress in this season of development.  In the Kingdom of Christ, no points are awarded for having an exquisite mission plan.  What excites our Lord is seeing mission done.  After laying out your basic strategy ask yourself: if we were to really focus on making that strategy happen, what might it look like?  Put differently, if you could time-travel to next year at this time and visit your congregation 12 months from now, what might you look for see if you had been faithful to this clarified vision?  What concrete steps would you check?   Note—your prayerful reflection should be focused on the things that you have responsibility for, not the things that are out of your control.  For example, instead of hoping church attendance will magically climb, identify one new initiative that you will undertake in order to reach out toward the needs for which God has placed you in your community.  Suppose  your leaders began to sense that God may have intentionally located you near an apartment complex with many struggling single parents.  What might you do if you were to dedicate the next year to exploring how you might bless those under-resourced families?  What are some concrete action steps that you could take and later celebrate to begin moving in the direction God seems to be nudging?  For instance, could you offer a free dinner for residents once a month in the complex’s community room?  That would be a goal  a church could hold itself accountable for.

A struggling church can easily be tempted to panic, like Jesus’ early disciples.  However, these four questions can help churches and pastors to pray differently in order to respond to such risks differently.  To repeat: 

1.  What is God’s specific purpose for our church?  (searching)
2. If this were our purpose, what would we actually focus on?  (mission)
3. If that were our mission, what specific steps would we actually take? (strategy)
4. What might we measure to hold ourselves accountable for to take those steps? (goals)

Is Struggling Worth It?

This is not to imply that God’s will is for every declining church to keep on struggling indefinitely. Churches have legitimate lifecycles, just as people do.  Along the way I’ve helped some churches recognize the end of their mission, helping them celebrate God’s past work in order to move on.  But I’ve also had the delightful opportunity to help others discover the vibrant future God had for them if they allowed Him to help them look at some of their familiar realities differently. 

The point of this article is to alert us to the difference between a church nervously striving to hold on to yesterday and a church that is allowing God to use a difficult season to help them more sincerely seek His mission for them tomorrow.

Turbulence, by definition, is difficult.  I’ve heard that the only ones who like change are babies with wet diapers.  But our Lord has done some of His best work in storms. What might He be doing in yours?