Joyce over at tallgrassworship has a post up that I’ve been meaning to comment on, asking the question, “How Can An Older Congregation Live Into Christ’s Future?” (In her case, she’s talking about one service in her congregation, rather than the congregation as a whole, but as she notes, it’s all the same issue in the end.) I appreciated her post, and especially this quote she pulled from Bishop Will Willimon’s blog:
No existing, older churches can be revitalized without risk, commitment, and a determination to be faithful to the mission of Christ no matter what.If your church is in decline and not growing, it is because your congregation has decided to die rather than to live (alas, there is no in between when it comes to churches). The majority of our churches are not growing, thus we have a huge challenge before us. Still, our major challenge is not to find good resources for helping a church grow and live into the future; our challenge is to have pastors and churches who want to do what is necessary to live into Christ’s future.
Bishop Willimon’s dead right in his analysis: revitalizing churches isn’t primarily about programs, skills, or doing this or that; at the core, it’s about the willingness of the congregation to choose life over comfort, “to be faithful to the mission of Christ no matter what,” even though the one we follow is the one who had no place to lay his head. That’s why Joyce is right to emphasize “a deeply felt and theologically sound spirituality, lived out in an outward focus, a welcoming and inviting atmosphere, flexibility, and willingness to embrace change for the purpose of reaching and assimilating newcomers” as the signs of a church that has chosen life, because those are marks of a church that’s primarily about its mission rather than about itself. (Incidentally, from this angle we can see that it isn’t only older churches that need revitalizing, nor only smaller churches; I’ve known a few large congregations with plenty of money and plenty of younger folks that weren’t in very good shape spiritually. It may be harder to get churches full of older folks to embrace change—but I’m not sure that’s necessarily so.)It’s interesting to me that Bishop Willimon describes this in terms of “living into Christ’s future,” because it seems to me that it requires us to take a different attitude toward time, past, present, and future, than we often do. First, I think, for a church to be revitalized, it must live out of its past—neither living in the past, as so many dying churches do, nor cutting itself off from its past, but rooting itself in the successes and lessons of the past in order to meet the challenges it faces. Second, in doing so it must live in the present—which is to say, in the present reality as it actually is, not as we wish it were. In order to be faithful to carry out the mission of Christ in our world, we have to understand where the needs are, and how to make our message heard clearly and faithfully. Third, it must live toward the future—not simply seeking to maintain itself, but working toward the goal Christ has set before it, reaching out to draw in new people and address new ministry needs. There must be roots; there must be an understanding of the environment; and there must be a clear sense of purpose.
Thanks for the link, Rob. Your post expands nicely on the topic. It’s an interesting dilemma for me, since I work with the part of the congregation that is most conservative about change.
You’re very welcome, and thanks for the good word. I think the key in all this is really just that we love Jesus; I think most of the time, we resist change because we love our comfort zone more than we love Christ, or at least that our love for him isn’t great enough to pull us out of our comfort zone. It’s no quick thing, but I’ve found that really nurturing and building up people’s love for Christ gradually shifts that, drawing us out of ourselves and growing our heart for his mission; other approaches may work in particular situations, but that always has to be the core of it, I think.