{"id":2011,"date":"2008-06-17T20:15:00","date_gmt":"2008-06-18T00:15:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rjaharrison.com\/?p=2011"},"modified":"2015-10-18T20:09:49","modified_gmt":"2015-10-19T00:09:49","slug":"out-of-past-in-present-toward-future","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/rjaharrison.com\/?p=2011","title":{"rendered":"Out of the past, in the present, toward the future"},"content":{"rendered":"

Joyce over at tallgrassworship<\/em> 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?”<\/a> (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<\/a>:<\/p>\n

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.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Bishop Willimon’s dead right in his analysis: revitalizing churches isn’t primarily about programs, skills, or doing<\/em> 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<\/em> 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\u2014but 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<\/em> its past\u2014neither living in<\/em> 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<\/em> the present\u2014which 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<\/em> the future\u2014not 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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[86,1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2011","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-church-and-ministry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6R3Ax-wr","jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":1901,"url":"https:\/\/rjaharrison.com\/?p=1901","url_meta":{"origin":2011,"position":0},"title":"Skeptical conversations, part IX: The church and its mission","author":"Rob Harrison","date":"22 August 2008","format":false,"excerpt":"Continuing the conversation . . . Parts I-VIII\u00a0here. Also, I've updated the\u00a0credo Wordle post. R:\u00a0The church, then, is the people of God; and specifically, we are the people God has brought out of slavery to sin. Just as he led the people of Israel on the Exodus, out of slavery\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Church and ministry"","block_context":{"text":"Church and ministry","link":"https:\/\/rjaharrison.com\/?cat=86"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/rjaharrison.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2008\/08\/Credo-post-9-scaled.jpg?fit=1200%2C633&ssl=1&resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200,"srcset":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/rjaharrison.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2008\/08\/Credo-post-9-scaled.jpg?fit=1200%2C633&ssl=1&resize=350%2C200 1x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/rjaharrison.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2008\/08\/Credo-post-9-scaled.jpg?fit=1200%2C633&ssl=1&resize=525%2C300 1.5x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/rjaharrison.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2008\/08\/Credo-post-9-scaled.jpg?fit=1200%2C633&ssl=1&resize=700%2C400 2x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/rjaharrison.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2008\/08\/Credo-post-9-scaled.jpg?fit=1200%2C633&ssl=1&resize=1050%2C600 3x"},"classes":[]},{"id":2113,"url":"https:\/\/rjaharrison.com\/?p=2113","url_meta":{"origin":2011,"position":1},"title":"What shall we do with a Christless preacher?","author":"Rob Harrison","date":"16 April 2008","format":false,"excerpt":"(If you know the sea chantey, feel free.)Over at Gospel-Driven Church, Jared has been writing a fair bit about the problem of Christ-free, counterfeit-gospel preaching in the American church, which he's quite correctly dubbed \"the new legalism.\" He's not the only one, of course; another redoubtable voice on the subject\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Church and ministry"","block_context":{"text":"Church and ministry","link":"https:\/\/rjaharrison.com\/?cat=86"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":2336,"url":"https:\/\/rjaharrison.com\/?p=2336","url_meta":{"origin":2011,"position":2},"title":"“Evangelism”? What’s that?","author":"Rob Harrison","date":"24 November 2003","format":false,"excerpt":"Now, this is just sad; but maybe it contains the seeds of hope, too. Apparently, the controversy over Avodat Yisrael, the Messianic Jewish congregation planted recently by Philadelphia Presbytery of the PCUSA, has started Presbyterians thinking about evangelism\u2014many for the first time. According to Leslie Scanlon, the reporter who wrote\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Church and ministry"","block_context":{"text":"Church and ministry","link":"https:\/\/rjaharrison.com\/?cat=86"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":1839,"url":"https:\/\/rjaharrison.com\/?p=1839","url_meta":{"origin":2011,"position":3},"title":"The attractional church: a paradigm for abusive ministry?","author":"Rob Harrison","date":"8 September 2008","format":false,"excerpt":"(Note: this was originally posted on August 28\u2014and then had the misfortune to be swamped by political commentary. I've bumped it up in hopes that folks who might be interested who might have missed it before will catch it.) I want, if I can, to start a conversation here. Over\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Church and ministry"","block_context":{"text":"Church and ministry","link":"https:\/\/rjaharrison.com\/?cat=86"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":2191,"url":"https:\/\/rjaharrison.com\/?p=2191","url_meta":{"origin":2011,"position":4},"title":"In defense of the church, part I: Preaching","author":"Rob Harrison","date":"25 February 2008","format":false,"excerpt":"This post\u00a0of Barry's, in response to\u00a0a meme\u00a0that's going around, got me thinking. Church-bashing is a popular thing, and with a fair bit of reason; even the best of churches are human institutions that screw things up and hurt people sometimes, and there are a lot of churches out there which\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Church and ministry"","block_context":{"text":"Church and ministry","link":"https:\/\/rjaharrison.com\/?cat=86"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":1431,"url":"https:\/\/rjaharrison.com\/?p=1431","url_meta":{"origin":2011,"position":5},"title":"The coming evangelical collapse?","author":"Rob Harrison","date":"11 March 2009","format":false,"excerpt":"The iMonk, Michael Spencer,\u00a0has been arguing for a while now that American evangelicalism is going to collapse some time in the relatively near future; now the Christian Science Monitor\u00a0has taken notice. \u00a0Yesterday, they ran \u201cThe Coming Evangelical Collapse,\u201d\u00a0a condensed version of his argument, in their op\/ed section\u2014to considerable notice. \u00a0After\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Presbyterian\/Reformed"","block_context":{"text":"Presbyterian\/Reformed","link":"https:\/\/rjaharrison.com\/?cat=102"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]}],"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/rjaharrison.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2011","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/rjaharrison.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/rjaharrison.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rjaharrison.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rjaharrison.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2011"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/rjaharrison.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2011\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3687,"href":"https:\/\/rjaharrison.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2011\/revisions\/3687"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/rjaharrison.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2011"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rjaharrison.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2011"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rjaharrison.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2011"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}