Over the next few minutes, for many of you, I’m going to stir up the dust that you’ve possibly worked hard to tamper down over the last few years. See internally; you’ve felt a deep rumbling that you’ve tried to keep at bay. A holy discontent that’s been gnawing at the back of your mind as you’ve stood at the rear of the worship center or in the lobby and said farewell to attendees. There’s been a metaphorical grit between your teeth for quite some time as you’ve processed texts and prepped sermons for your Sunday festivities. Then every time well-meaning persons say, “Good sermon, Pastor, Good Word, Preacher, You really stepped on my toes today; you must’ve been a fly on my wall this week,” you experience a pavlovian shiver and force another grin.  

The quiver of disquietness is disturbing because you know deep down that while some people genuinely attempt to grow in righteousness, many people are simply sleepwalking into eternity. They are religious box checkers, and the weekly status quo is an implicit endorsement of their saintly sacred cows. At some point, you and they have accepted disciple-making relationships as something that is only expected of the faithful devotees to Christ. Or the term disciple of Christ has come to mean roll member or small group attendee or something lesser than what Christ had intended. The very notion of every individual bearing a physical cross is archaic to hearers in modernity.   

Subtly, the congregation has become inoculated into impotence as it pertains to the cause of Christ. No longer is the organized body of Christ in western-cultural Christianity virile, but instead, it has become a barren wasteland of nostalgia.

What has happened? Where is the passion and love of Jesus that drove men and women to embark upon journeys into the unknown to see the lost come to a saving knowledge of our savior, and how does it return? This is a question that many are asking, too few are answering, and not enough are making sense when they do.  

See, the simple reality is faith is a journey. For every believer, this is true. There are spiritual highs and lows. The spiritual highs come because we walk through the valley of the shadow of death with faithfulness. The low points of our spiritual journey allow that which is superfluous and self-righteous to be stripped away, permitting us to reflect the beauty of our redeemer better.  

The problem is, what we know to be true about us as individuals who follow after Christ, the organized church has rejected when it comes to the interdependent parts that come together as a whole and form a local body of believers. For a local church to strip away something that doesn’t glorify Christ anymore is to declare war on the saints who’ve gone before and those who follow their precepts.  

George Bullard, consultant, and counsel for The Reinolds Group, frequently talks about this behavior in his Life Cycle of a Church. Below is an adapted model of Bullard’s Church Life Cycle Figure 1.1.  

In this model, we see that a church is birthed when someone receives an understanding of God’s Unique Disciple-Making Vision for a particular context. All the energies of the church are driven by that uniquely divine disciple-making vision in that area. Communities are impacted because a person or group of persons are banded together to be and make disciples of Jesus Christ. They are not simply attempting to be like Jesus; they are people who are attempting to live life as if Jesus had their life, work, family, boss, bills, friends, neighbors, mortgages, and coworkers. They begin as people driven by the vision, and they develop relational discipleship in the places where they live, work, and play Figure 1.2.  

After a while, though, as their congregational expression grows, they realize that they are in need of specific programmatic emphasis to help support God’s unique vision through relational discipleship. Often this takes the form of ministries, education, teaching, small groups, and classes, all of which prepare them to build more incredible relational bonds with others to build up the body of Christ through his unique disciple-making vision Figure 1.3.  

As the organism of the church continues to grow and the interdependent parts that make up the whole of the body of Christ begin to move and flow in various ways, some accountable management systems and structures must be implemented to funnel and strengthen the disciple-making vision. Without those management systems, chaos would overtake and negatively impact God’s purpose for the congregation Figure 1.4.

At the Life Cycle Stage of Adulthood, we see that all actors of Vision, Relational Discipleship, Programs, and Management are in their rightful places, and the church is beginning to soar with faith into the future in which God is pulling the congregation Figure 1.5.  

However, after some time, usually around seven years, based upon the Levitical seasons of seven in the Old Testament, if the interdependent parts of the whole have been faithful, the congregation, culture, and community around the church begin to change. The initial Unique Disciple-Making Vision for the Church begins to get tired. Relationships progressively turn inward, and programs and ministries become what the church does instead of a catalyst for relational disciple-making.

During this season of the church, Vision steps into the metaphorical backseat, and Management takes the place in the driver’s seat. However, when Management sits behind the wheel, it believes that it has finally arrived where it should’ve been the entire time. Without an intentional effort to renew the vision for the next season of ministry, it becomes almost impossible to dislodge Management from the driver’s seat Figure 1.6.  

In his new position, Management will emphasize the importance of returning to the disciple-making processes of the past in order to transform the church. However, attempting to grow back into what the church was before is impossible. Instead, the congregation must celebrate the past by growing from where God has brought them and stepping into the future that He is pulling them.  

In the Maturity and Empty Nest stage, churches are most likely to experience renewal and revitalization. As the church spins through cycles of half-hearted transformation while Management remains in the driver’s seat, it will progressively slip into Retirement and Old Age. These churches are astronomically more challenging to experience renewal and revitalization because the congregation frequently becomes cultural enclaves where the church functions as a museum and the pastor and staff operate as curators who keep the exhibits running. The pastor, staff, and leadership put their careers at risk to disrupt the status quo in these environments.  

Regardless, if you want to see renewal and revitalization happen in your context, here are 5 Ways to Increase the Likelihood of Success in Your Church’s Renewal/Revitalization Effort:

Begin with Prayer

Prayer is one of the most challenging things for believers to do. It is one of the most difficult spiritual disciplines to adhere to. But the action has the most tremendous amount of depth to it. Meaning you can dive into prayer and swim for decades and never come near the bottom. Unfortunately, most people who call themselves Christ followers barely dip their toes in the water of prayer.  

The reason is that it requires an active passivity. People must be actively engaged in waiting on God to move. As R.C. Sproul states, “One might pray and not be a Christian, but one cannot be a Christian and not pray.” Prayer is vital in the life of the interdependent parts that make up the whole of the body of Christ in a local congregation.  

Prayer is the act of leaning in and listening to God. Suppose you wish to see revitalization and renewal taking place in your local body of believers and see them dream a new dream about what God’s Unique Disciple Making Vision is for your context. In that case, the congregation must engage, together, in an active posture of leaning in and listening to God.

When we work with Churches through the Prism Journey, we intentionally begin with 120 days of Prayer in triplets because we know that for the congregation to experience renewal as a body of believers, they first need to have a humble posture of leaning in and listening for God to speak. Listen as Jesus speaks in John 16 about the work of the Holy Spirit in our lives:

“He will guide you into all the truth….”

The congregation cannot be guided if it is too busy barreling forward in our own direction. We have to make a margin in the life of our congregation for God to speak. Sometimes we must say no to “good” things to say yes to “God” things.  

G. Campbell Morgan once observed that “Waiting for God is not laziness. Waiting for God is not the abandonment of effort. Waiting for God means, first, activity under command; second, readiness for any new command that may come; third, the ability to do nothing until the command is given.”

Develop Pull Change Opportunities

From its inception, a congregation is pulled forward into a future it cannot yet fully see. God places his unique disciple-making call for a given context on a person or persons, and they, by faith, step out into the unknown, trusting in his leading along the way. Unfortunately, for a congregation that has traversed ministry mountain and made their way up to maturity, they have established trodden paths of familiarity. Each path has its own story of fruitfulness and how God’s faithfulness was with them during a period of uncertainty. They are familiar with these paths and are content to continue walking people through them so they can experience similar growth. However, what is forgotten is that these paths are well worn, and the fruit is not as plentiful since the trees have gone from a unique oasis of fruitfulness to common highway rest areas with vending machines.  

As leaders, we must remind our people that while we’re grateful for the paths of our ancestors, there is a need to move forward into the future and reach new fruit with the message of the gospel. However, we must not push them into the unknown; instead, they must re-experience or, for some, experience for the first time the persuasive pull of God to step into the dark forest of uncertainty with the light of the gospel.  

In order for this to happen effectively, we must develop pull change opportunities that inflame our people with a Holy discontent with the status quo. Congregations in the Maturity and Empty nest stage need to feel the bigger narrative of God’s redemptive story beyond their present comfort to step into the future with faithfulness and fruitfulness. Here are a few suggestions:

• Strategic Prayer & Dialogue Groups with Demographically and Generationally Diverse People

• A Redemptive Congregational Timeline that Chronicles Previous Chapters and Paints a Portrait of the Chapters Yet to be Written

• A Multiple Small Group Study and Dialogue of the 4 Defibrillator Questions

  • Who’s Church is This?

  • What’s God’s Mission for His Church?

  • What are we congregationally doing to fulfill God’s Mission?

  • What are we going to do about it?

• Create a List of the Signs of Health and Strength in the Congregation and Discuss ways in which to build upon those.

As when Jesus sent his disciples across the Sea of Galilee while he went up to pray, likely knowing that they were going to face a storm, the congregation must become so discontented by the current reality and so confident in the word of Jesus that they are willing to endure the difficulty. They must believe that where they are going is far better than where they currently are. They cannot be pushed into this place; instead, they must be pulled into the future missional story God is writing for them. 

When a congregation has crested maturity and dipped into retirement and old age, they must experience the pull of God. If, instead of allowing the Spirit of God to create a holy discontent within the heart of the people, we try and push them into the forest of the unknown, then we risk not only losing an opportunity for spiritual growth in their life, but we risk the congregation as a whole not making progress toward renewal or revitalization.  

In the Prism Journey for Churches, we spend a lot of time assessing the readiness of a congregation toward renewal and revitalization. If a congregation isn’t ready for renewal, they will likely become destructive to themselves and others, even the pastoral staff.

Count the Cost

As with any sort of transition or change, you must count the cost. As a church pivots from one season to another, there will inevitably be losses along the way. As a pastor/church leader, you must be prepared to repair or replace systems that no longer work with ones that accomplish the congregation’s fresh understanding of God’s Unique Disciple-Making vision for your context. As a church member, you must be willing to lay your beloved on the altar as Abram did to Isaac, not because God is necessarily going to have you sacrifice it, but because you must be willing for His bigger narrative that He wants to tell.  

When a church launches into imagining the future missional story of its context, it must also count the cost of the time required to walk such a road. Allowing God to pull a congregation forward, doesn’t happen overnight. Where most revitalization efforts fall short is on the timeline. As human beings, we want our pop tarts warm and ready to eat in ten seconds. We want commercials done in less than thirty seconds. We want food delivered on demand, and we expect free next-day shipping. Let me say this clearly: God. Doesn’t. Work. On. Our. Timeline.

Church renewal and revitalization isn’t going to happen in the proverbial smoke-filled back room where the deacons, pastor, and leadership pop out with the great new vision of where God is leading the church, especially in a congregation that is running less than 200 and has already cycled through a few rounds of trying to revision the future. Which, by the way, is where most churches under 200 are currently. 

Your congregation needs time. Therefore, as a congregation leader, you must take the time for true transformation to happen. This means that you may have to stop doing some things temporarily to determine where God wants you to go. If you don’t feel like you can take the time, here are some questions I’d like to ask you:

• Who in your community misses the opportunity to hear the gospel if nothing changes in your congregation?

• Who in your congregation will you lose in 3-5 years if you continue in your current trajectory?

• How many deaths are you away from becoming a museum where the pastor and staff are the curators?

• Is what you’re doing today of more excellent value than the disciple-making vision God wants you to carry out two years from now?

Believe me, from experience, I know there are a lot more costs that need to be considered as you begin the road toward renewal and revitalization. Still, those are just a few, and I would hate to scare you away from doing what God is calling you to lead in your context.

Recognize that People Will Be Irrational

I’m about to tell you something that is going to knock your sox off. Not all people in the church are rational human beings. Surprised? I know, me too. I was absolutely flabbergasted when I realized that there were people that existed in the context of the church that didn’t think rationally. However, it’s the truth that there are irrational people within every congregation, especially a congregation considering some revitalization or renewal process. If we’re sincere, there are times when we can all be a bit irrational.  

But here’s the reality that you need to know; according to Travis Bradberry & Jean Graves, authors of Emotional Intelligence 2.0, our brains are designed to react to every event in life emotionally before the logical/reasonable side of our brain kicks in. In big science and brain terminology, information must pass through the emotional part of our brains before it can arrive at Exit Logical. That means depending on how clogged someone’s emotional highways are, it will take them significantly longer to see the rational side of a situation. 

This means that when you share with someone that you’re considering putting a greater emphasis on online giving rather than physical contributions, they are likely to emotionally connect to a core memory of someone first teaching them the importance of giving sacrificially via the offering plate. That person may have been a parental figure or a beloved long gone teacher. Now, your simple shift in emphasis is a direct attack against their heritage and history. Isn’t it evident that passing the plate is vital to developing a child’s understanding of giving? But the only thing you get from that person is frustration and anger that may or may not be expressed in your presence but will definitely be expressed over morning coffee at Ann’s Diner (a real place from my hometown).  

In a congregation that is looking to transition and change for the sake of longevity and, more importantly, to embrace God’s Disciple-making vision for the church’s context in the community it exists, the congregation must see the need for change. Each individual, or at least initially 21% of a congregation (this is a figure we use through the Prism Journey for Churches as a mandatory minimum for congregational change to be embraced), must have a strong spiritual passion for the future ministry of the church. The driving need to change will keep them pressing beyond their irrational fears and into the brush of the unknown.

Also, it is essential that every person on the journey have crystal clear steps that they can follow as they step into God’s future story for their congregation. If at any point, their feelings of uncertainty grow beyond their logical understanding that things need to change, they like the children of Israel, will demand to return to Egypt where “life was better.”

Lastly, as the pastor, church leader, or navigator, you must prepare the way for your people to succeed by removing obstacles that may keep them from walking the journey. As I mentioned, we are notorious for trying to bring about change and transformation amidst “all our regular programming.” If you’re serious about seeing a grassroots disciple-making movement in your congregation, you have to push the pause button on some of the urgent things to make space for the essential things. God didn’t ask the Israelites to swim across the Red Sea to escape the Egyptians; he cleared the path so that the rational and irrational folks didn’t die on the shore.

Never Assume Church Members are Christ-Followers

In all likelihood, this one section will prevent this article from making its way into your news feeds or sharing it with others because what I’m going to say is highly offensive to the majority of those who perch upon your pews every week.  

The process of Renewal and Revitalization is, first and foremost, a Spiritual Journey of Transformation. Suppose a congregation has existed in a prolonged period of plateau and decline in the vast majority of cases. In that case, it is because individually, the persons sitting in the seats have either lost their passion for the saving power of Jesus Christ or they never had it in the first place (which I could argue that if they lost the former, then it is most likely that the latter is true).

Through various circumstances, religious humanism has arrested the hearts of those who participate in the weekly events of your church. When this occurs in a congregation, the church becomes a club, and the pastor becomes a puppet on a string performing for the majority’s will. When a pastor dares to function without the perfunctory strings and calls a congregation to repentance, it isn’t long before rebellion happens because the Lord, through that pastor, is shaking the floor upon which the sacred cows of that coven sit.  

As our friend Pastor Joe McKeever boldly stated in a recent post:

“The problem with preacher-haters and trouble-makers in the church is that they do not believe in God. That statement might require a little clarification.

Those members who are determined to have their way regardless of the cost to the fellowship of the church, the unity of the congregation, the continuance of the pastor’s ministry, or the sacrifice of programs of the church are not without religious convictions.

They may have even had religious experiences. Of a sort.

Regardless of what they believe, most are atheists in the purest sense.

Whatever belief in God they possess is theoretical. God was in Christ, yes. He was in the past. And He will be in the future, they confess, when He takes them and others like them to Heaven.

As for the present, alas, they are on their own.

What, you may be wondering, would lead me to say such outrageous things about some people who are members of churches and who frequently get elected to high positions of leadership in those churches?

Two things.

1) I have a half-century of dealing with them. I have met them in every church I ever served. However, it took me decades to identify the problem.

2) The clue to their atheism is simple: There is no fear of God in them.”

In a sermon preached in the 1960s, Paris Reidhead talked about the utilitarian religion of our day–fulfill the religious check marks, get the job done, and surely God will tell you “well-done.” Reidhead also shares that the humanistic philosophy that declares the end of all being is the happiness of man.  

One end of the spectrum says, “the end of religion is to make man happy while he’s alive, and the other end of the spectrum says that the end of religion is to make man happy when he dies.”

This “say a prayer and sign a card so you can go to heaven at the end of your life” is in utter and total contrast with Christianity. Jesus didn’t come down to earth, live a life of complete submission to the Father, take on the punishment for all sin, die, and then rise again so we can “be happy.” Happiness is a by-product, not a primary product. He died so that we might be Holy as he is holy and live as he lived.  

Suppose a congregation is in need of renewal or revitalization. In that case, there is a theological breakdown where they do not collectively understand that God has called them to a story much bigger than themselves and more extensive than their weekly traditions.  

You must be prepared to face opposition because you are disturbing the functional saviors of people, personalities, places, and programs when you begin discussing God’s Unique Disciple-Making Vision for a particular church.

Therefore it is all the more critical that this is not work you attempt to do alone. The work of renewal and revitalization must take place in the public square so that God has the opportunity to do a work on the souls of those who didn’t know that their faith was supposed to be something more than simply checking a box. You must provide clear hand-holds for them to climb out of the pit of uncertainty and into the glorious light of God’s redemptive plan for their life. This will allow them to help you and others to move forward with greater ownership and faith into the future story of missional ministry that God is writing.  

Summary

While I’m sure there are several factors in this article that I haven’t mentioned, I hope that you will keep these five things in mind as you step into the journey of walking the congregation that God has called you to down the path of revitalization and renewal. God has called you to a specific work regardless of your size or circumstances. Be faithful to him and labor well. As you labor, make sure you leave the hearers of God’s word without excuse as to what he is calling them to do. Lastly, please don’t attempt to short-change the process by bearing all the weight of change upon your shoulders. Here’s the thing, if the congregation doesn’t walk down the faith journey to develop their future story, they will not credit God as the one who redeemed them, they’ll credit you, and I’m sure that’s the last thing you want.  

For more information about the Prism Journey for Churches, visit us at PrismProcess.com/church, and let’s set up a time to talk.