Did you know that when people study or talk about doing something it fires off the same brain systems as when they actually do the thing they talked about? This is why committees love meetings. Having the conversation about the thing feels the same as doing the thing.
In this guest article, Shawn Keener addresses how this tendency can happen to pastors when we’re working on church revitalization. He looks at the temptation to stop after assessment, and helps us see how to move along toward the goal of true revitalization.
— Karl Vaters
When we come to the subject of church revitalization, there is a natural tendency to camp out.
This is less than optimal because revitalization is all about continually driving forward with indomitable courage and iconoclastic temperament. Camping out is the opposite.
On a path toward authentic church revitalization, we tend to camp out on analysis.
- We analyze what went wrong,.
- Or what is going wrong.
- Or what ticking time bomb is just waiting to blow it all up.
- We call in consulting crews.
- We read books on the ingredients of a healthy church and compare them to our church.
- We take church profile tests.
- We read books on how it has all gone wrong historically.
- We strengthen all these arguments with a host of statistics.
Where Are You Going?
All of this is good. It is crucial.
We are fools to set a course for revitalization in our churches before we have first analyzed our present predicament, how we got here, and what factors brought about our decline.
But, as a fan of Pixar’s Cars movie, I have to say that the character Mater only gets it half right when he quips to Lightning McQueen, “Ain’t no need to know where I’m goin’; just need to know where I’ve been.”
The problem is not with exhaustive analysis. The problem is that we camp out there.
In fact, very often, we think we’ve done all we can do simply by completing the exhaustive analysis. This is a grave, and pervasive, error. In fact, I think it is a worse crime to analyze without converting to a plan than it is to make a plan without first having analyzed.
Changing The Culture
If a church is struggling or dying, there’s always an underlying reason.
It’s never struggling because of forces inherent to the outside culture—it’s always because of problems in our internal church culture. And a very necessary, careful analysis will always reveal that the things that need changing are not little tweaks but big things that are exceedingly difficult to change.
Big, systemic changes like these won’t ever happen without a soberly realistic plan.
My fear for church revitalization is that it’s too easy to analyze, discuss, identify and clarify, but never take actual steps to actually do the supremely difficult, high-risk changes that are needed.
Where Are You?
So where are you on the path toward church revitalization?
If your church is doing well, you might be at the dangerous stage where your growth masks underlying off-course ministry philosophy or even theology.
If you realize your need for church revitalization and are somewhere in the fact-finding stage, that’s good. You recognize you have a problem and you’re figuring out the “why.” But never camp out there.
Be determined to convert your findings into action.
The more difficult and risky this action is, the greater the chance that you’ve truly isolated one of your church’s fundamental revitalization needs.
Demand a holistic, coordinated plan and strategy for effecting these difficult, risky changes at your church. Because at the end of that path is authentic church revitalization
(This article originally appeared in the Baptist Churches of New England blog. It has been re-used here with the author’s permission.)
(Photo by Daniel | Flickr)
