Church Revitalization III

There’s a story told by Non Government Organizations (NGOs) around the globe, and it goes something like this: A village is situated on a river, just downstream from a bend, so they can only see what flows by their doorstep and a ways downstream. One day a fisherman spies something floating around the bend, and after snagging it discovers that it’s a man clinging to a tree-trunk, wet and cold and hungry, but otherwise ok. So they wrap him up in a blanket, sit him around the fire and feed him, and sure enough he recovers and goes on his way. The next day the same fisherman sees something floating by, and lo and behold it’s a woman, just barely alive, beaten to a bloody pulp . . . so they take her ashore and they patch her up and nurse her back to health, and by and by she’s healed and on her way. The next day the fisherman spies something floating by, and it’s a dead body, all black and blue and contused and everything, and so the villagers wash it and braid its hair, say the prayers for the dead, and bury it with honor in their village graveyard.

To the folks in the NGOs, this illustrates the difference between charity and social justice. Charity is helping the people who float by—feeding them, healing them, burying them—but social justice is going up around the bend to see what’s causing the problem and fixing it. And I think that it applies to church renewal as well—using a strategic planning model, a snapshot of the church is taken, both in its history and its present form, and a snapshot of the community is taken, and a plan to meet the present needs of community and church is taken. This is ok as far as it goes, programs can be programmed, buildings can be built, but in no way does it change the underlying structure of the church, the way it operates, or how decision-making is handled. After all, these fundamental considerations are how the church got in that position in the first place.

If I might be permitted another analogy, it’s like the old proverb that says if you give a man some fish, you feed him for a day; if you teach him to fish, you feed him for a lifetime. In our renewal process, we’re trying to teach ourselves to fish, to be church in ways that help us to respond with our ministries to changing community needs, now and in the future.

A fair question to ask is—what might this new way to operate look like? What, exactly, is this new way of being church? Well . . . because the context—both historical (temporal) and spatial—of every church is different, what will work will be different from congregation to congregation. And that is precisely what we are doing in the Covenant Seeker process—we are studying ourselves (our past and present context) to try and figure out how we need to be different, how we need to do church in a more healthy way. At the same time, we are learning to think about our church in whole new ways, to conceptualize it and manage it using whole new models, so we can position ourselves to respond to God’s call—and our community’s needs—in fresh and exciting ways.