Church Revitalization II

Last week we talked about church revitalization and renewal. We saw how maybe 75% of churches in mainline denominations—including ours—are in need of revitalization, and that what revitalization entails in one church will likely be different than in another. For this reason, cookie-cutter methods and solutions just won’t cut the mustard. Fortunately, though, congregations are enough alike so that similar approaches to revitalization—that is, techniques to discover and implement what needs to be done—can be used in a variety of circumstances.

But how do you know a church needs renewal? Well, a church needs renewal when it is in decline, and a pretty good sign of that is long-term, sustained losses in membership, the kind Covenant has experienced for the last couple of decades. But we shouldn’t equate decline simply with numerical loss—although that loss is a sign of decline, it is not the beast itself. Often times, a church is technically in decline while it is still growing! How can that be, you ask? Thompson (2006) points out that a vital church is one that responds to changes around it.¹ Often, after a number of years of vitality, a young church finds a way of doing business that works—one that serves the community, that makes current members happy, that attracts new members—and then it decides that because it’s working so well it will enshrine that way as the Holy Writ, as the only way to do church. Effectively, it stops being responsive to community change around it, to the changing tastes of the worshipping public, and even to the tastes of the upcoming generations within it (that’s one reason why the young people leave and don’t come back). Although community and culture keep changing, the congregation stops responding to that change.

Therefore, a church can be said to be in decline when it reaches that point where it stops responding to change. So, the way to effect lasting change in a congregation is by helping it to return to that state, that is, to return to being responsive to change around it. And of course, the million dollar question (adjusted for inflation) is just how do we do that? There are a couple of streams of thought on that. Strategic planning-based models use planning models developed for business and adapted for churches; cultural/anthropological methods use ideas from sociology and cultural anthropology. Your session has chosen the latter approach, and next week, we’ll talk about why.