This article appeared in the February 24, 2010 edition of The Expanding Wave.
On my first Sunday morning as pastor I gathered with the church’s prayer team at the front of the sanctuary. The “team” consisted of one gentleman who also happened to be the vice chairman of the board, lead trustee, treasurer of the building fund, and main instrumentalist for the worship services at the church. During the first of many prayer times together, he prayed a simple, heartfelt prayer: “Lord, thank you that the doors are open and the lights are on.” He was praising God that we had survived another week. Listening to that prayer, I realized that if we were going to be faithful to the mission of Christ we had to change the focus from surviving in ministry to thriving in mission. Over the course of the last four years we have been on a journey to make that transition.
Discovering God’s Heart for the Church.
If truth be told, when I arrived at the church I was as much in personal survival mode as they were. My wife and I were coming from a challenging ministry situation that left us questioning whether or not we were even supposed to be in ministry. However, we could not bring ourselves to walk away, so there we were at a rural church praying for survival…for ourselves and for the church. Due to this reality we brought no lofty ideals or big visions for the church. We simply offered a challenge: Let’s seek God together and ask him what he wants to do here. The congregation accepted the challenge and for the entire first year together we worshiped, prayed and listened to the Scriptures. Our board meetings became Bible studies. We explored every passage in the New Testament that spoke about the Church and recorded everything we noticed. At the end of that year, we concluded that God’s heart for our church was for us to have a heart for our community and the world. In particular, we sensed a new desire to help people discover and experience the life God created them to live. Though we had broken no attendance records and received no awards or recognition, we were beginning to see the first signs of new life.
Admitting the Reality of Our Situation.
As we entered year two together, the question changed from “What is God’s heart?” to “How are we doing?” The first question is important because it defines the vision; the second question is crucial because it defines reality. We explored the history of the church, examined statistics, and interviewed previous pastors and current lay people. Through the process we learned all sorts of things about our congregation and its journey, but two lessons came to the surface as most important: 1) We had been in decline or plateau for the last 30 years of our 80-year history, and 2) We had developed an inward focus where everything we did was for “us” in the church. This was a hard truth to swallow, but you cannot change the reality of your situation until you admit it. So that’s what we did. At an all-church gathering on Maundy Thursday in March of 2008, I shared with the congregation our understanding of God’s heart for the church and how we were doing in fulfilling that purpose. In the course of that talk, I challenged the people to determine that it was not okay for us to “do church” for ourselves and accept the mediocre results that come from that kind of ministry. I wish I could say that a great revival broke out and the next day everything was different, but that did not happen. What did occur was that our congregation became open to the next steps for change.
Setting a Course for Change.
Over the next few months through feedback sessions and congregational meetings the church settled on some major change initiatives. We renovated our facility to make it more functional and inviting, and we changed the name of our church to signal to our community that we were making a fresh start with a new focus. As important and significant as these changes were, the most important transition we made was from the way we were doing church to a new model of ministry. Our old way of doing church was attractional, inward focused, and service oriented. We had four “services” a week that were essentially gatherings designed to serve the church people with Bible study, prayer and fellowship. We said that we wanted people from outside our church to come, but it was rare for anyone to visit. Since we were not reaching out into the community, and no new people were coming, our ministry was isolated and ineffective.
We shifted to a new model of ministry, one that is missional, outward focused and serving oriented. We simplified our whole ministry to three elements captured in three words: worship, grow, and serve. We have challenged people to look up and connect with God in worship, look in towards each other for support, encouragement, and discipleship, and to look out for needs in our community and then serve to meet those needs. Each of these three directions has found a primary outlet that connects with the programming on our calendar. In this way, we are insuring that what we do is alignment with what we believe to be the most important aspects of the Christian journey…loving God, loving each other, growing to be like Christ, and making a difference in the world through serving.
In the last four years we have broken no records and we have not become a mega-church; however, we have made a shift from surviving in ministry to beginning to thrive in mission. Long-time Christ-followers are re-energized in their faith, people are contributing to the mission, and new people are coming to faith in Jesus. And our prayers have changed. Instead of thanking God the “doors are open and the lights are on,” we are beginning to ask God to use us to impact this community for his glory through us.
