How Change Comes to Your Church

A Guidebook for Church Innovations

Patrick Keifert, Wesley Granberg-Michaelson

• Publisher: Eerdmans
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781467456791
• Topic: Teologia e religione
• Subtopic: Ministro del culto cristiano

Innovative spiritual practices that establish the foundation for durable, missional change

Many congregations recognize their need to bring about change in order to become or remain vital, both spiritually and organizationally. They have a sense of what they need, and what might keep them from changing. But they don't know how to change.

How Change Comes to Your Church draws on the practical experience, stories, and examples from two experienced church leaders. Patrick Keifert and Wesley Granberg-Michaelson have helped scores of congregations as well as larger denominational organizations identify key elements that are a necessary part of transformational change.

Rather than a superficial approach with a simplistic formula, How Change Comes to Your Church focuses on the important work of changing church culture, with innovative spiritual practices that establish the foundation for durable, missional change.

CHAPTER ONE

What Needs to Change, and How?

More often than not, anxiety and discontent drive the perceived need for change. While these are necessary preconditions to change, they alone do not create sufficient energy for the missional change we are proposing in this book. Such change compels a church to place its commitment to participate in God’s ongoing mission in the world at the heart of its life and identity. Anxiety and discontent are a place to begin, but moving to a process of spiritual discernment focused on the question of God’s preferred and promised future is necessary to reveal both what needs to change and how those changes can be made.¹ We will start with an example at the denominational level to demonstrate this shift from managing anxiety and discontent to spiritually seeking deep missional change.

Recently a group of church leaders in a major European denomination were gathered at the invitation of the theological faculty of one of the denomination’s major historical universities and the provider of theological education for most of its clergy for many centuries. At the table were chief executives of national church organizations, midgoverning judicatories, local churches—including some large, independent (so-called free church) leaders—and members of their parliament, and thought leaders in and out of the academy. They admitted, when asked, that this was an extremely rare meeting since their only purpose was not to conduct church business but to explore how churches change and how they need to be a part of that change process.

They were gathered not so much to act out of their hierarchical work roles but as perceived leaders who wanted a chance to explore in a relatively safe space the challenge they were feeling. Simply put: they knew that most of their local churches needed to change. Further, they knew that a critical mass of local church leaders felt the same need to change, but most of those local church leaders were unclear about what exactly needed to change and how that necessary change would happen. They agreed that greater church attendance or “more young persons” was desirable but that their absence was more a symptom than a cause. Even the “successful” free-church pastor who had significant ties to American megachurch leaders admitted that his local church was outside the norm and that he was not prepared to give a formula for what needed to change or how. Each of the attendees had ideas, hints, hunches, and some models of change that they had experienced or at least taken a workshop on or read about in a business, change-management setting. They all spoke of “spiritual” challenges both personally and organizationally and had various resources. What distinguished this meeting from those of other similar groups that we have experienced in the past thirty-some years was a genuine recognition and willingness to say in the presence of their fellow church leaders: we know we face a life-and-death crisis; we know we need to change; we know we don’t know exactly what needs to change or how to do it.

Notice there are three very distinct attitudes and beliefs present in the group gathered. First, they know they face a life-and-death crisis. Second, they believe they need to change and that some change could make a difference. Third, however urgent the sense for change is within a leadership group, they believe they don’t know exactly what needs to change or how to do it. We have often found only parts of these three prerequisites present in churches that say they want to change. Often, churches substitute big, hairy, audacious goals or catchy taglines that use contemporary phrasing, believing this will motivate the change they need. These tactics seldom generate the kind of energy necessary to make missional change.

Be that as it may, we find that the chance for successful missional change, the sort of change we are speaking of in this book, increases greatly when all three prerequisites are present. While we have seen churches pull off significant missional change without all of these prerequisites, we have observed a high correlation between successful missional change and the strong presence of all three prerequisites.

By strong presence, we mean at least three levels of presence. First, the behavior of the group reveals these three prerequisites; even if the group of leaders and greater community are not aware of them, they are present in their behavior. Second, a small group of leaders consciously seeks to create the time and space for these three prerequisites to become the behavior of the group. Third, 15 to 20 percent of the most active members of the church are attentive and focused on acting according to these three prerequisites. Let’s review the prerequisites in a bit more detail.

A Matter of Life and Death for the Community

Often leaders develop this prerequisite experience indirectly rather than straightforwardly. I (Pat) remember working with a number of churches in the Dallas area. They were very independent local churches that had chosen to do something quite unusual for them: to deliberately learn with one another how to innovate local missional churches. One local church had just spent millions of dollars adding onto and improving their campus under the general belief that “if we build it, they will come.” They didn’t come. The leadership of the local church sought to work with us because they wanted to be able to attract those for whom they had expanded their facilities. While the church had a relatively large worship attendance and there was high involvement in the various ministries of the congregation, the leaders had some sense that they needed a turnaround, or their present circumstances would reverse quickly.

The recognition of this need for turnaround came in part by observing that the median age of active participants was going up at an alarmingly increasing rate. More often than not, the increasing age of church members is the first publicly noted concern. Somehow it is safer to speak of the failure of a church to attract the young than it is to note many other symptoms of death. Among liberal mainline churches, the next most likely topic is a failure to reach persons of color, or persons of other language groups, or persons who live in poverty or whose sexual identity is other than the traditional norms. Among more conservative churches, we have found indicators like biblical illiteracy, low adult conversion, and diminishing worship attendance as publicly articulated indicators for concern.

From the perspective of this book, all of these are serious indicators but do not bring the deep missional crisis out into the open. Our use of the term “missional” deliberately shows our debt to the conversation begun by Lesslie Newbigin and David Bosch that notes the deep shifts in the relationship between church and wider culture in the modern period.² Following that missional conversation, we see the crisis at the level of culture, the deep values and beliefs that no longer match up between church and much of Western culture. We summarize the resulting notion of church as missional under four characteristics:

1.God is a missionary God who sends the church into the world.

2.God’s mission in the world points to and participates in the reign of God.

3.The missional church is incarnational in contrast to attractional. This changes the dynamic of the church, both local and international, in this new missional era.

4.The internal life of the missional church focuses on every believer engaging in mission in their everyday life.³

Indeed, too often, conflict over various causes for concern deflects from an honest conversation regarding the life-and-death character of the challenge facing the church. Taking these indicators seriously means placing them in a system of priorities that puts the deeper missional crisis at the center. This requires a critical leadership—critical both in terms of the percentage of active members who recognize the deeper crisis and in terms of their ability to maintain a clear sense of the crisis and keep it central amid tremendous complexity. Navigating this complexity requires discernment and risk.

The critical mass required to address a church’s deep missional crisis seems to be 15 to 20 percent of the active membership who recognize the crisis and commit to working toward substantive change, knowing they are in it for the long haul. Quick fixes will not be sufficient, though the church may need some to keep the momentum for deep missional change.

In the context of a local church, one usually cannot begin with the 15 to 20 percent. Our experience shows that if just 2 percent is willing to act over a three- to five-year period toward meeting the adaptive, missional challenge, the critical mass will develop. Note, however, that it is easy to attract those people who want change for change’s sake but who bore at the sustained work of three to five years. Start with two people in one hundred who are willing to enter a process of spiritual discernment regarding God’s preferred and promised future, and you are more likely to engage, attract, and form a critical mass of leaders. Much more on this spiritual discernment process later.

One other very important insight, which we will also discuss in much more detail, relates to the role of conflict in change. Change creates conflict. Conflict can be the Holy Spirit calling the church to multiply its mission. Conflict can be, at one and the same time, the work of the devil to create havoc and distrust, leaving the faithful divided, hurt, angry, disappointed, even despondent.

Once the critical mass of leadership is reached, it is essential to move the conversation from one that focuses primarily on managing anxiety and discontent to a journey of spiritual discernment seeking God’s preferred and promised future. Although we will return to this theme of discerning God’s preferred and promised future in greater detail, please note that rather than focusing on our preferences, we seek to discern God’s preferences. Further, it is more about the future than either the present or the past. More, much more, later. Both of us know how difficult this shift is to accomplish. A proverbial line comes to mind: “It is hard to remember that your initial purpose was to drain the swamp when you are so busy beating off alligators.” Indeed, one must manage the anxiety and discontent but keep the focus of energy, even the energy that is generated by the anxiety and discontent, on asking, “What is God up to here? What is God’s preferred and promised future?” Frankly, the capacity to keep this focus separates the business of managing from the business of leading. Both are essential, but to bring about the kind of change necessary to meet the present challenges requires the capacity to lead, not just manage.

Management and Innovation, Together but Different

When a critical leadership group gathers outside the church’s usual governing process, vaguely aware of the life-and-death character of their situation and honest about their not knowing what precisely they need to change but committed to change, Christian innovation becomes a possibility. Christian innovation is a process starting in failure, growing out of a Christian imagination, and leading to a shared positive outcome. We borrow from previous scholarship and best practices of over forty years of innovation in various spheres of change models. Chief among the movers and shakers in this area are Peter Senge, Ron Heifetz, and Everett Rogers. Senge harnessed an emerging systems theory from the social sciences and change models in business into his book The Fifth Discipline. Heifetz brought together models of government and business change in Leadership without Easy Answers. Rogers’s research gathered profound insights into how innovation is diffused in traditional cultures. What all three men share is a sense that there are times when attending to organizational change is insufficient. Rather, the deep values of a culture that fund the various societal and organizational systems need to be drawn upon to innovate a shared positive outcome. Such change involves tremendous risk, and this risk involves failure.

We formed our understanding of innovation by marrying these insights to the Christian imagination, especially the Christian narrative of reconciliation in Jesus Christ. Put perhaps too simply, since risk, experimentation, and failure are essential to innovation and failure causes deep hurt, harm, and conflict, Christians draw upon the deeper resources of reconciliation in Jesus Christ. Within this enduring pattern of Christian life, the church can dare to risk and to fail, depending on God’s promised mercy and forgiveness. While this attitude may initially appear as escapism to the sweet by-and-by, it actually draws on very specific, concrete, and time-tested practices of Christian innovation apparent in Scripture and in the emerging history of the church’s life together.

Missional Change: Beyond Attraction to God’s Mission in the World

One of the critical questions leaders of missional change must ask repeatedly is “What time is it?” We propose in this book that we are in a missional era, a very different time than what has been the norm for centuries in Western Christianity, or what some scholars call Christendom. While in some places, local churches still enjoy the leftovers of the local culture and society supporting and urging church membership and attendance, most local churches no longer enjoy that societal and cultural pressure in their favor. In addition, not only have lower birth rates negatively impacted the many traditional churches that fill their pews mostly with the children of members, but also massive demographic changes have occurred since 1965. Add the realities of increased individualism and the loss of a civil society that once strongly supported and worked with local churches and the systems that care about them. Along with these societal patterns, something we call “practical atheism” has crept into many local congregations, such that individuals certainly believe that God exists and is active in their lives, but when asked to tell stories to their fellow members about those everyday lives, they rarely use “God” as a subject in sentences with active verbs. In short, though members believe in God and God’s movement in the world, they seldom—indeed, often never—articulate God’s movement in their everyday lives to others. Combined with social and cultural changes, this practical atheism makes forming Christian community in a post-Christendom setting almost impossible; certainly, it is unlikely.

One major response to the challenges of post-Christendom—and one that has had clear success—could be described broadly as the attractional response. This model in one way or another assumes that if local churches and the systems that support them carry on certain ministries and programs, persons will be attracted to those local churches and systems. Megachurches—that is, churches with over two thousand active members—certainly give evidence to the effectiveness of this approach. Both of us have had significant working relationships with dozens of megachurches and have found, in most cases, that they are extraordinary Christian communities. They demonstrate that there are many people who are seeking effective, faithful, and efficient programs and ministries. Many small house churches work on the attractional model as well. They, too, demonstrate a powerful presence of the church in this post-Christendom setting. Many small churches remain vital Christian communities primarily through attracting membership. The underlying assumption for all these different forms of local church remains attracting people to join the local church. Whether they articulate it or not, the churches assume that the local public communities within which they are situated are watching them and that some might be attracted to them. Surely there is some evidence that they are also building community with those who are not Christian. However, the overwhelming evidence shows that megachurches attract mainly Christians who have been associated with other local churches in their lives. Many house churches and small churches follow the same pattern. The key distinction we want to make here, in speaking of missional, is the church’s move to joining God in God’s mission in the local community and to forming Christian community with those who are participating in some critical aspect of God’s mission in their community.

In this new missional era of the Western church, certain essential practices deep within the DNA of the early church and abundantly working within the church of the two-thirds world today need to be rediscovered and embraced. We find that Saint Augustine of Hippo articulated one such primal practice in his Confessions. In analyzing his own circumstances, he recognizes how God continues to create a good world for us to love. Humans remain lovers, no matter how powerfully evil and sin pervert that deep need to love. Further, God continues to give us so many good things to do. But if we seek to love everything that is good, we diffuse our lives into nothingness. (Nothingness is one of Augustine’s chief ways of describing evil.) Further, he notes that when we seek to love all things good, our love becomes disorderly, which he understands as sin. If we seek to do every good thing that can be done, we diffuse our lives into nothingness, evil, and disorderly love, sin. In this time after Christendom, the church local and ecumenical needs to compile short lists, not longer lists, of things to love and good things to do. Such creating of short lists requires the exercise of spiritual disciplines long neglected. Augustine suggests beginning with one activity: “Seek first the kingdom of God, and all will be given to you.”

This present book provides both spiritual practices for and theological reflection on doing precisely that simple task. We summarize that practice as seeking to discern God’s preferred and promised future for each local church and the systems that care about them. Put baldly, it is to recognize that we must begin with the end in mind: God’s promised future that at the name of Jesus, every knee shall bow and every tongue confess him as Lord. How God will accomplish that promise...