Leading Missional Change

Move Your Congregation from Resistant to Re-Energized

Dunbar, Blair

• Publisher: Wipf and Stock
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781621896173
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

It seems that nearly everyone is talking about missional change for congregations. As a result, many church leaders are attempting to drive that kind of change for the ministries they lead. Some succeed. But many others hit a wall of considerable frustration as they find that congregations resist the very change that is so needed. The reasons for this resistance are many, and they are explored in this volume. What is required to move a church from resistance to readiness? Some resistance is deeply rooted in spiritual patterns. But there are other reasons as well, and they center on trust--personal trust in the leaders who offer missional change. For this work, the authors have done extensive primary and secondary research to identify patterns and behaviors that invite missional leadership. More than that, they've lived this out in their own ministries as pastors of traditional congregations. This book thus offers compelling first-person stories and congregational case studies alongside more generalized findings.Leading Missional Change was written to support pastors and other church leaders who experience resistance, to share wisdom and experience that may lead to readiness, and to give hope and encouragement toward a re-energizing of your own congregation.

1

Keep the Change

When Churches Don’t Want to Be on Mission

Three Vignettes . . . and Why There is a Problem

Frances had an awakening when she moved from a rural setting to the city. She had been raised in a country village and had only served rural congregations, and now she found herself living and serving in a community that was struggling with all the usual urban social problems. There were drug deals on the corners and gunshots at night and some new form of vandalism every week. And it was heartbreaking to watch the kids in the neighborhood, many of them without loving parenting, many skipping school, their best chance to escape this life. Several decades before, this neighborhood had been the suburbs, but the city had grown out to it. The problem was that the congregation still considered itself a suburban church. Few actually lived in that neighborhood anymore, and most were rather blind to the challenges in the community around them when they worshipped together behind stain-glassed windows on Sunday morning. Pastor Frances was not blind . . . not anymore. Her heart bled for these people. So she proposed that the congregation create a youth center, to invite the kids off the streets and into the building to experience and hear the love of Jesus. It felt like a reasonable response of the people of God to spiritual and social needs right around them. The next thing Frances knew, her conference superintendent was scheduling a visit because he heard that there was dissension stirring in the congregation.

Tim was leading a congregation that had grown substantially in recent years. He had gradually come to recognize and be comfortable with his call to ministry and was now pleased with what God had done under his leadership. Yet he sensed that God was calling them into something more, that the church growth principles they had followed assiduously had brought in many warm bodies, but that most of his people were living at a rather shallow spiritual level. So he began to explore the heritage and literature of Christian spirituality, and discovered that through the centuries God’s people had gone deeply into matters that he and others in his congregation were largely unaware of. Something opened up in Tim, and he plunged deeply into these studies. He found a new awakening in his soul. But when what he was learning found its way into his Sunday morning sermons, some congregation members balked. Others left, claiming that Tim had “gone Catholic” because some of the sources were pre-Reformation. The size of the congregation declined noticeably, with even some of those who stayed wishing out loud that Pastor Tim would just stick to preaching evangelistic sermons to seekers and save the deeper things for seminary.

Don was a traditional guy who served a traditional church, and he was rather okay with that. He felt no need to be flashy and he wasn’t all that comfortable with technology. He did know how to love people, which is why he felt called to ministry to begin with. Pastoral care was his greatest passion. The folks in his congregation at First Church were mostly related to each other, and, despite the usual relational challenges, they took care of each other pretty well. It was a comfortable ministry for Don . . . except for his growing realization that the way they worshipped was increasingly disconnected from the culture of the community. Younger generations probably always complained that the older generations didn’t want to change, but after nearly twenty years Don had seen one younger family after another leave their church, sometimes in sadness. So he proposed a radical solution to the worship team: that they start introducing some contemporary music into the service. He was astonished at the vehemence of the response, and at the reasons they gave for opposing this idea. He quickly dropped the idea, and First Church continued its slow decline into obsolescence.

These three vignettes and literally thousands of others like them illustrate a significant problem facing many American pastors and church leaders. Mission-minded leaders see the needs of people in their communities who do not yet know Christ and they explore new ways of reaching the unreached and discipling their own congregation members. However, in many cases, those members like their church and their faith just the way it is; it is comfortable for them and it seems to meet their needs today as well as it did years ago. Many resist any efforts to change, even if it means that new opportunities to evangelize the lost and to disciple new converts may be missed. Thus, those who find themselves called by God to do something transformative, those who can envision a greater good for their church or community, those who are motivated to change the status quo in the name of Jesus . . . these men and women often end up with cold water splashed in their faces when they attempt significant missional change in real congregations. Some push back and see their congregations divide. Some are fired or quit, and try again somewhere else. Some acquiesce and settle for the status quo. Some never recover.

These are sad stories, for, indeed, changes in American culture necessitate adaptations and transformations in congregational paradigms, attitudes, and structures in order that the mission Jesus gave the Church might be faithfully accomplished.1 A genuine heart-level renewal of American believers and a recommitment to the mission Jesus gave are needed in order that each congregation might become what one has envisioned as “a community vibrant with life, pulsating with forgiveness, loud with celebration, fruitful in mission.”2 Ironically, one problem facing many congregations is that they were once missional . . . and the adaptations made in the past to speak with clarity to a previous generation ended up becoming new, deeply rooted traditions that impede further adaptation for later generations. And so congregations blindly or even passionately resist the replacement of those once-relevant traditions with missional change initiatives. Churches are social organizations and, as such, like any other organization or community they need to adapt continuously to changing cultural conditions, or they wither and die.3 We have both visited churches where we had the distinct feeling of being in a time capsule. The churches were locked into a style of ministry that was effective in the mid-twentieth century, but the congregations were not speaking to the questions of the early twenty-first-century.

The purpose of this book is to give hope to leaders of such churches. In the pages that follow we explore the roots of congregational resistance to missional change and suggest ways to change a congregation’s stance from resistance to readiness for change and then even to re-energizing for mission. From our study of change initiatives in other contexts, we suggest that the key issue in overcoming resistance to change is relational and, more specifically, a matter of trust. Therefore, we examine the trust dynamics of pastoral leadership in a variety of contexts and propose some ways by which that trust can be translated into mission.

The Changing Face of the American Church

Continuous change is a fact of life in the early twenty-first century. Social scientists are recognizing that rapid and frequently chaotic changes are taking place in Western culture. Increasingly, people are recognizing that such changes are more than brief episodes after which people and organizations can stabilize and recover, and they are coming to a realization of the reality of “virtually continuous change.”4 Things have changed at a fundamental level and there is no going back. Continual change of this sort can be very disconcerting for organizations, especially churches, that prize stability and continuity. The pace of change in this world is increasing so rapidly, and churches, like other organizations, need to learn how to accelerate their “internal rate of change”5 to keep pace. Churches may need to become more “organizationally agile,”6 changing structures, paradigms and attitudes to connect with those who need Christ and to spiritually form those who already claim him. In our experience, there often has been a greater willingness on the part of congregants to resist such changes than there is to adapt to the changing needs of the surrounding cultures.

As the winds of change blow through twenty-first-century American churches and their surrounding communities, followers of Jesus are being called to complete the mission Jesus gave to his Church. Many church leaders are reexamining their beliefs about ecclesiology and even their own roles in this new environment. There is a growing abandonment of traditional ecclesiastical structures among some confessors of Christ and an increasing experimentation with new forms of worship and ministry. Many followers of Jesus are building bridges into the lives of unbelievers by deepening relationships with neighbors, co-workers, friends, and family members that open opportunities to discuss matters of faith. Some observers of American church life have recognized the signs of a new ecclesiological revolution in which churches are moving from an inward-focused, maintenance mentality of ministry to an outward-focused, mission-driven ministry, and they have been referring to these changing churches with a variety of adjectives: “missional,” “emerging,” or “incarnational.”7 A missional church understands itself to be on mission, not in the sense of traditional missionary activities, but as having been “created by the Spirit as a called and sent community to participate fully in God’s mission in the world.”8 For our purposes here, missional change is defined as any strategic shift in congregational paradigms, attitudes, or structures in order to more faithfully accomplish the work of living out the reality of the Kingdom of God.

The history of the Church plainly reveals that missional change has been a normal part of life in ...

Table of contents

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