Friday, February 17, 2012

Journal: Let's Stop 'Revitalizing' Churches


I was listening to an interview on the radio in which a well educated, well versed, and very articulate pediatric physician/university professor was explaining how the changes we made in our food in the 1970s to reduce fats for better cardiovascular health have had the opposite effect.  We now know that carbohydrates are the real culprits in cardiovascular disease.  It made me wonder what a physician/professor might be saying about our current thinking about food and disease forty years from now.

It seems everything goes through phases of understanding.  We're always adjusting our thinking based on new evidence, experience, and the results of past efforts.  Growing the church is no exception.  Today the two methods of reaching people and growing the church that are most talked about and promoted are church planting and church revitalization.  Church planting concerns itself with starting new churches.  Church revitalization seeks to reverse the decline of existing churches and give them new life.  After thinking about these things for some time, I've come to the conclusion that, while church planting is a tried, true, and Biblical method of growing the church and we should continue to plant churches, it's a mistake to try to revitalize churches and we should put and end to the practice.

I think that the primary problem in church revitalization is that it ends up being used as a means for church members to try to recapture or re-create the glory days of their congregations.  Rather than looking for new ways to reach new people, the core group of people committed to revitalization efforts are seeking to reestablish old ways and attract people who share their love of them.   Many (most?) revitalization efforts inevitably seem to lead to crippling conflict between those honestly seeking to revitalize the congregation and those who want to bring back the good old days and good old ways.

We know enough now to understand that every congregation goes through a life-cycle.  While decline is not inevitable, once a congregation enters into decline it's unlikely to recover from it.  Revitalization efforts are almost always reactive and are typically desperate attempts to extend the life of a congregation in advanced decline.  What we don't seem to have learned is that we should let the congregation finish it's life-cycle and let it die a peaceful, dignified death rather than squeeze out every moment of life that we can through heroic, but doomed, revitalization efforts.  In other words, once a congregation has entered into advanced decline we should shift our emphasis to providing palliative care for it.

That being said, while the congregation is living out its final days in dignity under compassionate palliative care, we should make every effort to bring forth life from death.  Using the resources of the dying congregation as an inheritance and trust, we should plant new churches as legacies of the old.  The new church could use the buildings, personnel, capital, and even the name of the existing church.  It could aid in providing the end-of-life care for its predecessor.  As one human generation passes the baton to the next, one congregational iteration can enable the creation of a new and vibrant descendent of itself.

Imagine the glory that could be brought to Christ if the time, money, people, and energy we're expending in confrontational church revitalization efforts were to be redirected into a harmonious effort of bringing dying churches to a dignified end while planting churches that are genuine rebirths of the old rather than altogether new.

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