Decline & Renewal, 18: Turning to Hope

We admitted we were powerless over alcohol—that our lives had become unmanageable. (The "first step" to recovery according to Alcoholics Anonymous)

Truth-telling is not a natural instinct. It’s not our basic human approach. Rather, we tend to hide our problems—sweep them under the carpet, pretend as if nothing ever happened. "What problems?" we ask.

This kind of collective denial can be deadly for a church. We keep trying to convince ourselves that things really aren't that bad. We fool ourselves with these kinds of thoughts:

"We just need one or two new, solid people to get us back on our feet."

"If we can get a more dynamic preacher, we’ll be as good as new."

"If our worship were more contemporary, these problems would go away."

"We just need to grow our budget over the next five years."

"Our friends and neighbors will want to come when we freshen up the property."

All these are technical approaches that fail to address the adaptive problem standing before us. There's nothing wrong with them. But we’d be fooling ourselves to think they will make our most urgent problem go away.

What is our biggest problem? West Coast Churches of Christ were built for an era that is now gone. By “built,” I’m not just talking about the physical buildings. I mean our mentality and our methods.

Meanwhile, the world around us changed. Massively! We’re in a new world where the number of church-goers has been shrinking for years. Yet churches of all stripes are simply recycling the saints. Most growing churches are just doing a great job of attracting people from the ever-shrinking circle of church-goers.

This was the game we used to play in Churches of Christ—and very effectively. Our churches almost never grew by evangelizing the truly unchurched. We "converted" the converted. We won over Baptists, Methodists, Catholics, etc., some of them lapsed or uninvolved, but practically all of them believers. We did it by pointing out important gaps in their churches' theologies and practices.

But that method no longer works in most cases. And what’s more—many of us can no longer in good conscience practice that old method. We’ve moved on philosophically and theologically.

We lack, however, tools for the new day that has dawned. We’ve never learned how to reach the truly unchurched. We’re still methodologically trapped in a world that is vanishing. We aren’t properly equipped.

Say it with me: "Our world has changed and will never be the same. We aren't properly equipped. We are powerless."

Perhaps it's a simplistic thought, but I think the first step toward healing and renewal is an admission of powerlessness. We can mourn together. We can lament mistakes and opportunities lost. We can reminisce about the good old days. But eventually, some leaders have to step up to take us forward. Otherwise, we'll remain hopelessly stuck in the past.

We could spend time dissecting the past. We could deconstruct past “success” that wasn’t quite as awesome as we sometimes think. We could beat ourselves up for a narrow legalism that many of us now laugh about. But would any of that really help us move forward? How can we grasp the future when we’re controlled by the past?

The biggest danger for churches in our predicament is not the uncertainty of the future. It's shame about our mistakes. It's nostalgia for the past. Or it's also fear about what we’re losing. It's okay to have these natural feelings—fear, shame and nostalgia—but we'll be stuck in dysfunction if we don’t move past them.

Fear, shame and nostalgia can cause us to batten down the hatches and create a bastion of resistance against the forces of change. Fear, shame and nostalgia provoke those of us who are left to bond together in an "us-against-the-world mentality" that laments all our losses and fatalistically awaits the end. Fear, shame and nostalgia imprison us in a dungeon of navel-gazing cronyism that helps soothe our pain as we anticipate death.

But there's good news for those of us who will admit our powerlessness. There's GREAT news for those who are willing to embrace the crisis of the moment in order to lean more heavily upon a Creator who wants to provide. The uncertainty of the future can propel us into the sustaining arms of a God who empowers by his Spirit for his mission in this world.

Speaking the truth about our fear, shame and nostalgia is a powerful tool. We've done some truth-speaking on this blog over the past few weeks. I deeply appreciate the contributions of many great writers and church leaders.

We'll explore the hope of renewal in the coming weeks. Please join us in a conversation about the future. After one more article from me, we'll enjoy series of posts from more thoughtful guests who love the church and who believe in the future.