Decline & Renewal, 19: Renewal Starts with Unknowing

Editor’s Note: I’ve written this article to launch our series of guest columns on church renewal. In the coming weeks, you'll read insightful articles from brilliant thinkers and pioneering church leaders like Ron Clark, Mark Love, Jeff Childers, Mike Cope, Chris Flanders, Jarrod Robinson and more.

If you’ve followed our blog series about church decline, then you probably have a decent feel for the state of most West Coast Churches of Christ. I haven’t cherry-picked bad stories. The authors in this series aren’t a bunch of grouchy church leaders who only see the negative. We’ve given what I think is as fair a picture as one can make of a diverse topography.

We now turn our attention to church renewal. To be quite honest, it might seem premature to talk about renewal. A small number of our existing West Coast churches—probably less than ten—have maintained at least the appearance of vibrancy. An even smaller number are experiencing renewal out of the ashes of decay. Almost all, however, suffer from decline, fatigue, infighting and/or a general lack of leadership.

So what’s my goal from this upcoming series of articles? Where am I expecting these guest columnists to lead us? Do we expect them to have all the answers?

Quite frankly, I’m not hoping for a “play manual” on church renewal. There is no one-size-fits-all solution. No one has a silver bullet that will stop church decline and usher in a new era of growth and health.

But there are helpful voices/thoughts/ideas that can point us in the right direction. And by contrast, there are voices/thoughts/ideas that can prolong and worsen decline and despair. Some of the things that sound most attractive and that scream the loudest belong to the latter category. Our gut instincts will likely mislead us. It requires great discipline to discern what will truly lead us in the right direction.

For this series on renewal, I’ve carefully selected such voices. They won’t all say the same things, but they will all point in the same direction.

In a recent conversation with Mark Lau Branson, professor of ministry at Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena, we renewed our discussion about the struggles faced by church leaders at various phases of church life. He reminded me of his co-collaborator Al Roxburgh’s “3-zone model” of missional leadership. You can find more about it in The Missional Leader by Roxburgh & Fred Romanuk (Josey-Bass Press, 2006).

Most of our churches are in the red zone. We’ve long since moved out of the blue zone of high performance. We’re in the mode of reactive leadership, and we’re stuck there. Why? Because we keep trying to go back and recreate the performative leadership of our recent past. We continually attempt to “reinvigorate” our congregations by resurrecting old ministries or introducing new magic-bullet ideas. This attempt to “go back” and the corresponding inability to “let go” and keeps us mired in the “reactive” mode and further exacerbates our already fragile condition.

To move toward renewal, we have to do something counterintuitive. We have to accept decline. Believe it or not, in order to experience a renewal of God’s Spirit and a fresh incarnation of God’s mission, we have to relinquish the old days and old ways of high performance.

We can still celebrate the good things about our heritage. We can honor our legacy and praise our pioneers. But we have to stop living in the past. Our goal isn’t to recreate what once was.

So what do we do? According to Roxburgh’s model—which is one that fits our situations—we have to embrace the crisis of confusion, uncertainty and struggle. As long as we seek to avoid this stage, we will never bridge the gap. We’ll never move from crisis to a reemergence of transitional forms. We’ll never grasp a new sense of mission under the Kingdom reign of God.

We need to take our medicine and stop fighting a necessary period of confusion. If we have the right leadership, we can eventually experience healthy transition and renewal. New systems and structures will eventually emerge, but those will come out of a reemergent leadership and a renewed church that live into fresh ways of doing things.

I invite you to bring your mind and heart to this conversation. I also ask that you engage your church leadership in this discussion. As long as we misunderstand and remain blind to the path toward renewal, we have no hope.

I’m grateful to have partners like you on this difficult yet ultimately rewarding journey.