Decline & Renewal, 23: Jarrod Robinson Guest Column

Editor's note: Here’s the fourth in our series of guest columns on church renewal. In the coming weeks, you'll read insightful articles from great thinkers and pioneer church leaders like Ben Ries, Mike Cope, Chris Flanders, Stan Granberg and more.

The author of this column on renewal is Jarrod Robinson, a native of Northern California. After preaching for several years at the Eastside Church of Christ in Antioch, California, Jarrod now preaches for the Riverside Church of Christ in Coppell, Texas. He is one of a growing number of talented, insightful, young preachers who understand what will—and what won’t—help our churches find true renewal in the identity and mission of God.

Good Reason to Hope

You don’t have to be a sociologist to know that the world around us has changed without giving us notice or asking our permission. We are living in what many are calling a postmodern world and an increasingly “post-Christian” nation. It’s not that a huge majority of people in the U.S. are anti-Christian, it’s that an increasing number of people in the U.S. simply don’t consider Christianity (or any religion) as essential to living a fulfilling life of meaning. There’s less and less people every year who are willing to give Christianity the benefit of the doubt that previous American generations largely did.

Growing up on the West Coast, and starting my full-time preaching ministry in a Church of Christ in the larger San Francisco Bay area, I know this reality first-hand. We simply couldn’t keep doing what we’d been doing and expect for anything new to take place. It wasn’t that we weren’t trying hard or doing those things well . . . it’s that we didn’t know how to reach a world that simply wasn’t paying much attention to what we were doing inside our church. My guess is that my experience touches on all of our experiences. It seems like the world has moved on, and we’ve lost a sense of how to reach it.

This experience of being pushed from the center of American social life to somewhere closer to the edges of cultural influence (or at the very least to the position of a minority group) combined with a steady, significant decline in congregational attendance numbers and in resources as a result, force us to make necessary decisions of what we’re going to do next.

We can respond to our current situation with anger, anxiety, and nostalgia. We can shake our heads and say that the world is to blame, that we’re innocent victims of forces beyond our control, and that if we just keep doing what we’ve always done and wait, the world will come back around and things will be as good as we remember them being in the “golden age” of the Churches of Christ. This approach often holds up diminishing numbers as a badge of honor, as if not growing numerically automatically means growing spiritually as a congregation. Before long, it can seem like it’s us against the world, instead of us laying down our lives for the sake of the world.

We can reach a place through pragmatism and a desperate need to survive at all costs, that our best bet is to adapt and directly compete with the largest congregations around us, doing our best to aggressively attract the churched people who used to go to our church, or churched people who’ve never gone to our church, but drive past our church every Sunday to attend a nearby “mega-church.” This approach often means lots of surface and cosmetic changes to worship and ministry programs that may or may not be theologically healthy. We can end up frazzled and exhausted, constantly comparing ourselves to and criticizing those other bigger congregations, feeling insecure and inferior because we simply can’t figure out how to “beat” this other church at its own “game.”

We can decide, as many in our world have, that what’s really wrong with the current state of things is the “institutional” church across the board, and so we walk away from the formal structure of organized religion into radically diverse forms of personal faith, and by extension, radically different forms of church. While there are incredibly important changes that can and do take place when we consider redesigning things from the ground up, my observation has led me to the conclusion that regardless of the names we end up giving to these various informal forms of Christian spirituality and innovative church structures, it’s hard to honestly say that they share nothing in common with existing approaches to Christianity and congregations, and it is just as hard for them to resist the same challenges of existing forms of Christianity and congregations. New forms of church aren’t easily able to overcome the fact that religion, identifiable communities of faith, no matter how new or innovative, no matter how organized or disorganized, still struggles to have a hearing in our current cultural context.

I want to suggest that there is another option, a better place that exists beyond these extremes of giving up because of the state of the world around us, or giving up because of the state of the Churches of Christ in specific, or giving up because of the state of the institutional church in general. I want to believe that God is with us in this story of decline. I want to trust that while God may not be the author of our current chapter of challenge and struggle, God can, and will, use our current situation to bring about real and lasting renewal. I want to imagine that there are good reasons to hope. And I do.

There are at least two reasons why our current experience of decline gives me hope for our immediate future.

1. We are forced to clarify our calling. We aren’t called to compete over already-churched people with other churches. We aren’t called to grow numerically at all cost. We aren’t called to run the world or attack it when it won’t let us run it. We’re called to save the world by serving it. We’re called to intentionally grow spiritually into people shaped by unconditional love and self-giving sacrifice, trusting that God will both send us to and gather people to us as we follow the example of his loving, self-giving Son. We’re called to cooperate with Christians of all kinds, believing that our commitment to Jesus above all else matters more than anything else.

We don’t stop to ask clarifying questions of identity when things are going well. Instead, we assume that we’re already on the right track. This moment of our struggle makes us ask essential questions of who God has called us to be, and how faithful we are being to that calling. If the foundational calling of the church is to exist for the world-saving and world-restoring mission of God, a mission that is all about reaching out to unchurched people who are not yet enjoying the blessings that can only come from a committed relationship with God…how well are we doing that, and what needs to change for us to do it better? How important is our building to God’s mission? How vital are our programs to God’s mission? How much of what we do is mostly about us, and not about those we’ve yet to encounter? How can we partner with God, how can we be co-workers with Christ in being a community where the life-giving Kingdom of God is reliably experienced by all? Where is God asking us to go, where he is calling us to serve in our immediate community? How have we been uniquely gifted to respond to these opportunities?

These are questions that lead us to much better places and to different kinds of people than the church vision of “us…just bigger.”

2. We are forced to be open to new forms of collaboration. Fewer members mean fewer resources, and fewer resources make us admit that we can’t carry out the mission of God on our own. It’s just too big of a calling. And that’s a wonderful realization to reach. Because it’s always been true, it’s just that it’s now undeniably true. We need help. And not just from other Christian groups or churches in our communities, we need help from any person, or group of people, doing something right, compassionately serving out of a desire to fix what’s broken in our homes, our neighborhoods, our schools, and our streets. The gospel isn’t just about getting people to heaven when they die. It’s also about offering people foretastes of the goodness of heaven and the kingdom of God in the here and now.

Instead of creating our own Christian versions of organizations and groups that are already serving our communities, what if we decided to actively partner with them, to join them, to work alongside of them? It takes far less resources for us, and it puts us in caring contact with people in need, while at the same time allowing us to join hands with unchurched people who serve those in need with us. In my experience, it’s much easier to start a conversation with someone about faith, to build an authentic relationship that draws them closer to Christ, when we can point out ways they are already partnering with God in loving their neighbors, than it is to steal their idea from them and create our own competing version of what they’re trying to do because they aren’t doing it for all the reasons we wish they were.

I’ve been blessed to witness several churches throughout the nation, cooperating and collaborating in this way with others and as a direct result, they’re growing in reputation in their communities to the point where all kinds of people who never knew that the church was even there before, suddenly have a respect for the church and its members that open doors for new people to come be a part. A church that seeks to serve their community by being an active presence in that community is the church that reaches their community with the love of Christ.

Reclaiming who God has called us to be, and engaging our communities through compassionate collaborations are real ways for us to experience real renewal. But it’s not going to be easy. No true renewal I know of can take place, without taking risks. This is not a time for anger or anxiety. This is not the time to give up and walk away. This is not a time to resign ourselves to defeat.

This is the time to find the holy courage of Christ. This is the time to believe that God has not abandoned us and never will. This is the time to step out in the faith that because of Jesus, no form of decline or even death is ever final. Our story leads to resurrection, and not just for ourselves or our congregations, but for our broken and dying world.

Do we really believe that? Do we really believe that when we are faithful to our calling and we reach out to actively love the world alongside of people in the world for the sake of the world, the good news of the gospel somehow happens again?

Then, brothers and sisters, let us step forward in the confidence of God’s undying grace. For there is good reason to hope.

           
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Bio:
Born and raised in Northern California, Jarrod Robinson grew up in a preacher’s home and graduated from high school in Sacramento. He is a graduate of Abilene Christian University (BA in Christian Ministry in 2000 and an MDiv in 2003) and is currently working on a Doctorate of Ministry from Lipscomb University. Jarrod preached for the Eastside Church of Christ in Antioch, CA from 2004-2006 before moving to be the preaching minister for the Riverside Church of Christ in Coppell, TX. Jarrod and his wife, Lauren, have been married 11 years. They have two daughters, Rylee (5) and Reese (2).