Jason Locke's Blog

If you’re familiar with any of  the blog posts  from my sabbatical partly spent in the UK, then this book by Mike Moynagh explains a big piece of my research. During our 10 days based in Oxford, I got to visit with the author over cool drinks on a warm, summer afternoon. That two-hour chat was one of the highlights of my sabbatical. Mike is incredibly pragmatic, knowledgeable and humble. We had a wide-ranging conversation about how most efforts to "diagnose" the church's problems are quite misguided. What often results amounts to little more than prescribing surface changes: sprucing up the building, livening up the worship service, preaching more emphatically or with better theology, or simply doing the liturgy well. These changes, Mike suggests, never really address what lies at the heart of church decline in Western societies today. To be clear, Mike Moynagh loves the traditional church. He personally prefers the Anglican liturgy above more "contemporary" ...

Most North American churches are in crisis mode. Decline. Division. Lack of direction. Even closure. These are the realities you likely know all too well. It’s old news. In response to these negative trends, I typically hear one of two lines of thought. The first just involves doing what churches already do, only better. Welcome people more warmly. Lead better worship. Be more transparent. Preach more effectively. Make your facilities more inviting. Serve nicer coffee. Have snazzier kids’ classes. Use social media more successfully. The list goes on and on. Standing-room only crowd for our workshop at the 2023 Harbor Lectures This set of strategies stems from the reality that most church leaders have a church-shaped mission. In other words, they know how to do one thing: Sunday morning worship. And since that is what churches do, that must be the tool to turn things around. The mission must fit church as they know it. The second line of thought is less optimistic. It embraces dec...

The Sunday morning church service comes once a week. That hour occupies such a small sliver of a person's waking hours in a week (about 1%). Yet churches pour a huge amount of time and resources into thinking about, planning for and executing the weekly gathering. And no matter what they do or how well they do it, the vast majority of people will never show up or even consider showing up. This is true for nearly every church I know. The Sunday morning worship gathering is what churches in North America know how to do. Those with bigger staffs, newer buildings and more money are obviously able to do it at different level from most churches. Regardless of size, however, churches tend to measure their success based on that one hour. It's the primary focus. It's the main entrance into the church family. It's how churches teach, train, disciple, encourage, communicate, and evangelize. And yet, year by year, despite such massive investment, the number of people who show up fo...