Failing at Church: The Pathway to New Mission
Over the course of this last winter season our small congregation spent three months discovering and rehearsing the story of our church family. We shared about exciting beginnings, adventures of faith, joyful celebrations, and experiences of vibrant partnership with God. We also remembered demoralizing defeats that tested our resolve and spoke of losses that still elicit pain and misunderstanding. We looked at the original purposes of the leaders who brought us to this place decades ago, and faced the cold reality of a present that seems to be slipping ever farther away from the glory days when twice the numbers filled our pews.
We can no longer deny our winter, a wilderness that we have entered. We now live in a strange land of aging facilities, fewer programs, thinned staffing, and depleting membership. It is not fun to balance our books. Our congregation had always had transition in its DNA, a church whose space sits amidst one of the largest universities in the world. We were accustomed to people leaving—college students obtaining their degrees, or young families coming for doctoral studies and then moving on to their careers in other places. But then others would come, looking specifically for a church family in our heritage. The days when we could count on our church label as the means to replacing those departures is over. It is winter.
It can be a depressing thing to wake up one day and find yourself in the wilderness. Those reliable, familiar ways of living have disappeared. The strategies that worked all our lives in fertile land simply won’t bear fruit in the desert. If you let it, the wilderness can be depressing and hopeless. If you’re not careful, you’ll strike out in frustration. You’ll blame someone, scapegoat, or rationalize. Or, you might just choose to ignore it or be apathetic. Some people just lie down and die.
And, it is tempting to do something rash, something sudden, almost anything to avoid the pain. The quick fix hire, the quick fix program, the quick fix move, the quick fix rock band. People make millions selling books about this stuff. I call it wilderness denial reading. It seems some people will bear no unpleasantness.
But waking up in the wilderness can also be one of the most liberating experiences of your life. After all, it literally was that for God’s people back in the day! Finding yourself in the wilderness, on the back side of the life curve, at a place where our strategies no longer work, can bring a freedom you’ve never experienced before. In fact, refusing to react anxiously and instead spending some time in the wilderness can be one of the most restful, renewing, and transforming experiences a people may encounter. The Hebrew people wrote four long books about their desert experience, and spent most of their canon reflecting back on it.
What if the wilderness can do something in us that no other place can do? What if it reveals things about us which before we could not see? What if in the wilderness all the extra baggage gets thrown away and we find what is really needed in our life with God? What if we find God, his love, and his provision in a new and more vibrant way, because if we are going to survive in this hostile environment, we are going to need his power and grace to be present?
As a church, we believe we are finding our hope in the wilderness because it is there that we are finding God anew. So we are choosing to remain here a while, praying, walking, loving, listening, and worshipping. We are not trying to be big or do big things. The wilderness requires us to be small and travel lightly. We’re trying to open our eyes to the sights and sounds around us. We’re discovering that in our weakness we are seeing other places of weakness that need God’s touch and love. We’re determining that in this land we want and need his leading—all the time for everything. We’re trying not to be smart, but to be faithful. We’ve found hope in our failure. Here’s what we have heard God speak to us and through us about our life right now:
We need to simplify. The best and most important things come to light in the wilderness, and they are worth a lot of attention. We need to create space for those things: compassion, hospitality, confession, healing, and blessing.
Our church has diversity—racial, economic, social, geographical, and educational. This is a gift from God. He is asking us to value this, nourish this, and celebrate this.
We must equip people. The wilderness requires a different way of living and surviving. The mission is clear. We want to equip each other for the life God calls us to.
We need God. We need his life, his love, his leading, and his grace. Anything done outside of his love and guidance, no matter how successful it may look, is worthless.
If your ministry setting feels discouraging, small, weak, or failing, please remember that this is where God does his best work. And helping your church face and accept the reality of this weakness can be an exciting first step into encountering the reality of God! [1] What might you and God discover together in the wilderness?
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[1] For help with this journey and hope for small churches see Cameron Harder, Discovering the Other (Herndon, VA: Alban Institute, 2013) and Peter Steinke, A Door Set Open (Herndon, VA: Alban Institute, 2010).
