Church Renewal Is Impossible Without Knowing Your Strength
Do you know what your church is actually good at? What your congregation’s core strength is? What key value underlies the heartbeat of your faith community?
Knowing how your church functions at its best is perhaps an important piece of knowledge. You cannot experience true renewal without it. Just as each person has God-given strengths or DNA, so too does each church. Call this your charism (a word for a God-given gift of grace) that can enable your church to extend God’s mission of mercy into the world. We as individuals and communities function at our best when we operate authentically out of our charism.
To be honest, though, the DNA of some churches doesn’t seem like an asset. I recently heard about a church that started as a 50/50 split with another congregation. After an initial season of stability, they are once again in fight-or-flight mode, with members threatening to leave or even divide the church. Churches birthed out of conflict often maintain a fighting spirit among the members—and not in a healthy way.
Even churches without negative roots seldom have a clear sense of their strength or God-given charism. Leaders or preachers may suggest an idealized strength that matches their personal desires but does not connect well with their church’s DNA. Elders and ministers may even borrow priorities gleaned from a conference or a consultant and try to force that onto their church—with predictably unsuccessful results.
A charism is not something we choose. This is a gift from God. Paul describes these gifts when speaking about the individual members of a body: “To each is given the charism of the Spirit for the common good … All these [charisms] are activated by one and the same Spirit, who allots to each one individually just as the Spirit chooses” (1 Cor 12:7, 11).
While this passage is referring to individuals and not churches, it seems that each church also has its own unique characteristic or charism. Biblical scholars might refer to it as particularity. In the book of Revelation, John clearly views each of the seven churches as uniquely gifted or perhaps weighed down by a certain value. The missions scholar Lesslie Newbigin defined each congregation as a “hermeneutic of the gospel.” He was attempting to locate Christian identity in a body of believers rather than as solo Christians (The Gospel in a Pluralist Society [Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1989], p. 227). Newbigin freely admitted that congregational life in his context of Great Britain was far from ideal, and he was aware that his contemporaries were often embarrassed by key aspects of the church, especially its humanness.
This brings us to the crux of the problem and the possibility of trying to identify a given church’s strength or God-given charism. This core value need not be perfect or even overtly Christian. The work of the Christian pastor or leader is to take people or congregations where they are and inject the life-giving story of Jesus into the narrative. Through this process, we come to the place of repurposing a church’s experience, even if it has been traumatic.
The church where I preach in Fresno, California, has a rich 59-year history. Through a lengthy story-telling process back in 2010, we identified the primary strength of this church. It came up over and over again in the transcripts, sometimes in slightly different ways, but unmistakably present as a core value. Over and above all other values, our church appreciated the strong and vibrant relationships they had enjoyed. Even new people echoed this sentiment by expressing how this church had become like their family or how they had finally found a place that accepted them despite their struggles.
Despite this clarity, there was a key problem. The data pointed in one direction, but something important was missing. The stories contained only superficial references to God. People loved their relationships, but God was missing from their descriptions of these strong ties. Were they in fact describing relationships focused on God’s mission for the world, or were they describing a kind of club to which they were thrilled to belong? From a cynic’s perspective, the latter felt a very real possibility. We struggled to know how to frame this.
Then, several years ago, Soong Chan Rah of Fuller Seminary (he was at North Park Seminary at the time) guided me to the conclusion no one else had ventured. In our coaching session, he listened to the narrative data that revealed the DNA of our church and its lack of God-language. He said (in my paraphrase), “Adding the theology is your job. You must inject the redemptive story of God into the church’s DNA.”
Over the next few months, we coined a statement that captures our church’s DNA and also points toward the gospel: We’re about building healthy relationships as we join God’s Kingdom work. Through story-telling and the simple act of identifying our true charism, God has slowly brought purpose, focus and renewal to our church. And because this value isn’t imposed on our church in an aspirational manner, it makes sense to us and fits who we are. It’s helping us prioritize what’s important and shed the things that are of less consequence.
Can this work for your church as well? Absolutely. But you must do the hard work of listening to your church’s stories in order to discern its key strength. And if necessary, your pastoral team will need to merge the story of the gospel with your church’s story, especially when its natural priority turns out to be too humanistic or filled with trauma.
The redemptive story of Jesus has entered into the human story. Let us not shy away from the hard work of incarnation. In so doing, we pray that God will lead us into new life.
