Pastors and congregations often feel great distress at the state of our churches. Sometimes we wonder whether our doors will even be open in a decade’s time.
I want to both validate and deny these fears.
1. It is right to fear
An article in the Harvard Business Review in 1988 ominously declared that one third of the Fortune ‘500’ companies had vanished in 13 years, and that the average lifetime of the largest industrial enterprises is less than 40 years! Could this be true of our churches?
Peter Senge, a management expert, gives two reasons why this happens. The first is that leaders and workers think ‘I am my position’. This means they take responsibility only for what they are involved in, ensuring people see they are doing their job well, but not taking responsibility for the overall organization.
The second reason he gives is that when things go wrong we blame the external uncontrollable circumstances rather than taking responsibility ourselves.
Senge then argues this leads to a fixation on events. We worry when events do not go well, and relax when they do. Senge claims ‘the primary threat to our survival… comes not from sudden events but from slow, gradual processes’ we worry about the wrong things and fight the wrong fights.
Lessons for our churches
I suspect this analysis has things to teach us in our churches.
‘I am my position’ is a great danger. My true position is not what I do, but that I am a child of God brought into the family of God. This will mean that my concern will not be focused on my performance in the task, but for aiding the body of Christ to grow personally and corporately. Of course we will strive to do our task well, but that is not the end of our labour; we do it so that we may all grow.
Event thinking is a danger too. God is at work changing individuals and the way they relate, and events so often do not show this change. Events may assist in what God is doing in people’s hearts, but it is not the measure or goal of His work. In our churches this means we must take the long view and shape our events around how they can contribute to people’s growth in faith.
Thinking event failure threatens our survival is dangerous too. It leads us into focusing all our attention on the event. We are in danger of losing sight of those gradual changes that are the real threat: the loss of a true and large view of the goodness and power of God, a loss of the distinctiveness in life that the gospel brings and calls for in people, and a loss of the change in the community of God’s people that faith shapes. My great fear is that we are just like everyone else. Those around us do not see anything much in Christians that is different to what they have – in fact Christians have less. So Christians are impoverished and our message is muffled.
2. We need not fear
The church has been around for a long time, and each day people are drawn from death to life through the proclamation of the gospel through the power of the Spirit by the goodness of God. 40 years is such a short time in the church’s history!
The church is the bride of Christ, the one for whom He died and the means by which God promises to leave a witness in the world. Despite the external forces of secularism, material and atheism the gates of Hades will not prevail against God‘s church.
Lessons for us
God will use the resources He has given his church to grow his church. We have in our midst all that we need. Our tried and true tools: friends sharing their faith, people reading and discussing the Bible together, being a gathering who love the Lord and each other and whose convictions and actions are shaped by the Scriptures – these will be used by God to do his work. We are in danger of thinking that is not enough. We must remember that God promises to work powerfully and supernaturally through means such as these.
So to the state of our churches.
Praise God that He is the shepherd who cares for his sheep. But our task is to live appropriately as his sheep. Even the secular writers see things in this area that we should pay attention to.
