Why Should this Church Revitalize?
Before you revitalize a church, you need to be able to answer this question soundly and succinctly: Why should this church revitalize?
There are hundreds of wrong answers to this question; they all sound spiritual but are not Biblical. Typically, these bad answers all boil down to roughly the same idea: revisiting the glory days of the church’s past.
Trying to relive the glory days is a fool’s errand because A) it’s impossible and B) it’s not a strong enough motivation to get a church through the rigors of church revitalization.
The Glory Days Are Gone
We’ll start with the fact that it is impossible. You say, “All things are possible with God!” True. But is this how God typically works?
To return to the glory days, God would have to resurrect certain people from the dead, revert an entire regional culture to a different era, rewind the lives of the elderly amongst you, and miraculously fix about 28 things in the building.
You can’t go back to the glory days the same way you cannot turn back time.
I know this sounds sad initially, but I’ll let you in on a little secret that will help ease the pain: The glory days have been romanticized.
They weren’t nearly as good as people are remembering them. It’s a trick our mind plays on us. The Bible warns us against this…
Say not, “Why were the former days better than these?” For it is not from wisdom that you ask this. - Ecclesiastes 7:10
Believe it or not, though more people may have been in the building, the “glory days” had their difficulties, problems, challenges, and mistakes. Those are just not the aspects of the past our minds have prioritized.
The Glory Days are Not Enough
Now let’s consider the fact that the glory days aren’t a strong enough motivator for church revitalization. As you well know, when you revitalize a church, things get really tough. Everyone is going to be stretched outside of their comfort zone. What’s going to keep them going? Certainly not the promise of “the glory days.”
It doesn’t take very long for a new revitalizer to realize that as bad as everyone says they want to go back to the glory days, they’re not willing to work very hard to actually make it happen. And that’s because it’s an inward-focused motivation that isn’t actually compelling enough to fight for.
At the end of the day, the soul needs a deeper and more external reason to push through a season of revitalization. It needs upward-focused and others-focused motivation. It needs a gospel-focused motivation.
You Need a Mission
So here it is, the Biblical answer to our question, “Why should this church revitalize?”
To make disciples.
Why should this church revitalize? Not to get back to the glory days but to move forward on mission.
It sounds like this…
There are people who could be reached…
There are people who could be taught…
There are people who could be worshippers…
There are disciples we could make…
… if we were a revitalizing church.
(Just as an aside, notice I said, “If we were a revitaliz-ing church.” Not, “If we were a revitaliz-ed church.”
We don’t revitalize and then start makeing disciples. We make disciples as we are revitalizing. The reverse is also true. We revitalize as we are making disciples again. The two work in concert.)
There must be a specific, local group of people you, as a church, are passionate about reaching with the gospel of Jesus. This should be people in close proximity to the church who live in a defined area with a life you either understand or are learning to understand.
For more rural areas or very small towns, your mission may be to reach the entire town. For midsized towns and cities, your mission should be much more defined.
Pray for and seek a burden for your side of town. Or, better yet, your specific community on your side of town (i.e. the 2-5 mile radius around your church). Or, better still, the specific neighborhood your church is in or adjacent to.
Ask Jesus to reveal to you who your church will be on the hook for in the judgment. This love for Jesus and his great commission is what will motivate you to push through the intensity of coming back to life as a church.
We All Need a Reason
When we started revitalizing at Griggs, we had a very easily defined mission field; The neighborhood directly across the street from Griggs - Poe Mill.
Poe Mill consists of roughly 320 houses filled with primarily low-income families, a high percentage of which were facing addiction issues. Our church has always had connections to the neighborhood and understood their issues very well.
Upon doing my own research, knocking on doors, sitting on porches, and getting to know the neighborhood, I quickly developed a passion for making disciples in Poe Mill. That passion has kept me and our church going through the last SEVEN YEARS of revitalization.
One of my favorite stories from our church was when we had a Poe Mill grandmother coming to Griggs. She had been through the wringer in many ways. And she had some really poor church experiences in her past. (When she came to Griggs she told me a story about visiting a church where the preacher pointed at her in the middle of the service and called her the devil for some reason. Weird way to respond to a visitor.)
One of our deacons from Griggs invited her to come to our church one Sunday and she did. She began attending faithfully. Eventually, she was baptized.
Then, her daughter and her granddaughter were baptized. At one point, this grandmother had like 9 members of her family coming to church with her every Sunday.
Whenever I would hit a wall in those early years, I would think of her, and it would keep me going.
Whenever I was scared to preach on a Sunday morning, whenever I was overwhelmed by a decision that needed to be made, whenever I was exhausted from being bi-vocational, and whenever I was personally hurt by someone’s critique of the church, I would say in my mind, “It hurts, but I’m hurting for her.” The picture of this grandmother smiling in the 4th or 5th pew would be my reason to endure it all. ‘
Not only do I have to hold on to this “reason,” but I also have to continually convince my whole congregation to as well.
I want my people to be able to think of someone in Poe Mill when they feel like giving up. So, from time-to-time, I tell stories from the stage about the things God is doing through us in Poe Mill.
I remind my people all that we have a reason to walk through the battlefield of revitalization. One example would be this photo:
I know this is kind of a weird photo. The doodles on the notebook are both right-side-up and up-side-down. However, inside the notebook are sermon notes chock-full of straight-forward gospel truths.
This notebook was left behind one Sunday by a teenage girl from Poe Mill named Shaniya. She began coming to Griggs on our church van as an elementary aged kid. She was now being picked up by one of our members to worship with us on Sunday morning.
Upon finding this notebook I realized that not only was she hearing the gospel, she was writing it down and, presumably, understanding it.
I took an opportunity last summer to put this photo of her notebook on the screens in front of about 35 of our adults on a Wednesday evening (Shaniya was not present). My goal was to simply encourage them that what we we’re doing IS making an impact.
I was trying to sympathize with these folks (who really make up the core of our church). I was saying that I know what we’re doing is hard. And, no, we can’t go back to the glory days. But we ARE going forward. And, by God’s grace we can keep going forward if we can continue to answer this question: Why should this church revitalize? The answer for that mid-summer Wednesday night was Shaniya’s notebook.
Our hope is to continue to answer that question with our mission statement: