”This congregation has been in slow and steady decline since 1964. I don’t know if we have a future.”
“I want the elementary school kids in the church to know Jesus. And I can’t figure out how to compete with soccer and travel and divorced families and everything else.”
“The neighborhood around the church has changed so much – we don’t even know the people who have moved in around us.”
“I don’t know what to say in my sermons because everything is heard as partisan. It seems like the gospel is polarizing more than bringing us together.”
Specific leaders uttered each of those sentences, but they speak to more universal themes that have become too familiar across the American church and certainly the Presbyterian Church in recent years.
At a NEXT Church National Gathering, Stacy Johnson, professor of theology at Princeton Seminary, noted the cultural tsunami facing North American Protestant churches and then quoted the apostle Paul saying: “We have two ways we can live as Christians. We can live as those who are perishing or as those who are being saved.” Others in NEXT Church and I are trying to live as those being saved. It is messy, hard, slow and grace-filled work. I pray it is the work of sanctification in our midst.
Through the creation of a strong relational network, national gatherings, regional conversations, coaching cohorts, online conversations about the practice of ministry and resources on our website, NEXT Church is seeing some change in the narrative. Church leaders who participate in NEXT Church are finding themselves more hopeful, focused and equipped to shape and serve a church that is working in sustained, effective and faithful ways to promote God’s transformation of our communities for the common good.
Consider those same church leaders quoted above. Here’s what they are saying now:
“We’re in collaborative conversations about a radically new future that we could not have imagined five years ago.”
“I’m sharing ideas with leaders in other congregations and we’re trying new models of Christian formation, grounded in our passion for sharing Christ’s love with the children and their parents.”
“Through the disciplines of community organizing and consistent theological reflection of what it means to be a neighbor, we’re learning to see immigrants in our community as ‘us’ and not ‘them.’”
“I’m tending to relationships with people different from me and I’m learning to set down my assumptions and listen deeply. I’m coming to understand different ways of seeing the world and it’s helping me find ways to teach and preach that share the truth and grace of the gospel in ways that honor other people and perspectives.”
Just as God’s Spirit blew over the chaos in the beginning and rained down on the people gathered at Pentecost, our story is that God is always present and calling the church into the future. We will find that future most faithfully together in the messy, hard, slow, grace-filled work of following Jesus. That is a theological statement that keeps me motivated to continue to work and serve the church, to live as those being saved.
Jessica Tate is the director of NEXT Church (nextchurch.net). She’s a pastor living in Washington, D.C.
