Wednesday Pastor: Not Giving Up on Existing Churches
Jesus was with his disciples for 3 years and it took a resurrection and ascension for them to truly get it.
Now, I may be overstating my point a little but something has been bothering me over the last few years. There is a distrust/disgust/distaste for the existing church among many young training pastors. There is a constant conversation about the ineffectiveness of existing churches and the need for renewal. This has led to a large church planting movement and what seems like an attempt to restart the church. If someone is talking about rejuvenating an existing church, it usually consists of making such wholesale changes that the church splits or “restarts” and the result is something that functions much like a church plant anyway.
I have no problem with church planting. I think it is vital to continue to spread the Kingdom through multiplication of churches. What isn’t sitting well with me is the exclusion of existing churches from training for the work of the Kingdom.
Many existing churches are broken. Many have internal structures that are dysfunctional and ineffective in spreading and growing new disciples. What is unsettling to me is that those of us in vocational ministry who may see these problems are just writing off the people in these churches as people who don’t really care about the Gospel or are too selfish to change. Maybe pastors are seeing the dysfunction rather than seeing the people.
And besides, haven’t people in these churches been trained by us pastors to be the way they are over the last 100 years?
Are we training pastors to see people who do love God and want to see His Kingdom advance even if they are (at times) misguided in their methods or mission?* Are we as pastors willing to make the long-term commitment and endure the slow process of helping people see what our life in the Kingdom of God should look like even when it doesn’t look like what they have always known?
It takes longer to change people’s preconceived ideas than it does to start with people who are new to Christianity and it is a long, hard process. But does that mean we shouldn’t try?
What do you think?
It reminds be of a recent study I read last week concerning school systems that don’t effectively educate children. For the past 10 years or so, When a school is “failing”, a governing body comes in and dismantles the school staff, rehires at least 50 % etc., effectively causing a “school split” which many times leads to a closure and the formation of another kind of school. Sometimes, this might be necessary. The study I was reading though was saying that another way (and apparently more effective according to this study) way to turn around an ineffective school is not to bring in the heavy artillery, but to retrain the folks who are already there. They are probably still there because they love that place. They may be so in love with the place that they are blindly following methods, procedures, traditions and curriculum that don’t really serve the needs of the student population as well as they could. BUT, the point is it may be more effective to keep these staff members around if they are willing to participate in long-term retraining (or training. since sometimes they were never trained well to begin with). It’s improving the soil around a struggling bush instead of pulling it out and planting a new one. It might take a while, but once those long-established roots are revitalized, there is no stopping it!