Leadership Journal

One day a preacher said to a friend, "We have just had the greatest revival our church has experienced in many years."

"How many did you add to your church membership?"

"None. We lost five hundred." —Brennan Manning,The Ragamuffin Gospel

When I considered the possibility of moving from Bellingham, Washington, to Tulsa, Oklahoma, the question wasn't just why I would exchange Mount Baker for oil country. I'd come to a fork in the road.

Was it time to plant an emerging type church? Or could I help an existing modern-ish church position itself for ministering to the next generation by developing some emerging sensibilities?

Rather than giving up on existing churches, which is what the prospect of church planting felt like to me, I wanted to believe that an existing church could make the transition. So I came to Garnett Church of Christ and set the transition in motion.

The results have been astounding.

850 members in 2003.

550 members in 2006.

Everyone told me that church planting would be hard, but I don't know if anyone warned me how difficult making this kind of church transition, with its epistemological, cultural, and sociological elements, would be.

Garnett was once a flagship congregation in our denomination, quite visible in the community with JOY buses fetching children city-wide and splashy events that captured national attention, including a segment on Good Morning America. Garnett was blessed with a location in the growing edge of East Tulsa, and it had visionary leadership in Marvin Phillips, a gifted evangelist and motivator.

Our facilities were built with a megachurch in mind. With a 3,000-seat auditorium built in the center of forty acres, Garnett was positioned in the mid-eighties to grow exponentially like the oil-boom neighborhoods that surrounded it.

It never did.

At least, it never grew the way it was supposed to. The building was never filled with multiple services of enthusiastic crowds. The oil-boom intoxicated debt the church incurred to build the facility was never paid off. Financial difficulties, leadership controversies, and a demographic shift in the neighborhood left Garnett, by the late nineties, a shell of its former self.

A church that at one time boasted 2,000 attending now averaged closer to 700. Marvin Phillips retired in 1996, and the church struggled to find its way in his absence. The senior minister who followed him inherited conflict and systemic dysfunction that made success impossible.

Beginning in 2000, the Garnett leadership entered into a recovery process that lasted three years. During this time, the church had no senior minister, but the leadership culture and structure was reshaped with the help of consultants such as Lynn Anderson, who said more shepherding by the leadership, more depth, more balance, fewer events and less flash were some of the important steps for the congregation to heal and turn the corner.

In 2003, having taken this advice, the final touch was to call an energetic young preacher to deliver relevant messages. And everyone assumed Garnett was just a few months away from returning to the glory days.

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