Four years ago, my pastor left our church and moved 45 minutes away to plant a congregation. Thankfully, he had a family of six, so that more than doubled the waiting group of five people. My wife and I decided to join the group because we’re church-planting junkies; if we’re not sitting on folding chairs, we don’t know how to worship! Still, it had been some time since our church fit in a living room and served Holy Communion from a card table.
I figured the new church would soon be like the former one, for it had the same senior pastor, the same worship style, a similar location, and, including our family, 10 of the same people.
I was wrong, hilariously wrong.
The church has become radically different from its ancestor. Their demographics, passions, and projects diverge widely, even wildly. One example: They have a ministry for home-schooling families; we have one for Gen-Y professionals.
The churches stand as a case study for Lyle Schaller’s point that churches are progressively becoming more unlike each other.
That fact challenges every church leader today to discern and affirm the congregation’s unique spiritual calling. This sounds easy, but it’s surprisingly difficult. To understand and accept these people, to see what God wants to do in and through them, requires us to lay down much of what we know and what seminars teach. It requires listening and letting go of our plans.
It’s much faster, when entering a church, to franchise, to use an approach proven in a larger congregation. It worked there, it should here. (Besides, we like that approach.)
When our new church chose music different from what I’d enjoyed in the former church, I grumbled within. I justified my complaint by my superior knowledge that the music I liked would be more effective in outreach. Only slowly, as a spiritual discipline, could I accept the fact that the new music better fit this new group of people.
As leaders, it’s tempting to bring in the vision God has given us, assuming it should also be this congregation’s. Not necessarily.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer warned (in Life Together) that “God hates visionary dreaming; it makes the dreamer proud and pretentious. The man who fashions a visionary ideal of community demands that it be realized by God, by others, and by himself. He enters the community of Christians with his demands, sets up his own law, and judges the brethren and God Himself accordingly. … He acts as if he is the creator of the Christian community, as if his dream binds men together. When things do not go his way, he calls the effort a failure. When his ideal picture is destroyed, he sees the community going to smash. So he becomes first an accuser of his brethren, then an accuser of God, and finally the despairing accuser of himself.”
I’m learning to ask, “What is unique about this church? How is God at work in her leaders, her location, and her loves?” We must be teachers, but also learners. We must stop saying, “These people don’t get it” and start saying, “They might be right.”
We grow, and the church flourishes, when we let this crazy-quilt people be who God made them to be, when we accept and bless the group we have. Leaders shape a church, but we must work with the grain of the wood.
Wisely did Eugene Peterson write in Leadership, “When we work well, our tastes, experiences, and values are held in check so that the nature of the material, or the person, or the process, or our God is as little adulterated or compromised by our ego as possible.”
Kevin Miller is Leadership editor-at-large.
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