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.
After the Boom
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.
Yes, I was that energetic young preacher.
I arrived confident in my choice to revive an existing church rather than plant a new one. I set out to ride a new wave of spiritual formation in a church hungry for depth. Together we would learn what it means to live out the gospel in today’s culture.
I had a clear sense of my mission: to catalyze a process in which a personality-driven, event-oriented, excitement-addicted, down-on-its-luck failed megachurch is transformed into a missional community.
For me, that meant starting with the gospel, asking what it means today for our church, our community. And perhaps that may have been where the trouble started.
Why Study the Gospel?
During my first six months, I was leading a Bible study with the leadership team, and I suggested that we start with a study of the gospel.
One of the leaders responded, “I think we’ve already got the gospel figured out. Why do we need to study that? Let’s figure out how to start moving the ball down the field.”
I was sure we didn’t already have the gospel figured out and that what we were calling “the gospel” was actually only a small slice of what the gospel is all about.
That conversation was one of the first indicators that we had a problem, that the modern we-have-it-figured-out megachurch concept would clash mightily with the emerging ideas of what gospel means, what it means to be a missionary in our own culture, and what it means to live it outside the walls of the church.
At the same time, the rehabilitated leadership structure relapsed and some of the old problems began to show up again. Attendance, which had remained steady and even increased a bit during the get-well season, began to drop.
Some left because they didn’t know who was in charge anymore. Others left because they perceived the church wasn’t focused on proclaiming the gospel anymore. Still others left because it seemed the current leadership was soft on truth.
Now, six years later, numbers in attendance and giving are lower than ever and a spatula is needed to elevate morale. On paper, Garnett appears to be in pretty bad shape.
Yet on our good days, we’re hopeful that God is up to something important among us.
God is doing something at Garnett Church of Christ that seems counter to what I previously thought God would do in a church. The Spirit, I believe, is teaching us that it’s not about people populating programs but about God inhabiting every moment of our lives, most of which happens outside the walls of the church.
And we’re learning that these church walls must come down.
Facing ongoing debt and fewer members, a neighborhood that is transitioning to Hispanic, and the fact that we fill less than one-fifth of the assembly hall, we invited Larry James, director of Central Dallas Ministries to help us discern what we should do.
He opened our eyes to the dramatic potential of our underutilized property. He focused on urban renewal, debt reduction, and community outreach.
That led us to take these steps.
1. To be honest about our current condition. This can be hard for a church with such a storied past.
People kept asking: Why have our long-term members left? When are things going to get back to the way they were? What’s wrong with us?
Such questions can squelch even the most sincere brainstorming sessions. The hard truth we’ve tried to communicate through all of this is that the glory days of the past are exactly that—past glory days. We’re not to try to return to them. Garnett will never again be the church it once was. We have to do the difficult thing of letting go of our former glory in order to allow God to do a new thing in us.
2. To relinquish our rights as members to a church building that we are no longer able to pay for by ourselves. The Garnett Church of Christ building is becoming the Garnett Event Center.
Already, several other churches are using our facilities on Saturday night and Sunday afternoon: a Messianic Jewish community, a charismatic Hispanic church, a rock church called Rolling Stone, and a new church plant.
Throughout the week, a number of other events, some church-related and others not, are held at our building. Not only is the rental income from these events helping to pay the bills, but it’s also giving us a hospitable presence in our neighborhood.
But not without some difficulty. Everyone, myself and all ministry staff included, must reserve any classroom or meeting space equally with those in the community who are using or renting space.
The way we’re trying to see it: this building no longer belongs to us. It belongs to our community. This isn’t easy to explain to a charter member who’s been helping to pay off the building for 20 years!
We’ve started a bi-lingual preschool that has grown to 50 students, half Anglo and half Hispanic. We’ve projected beyond our ability to speak Spanish, putting “Bienvenito” (Welcome) on the front doors and asking Spanish speakers to help us translate for different events.
We made it our goal to pray for every family that comes into our weekly food subsidy ministry and to invite them to serve with us.
3. To recognize that the most life-giving activities of our church aren’t necessarily going to happen in our facility. Church leaders in event-driven and personality-centered churches tend to gauge success by headcount, the number of people who show up. This is what leaders talked about, and subsequently members tended to judge success by how pews and collection baskets were filled.
With Michael Frost (author of Exiles: Living Missionally in a Post-Christian Culture) and Alan Hirsch (The Shaping of Things to Come: Innovation and Mission for the 21st Century Church), we have been forced to ask new questions: What if events of church, personalities of church, and Sunday assembly went away? What would be our view of the Christian life? What would we do as Christians, and who would we be?
We’re working with the local fire department to arrange Spanish classes for them so they can better serve and communicate on daily calls. We’re partnering with Habitat for Humanity and our city to build and renovate houses and help people to get back on their feet again.
We are learning to see our community, and individuals, not as needing handouts but as valued people who can together with us serve our Lord and our community.
4. To learn to be missionaries in our own culture. Across the street from us, Fire Station 27 is the busiest station in the city. Fire Chief Michael Baker said, “This is a big church and the neighborhood is waiting … waiting to see what you are going to do for this community.”
This comment has been forcing us outward, while we are at the same time redesigning our space for community groups to enter. Church Shepherd Robert Garland replied to Chief Baker that “we want to be a better neighbor to you and this community.”
And really, that’s the first step to becoming missionaries: getting to know our neighbors’ needs.
Todd Hunter of Alpha-USA articulates well what we want to do: “I want to help people become the cooperative friends of Jesus, seeking to live lives of constant creative goodness through the power of the Holy Spirit for the sake of the world.”
That’s what we’re determined to do: equip our congregation to be Christ to neighbors, co-workers, and family members, rather than trying to coax people into signing up for every church program possible and burning families out with church involvement.
We’ve had to ruthlessly ask of each ministry venture, “Is this an energy drain? An event without purpose? A building-centered program that determines success by how many populate this building?”
Anything aside from a Christ-centered approach is out in favor of teaching one another how to be incarnational presence of Christ, in practical ways in our jobs, neighborhoods, PTAs, and sports teams.
The Next Step
This is the direction our transition is going. It has been hard, painful, and messy. At times it’s confusing and depressing. And we’re not done yet. The hardest part may still be in front of us.
Every day we remind ourselves that what we’re attempting to do may not work.
But we wouldn’t have it any other way.
Wade Hodges has been teaching minister at Garnett Church of Christ in Tulsa, Oklahoma, since 2003. www.wadehodges.com.
Greg Taylor is associate minister at Garnett Church of Christ and managing editor of New Wineskins. www.gregtaylor.cc.
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