How Will Your Church Change?

“While change is vital to the life of a church, it’s one thing to want to change – it’s another thing to know how.” Innovative Transitions — Galloway and Bird

An insightful person once said, “Until the pain is bad enough, few of us are really motivated to change.” Truthfully, most of us want to keep everything the same, the way we’re used to having it. While my faith-filled side wants to disagree with that statement, life experience forces me to agree. (I remember the last time I had to go to the dentist.)

The subtitle of the new book from Beacon Hill Press, Innovative Transitions, is “How change can take your church to the next level.” Authors Dale Galloway and Warren Bird include interviews with 15 different pastors of growing congregations - four of them are Church of the Nazarene. They review a wide variety of challenges and changes required for missional growth. While the gospel message always remains the same, how it’s communicated will always need to adapt in relevant ways. Some things need to change.

The authors conclude after these exchanges, “These pastors and churches are authentic. They are the real deal. God has done something special in their midst – and continues to do so.” Each story is unique, in how they had to address issues of change to move their ministries forward. While their situations were different, they all needed to address the will and the commitment to change.

Every chapter also concludes with a list of transferrable principles for other leaders and churches to apply to their own situation. This approach seems the next best thing to having a cup of coffee with these 15 missional pastors, while having a top researcher and consultant at the table to guide your discussion. There are far too many practical lessons in these 160 pages to describe in this brief review, but here are just a few samples of their suggestions to whet your appetite to study this helpful resource.

The time to respond is now. For too many existing congregations, they dare not wait many more months to address needed changes. “Missing people” need to hear the Good News; hurting people are looking for the answers. If we would dare to change, the gospel would dramatically change their lives.

One of the Nazarene pastors interviewed said as their church leaders began to research to understand their community better. They were shocked to learn 87% of their county was unchurched. In their own words “The brokenness of our community is staggering: about one-third has experience as a broken family, the divorce rate is 14% higher than the national average and there are higher-than-average financial struggles.” While all of these hurting people wanted to have healthy families, they just don’t know how to do it. Our church family could be a positive change agent for them.

Tremendous possibilities exist in your church. Galloway points out “without the transitioning of history-rich churches to a new generation of ministry, those churches die too. It’s a big loss for the kingdom of God.” The influence and impact of every congregation is needed to extend the kingdom of God. We change because we care.

On every district in the USA and Canada, even more new churches are needed to fulfill their mission. And, no church or pastor ever “arrives,” where they never need to adjust and adapt to the changing world around them. Every church experiences change: some intentionally initiate changes to be missional in their ministry context, while others slowly coast into irrelevancy. But all churches experience change, we can decide for the good or bad.

You can become part of the solution. The authors described a sermon by Pastor Aguiar Valvassoura in their visit to Campinas, Brazil, as he observed none of us are immune to gravity. “People all over the world tend to settle in, becoming content with where they are spiritually … satisfied with the status quo, not stretching to new heights of faith because we give in to gravity’s pull to sit still.” So, are you willing to change, and help your church transform your community? We change so they can change.

Like Galloway and Bird, we pray as you finish their book, and read through the stories in each issue of GROW magazine, you’ll find yourself deciding “There’s no reason God couldn’t touch our church - and my life - in a similar way.”

Jim Dorsey
Editor, GROW