Leading Change in the Church - Lesson 7

So, let's talk briefly about effect of change on churches, then, which really is the collective of people. Some of the questions that I hear being asked, because change is one of the greatest challenges that face church leaders in our day, that churches are changing at an unprecedented rate, and historically, we've not had to deal with this rate of change in the church in the history of the church, and so we're in a time that we really don't have any guide map for, in many respects, and so this whole issue of coping with change and dealing with change in the church is a massive issue that needs a lot of attention. 

Here are some of the questions. How do I help the church to face 21st century challenges? And they are enormous. We can spend a lot of time. What do you sense are some of the challenges, the macro challenges that face your church right now? Let's talk about that, that are probably going to require constant and consistent change. What are some of those things? 

STUDENT: The movement of the American culture to a post-Christian society. 

Unpack that a little bit. What does that mean? 

STUDENT: I'd say that previously in this society there was a common value system, if not a common appreciation for Christianity, and the culture has become so diverse and so dynamic in terms of its rapid change of immigrants and demographics, but that kind of commonality is disappearing, and people also have less and less tolerance for organizational entities. The church has lost its respect in many aspects of the society, and so there's less interest in being a part of a church. There's less respect for it. There's less interest in going to scripture for a model for life, and that's kind of a non-entity for many people nowadays, the relativistic thinking rather than thinking that's based on universal truth. So all those changes are a big and huge shift. 

They are huge. I was putting together a talk today for another situation and ran across a statement that one in three people in this country have never and will never enter a church, ever, even on Easter or Christmas. What that communicates is they don't have any reference point, in effect, for the gospel as we understand it, none whatsoever. There's no reference point at all. And so it begs the question, how is the culture going to be informed by the proclamation of the gospel when the proclamation of the gospel happens primarily within the church? So that's a sea change in terms of our culture, and those kinds of questions that relate to the post-Christian, post-modern context is very, very important as it relates to how are we going to do church. The very definition of church is changing, as you know. So not only are people not interested in the organization, but George Barna has done work to suggest that people are actually redefining what church means.

STUDENT: We also have to redefine what community means. It used to be the geographic area around our churches where people come from. Now we're blessed to have people from Gibson [laughter]… 

And whether we like it or not, whether it fits into our idea of church or not, there's the virtual church, there's the Facebook church, there's the tweet church, and so forth. What other things do you see challenging church in the 21st century? 

STUDENT: Related to what he said the perception of the church is, I mean, what you're saying is a third of the people won’t actually go into a church to hear what a church has to say, that their understanding of what church is, is in pop culture or headlines. So that's what it means, and increasingly, church people are demonized, I mean, it's considered bad, it is judgmental; the bad people are the churchgoers. More continually, you see characters in stories and storylines on TV and in movies that have that sort of intolerance, close minded, or are you the child molester that pretends to be a Christian? I mean, that's the religious, super-religious person, or the crazy person is religious, or that kind of thing, and also related is just that whole lack of understanding. I know you said this, but just the lack of understanding of what the Bible is and how it can live and breathe in today's world. 

STUDENT: And in an environment like she's talking about, the home church would be more appealing to someone unversed in the old ways of doing church. 

It's true. I was reading some other statistics lately that were quite surprising that suggested that the United States has become one of the leading receiving countries in the world as far as missionaries are concerned. We are now receiving. I believe it's, if not the top country in the world, one of the top two or three in the world as far as receiving missionaries, rather than just sending. Fascinating how the shift, the seismic shift of the global center, the epicenter of global Christianity's changed, what that means for the church and our role in the future. Other thoughts? 

STUDENT: I'm going to say something much more basic – 

-- or probably much more important – 

STUDENT: Well, just communication -- you we're making references to Facebook and Twitter and email, and that's a struggle in the church; how do you communicate? How do you connect with, not just one way, but there's so much going on, and there're so many things competing for our attention, even over email or web. There's a professor at the university here who no longer communicates over email. He's abandoned it because he's so into Twitter and I can’t think of what other… 

STUDENT: Facebook. 

STUDENT: Yeah, Facebook (laughter) I've heard of Facebook; I just forgot what it was! 

We know you didn't forget what Facebook is…

STUDENT: I was forgetting what other – I was thinking that he had already gone beyond Facebook. 

STUDENT: Yeah, I think he tweets mostly… 

So the 21st century challenges are unprecedented. So how do I implement necessary change without hurting others or myself? I think that's a critical question that church leaders are asking today, and I've heard it so many times. Is it possible to take a congregation through significant change without losing anyone? That's a tough one, isn't it? Yeah. I see some people shaking their heads, no. Why that response? Tell me what's behind that response. 

STUDENT: Because people don't like change. 

STUDENT: I think even if you do it right, you're still going rub people the wrong way; some people are just -- and I think it's just the reality of the situation.

It’s tough, isn’t it?

STUDENT: It’s hard to do right, and our society has become so much more consumerist; what's in it for me, how is it meeting my needs? 

STUDENT: There's another place to go.

STUDENT: Yeah. It's so easy to change church. I mean, there are other options, and so people go to a different church; they're frustrated, so they go somewhere else. 

So, can I lead in change when I am personally threatened by it? I’ve heard that one on a number of occasions. So these are questions that we face as church leaders that are very real. 

STUDENT: The last one, though, when we talked about being from the beginning, I mean, that we're supposed to be people who are pointing to the cross and not to ourselves and not pretending that we have it all under control. To me, that question gives us freedom as believers in the sense that we can say, yes, change is scary, but we're walking through it for a reason. All of us need to be more Christ like; this change is going to do this in some fashion, this is why, you know, so we're trusting not in ourselves but in God, in something bigger. 

Now, that's very good. We're fellow travelers in this journey into the land of the unknown. I think it was Scott Peck who talked about change as traveling naked into the land of uncertainty, and I thought that was a pretty profound way of putting it; I think it was something like that.

The nature of change is upon us. We have moved from a society that was originally hunter gatherers to then become agricultural, where the family worked together all in one, and then we became an industrial society, when usually it was the man who went away for the first time, left home, left the farm, and went away to the factory to get the work done, and then we became a technology society. That, by the way, is a pile of old telephones in Germany. So even our technologies are being discarded and becoming obsolete more quickly than we can imagine. The nature of change, the impact of change today is overwhelming. Just to give you a couple of statistics: Active blogs have increased from 12000 to 12 million in ten years. Reality TV shows have gone from 4 to 320; emails per day from 12 billion to 247 billion. Online activity per week, each of us was spending 2.7 hours; now it's 18 hours. Books published, interestingly enough, has gone from 282,000 to over a million per year, so the book world is not over, folks. The electronic book has actually overtaken print books on Amazon in recent months, but more new information will be generated in the next four years than in the history of the world. 

So that's the kind of world we live in, and sifting through this and managing the kind of change that we're going through as a society is just overwhelming for leaders, and that's why what we're facing is unprecedented.