Frantic plans and desperate measures

Men of Issachar, who understood the times and knew what Israel should do . . .” 
(1 Chronicles 12:32, NIV).

Recently, I walked through a downtown section of a small community here in central Wisconsin. I was shocked to see that within just a few blocks of each other, five church buildings stood without their congregations. They had been transformed into law offices, an art museum, and the like. Each congregation had either folded or merged with some other struggling group. It was a very sobering walk that day.

The Wausau church, where I am pastoring, seemed to have had a similar destiny. Twenty-five years earlier, it was a thriving church family. The membership numbers, however, told the awful truth of steady year-by-year decline. We all could see that the congregation was aging. Monte Sahlin calls it the “graying of Adventism.”¹ He could have been observing our church family. We were slipping each year more and more into a boomer/builder congregation. We were also discouraged, frustrated, and didn’t know what to do about it. All our previous efforts had pretty much failed.

The temptation, of course, was to panic. But we had already pushed the panic button, and nothing had changed for the better. Some of us wanted to do something very quickly to fix the problem, because desperate times called for desperate measures. Others seemed resigned to the inevitable. Who should be designated to turn out the lights for the last time?

But over the next three years, the Wausau church turned completely around. Remarkably, it actually found within itself those “men of Issachar.” It found the men and women who came to understand the times, and then worked diligently to know what to do. It worked, and today the Wausau church has blossomed and grown. It turned from lots of empty pews into not knowing where everyone is going to sit. In times past, attendance lagged way behind membership. Now, attendance far exceeds membership. Today, more people under age 45 than over age 45 attend. The children’s divisions are overflowing with eager, happy participants. Skeptics who wondered if anything would ever change are shocked.

Those who know the story and have witnessed the changes in Wausau often ask, “How in the world did you do that?” That’s a good question. We had nothing really special to bring to the table. We are, and were, just a normal struggling church with normal people. No supertalented, supereducated leaders. We’re just people from the heartland of America. But we were determined to do something, and we begged the Lord to lead us out of our impending disaster.

There were several things that helped us as we made our journey. Here is what we learned. Perhaps it will be helpful.

Who’s to blame, and who’s responsible?

It was a crucial first step for us to find out who was to blame and who was responsible for the serious problem we were in. In coaching other church groups, we have discovered that, like us, they tend to blame a lot of people and programs that are actually not part of the problem. Yet, they are frequently targeted as the culprits. Usually, these blamed leaders were not present, so it was a lot easier to verbalize the accusations.

You could probably add your usual suspects to the following list, but we felt that it was important to us to let these (and many others) off the blame hook. It really was a giant step forward toward addressing our issues and problems to not bring them up for blame anymore.

The last evangelist who had meetings at the church. Yes, the one who worked so hard to baptize only four or five people who didn’t “stick” with it very long. The very one we had agreed wouldn’t be very effective even before he started. We all agreed he was not the problem. The conference/denominational leadership. We did give them half of 1 percent blame. But even at that, they really were not the problem.

The lack of spirituality among the members. We acknowledged that we all could get closer to Jesus in our personal walk. Suggesting that it’s a lack of spirituality may be just a way of excusing doing nothing about the problem. The hope would be that if we all could “get more spiritual” the problem would be solved. We took this off the table believing we had plenty of spirituality to know we had to follow Jesus. We did this not in arrogance but in humble submission to Him.

The community is just too secular. We asked ourselves if we thought Jesus had written off our community. It was easy to look around and see evidences that He hadn’t. We saw that He was indeed working in our community—we just weren’t a part of that.

The mass Adventist media. We’ve handed out tracts and books, blanketed our town with TV and radio, put Signs magazine news boxes at key spots—you name it. They didn’t do the trick to make our church grow. We had accepted the fact that they were not the problem.

It was a bitter pill to swallow, but we had to admit we were to blame. The reason people, even our own young adults, were not walking into our church was what we were doing. That hurt. Our young adults told us that church was “boring.” We later learned that really meant the church wasn’t relevant to their lives. Why should they bother?

 But the truth of facing who is to blame was somehow freeing. Recognizing the truth was our first step into taking responsibility for what happened or didn’t happen at our church. Oh, we saw glimpses of the Lord working in our church family, but it seemed He was doing it in spite of us or outside our ministries.

What really is the problem?

It would seem this is the easiest part: defining the problem. And quickly we started saying what we thought (knew) the problem was. Actually, we didn’t really know. Congregations often think they know exactly what their problem is and how to fix it. Although they may come close at times to some of the issues, generally we all tend to miss the heart of it completely.

We determined not to do the “quick” fix but pour time and effort into seeing if we could discover what the problem really was within our church and out in our community at large. Although it wasn’t rocket science, it did take some careful digging. Our research, data gathering, and study took almost four months. As we worked on it, a clearer picture of what had happened and why it happened opened before us. One of our elders exclaimed at just such a discovery work session, “Now I know why my kids don’t come to church anymore. I can’t believe how clueless I was. I finally get it!”

After we discovered what we thought were the issues in our growth problem, we didn’t immediately jump into fixing them. Carefully, we built a process of change² that would hopefully make a significant difference in the life of our church and keep our congregation together. We had already learned that creating frantic plans and implementing desperate measures were ministry program killers. We knew that if we weren’t careful, we could split the church and have a dogfight on our hands. We also knew that a lot of us were skeptical that anything could really change and that many were somewhat insulated to any new ideas proposed.

Our change process

1. Don’t assume you know what the problem is. This is the most crucial place to start real change. Most of the churches want to skip the first four steps in our process. We have learned that to do so can spell for a quick failure or lead to conflict and disaster. Starting here also helps the pastor move from being the “person with the correct answer,” to just another traveler taking the discovery journey with the church family. The pastor needs to be a fellow traveler, not the expert. This keeps the issues from being clouded with personal agendas. This helps so much in allowing the church family to take ownership of the process, and to not just be dragged along as participants in another of the pastor’s new programs.

2. Gather as much data as you can before drawing any conclusions. The more details and facts we gathered, the easier it was to see the true scope of the problem we faced. We checked out everything we could find including our community demographics with the United States Census online data.³ Our church clerk gave us our church’s demographics that included our membership, membership attendance at worship, and the attendance at worship of nonmembers,⁴as well. We wanted to know if our church reflected the community demographics around us. It did not. Facts and details here can be a pastor’s friend, as it relates to helping the church accept the case for change. I didn’t have to convince our church we needed change. The facts did that work for me. I just had to travel along with them toward the obvious conclusion.

3. See who is missing. We took the church clerk’s reports and pitched the names listed there into the common generational groupings. We could easily divide our whole group into five categories (builder, boomer, buster, bridger, children).⁵ Placing the data results in a bar chart made it easy for all to see exactly where we were not being effective. Clearly, our huge hole was reaching young adults. That missing group of people affected everything in the church. It was most visible every Sabbath in our children’s divisions and our youth ministries.

4. Start reading.Once we knew exactly who was not attending, we then went in search of current information and solid research on how to reach that group. We read books by authors such as Roger Dudley, Dan Kimball, Brian McLaren, Reggie McNeal, Loren Mead, Thom Rainer, and Mike Regele. We looked for everything we could find on how to reach the young adults who were right around us. But once we started reading the wealth of information on the postmodern culture and its effects on young adults, we saw a much larger picture. We quickly saw that we needed help (1) to address the larger issues (the effects of postmodernism on our church) and (2) to accomplish a number of needed changes. We learned that we could change the way we did church and yet not compromise our faith. Understanding this helped relieve a lot of anxiety among us.

5. Start making a list of areas that need to be addressed. This is exactly where most churches want to start fixing the problem. We had to fight the urge to quickly fix it without doing our homework first. Even today, it is still a temptation as we continue to progress on our journey. But we frequently asked ourselves if we are again trying to do the “quick fix.” We firmly believe real change cannot happen without carefully doing the preceding four steps first.

Once we had done our initial homework and got a good handle on the reading, the list of what we needed to do was more reliable, easier to create, and more workable to implement. For us, we had to do something immediately about our boring (irrelevant) worship service.

We clearly understood that if people couldn’t encounter the Living God at our worship services, then something was desperately wrong. For other churches, it may be other things that are blocking effective growth, but the worship service frequently needs addressing.

Working together, we developed a list of about eight items to start. Since then, we have kept adding other items to that list. Our process of change continues even today. It really must. If you’re doing the same thing now you were doing a year ago, you’re falling behind. We understand that our society is in constant change. Therefore, we must move ahead and adapt our methods as well.

6. Decide, as a group, what to do first. We all recognized that we had to think first of the needs of those born after 1964. Yet, we didn’t want to alienate our stalwart group of builders. We carefully crafted an 18-month strategy to keep all our members informed and moving together. The development of information that everyone could understand was crucial. This element of change brought people together by meeting in small groups in people’s homes after our worship service. We divided our church family into those small meeting groups (8–12) to share a potluck lunch and chat through the issues with a prepared discussion leader. We sought input and permission from all our generational groups to move forward. At those sessions, people were allowed to ask questions, express their concerns, be heard, and receive information.

Since we are in the process of changing all the time, it is important for us to move together. Today we still work our process, but it is much easier now when people understand we’re not going to dive off the deep end, and that what we are talking about they can have a part in making it happen. Through working the process, we have established trust and confidence in where we are and where we want to go. Of course, it’s really not possible to get 100 percent on board, but we are close to it.

7. Remember that change brings conflict. We all knew that change would bring some conflict. By taking our time and bringing people along with us, we avoided a lot of incoming flak. Some at first grumbled about things being different than what they were used to. Some weren’t sure if we were changing simply to justify abandoning our Adventist roots somewhere down the line. Some thought we were trying to be “like the world.” Some thought we were just trying to be popular. Time and process, however, helped settle those fears—to change the culture of our church. Our membership would tell you now that they believe the changes we made were Spirit-led.

8. Keep moving forward. Don’t give up. There were times when we felt like giving up. Turning a church around is just plain hard work. When challenged in meetings about what we were trying to do, we knew we had to do a better job at providing information, a better job listening to the members’ concerns, and a better job seeing if the Lord was really the careful Prompter behind the question. When we grew weary at times, we would remind ourselves of our predicament. That would push us forward again. We sought to have the longing desire for our community that is found in the heart of Christ. We knew we just couldn’t give up if He was still out there working.

Here at The Shepherd’s House, we believe we’re at the beginning of our adventure, not at the end. There is an excitement about what may be just around the corner for us. We are being more aggressive in looking around us to find where the Lord is working right now in our community. We want to know how we can go to where He is and how we can work together with Him. We have determined that we want to actually follow Christ into our community.

We know that if we keep doing the same things over and over again, we’re not where He is. He is on the move. We believe we should be too.