The Redevelopment Loop

From the book Holy Conversations: Strategic Planning as a Spiritual Practice for Congregations by Gil Rendle and Alice Mann. Copyright © 2003 by the Alban Institute, Inc. All rights reserved.  Reproduced by permission. 

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In a time when stability is drifting toward stagnation, a congregation might find a way to take a fresh look at the three formation questions. In the evangelical tradition, periodic revivals may have served this purpose to some extent, long before anyone started to study congregational development; in more catholic traditions, teams from religious orders would come to a church and conduct a preaching mission. These periods of intense proclamation, prayer, song, and study would interrupt “business as usual” and press the church back to fundamental questions of faith. Because they were systemwide interventions, they introduced common language and frameworks to which leaders could later refer as church decisions were made. Today it is common for churches to engage in strategic planning—even in times of relative stability—to refocus the congregation on fundamentals and to ask challenging questions about identity, purpose, and context. Other congregations rely on the self-study process that accompanies the selection of a new pastor to help them take stock.

Two tendencies prevent churches from revisiting the formation questions when everything seems to be working. First, the renewal event, self-study, or planning process may be rejected outright under the banner, “If it ain't broke, don't fix it.” The new perspective provided by a revival leader, consultant, or self-study process may seem quite unnecessary, since the congregation's key programs are humming along successfully. Second, the congregation may undertake the process but discount any disturbing trends or hard questions that come to the surface. Some theorists argue that a system will never question its fundamental assumptions until the pain induced by present practices becomes intolerable.

In the early stages of decline, a congregation might gain some motivation to revisit the formation issues. If some way is found to look hard at the facts, avoid blame, and engage in new learning, we might call this process revitalization—a term implying that there is still substantial vitality present that can be refreshed and refocused. Though congregations usually expect that the call (or  appointment) of a new pastor will accomplish this work automatically, a change in leadership will not, by itself, alter the curve. If the new pastor has the skills, information, and political support to raise the formation questions again effectively, a new era of vitality might ensue. More typically, the forces driving the decline—internal dysfunction, external change, or both—will be ignored until things get worse. In that case, the new pastor will experience (and often collude with) the congregation's two most destructive illusions: the fantasy that growth can occur without change and the fantasy that change can occur without conflict.

When a congregation has been declining steadily for years and even decades, when it has sustained significant losses in people, energy, flexibility, and funds, then the path back to the formation questions is far more costly. The farther you slip down the decline side of the curve, the more capital it takes—spiritually, financially, and politically—to create the possibility of a turnaround. Yet there may still be tremendous potential for spiritual growth, invitational outreach, and community ministry.

In my experience, redevelopment efforts are often “undercapitalized” in all three ways. Many are set up for:

• Spiritual failure: The congregation has not really faced the fact that it is dying— that most elements of an old identity and purpose must be relinquished if anything new is to occur.
• Financial failure: Leaders are working with an inadequate budget or overly optimistic revenue projections.
• Political stalemate: Leaders—at both the congregational and denominational levels— severely underestimate the amount of political resistance that redevelopment efforts can provoke.

Those are stark assertions. I have presented them not to discourage the work of redevelopment— which has occupied a great deal of my ministry—but to increase the chances that specific redevelopment efforts will succeed. Redeveloping congregations are important to the whole church for several reasons:

• Often they are located in communities where the needs for ministry are enormous.
• Since all congregations will eventually face similar issues, these churches are engaged in important learning.
• Whether or not they succeed in establishing a new era of stability, redeveloping congregations live out the mystery of death and resurrection by “losing their life to find it.”