Each week I speak with pastors and key church leaders who are interested in doing the much needed and challenging work of revitalization. One of my standard questions I ask churches is this:
What is your church’s reason for existence?
Or, to frame it using Simon Sinek’s language, What is your church’s unique WHY?
You might be surprised to learn how difficult answering these questions is for many church leaders today. Many of us (myself included) have spent a few years since the pandemic trying to increase online engagement (or at least develop an online presence). We have exhausted ourselves trying to understand why so many people disappeared from our churches. We have tried everything we know to try and get them to return and consumed ourselves with our dwindling financial resources. While some people are finally returning, many are not.
Just in the last month, I have had multiple conversations with key leaders who have come to Cyclical Full Circle looking for help to re-engage their congregation on mission. These leaders have a deep sense that their current congregations are not their pre-pandemic congregations (and they are right). They seem to understand that they have experienced some “mission drift” and aren’t sure where God is leading them in the future. So how might faithful leaders like you begin to re-engage and inspire your church to greater missional faithfulness?
In this article, I’d like to walk you through four steps that I advise churches to take in order to re-engage on mission:
- Step 1: Accurately Assess Your Starting Point
- Step 2: Focus On Your Foundation
- Step 3: Refresh Your Vision
- Step 4: Launch A Missional Experiment In 2024
1. Accurately Assess Your Starting Point
You need to know where you are before you can know where you are going. The church of the present is not the church of the past, and yet so many leaders want to jump immediately into change implementation.
Before you can move forward, you need to have a firm understanding of where your church is right now. A simple look at some key metrics can be really eye-opening. You get to decide what those key metrics are for your church. I recently assessed our staring point, looking at in-person and online worship numbers, financial giving units, leadership, and numbers of people engaged in the mission of the church. I came away with a full page of surprise learnings from it (and not all of it was bad). Analyzing some key metrics will give your leadership a more realistic picture of where and who you actually are today. Accurately assessing your starting point will help you answer a few good questions:
- How would you accurately describe reality for your church today?
- Where is your church experiencing health today?
- Where are you experiencing a lack of health?
- What potential opportunities do you see?
2. Focus On Your Foundation
In Luke 6, we find Jesus’ description of two very different foundations, one built on sand and the other on rock. The foundation built on rock is the foundation that is capable of withstanding the storms that are sure to come. The solid foundation, Jesus says, is the person (church) who not only hears Jesus’ words, but acts on them. A strong foundation for our churches is built by living out the way of Jesus (mission) in the world.
Sadly, what we are learning is that many of our churches have lost touch with mission and lost touch points with their surrounding communities. And many mission statements are just collecting dust. I spoke to a group of church leaders a few months ago and although every one of them knew that their church had a mission statement, not one of them actually knew what or even where it was. I am not suggesting that you must have a mission statement, but I do believe that understanding your reason for existence is a crucial step in building a strong foundation. If you don’t know who you are, it will be very difficult to discern where you are going.
One of our key learnings from Step 1 in our church was that we all felt that our mission field had changed. The people we felt called to connect to had shifted a little. This invaluable piece of information helped shape our strategies moving forward and helped strengthen our foundation.
- Why does your church exist (mission)?
- What is your church’s unique WHY?
- What did we learn from Step #1 that helps us better understand our missional foundation?
- In what ways has our mission field changed and how might this change our strategies?
3. Refresh Your Vision
Vision is always about where you are going as a church; discerning how and where God is leading you into a new and hopeful future. For every one church that has experienced some mission drift post-pandemic, there are 2-3 churches that have experienced vision drift or have no discernible vision at all about where their church is going.
At Full Circle, we see refreshing a church’s vision as one of the most critical steps toward moving into a more hopeful future. I have written more extensively about this in our free eBook, How to Develop a Vision Statement for Your Church, and we have even developed a full retreat for church leaders to help them do this work well.
- Where do you sense the Spirit leading your church in the next 1-2 years?
- Where is your church going?
- How does your church’s mission impact / effect where you are going?
4. Launch A Missional Experiment In 2024
The New Year is coming! The new year offers a chance for new beginnings and chances to move into new things. Yes, I get it; this is a busy season with the holidays upon us. But we simply cannot afford to be about business as usual.
As you reflect on who you are (mission) and where you are going (vision), you will need to consider next steps for your churches. As you consider strategies to help you get there, consider developing a missional experiment to get your congregation moving again, reaching out beyond yourselves, and sharing the love of God with neighbors.
How will you inspire your church to greater missional faithfulness in 2024? Start with one experiment to get you moving again. See what you learn from it and then launch another one!
