Reimagining Church Series
A Conclusion and Invitation
As we end the Reimagining Church blog series, we must pause to consider if this series of 15 articles has accomplished our intent. We all stand in a place in history when American Christianity is losing both numbers and influence. As the Christian worldview wanes across the American cultural landscape it is being replaced with a variety of alternative religious traditions and, more commonly, a secular worldview. It was this realization that sparked Jason Locke and me to lead a workshop at Pepperdine’s Harbor 2023 with the same title (click here). There is no question that American Christianity is shrinking. By some measures, the average size of American Christian congregations has shrunk from about 137 in 2000 to about 68 in 2024. Other measures suggest that the number of congregations is about half of what it was in 2000.
If one wishes to focus exclusively on the a cappella Church of Christ tradition, a quick review of articles in the Christian Chronicle bears similar conclusions. Over the past three years, the Chronicle has published no less than seven articles about churches closing, merging, and shrinking, many of which were flagship churches in this fellowship like the Skillman Church of Christ and Highland Oaks Church of Christ both in Dallas, Texas. There is no question that Churches of Christ are losing significant numbers along with all of American Christianity.
Frequently, experts point to the rapid increase of secularism as a cause of declining Christian influence and numbers. In the introductory article to this blog series, Rex Butts (the editor of Mission Alive’s blog) pointed to Charles Taylor’s seminal work, A Secular Age, in which Taylor describes an “immanent framework, which is closed to an awareness of transcendence.” In other words, a growing number of Americans both inside and outside the Church do not experience, value, or recognize anything above the human plane.
Much of what traditional Christianity provided society is now provided by others outside the Church who come from a humanistic perspective. One example is the role counselors and therapists play. In generations past, it was the local pastor who helped young couples get ready for marriage and conflicted couples work toward a healthier marriage. Admittedly, pastoral help was sometimes lacking and occasionally harmful. Yet, it maintained a transcendent perspective in which God was still believed to be the source of help.
It would be easy to wring our collective hands about the loss of a transcendent worldview. It would be even easier to fixate on congregation size and numbers. What we have attempted to do in this series of articles is something much harder. We have attempted to focus on the future. We invited a variety of leaders, all associated with Churches of Christ, to help us think innovatively about the future of the church. Quite intentionally, we invited younger leaders whose voices may not be heard as frequently.
We hope that by focusing on innovative theology and practice we have pointed all of us to the future. While evaluating the past, the mistakes we made, and the misunderstandings we held is a good place to start, it is not a place to stop. The collective wisdom and experience of all the writers, not to mention all of the readers of this blog, must be focused on presenting the Gospel afresh to our demystified neighbors.
We hope this blog series serves as an invitation to engage in this most important of conversations. We invite you to engage by re-reading the articles, posting your responses, and developing your innovative practices. Then we would love for you to share them with us. We need to learn from each other because in our culture Christianity must be characterized by collaboration, curiosity, and experimentation with no room for judgment.
Collaboration has been foundational in this blog series and we want to thank those who have worked so hard to make this a place where ideas can be freely explored.
We must start by thanking K. Rex Butts for overseeing this project and for all of the time and effort he has contributed to generate this series of articles. His attention to detail, his heart for missional ministry, and his passion to see the Churches of Christ move into the future in a healthy way have served this project well.
We also want to thank each author who contributed their time, expertise, and efforts. They have challenged our thinking. They have pointed us to the future and they have done so with grace and courage. So many of the articles did exactly what we had hoped for. They helped us see the future a bit more clearly and gave us a bit more confidence to move into that future.
Not only do we want to help leaders start and grow new forms of church, but we also want to help established churches missionally engage their community.
In addition, we extend our appreciation to all of those who have subscribed to this blog and participated in reading the articles. This blog series is for you. It is for the practitioner who wants to do theologically and philosophically responsible ministry. It is for the practitioners who frequently struggle in anonymity to embody Christ in their congregation and community. To you we say, Thank you!
Reflections
It has been both fun and fascinating to read the articles in this blog series. Let me share with you some of what caught my attention.
Missions professor at Abilene Christian University, Chris Flanders, kicked off the series introducing us to innovation by describing various new church models. He challenged us to redefine “flourishing” not as membership growth but as living into a missional adventure. Chris also helped identify several types of innovation among churches including architectural, organizational, social, and economic. He challenged us to let go of a list of practices that hinder the traditional church and invited us to discern the way forward out of our missional calling. His article set the bar high for all that followed.
Greg McKinzie, missions minister and adjunct professor, challenged us to interpret scripture by paying attention to God’s present activity in and through the church. Greg called us to a missional imagination–envisioning the world according to God’s purposes.
As the series progressed, other authors challenged us to reimagine even more unique ways to flourish. Claire Frederick helped us reimagine the nature of the located presence of the church. Mark Love challenged us to exchange our theology of glory, through which we think we know Jesus, with a theology of the cross that would lead us into a deeper and more self-sacrificial mission. Nathan Pickard’s article led us to pay attention to our local neighborhoods while Cheryl Russel guided us toward radical liberation.
As the series shifted from theological to practical considerations, Ron Clark took us deeply into the world of religious trauma and helped us understand the central role this has played in the lives of so many people raised in the church.
I found Falon Barton’s article uniquely challenging. She shared her experience with college students who, “Do not see how Jesus is relevant to the most pressing concerns of their present and future” (specifically referring to climate care). She then revealed some spiritual practices that she engages in as a way to care for creation.
Upon reflection, it seems obvious that our fellowship of Churches of Christ has some impressively thoughtful leaders. In my role with Mission Alive, I have the opportunity to interact with leaders from a wide array of denominations. At the end of this blog series, I find myself proud to be a part of a fellowship with such creative and prescient leaders. While it is not Mission Alive’s objective to further the historic Churches of Christ, it is our objective to help start new, innovative communities of faith. I am pleased that this fellowship that holds us together is preparing leaders ready for that task.
What’s Next?
While this blog series has helped us with our task of reimagining church, there is much more to do.
It is true that Mission Alive is specifically a church-planting ministry. It is also true that Mission Alive is more generally a missional ministry (after all, it is in our name). Not only do we want to help leaders start and grow new forms of church, but we also want to help established churches missionally engage their community. To do that effectively, Mission Alive wants to explore all of the ways contemporary leaders are leading their respective churches. We want to understand all of the different innovative church models, economic models, congregation models, and discipleship models to better equip church planters and church leaders.
To further that understanding we want to continue the conversation with a follow-up series. In this next series, we will ask innovative ministry practitioners to write narrative descriptions of their ministry. We will have five authors from Churches of Christ and five authors from outside the Churches of Christ who are actively involved in some kind of innovative ministry. We hope to stoke our collective imagination for how we can develop ministries that more effectively engage our respective communities.
We want to end this blog article with a challenge to prayerfully consider your role in God’s mission. Mission Alive seeks innovative and thoughtful leaders to start fresh communities of faith. God’s mission needs leaders with a deep inner longing to engage unbelievers with a fresh articulation of the Gospel. Mission Alive challenges you to commit yourself to a season of prayer and discernment to see if God is leading you to a new vision of your ministry.
Tod K. Vogt, serves as the Executive Director of Mission Alive in Dallas, TX. Prior to working as Mission Alive’s Executive Director, he served as our Director of Equipping. Tod joined the Mission Alive team in 2007 after several years in local church ministry. Tod began his full-time ministry as a church-planting missionary among the Fon people of Benin, West Africa.