Reimagining Church

An Introduction

Looking back as a Gen X child who grew up in the Midwest, life was idyllic. My parents were happily married, I had four wonderful siblings, and there was never a concern about not having enough food to eat or clean clothes to wear. My mother took care of me when I was sick, taking me to see our family doctor when necessary, and my father, who owned his own excavating company, took me to work once I turned 13 years old. 

Another little feature in my childhood life was church life. My family were members of a Church of Christ in LaPorte, Indiana and if the doors of the church building were open, we were there–Sunday morning, Sunday evening, and Wednesday Night Bible Study. My family attended every gospel meeting, “revivals,” which our Church of Christ and other regional Churches of Christ were hosting. It was only later in life that I realized that church was not as important to every family as it was to my family. Years later, that realization seemed like a preview of what was coming to North America. A recent Gallup poll shows that post-pandemic church attendance in the United States is at thirty-one percent, which is ten percent lower than in 2012.¹

Numbers aside, the changing religious landscape of North America impacts the way people conceive of life. The rise of secularism has resulted in a mindset characterized by what Charles Taylor describes as an immanent framework, which is closed to an awareness of transcendence.² In other words, most people can live their lives on any given day without any awareness of a sacred and divine presence. Consequently, even when the loss of the sacred is experienced in different ways, the default response is not to seek after God. Even when people consider the possibility of the sacred, there are other options besides Christianity. 

In addition to the challenge of secularism, the demographics in many communities are changing as diversity increases. Just as an anecdote, my children attended elementary school with children from thirty-two different ethnic and national backgrounds. Their fellow students were white, black, and brown, some of whom lived in households where English was the second language. There are also plenty of urban, suburban, and even rural communities facing different economic challenges that new churches must engage in.³

More germane to the Churches of Christ is the decline of congregations and members among this fellowship of believers. At its peak in 1990, the Churches of Christ consisted of 13,027 congregations with a reported membership of 1,284,056. More recent statistics gathered by the 21st Century Christian in 2020 show that Churches of Christ consist now of 11,914 congregations and a reported 1,113,362 members. These stats led Tim Woodruff and Stan Granberg to project that with just a 5% loss of members every one to three years, there will be an 80% loss with just 250,000 members in 2050–a little over twenty-five years from now.⁴

Although such numbers are bleak in and of themselves, they don’t reveal the full reality. The Churches of Christ, which I have proudly served as a minister of the gospel for twenty-five years, is made up of local congregations that are aging, shrinking, and geographically isolated. Most congregations are well over fifty years of age, have less than one hundred members, and are located in one particular region of the United States, commonly referred to as the Bible Belt. For the most part, congregations are very homogenous with a one-size-fits-all relation to their local context. As a result, consideration for the local context in the way a congregation embodies the gospel is a challenge that requires adaptive changes too difficult for most congregations.

So what is the future? Is there even a future?

Although the future may appear dismal, I believe there is hope because God the Father, Son, and Spirit is still redemptively at work. The mission of God continues and so the Churches of Christ don’t need to find a new mission but instead just continue living as participants in God’s mission.⁵

Such participation in the mission of God is what this Reimagining Church project is about, particularly through the practice of church planting. Mission Alive is committed to planting new churches, or establishing what we call “innovative faith communities,” throughout North America. This means engaging new people with the gospel in a holistic manner that results in new communities of people coming to faith and learning to follow Jesus Christ together. However, establishing new innovative faith communities requires a robust theological praxis that opens space for the contextualized embodiment of the gospel among local neighborhoods. 

To this end, the Reimaging Church project will explore the theological and practical issues that are necessary for conversations as church planting participants in the mission of God. Whether you are a leader, such as a minister or an elder, in an existing church that wants to help start new churches, or you are a student considering the ministry of establishing new innovative faith communities, this is the start of a conversation for you and us together.

Our conversation is framed in two parts, with the first consisting of the various theological issues and the second part addressing practical ministry matters. The specific theological topics to be addressed are Missiology, Hermeneutics, Theology, Christology, Pneumatology, Soteriology, Ethnography, Ecclesiology, and Eschatology. For practical ministry matters, the specific topics will include Ethics, Incarnational Praxis, Social Displacement, Religious Trauma, Post-Christian Leadership, Pastoral Care, Evangelism, Environment, Proclamation, and Spiritual Formation. These two parts open space for developing necessary theological praxis in establishing innovative faith communities. Our conversation partners consist of men and women with ties to the Churches of Christ, some of whom are teaching in various universities and others serving as ministry practitioners throughout North America.

We pray this series offers a path forward as participants in the mission of God. Please join us in dialogue through comments in each Substack post.

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K. Rex Butts, D.Min, serves as the lead minister/pastor with the Newark Church of Christ in Newark, DE, and is the author of Gospel Portraits: Reading Scripture as Participants in the Mission of God. Rex holds a Doctor of Ministry in Contextual Theology from Northern Seminary in Lisle, IL, and a Master of Divinity from Harding School of Theology in Memphis, TN. He is married to Laura, and together they have three children.

1. Jeffrey M. Jones, “U.S. Church Attendance Still Lower Than Pre-Pandemic,” Gallup (June 26, 2023), last accessed Tuesday, December 5, 2023. By comparison, according to a simple search on the internet, church attendance in Canada is roughly at twenty-five percent and roughly at fifty percent in Mexico.

2. Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2007), 294.

3. Mission Alive has identified one hundred marginalized communities in need of churches that can “engage the brokenness of their respective community” (see https://missionalive.org/100-marginalized-communities-initiative/).

4. Stanley E. Granberg, Empty Church: Why People Don’t Come and What To Do About It (2022), 40-41.

5. Christopher J.H. Wright, The Mission of God: Unlocking the Bible’s Grand Narrative (Downers Grove: IVP Academic, 2006), 62, “the mission of God is the prior reality out of which flows any mission that we get involved in. Or, as has been nicely put, it is not so much the case that God has a mission for his church in the world but that God has a church for his mission in the world. Mission was not made for the church, the church was made for mission–God’s mission.”