What Can We Do Now?
The Possibilities of Starting Innovative Faith Communities
On behalf of Mission Alive, I hope you have enjoyed reading our series Reimagining Church: Stories of How Innovative Faith Communities Work. This series follows our previous series Reimagining Church: An Innovative Approach to Missions in North America.
With the former series, we sought to explore the theological praxis that shapes the establishment of new churches or what Mission Alive refers to as innovative faith communities. All communities of believers, whether traditional or innovative in practice, have a theology that shapes their beliefs and practices. So, starting with a series exploring the theology and practices necessary for contextualized missions in North America was necessary. But ideas, no matter how good they appear in writing, are good insofar as they are put into practice where we can see if the ideas actually work.
I believe the descriptive accounts of different innovative faith communities have allowed us to see how the reimagined ideas at work are working. This matters because the idea of church, as we have understood, in North America is struggling mightily. The reasons, which are vast and complex, don’t matter. What matters is that we see the reality of what is happening among traditional churches with sober eyes.
I have served as a full-time vocational minister among Churches of Christ for twenty-five years now and love doing so. I am also thankful for the Churches of Christ because I would likely not be a follower of Jesus without this Christian fellowship and some of the wonderful Christians who have taught me to live as a follower of Jesus along the way. I suspect many of you reading the Reimagining Church SubStack hosted by Mission Alive can say the same.
At the same time, serving in ministry has allowed me to visit and talk with many different Churches of Christ. Many of these churches are in decline. As of 2020, there were 1,113,362 members among Churches of Christ, representing nearly 12,000 congregations. But with a 5% rate of yearly decline, by 2050—twenty-five years from now—we would have around 250,000 members.1 That’s just over 80 % in decline.
“Now that we have a better understanding of both the theological praxis necessary for establishing innovative faith communities and what some of these innovative faith communities are like, can we be supportive of this endeavor?”
Jesus tells a metaphorical parable using the image of old and new wineskins. Just as pouring new wine into old wineskins will ruin the new wine when the old, already stretched wineskins burst, trying to embody a renewed understanding of the gospel within the established traditions of existing churches doesn’t usually work. The challenge is that embodying a renewed understanding of the gospel requires new ways, what is often referred to as adaptive change, which is different than technical or tactical change. The latter just improves on what is already being done, like switching from church pews to chairs in the worship center. Such a switch is a change, but it doesn’t require any new ways of thinking and doing. On the other hand, adaptive change requires a new approach to the different challenges, a paradigm shift in the way a church thinks and does the gospel.2
In my experience, there have been two responses to the decline and they both involve grabbing old wineskins. The first is to grab the old wineskins of the Churches of Christ, doubling down on the sectarian practices of legalism that once characterized many congregations. I presume that most readers of this SubStack are not interested in grabbing these old wineskins of the Churches of Christ. The other option then is to grab the old wineskins of other Protestant Churches, both Mainline and Evangelical, thinking that church renewal will follow if the congregation can just add an instrumental worship service or plan a more liturgical style of worship, and perhaps add a coffee bar near the entrance of the building.3
But here’s the hitch and the pastor in me. I know that adaptive change is difficult and not every congregation is capable of making such changes without creating a massive division. In fact, I suspect more churches are incapable of adapting than are capable of doing so graciously and lovingly. A division so painful that it expedites the closure of a congregation serves nobody well and certainly doesn’t serve the kingdom of God.
So here is my pitch again: Now that we have a better understanding of both the theological praxis necessary for establishing innovative faith communities and what some of these innovative faith communities are like, can we be supportive of this endeavor? By all means, existing churches should continue trying to serve God faithfully but they can also support a new movement of establishing innovative faith communities. Mission Alive has ways your church can do this and has even identified 100 marginalized communities in North America that need the gospel to be embodied in some new innovative expressions of faith.
Churches of Christ and any other Christian group, can we do this?
K. Rex Butts, D.Min, serves as the lead minister with the Southside Church of Christ in Milwaukee, WI, 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.
Stanley E. Granberg, Empty Church: Why People Don’t Come and What To Do About It, 2022, 40-41.
Alan J. Roxburgh and Fred Romanuk, The Missional Leader: Equipping Your Church to Read A Changing World, San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2006, 98-99. To clarify, adaptive change does not mean changing the gospel message but has to do with how churches embody the unchanging gospel in new (innovative) ways.
Jack R. Reese, At The Blue Hole: Elegy for a Church on the Edge, Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2021, 182-183. The author not only makes this observation about the Churches of Christ grabbing either their old wineskins or the old wineskins of other Protestant denominations but he also discusses five resources within the history of the Churches of Christ that could be the starting point for the adaptive change(s) that open space for potential of a renewed embodiment of the gospel.