OMG CHURCH DECLINE!  Our congregations are getting older!  People don’t tithe so we can’t afford our staff and buildings!  What solutions can we create from business models and hired experts to shake up our congregations so they’ll get some new (hopefully wealthy and generous) faces in the door?

The physics principles of Newton’s cradle (you’ve seen it on someone’s desk) can apply to any attempt to church change.  When someone drops a ball, the kinetic energy flows through the group (which remains largely unmoved), straight into the ball on the opposite side that responds with all the force to come back and fight.  The two balls on the end go at it for a while and everyone in the middle watches.

Maybe this seems meaningless.  A chase after the wind.  And so some don’t put forth the effort to shake things up because it’s not worth their energy.  One key to the success of the Wesleyan movement was that it was based in small accountability groups (class meetings), that were accountable to larger societies where lay preaching happened.  The church was not stepping up to produce Christians, so the Wesley’s took Christianity out of the church buildings and into the streets, fields, and homes of the people.  Instead of a wet-blanket attitude about grace, the Wesley’s emphasized our responsibility in light of grace.  Instead of privatized faith, class members asked each other hard questions and answered with honesty.  Their three rules were to do no harm, to do good, and to attain to all the ordinances of God (that is, to obey the commands of Christ).  The church leaders thought this made Christians too enthusiastic about their faith, thought it was too divisive, thought it was to personal.  But the number of Christians who took their faith seriously went through the roof…and it wasn’t until the Methodist Americans started to build expensive buildings over a century later that the movement lost its momentum and became the new establishment.

Now here we are again, afraid to challenge people, afraid to hold one another accountable, afraid to say a convicting word because the world is already so harsh and we should just play nicely.  We’re afraid to take the church out of the building.  We’ve just got so much history in these expensive buildings.  We’re afraid to give the lay people better education and control of the church because we hire staff and clergy to be our experts.  We’re afraid to focus less on programs and committees and more on spiritual disciplines.  We’ll talk and argue till we’re blue in the face, but we won’t spend equal time in prayer over it.  I could go on, but I think there’s plenty here for one of you out there to pick up the ball and roll with it.