Leap-of-Faith Adventures in the Ventures

Coronavirus and Church Networks, Part 3: Strategic Thinking to Accelerate Churches with Missional and Movemental Agility

Without faith it is impossible to please God.

~Hebrews 11:6

Pray God, I should have been a true and passionate Christian. The adventure. But now I live in 1924, and the Christian venture is done. The adventure is gone out of Christianity. We must start on a new venture towards God.

~D.H. Lawrence, Phoenix, 1924

Life is either a daring adventure or nothing. To keep our faces toward change and behave like free spirits in the presence of fate is strength undefeatable.

~Helen Keller, Let Us Have Faith, 1940

Courage is not simply one of the virtues but the form of every virtue at the testing point, which means at the point of highest reality.

~C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters, 1942

Church and network leaders, this is a once-in-a-lifetime moment that will be in the history books. The Coronavirus pandemic is presenting denominations, networks, ministries, and churches with a set of circumstances creating opportunities to advance, if we’ll adjust and adapt our leadership. How American churches respond will be written in history.

This is our moment to put adventures back into our ventures—leaps of faith without a safety net. Faith initiatives can be catalyzed when opportunity knocks and brotherhood forms or renews around shared risk-taking. More on this later, but first . . .

. . . There are also real challenges and impending dangers. COVID-19 is sounding a warning if we’ll only listen. There may be a fair percentage of churches that will close their doors, not just during the current lockdown, but permanently. For others, there will be longings and attempts to get back to “normal.” Some will try, but in so doing, miss opportunity knocking. Others will end up facing the fact that there’s no going back, yet they’ll have little vision for what the “new normal” should look like.

But then, many churches could really get SET back by the Coronavirus aftermath yet to come, even years back. What do I mean? Well, a “setback” is a reversal or check in progress. Before COVID-19 hit, some churches had been making progress in missional thinking, experimentation and practice. To get “set back,” then, is to delay this progress or make it wait.

A lot remains to be seen, but allow me to unpack what I’m pondering today . . . starting with what just happened this past Sunday.

Easter, the most important event in the Christian calendar, is now in the books for 2020. Just a handful of days ago, Resurrection Sunday worship gatherings were shut down across the entire country to slow the spread of the Coronavirus. Churches that would typically be experiencing their largest crowd of the year were deemed “nonessential” and compelled to offer online services due to social-distancing orders from city or state.

Now, just for fun, imagine if the resurrected Christ were stepping out of the empty tomb on Easter Sunday in 2020. A patrolling officer just happens to be driving by the tomb in his marked car and catches Jesus taking his first step out of the tomb’s entrance where the stone has been rolled away. Leaning out of his patrol-car window, the policeman takes one look at Christ and, while speaking through a coronavirus mask, orders Jesus, “Don’t even think about it!” A bit stunned and taken back, Jesus is left frozen in his tracks. Just a lil’ levity, but let’s look at some “fun facts” that are quite noteworthy and thought-provoking:

Factoid #1: It was the week of Easter in 1983 that the term “megachurch” (to describe of church drawing 2,000 or more on an average weekend), first appeared in a newspaper. The Miami Herald used the term to describe 12,000 attendees cycling through the 3,400-seat Coral Ridge Presbyterian Church with D. James Kennedy. Today, Coral Ridge is no longer a megachurch.

Factoid #2: At Easter, when church attendance has always surged to its biggest day of the year, newspapers liked to report on which church was the biggest. Journalists often identified the first megachurch in America as the 2,890-seat Crystal Cathedral with Robert Schuller. The claim was wrong, since the church didn’t reach 2,000 in attendance until the 1970s. In 2010, the Crystal Cathedral declared bankruptcy.

Factoid #3: Over the last fifty years, the number of megachurches in America nearly doubled during every decade. Today, in a select greater-metro-area city, there could be as many megachurches as there were in the entire country sixty years ago.

Factoid #4: With the rise of megachurches, church membership among U.S. adults has actually declined, especially in the past twenty years (source: Gallup). There are more megachurches than ever before, yet less members of churches than ever before.

Now it should be acknowledged that the decline in church membership might be worse had it not been for megachurch stats. But in terms of overall Kingdom impact collectively, “church growth” strategies have failed. For a megachurch, its kinda like being an all-star player on a losing team.

Over this same time period, “attractional” strategies have tempted pastors to become more like marketers and less like missionaries to their surrounding communities. Having the optimum-sized buildings to gather ever-increasing crowds became what “counted” most for assessing pastoral success. Polished preaching and contemporary worship drove the majority of church budgets and the schedules of paid staff. In order to keep people coming back week after week, the pressure was on to be better week after week, because most every other church in town was doing the same thing.

Then in a matter of days, the Coronavirus pandemic flipped attractional strategies and seemingly shifted thinking toward more missional strategies. Counting butts in seats, bucks in the offering, buildings to maintain, and boards to convene (the four b’s) were eclipsed by a compulsion to consider more organic, simpler forms of church. Church “going” seemed to shift to church “being.'“ But in the early weeks of the pandemic, have attraction-centric churches actually shifted to more missional practices? Well, not so fast.

What’s happened is that the same ol’ services that’ve been on platforms in buildings have now been forced to be recorded or streamed via platforms online. So far, counting continues as before, but now instead of in-person attendance numbers, we’re counting online views. Butts once in auditorium seating simply stayed home to “view church” from the comfort of a living room couch. So now with every login to an online service, even if only for a short part of the sermon or musical segment, a view gets counted.

And with every other church in town doing the same thing, there are a plethora of simultaneous online options available. Church hopping once risked being noticed if ones were missing from a church service on any given Sunday and used to require driving around. Not any more. In a moment and a click . . . church hopping. Now this possibility has been around for a long while, but all of a sudden it’s kind of legit to shop around. Pew potatoes once would sit through the Sunday programing. But couch potatoes are free to roam about the country, even while listening in on their local church service. And since everyone is online Sunday morning, church hopping is no longer limited to driving across town.

Another church’s preacher from anywhere in the world can be someone’s “pastor” on any given Sunday and no one’s local pastor will be any the wiser. Renowned teachers are conveniently being viewed while folks don’t even have to get up from the couch or change out of their jammies. And then they’re also counted in another church’s view tally. And then another. And then another. And now they’ve contributed to several churches feeling good about their viewership ratings or view counts on this new score card. But make note here that “counting” is not the same as “measuring.”

With the novelty of stay-at-home orders and subsequent church-online smorgasbord of options, view counts are up. For some, dramatically. For others, at least above previous regular attendance stats. But beyond this novelty stage, this may be short-lived for churches without tech staff devoted to continually improving online presence and virtual spaces, both with current online tools and emerging digital platforms.

A spike in views is to be applauded if it means more new people, including more younger people that are already more digitally minded, are being ENGAGED in the gospel. And, of course, views of celebrity pastors with national name recognition and recent mention in news media will see a huge spike. But any trend upward in view counts may be a bit of an illusion if equated with “growth,” much like perceptions with the growth of megachurches in terms of overall Kingdom impact collectively. Replacing numerical “church growth” strategies with “church online” strategies may fail to make mission-shaped disciples that actually contribute to the genuine growth of the Kingdom.

As creative online services continue to improve for big-budget churches, even more people can become accustom to “viewing church” (pun intended) as an online spiritual stimulator or morale booster. This is not the same as equipping the church to advance Jesus’ mission in ways that are really transformative to lives and society at large.

Teaching will continue, but are people really engaging with the messages if the sermon audio is merely being played in the background while they’re surfing the net, “following” people on Instagram and scrolling the latest posts of Facebook “friends”?

Pastors are left wrestling with such questions. Is “church online” or “communion online” an oxymoron? Is a virtual gathering a bonafide gathering? What about the seemingly competing commands in Scripture, like . . . Obey the law of the land by submitting to governmental authority that’s ordering churches not to assemble together, and at the same time obey Biblical authority that’s ordering churches “not to forsake assembling together”? There are good answers, but back to my main focus . . .

Now that churches have bolstered their online presence in virtual spaces, will “church online” become the habit of some? Will online presentations be good enough to hold the average viewer that’s becoming accustomed to high-quality live streaming, sharply edited video productions, multiple camera angles, lighting to sooth and comfort, and engineered sound quality? Then how will the average church compare, compete or just keep up with megachurch online productions maintained by full-time tech staff? Over time, are churches creating new expectations for these virtual efforts to remain as ongoing fixtures, even after buildings reopen?

Even before COVID-19, commitment to WEEKLY attendance has been waning, even as a mere expectation. So after the lockdown is lifted, will enough people return consistently to maintain previous levels of infrastructure in terms of critical mass and financial support? Will we see more Crystal-Cathedral-style bankruptcies? Or if churches don’t have to close their doors permanently, will Coral-Ridge-style declines become increasingly more commonplace?

Churches must look and think beyond church -online-as-prepackaged-services to be consumed along with snacks on the couch week after week. Otherwise they could really get set back by the COVID-19 aftermath . . . even years back to again “doing church” in ways that produce consumers of religious goods and services, just to survive, hang on or keep up.

Please don’t misunderstand. Online content may be excellent and more accessible. Both good. But will churches feel forced into competing for a bigger “market share” of an audience they now increasingly expect less of? And if a church can show that “viewership ratings” are still trending up, they may be able to applaud an increase of gospel seed sowing, but will they fall under an illusion that church membership and the Kingdom are  genuinely growing?

Now, threats like this are looming . . . but so are the opportunities.

Leaders of the tribe . . . understood the signs of the times and knew the best course (1 Chronicles 12:32, NLT)

For if you keep silent at this time, relief and deliverance will rise . . . who knows whether you have not come to the kingdom for such a time as this (Esther 4:14, ESV)

The greatest danger in times of turbulence is not the turbulence–it is to act with yesterday’s logic‬.

‪~Peter Drucker‬

America’s churches should not go back to “normal.” Some will try to go back. But the courageous leaders will face the adventures ahead with a “leap of faith” and start making the big shifts needed in church and network ventures. When it comes to navigating the future of our leadership and the shifting of our ministry strategies and structures to meet the reality of a “new normal,” it will become increasingly difficult to do it alone. We are still better together.

GCMovements envisions a winning future, seen though a small window of big opportunity! The rapid changes and seismic cultural shifts in 2020 provide a window of time with enormous opportunity for leaders of churches, ministries, networks, and denominations. A sense of urgency is needed to respond effectively to these significant challenges, even impending dangers. And a unified response together can be a shared “leap of faith” forged in the crucible of 2020, which is a leap year.

The bridge to GCMovements begins with Leap Year 2020, a standalone one-year catalyst being designed to stimulate and facilitate (in some cases, “force” desperately needed) conversations. As we create a culture of courageous conversations, we can then lead strategic thinking around accelerating churches and their leadership with a more missional posture leaning forward with more movemental agility.

Leap Year 2020 will be an onramp for church and network leaders seeking brotherhood around Jesus and His mission, with plans to begin sometime in the summer of 2020.

More than ever, NOW is the time. “New wine” is becoming “old wineskins” seemingly in a fraction of the time. This is having a dramatic impact on pastoral ministry and governance boards responsible for a generation of churches, networks and denominations. We can’t expect significantly different outcomes using outmoded understandings of church and culture.

So, if churches are not prepared for what’s already happening, then how will they respond to what’s likely to happen in the future? The good news is that we can become the church as it was meant to be—a spreading Kingdom-impact movement. We need not settle for striving or merely surviving in this rapidly changing world. Churches can actually be thriving as Jesus redirects His people.

If we are to thrive “for such a time as this,” we will have to embrace cultural changes and see the possibilities in seismic shifts. Jesus is building His church and the gates of hell will not prevail. So, one big opportunity is to recover the New Testament ways of church-as-missional-movement.

Honoring Jesus and His mission, GCMovements aspires for dynamic movements able to shift the tracks of church history from its current trajectory with new tracks of disciple-making, church planting and networking. 20/20 vision for Leap Year 2020 will include an opportunity to be a part of a select brotherhood of leaders pioneering the needed course moving forward.

GCMovements exists to catalyze emerging voices and “think tank” groups for sparking movements of Jesus and His mission . . . and to spark a wildfire in YOU.

Oh, that we’d treat every day like a “leap day”—a day that only comes around once every four years. It marks a "leap" in time. A day of unlocked potential. Speaking of which, there’s a latent seed of a great-commission movement within YOU. And we’d like to see it sprout and shoot up.

Use this day to take a leap. And, while you’re at it, leap over to Take Action in the navigation bar of GCMovements.com and let’s put leap-of-faith adventures back into our ventures! Leap Year 2020 will serve as a bridge to GCMovements.

And then leap over to previous posts in this Coronavirus and Church Networks series:

Part 1—Bound by the Voyage Jesus Launched: Stewardship of Both Structures and Supporting Core Values

Part 2—Shifting the Tracks of Church Networks: Solutions to the Conundrum of Governance in the 21st Century

Bonus poem to preview a future post:

Still Better Together

We gave ourselves to a great-commission unity

And we dove right in as stewards of God’s mystery

Just how did we end up with stumps in the family tree

We’re not quite the movement that we dreamed we'd be

We reminisce about how it was in a simpler time

Before all our scars and ladders of success to climb

But on this sacred ground was drawn a battle line

Guarding our positions, we left brotherhood behind

Somehow, we’ve been losing sight of all the ties that bind

With stubborn paradigms, only God can change our mind

You can bring your unrealized dreams and I'll bring mine

And pray that God will help breached brotherhood realign