Navigating Change: Lessons from Church Renewal

In this episode we discuss the 'elephants' of church renewal. Rev. Dr. Elaine May discusses her work in church renewal and leadership development within the Christian Reformed Church in North America. She highlights the importance of shifting from ownership to stewardship, aligning church ministry with God's mission, and the challenges and blessings of navigating change and discernment in congregational contexts.

The following is a transcript of Season 8 Episode 6 of the Do Justice podcast.  It has been lightly edited for clarity.  Listen and subscribe on your favourite listening app.  

Chris: Well hello friends and welcome to Do Justice. My name is Chris Orme and today I'm very pleased to be joined by Reverend Dr. Elaine May. Elaine is a ministry consultant with the Christian Reform Church in North America. Elaine's consultation work focuses on the development of leaders who partner with God in his redemptive mission. Her area of study at Fuller was in lifelong leadership development. Alain and her husband Greg have four emerging adults and the family's home base is in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Reverend Dr. Elaine May, welcome. Thanks for joining us today.

Elaine: Thanks, Chris. That was a great introduction. Appreciate that. 

Chris: That's the bio. That's the Wikipedia link there for our listeners, but tell us a little more about yourself. Tell us a little more about who you are and tell us a little bit about Thriving Practices and Gatherings.

Elaine: Thanks for this invitation, really honored to join you. I grew up in the Christian Reform Church. I'm a daughter of immigrants from the Netherlands. My grandfather, uncle, and my father are all pastors in the CRC, so I have a deep love for the Christian Reformed Church. Also, because I've been around for so long I know her weaknesses and foibles.

My personal experience of ministering in the denomination is a lot of volunteer ministry before I went to seminary. Then I pastored a church here in West Michigan through a transition – through a church renewal process. Asking big questions about mission and how do we partner with God and what he's doing in the neighborhood. Then, I transitioned from that work to working for the denomination and helping churches, bi-nationally, engage God's mission in their context.

Chris: Awesome work and I just want to say thank you. I talk about it a lot here, I have such a love for the church. I can tell, even in our conversations before we started recording, you just have such a love for this church. That being said, if you could snap your fingers and give one gift to CRC churches, what would it be?

Elaine: If I could help churches do one thing, that would be shifting from a posture of ownership to a posture of stewardship. Often, we hear in congregations: “My church.” “This is my church. This is the way I want things to be.” If I could with the snap of my fingers shift that to a posture of: I am a disciple of Jesus partnering with him in what he's doing through this church that is his. I just get to steward it for a season. That would be a game-changer.

Chris: I wanted to drill into that a little bit, because I want to know what that would look like? I think oftentimes when we talk about the church and we talk about our ministries, we throw a lot of big words around. We say things like incarnational and we’re focused on that track. When we incarnate or in-flesh something, there that tends to be that sense of ownership. So how do we take our hands off a little bit and move into stewardship?

Elaine: Using that metaphor of your hands, when we own something – in my estimation – we hold it tightly. We've got a firm grip on it when I own something. When I'm stewarding something, the primary ownership is not mine but it has been placed in my hands. There's responsibility, but I don't have to grasp it. I can hold it with open hands. When we see ministry through the church, open-handedly, I think it allows for the breath of the Holy Spirit to merge with our human abilities. We leave room for God to do what he wants with our church, because ultimately he owns the church.

Chris: Elaine, what's something that people won't say about decline in church participation, but would be a really helpful starting point in being a light to the world? 

Elaine: Thanks Chris. One of the things we discovered coming out of a pandemic when church attendance was really shut down for multiple years, longer in Canada than in the US. One of the things we discovered was there was probably about 30% of the church that didn't come back. They didn't return to weekly Sunday attendance. As we dig into some of that research, what we discovered is there was this 30% that were coming to church not knowing why they were coming to church. There was a commitment, a schedule, and a ritual of coming, but it was not connected to the purpose. 

What the pandemic revealed is that there are churches that are experiencing decline that lack a clear sense of mission. If you don't know why you're coming to church on Sunday, it's really easy after the pandemic to identify the fact: I didn't really miss it. I had my people in the bubble that I was able to get together with, I didn't need to include the church in that bubble. I didn't miss them when they weren't there. So the relational connection wasn't strong enough to bring this 30% back to church. My hypothesis, in some of the research we've done on it, says it's because the church ministry wasn't connected to God's mission in the world. I think the elephant in the room is churches who lack a sense of connectivity and clarity about God's mission in the world have a hard time recruiting people to just come to church.

Chris: I have so many more questions and I think the first one is: What is God's mission? How do you articulate that?

Elaine: That's a great question. In the course we created, Thriving Essentials, we structure the course around Christopher Wright's definition of mission. He says mission is “our committed participation as God’s people, at God’s invitation and command, in God’s own mission within the history of God’s world for the redemption of God’s creation.” Briefly, we can say that the church does not have a mission. Get this. The church does not have its own mission. God's mission has a church.

As God's people, we are both commanded and invited to participate in what God is doing. That's the redemption of God's creation, which is huge. There's so much we can include in the redemption of God's creation. It's both people and places and structures and systems. There's a lot for us to participate in. What we found in the research is that the church hasn't done a good job, in general, of clarifying what their participation in God's mission is. Therefore, people who have a strong desire to use their gifts and energy in their church, but people don't know what's expected of them. This does create this sense of decline that we're seeing in the church, because purpose and meaning is so important to a human being that the church now couldn't have a significant role in helping people find connectivity to God's mission.

Chris: You give us a good picture of a compelling “Why”, and it's the identifying of that mission. Can you tell us what it looks like when a church is doing that? What's an example of a church finding or understanding their place in God's mission?

Elaine: We have a number of churches that come to mind. I think one of the tensions is sometimes these churches aren't big. Numerically, they're not huge churches, but they're doing significant ministry. Again, one of the principles that we teach in Thriving Essentials comes out of Ephesians 2:10. We often use this verse for individuals. I think it also applies to the church. Paul writes that God has prepared good works for you to do. He's prepared these opportunities to partner with him, good works for them, for us to engage in. 

When we look at this verse through the lens of a congregation, there are good things for us to do and there are some good things that are not ours to do. There are some good works that are for someone else to do. The churches that are really living in to their unique mission are very focused. They're not doing a lot. They're doing a few things really well. I think that's another shift we're seeing in our culture. Gone are the days when a church can provide a lot of programming. Unless you're a large church ministry, which isn't the case for many of our Christian Reformed congregations. When we give churches permission to say no to some things, they can say yes to the things that God's clearly inviting them to engage. We see increased engagement. We see ministry that extends beyond the walls of the church building. We see people growing in their faith personally. That personal transformation influences the corporate transformation of the whole body.

Chris: How does the church do that? Can you give us an example of a church that has gone through that narrowing process, that focusing process of saying, “Okay, we've got fifteen programs here that are scattered all over the place.” Can you tell us a story of a church that went through that process? What were they doing and then where did they land?

Elaine: It takes a lot of courage and a lot of discernment to go through this process because, inevitably, you're going to end up cutting a program that someone in the church loves. They have a lot of love around this program. I can't even name it, it could come in any form. 

One of the churches that set out on a journey to define their unique missional identity was Trinity Christian Reformed Church in the Grandville-Jenison area. They got so clear on it that they renamed themselves. They became The Refuge. They went from Trinity Christian Reformed Church to The Refuge. I would suggest that the transformation that took place in the church body was just as significant as the name change. What happened was, they saw themselves as stewards of this congregation in this church. They began asking the question, what is our unique mission? What has God given us to do? 

They walked out… This isn't rocket science but it does take courage. They walked out the front door of the church. On either side of the property, there were creeks. They're in the Rush Creek watershed. A creek on the left and a creek on the right. They noticed that these were unkept, neglected streams. They said, “At minimum, we’re to take care of the creation right outside our door. This is where God has placed us – in this watershed. We're going to invest in the cleanup of the creeks.” 

Through that process, interestingly enough, providentially, they have someone in the congregation who has a relationship with the Department of Michigan that oversees the health of the waterways. So, they reach out to the Department of Natural Resources. The department asks, “Hey, would you like to be trained on how to assess and measure the health of the water?” They come out, they train the church on how to take care of the streams. They regularly test the water and upload what they're learning. Over the years, they've seen wildlife return to the streams. It has become an integral part of the ministry of the congregation. On a nice summer day, you'll see the pastor and his wife bring their kayaks to church and they'll paddle up and down the streams. This is now part of how they are participating in the redemption of God's creation. 

They’ve gone on to say, “Hey, we're a refuge for wildlife. We're a refuge for those in the community who are coming to the United States as refugees. We're also a refuge for people with disabilities.” That's another way in which they have identified their unique mission. They created a sensory sanctuary where, on Sunday morning, people of all abilities can participate in worship. 

There are a lot of things they don't do. There are a lot of things they said no to. Discipleship does not come through Gems and Cadets or Coffee Break, which are some of our traditional ministries. It happens on a Saturday, tapping maple trees and hearing a spiritual formation talk about the ministry of the Holy Spirit. I don't know how Pastor Gerry does it. I couldn't put together that talk. But it is true to who they are and what they've been uniquely called to do.

Chris: That is awesome. I'm kind of flabbergasted. I'm not going to lie. I'm just thinking of the significance… First, you blew my mind at the point of “Let's change our name.” In the biblical record, there's some significance of when a name is changed, an alignment and a trajectory is adjusted. I could only imagine that there were some involved in that process that may have been a little bit anxious. There may have been a little bit of fear. I'm wondering if you could share a story about a difficulty that you've experienced helping churches work on renewal and where you see God working in it. Because, it's a great story and it's a beautiful image, but I'm sure that there were some difficulties. What have you seen in your work with the church?

Elaine: People leave. That’s the hardest part. Because our metaphor for church is family. The CRC, our metaphor, it's family. When people say, “You know what, that can be. We even affirm that that is the mission that God's given to this church, but I no longer identify with it. So I'm going to go somewhere else.” That is hard work and that does happen. It's really sad when it does. It's also part of this sense of calling and having faith that they're discerning the direction of the spirit correctly. I don't think anyone lost their faith over that change. But they did lose their church family. 

If I've noticed anything in the work that I do in church renewal, there is significant grief when people leave or people don't come back after COVID. People don't explain why they're not coming back. They don't want to do an exit interview. There's grief and some fear that we're not going to make it. So, the church renewal work, the getting clear on your mission and how your mission aligns with God's redemptive mission in the world, it does require faith, and courage, and a process for paying attention to the grief, and a way of processing it together.

Chris: I want to pull over on the people leaving. I've been part of something similar. I remember feeling sad and feeling worried, but also feeling a sense of loss of the connection with some of the people that felt like the church I was attending at the time wasn't where they wanted to be.

How can we bless people and release them? If our mission as a church or if our particular context is pulling us in one direction and it's not for everyone or not everyone's feeling that same conviction, how do we bless and release people? Is there a good way to do that? Have churches had an opportunity to do that in your experience?

Elaine: Yeah, probably quite a bit of experience. I can speak from personal experience. Often, when people are losing their church, because that's what happens during the church renewal process, things begin to change. There are losses. We're not singing the songs we used to sing. The people that were typically here are no longer here. We don't have as many children in worship. All these losses. People don't resist change. They resist loss. People aren't change resistant, but they don't want to lose the things that are important to them, understandably. 

Often the church that they're in is the one that nurtured their faith. There's this deep connection. Their faith in Jesus is connected to the ministry of the church. When you're in a leadership position, Todd Bowles-Singer says leadership is disappointing people at a rate they can handle. Sometimes, I didn't do that very well. I disappointed people at a rate they couldn't handle. I hope that I’ve learned a little bit over the years. Realizing that whatever the emotional response of the person in front of you is, it’s probably connected to loss and it's not personal. 

We have, I have, a hard time moving towards people who are angry with me. As soon as I could see them for… Hey, they can take their anger out on me. They're not really angry with me. They're grieving. They're identifying the loss. I'm the target for that loss. Then I could step toward them and say, “Let me have it, tell me what’s going on. Stay in relationship with me, don’t pull away.” I could even say to them, “I don’t like this either.” I am grieving that ministry in the nineties is not what we're experiencing today. The heyday of the fifties is not what we're seeing today, where you met somebody and it was like, “Where do you go to church” not if you go to church. I don't like it either. 

We're just doing the best we can with what we sense God calling us to. We're just trying to be faithful with a sense of humility and a sense of: Hey, we're in this together. We’re just trying to follow Jesus. People have a pretty hard time staying angry, because they pretty much get that. If we can have the courage to step towards each other when the emotions begin to flare, we have a chance at saying, “We bless you. We know that this isn't for you anymore. Can we help you find a new worshiping community? We don't want you to leave church altogether.” That's that holding it loosely. If God is going to build this church, I don't have to hold on to every member, because I'm not fearing that if they take their money and walk out the door, this thing's not going to make it. If it doesn't make it, then God has got something else in store for us. That's that stewardship piece, not the ownership piece. I've talked to church leaders and council members who have said, “The church isn't going shut down on my watch.” I hope that doesn't happen to you, but it might happen. You might not be able to do anything about it. 

Chris: It's such a redemptive picture though, what you're painting here for us. In that we can,  when we're aligning with God's mission, when we even just saying those words, this is God's mission, so I release you to go and find an expression, and a calling, and an invitation that matches your heart. It's a redemptive approach.

Elaine: Yeah, it's a big church approach, not a little church approach. It's seeing God's church as bigger than just one entity.

Chris: We're coming to the end of our time and this has been great. I'd love to hear a little bit about Gather. Can you tell us about your work with Gather? Maybe point us in some directions where our listeners can find out more about the work that you're doing and how to engage with you.

Elaine: Through the work that we did through Thriving Essentials, Thriving Essentials ended up being my doctoral project. So we got to do a lot of extra work studying it, piloting it, tweaking it. Through that research we discovered that the most relevant sessions… We talk about mission, discipleship, discernment, and leadership. The most relevant sessions were mission and discernment. So what we've been talking about, how do we see ourselves as a church that's on assignment from God, participating with him and what he's doing. That's the unique missional identity that we teach. The second thing is how do we listen to the one who's in charge of the church? How do we figure this out? We want to figure this out. But how do we do that discernment work together? How can it be? Listening to the one who's in charge of the church rather than the loudest voice in the church pushing their agenda or their personal preferences. 

What we began to realize is we have some underdeveloped discernment muscles in the denomination. Everything that I'm doing now is to strengthen those discernment muscles. Susan Beaumont in her book, Leading in a Liminal Season, chapter 4, if you if you want to read more about a deciding mindset or a discerning mindset take a look at that chapter. That's the core of the content there in the discernment section of Thriving Essentials. 

Gather came out of the synodical mandate to reverse and arrest membership decline in the denomination. It's a pretty lofty task. I'm just going to say, humanly-speaking, it's not possible. Now, through the work of discernment, I think we can align ourselves with what God's doing. It requires the work of figuring out what that is. Gather is an initiative to do corporate discernment across the entire denomination. We're gathering five classes in ten events. So every classis will be invited to participate in one of the Gather events. Each of the events is one piece of the discernment process. What is God doing throughout the denomination? We're gonna exercise some of those discernment muscles and strengthen our ability to listen to the one who's in charge of the church. Then coming out of the twelve to eighteen month discernment process, we're pretty confident that God's going to show us how we are to align ourselves with what he's doing. You can read more about the Gather initiative at CRCNA.org/gather. You can find out which event your classis is invited to participate in. We're going to hit ten big cities across the United States and Canada. Each classis will be able to send fifteen people from the classes. They will gather with another fifteen from the other four classes.

Chris: Awesome work. Awesome stuff. Thank you. Thank you so much. It's exciting to hear about this work. Our guest today has been Reverend Dr. Elaine May, serving as a ministry consultant with the Christian Reformed Church in North America. Elaine, thanks so much for today.

Elaine: Thanks for the conversation, Chris. Really appreciate it.