Reawakened: Activate Your Congregation to Spark Lasting Change

By Glen Guyton

San Antonio, TX 78258
 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Herald Press
• Release date: May 18, 2021
• ISBN: 9781513807645

Glen Guyton

Glen Guyton is executive director of Mennonite Church USA, the first African American to serve in that role, and consults with leaders to help them reap the benefits of developing more diverse, inclusive, and culturally competent organizations. A proven leader, Guyton is a former Air Force Officer and has years of experience serving in executive roles, coaching leaders, and cultivating relationships with diverse volunteers and donors. A father of two and a native of Houston, Texas, Guyton stays in shape and helps to offset his passion for great food by running. He holds a BS in management from the U.S. Air Force Academy and an MS in education from Regent University.

Book preview

Introduction

Awake, O sleeper,

rise up from the dead,

and Christ will give you light.

—EPHESIANS 5:14 (NLT)

WHEN I REFLECT on the state of the Christian church in the United States, I can’t help but think about the scene from the movie Monty Python and the Holy Grail. (For my readers who are younger than Gen X, check it out on YouTube and thank me later.) In the Bring out your dead scene, a dirty undertaker and his hirelings pick up the bodies of poverty-stricken people who have died from the plague. The undertaker and his crew of workers throw body after body into a wooden cart. The pile of mud-covered bodies gets higher and higher as the undertaker repeatedly yells, Bring out your dead, in a monotonous, macabre, joyless, military-like jody. At one stop, an impoverished old man cries out, I’m not dead yet. The undertaker’s helper replies, Well, you need to go anyway. You’ll be dead soon. Back and forth they banter in their dry British humor. The man is clinging to life but continues to protest his addition to the cart. Eventually, the undertaker clubs the man on the head, knocking him unconscious, and his hirelings throw him onto the cart with the other bodies.

The Monty Python sketch, oddly enough, reminds me of the church. At times I see the church surrounded by hopelessness and death, but not able to make a difference. All around, there is need. People are in trouble, crying for help, but the church in the United States is not standing out as a beacon of hope. The church is calling out for people to join us, crying out to be noticed. To those in the younger generation, the church is insisting, Hey, I am still here, but this modern world seems to be moving on.

The challenge church leaders face today is that our culture is becoming increasingly skeptical of religious leaders and institutions, leaving churches increasingly marginalized and isolated from the center of community life. Not only is there significant skepticism about churches, but in some circles, there is growing hostility and resentment toward the church because of widely publicized cases of sexual abuse, greed, and partisan politics. Instead of being seen as contributors to the community, churches are increasingly seen as a drain on the community.

A young sociologist friend of mine who studies the decline in church attendance says that more and more people are moving away from the church not because they lack faith in God, but because the church is no longer relevant to meeting their needs. In their book, Church Refugees, sociologists Josh Packard and Ashleigh Hope address this idea that the church in the United States has become increasingly irrelevant. They write, The two most important macro-level trends are undoubtedly the loss of trust in social institutions in general and religious leaders in particular, and the perception that religious institutions are no longer tied into the daily life of individuals as intimately as they once were.¹

The increasing marginalization of the church in the United States can be seen in dropping levels of church participation. According to a study done by the Pew Research Center, rates of both religious affiliation and religious attendance are declining. Over the last decade, the share of Americans who say they attend religious services at least once or twice a month dropped by seven percentage points, while the share who say they attend religious services less often (if at all) has risen by the same degree. Today, 54 percent of Americans now say they attend religious services only a few times a year. Only 45 percent of Americans say they visit religious services monthly.²

One of the most striking things about the decline in church participation is the generational differences. Participation in the church isn’t just decreasing overall—it’s decreasing most in the youngest generations. With each new generation, there has been a greater decline in Americans who identify as Christian. Only 49 percent of millennials consider themselves Christian, while among Generation X, one of the smaller generations, with 65 million members, 67 percent identify as Christian. Millennials are the second-largest generation in the U.S. population, with 72 million members, and many of them dropped the habit of participating in church after they graduated high school. The largest generation on the horizon is Gen Z, at 90 million strong. It is not too late for us to adapt and reach them.

Michael O. Emerson and Christian Smith note in their book about evangelicals and race in America that the organization of American religion is characterized by disestablishment, pluralism, competition, and consumer choice.³ These factors have contributed to a culture in which many people increasingly choose not to participate in church at all. The church in the United States has become a victim of its own consumerism. It is no wonder that so many of our churches are increasingly disconnected from the life of their communities and are faced with waning attendance and decreasing financial support. Too many leaders are building empires rather than building up the lives of people.

Some have attempted to respond to these cultural shifts by embracing a form of neo-traditionalism. That is not what this book is advocating. In my experience, neo movements are a red herring in the search for a culturally relevant model of church. Neo-traditionalist churches look to the good old days as their ideal, and are usually homogenous, rather than modeling the diverse and inclusive nature of the church in the book of Acts. They romanticize a bygone era before technology, the Internet, the dissolution of the nuclear family, and in many cases, before the new, more inclusive cultural diversity that is present in the twenty-first century. When we perpetually mourn the good old days, we fail to speak to the contemporary realities of life. Yes, those involved in neo-traditionalism can reformulate tradition for new purposes, crafting new institutional solutions that enjoy the benefit of social familiarity and embeddedness in local culture. But shaping congregations that connect with contemporary people in truly effective ways demands an understanding not simply of how culture and vision are recrafted, but that also asks: Who does the recrafting? How is power exercised? What interests are we pursuing? It is good to look back to the key lessons of the past, but we must interpret the modern-day applications of the past, not stay stuck in the past, especially given the history of racism, sexism, and classism in the United States. Depending on your social status or identity, the good old days may not have been that good. The gospel is for all, not just a select few.

Neo-traditionalists put their faith and that of others in danger when they ground the intellectual viability of the church on the idea that the church’s teaching has never changed. While the church should not be held captive by popular culture, it must find ways to respond to the changing impact of culture on people. When neo-traditionalist churches allow themselves to be guided by a romanticized view of the past, they lose power and purpose.

Contemporary church leaders would be better served by reflecting on the Sankofa bird as a model of integrating the past with the future. Sankofa is an African word from the Akan people in Ghana that literally means it is not taboo to fetch what is at risk of being left behind. The word is derived from the words san (return), ko (go), fa (look, seek, and take). The symbol of the Sankofa bird is a stylized drawing of a bird whose feet are grounded and pointed forward, and whose head is turned back yet remains alert to what lies ahead. The Sankofa bird reminds us that we must continue to move forward as we remember our past, planting seeds for the generations that come after us. The activated church builds on the foundation and lessons of the past but continues to advance and cultivate future generations.

What is the cause of the increasing marginalization of the church in American communities? It would be easy for me to get on my high horse and say, The problem is that most church leaders stink. That wouldn’t be helpful, and I am pretty sure I can’t place a laughing out loud emoticon in this book to ease the tension that statement would create. As church leaders, most of us are committed and faithful. Depending on where we are in our leadership journey, we may feel deeply discouraged about dwindling congregations and the increasing marginalization of the church in the surrounding culture. We are tasked with leading in a culture that seems to no longer value church participation. We know God is faithful and that we are working harder than ever at the job of ministry, even as fewer and fewer people join our congregations. Depending on our demographics, those who do join are much more likely to be in their seventies than in their twenties. And to the next generation, membership is less likely to translate into regular participation in worship. It’s clear that the church must change.

Several factors have contributed to the decrease in church attendance among Americans. One factor is that our sense of community, which was traditionally rooted in faith communities, is increasingly found in new social locations. I define community as a group of people who share common attributes that create strong, lasting bonds and a sense of belonging that guides and shapes behavior. Our understanding of community also shapes our values. The new centers of community for many in the younger generations are sports, school and its related activities, and the Internet. For most younger people, the church is not the center of community activity, even on Sundays. Club sports and traveling teams take families away from Sunday church attendance. Increasing debt and changes in family structure also affect the traditional Sunday morning service, as families burnt out by trying to make ends meet find that they lack motivation to hop in the car and attend an early morning worship service.

The transient nature of our society is another factor that has affected the church. If the beginning of the twentieth century was marked by the growth of the city and the mid to late twentieth century was marked by the growth of the suburbs, the beginning of the twenty-first century is marked by a return to the city. Geographic mobility has a direct impact on the growth potential and sustainability of a church. A 150-year-old church building cannot be picked up and moved, but families do move as young people follow jobs and societal movements. What was once a thriving populace in 1995 might be a community faced with a dying economy in 2021.

In our work and social relationships, Americans engage each other differently than we did in the past. We are broadly much more transient than generations past, and we are experiencing an increased isolation in many communities, where it’s less common to know our neighbors. Because of how the world changed in 2020, we now know that developments in communication and software technology can create a sustainable form of community. Before COVID-19, we thought it was just the younger generations who consumed and stayed put, forming online relationships. Now we are all seeing that it is possible to sustain long-term relationships with people who live in geographically distant locations. We no longer need to live and work in the same place. We do not have to see people or appear in person in order to feed ourselves, educate ourselves, or earn a living. The ability to work remotely decreases the importance of living near an office park or of forming relationships that take us to a physical church building. Some might argue that the social needs the church used to meet are no longer germane, because of the changes in our culture. Instead, I’d argue that we are connecting in many different ways in the twenty-first century, including through groups such as online potlucks.

In prior generations, there was often social pressure for some demographic groups to just do church. A white friend told me a story of her grandparents, who were not particularly God-loving people, but were adamant about attending church regularly in the 1950s. She reflects that their church membership likely had more to do with assimilating as new immigrants, seeking middle-class respectability, and creating social connections than it did with Christian conviction. Nowadays, people join country clubs, service organizations, book clubs, sports groups, and professional organizations to meet those same needs. You can even belong to these groups virtually. In this sense, what has changed is not the church, but the values of the surrounding culture.

For other Americans, church provided a refuge that could be found in few other spaces. For my family, and for many people of color, participation in the church was not so much about seeking status as it was about seeking safety, justice, and hope. Now, because of the civil rights movement, improved communication systems, and the increasing affluence of people of color, the church is not the only safe refuge, and some of the reverence paid to clergy as icons of communities of color is fading.

I asked Candace, a female millennial friend of mine, why she thinks the church is no longer relevant. Candace does not attend church but did attend as a youth and has a strong Christian background. She responded, I think most churches historically that had greater relevance than they do now were centers of social activity. They were in smaller communities, and so it was like a melting chamber for many different parts of the community. So I think if churches want to become more relevant, they need to understand the current issues of the community, not just serving the poor, which is obviously important. Not just saving your souls, but helping shape the world, even speaking into politics as appropriate. Candace’s perspective supports my understanding of the cultural shifts that have affected American society in recent decades, especially in the Black community. Candace even gave a nod to the impact the church formerly had on influencing social change through movements such as the civil rights movement, equating relevance with some type of social transformation. But Candace also acknowledged that the communities we are a part of today are much different. Our geographic transience means we are more spread out from the people with whom we have the closest bonds, and our ability to maintain relationships digitally means we often remain more emotionally detached from our actual neighbors in our local communities.

Finally, an increasing distrust of institutions in American culture has also contributed to a decline in church participation. People have more access to information, and this has forced transparency that did not exist in years past. It is more challenging for church leaders who abuse power to cover up scandals. The church is a place where adults and children should feel safe; today’s leaders must recognize and acknowledge the damage that has been done related to sexual abuse and the abuse of power. When people lose trust and are abused by the church, they stop coming, and the church loses not only that person, but several generations of their family.

From time to time we must be reminded that we are children of the light. Ephesians 5:14 calls us to wake up so that the light of Christ will shine on us. I believe in the church and its leaders. There are many leaders who are already wide awake, doing all that is good, right, and true. But even the best of us get drowsy from time to time and need a little nudge. The awakened churches are beacons of hope. They are helping provide comfort, shelter, and assistance to many both inside and outside of their congregation. It is my hope that every congregation and every Christian leader wakes up fully to become an imitator of Christ. Therefore be imitators of God, as beloved children, and live in love, as Christ loved us and gave himself up for us, a fragrant offering and sacrifice to God (Ephesians 5:1-2).

So what is a reawakened church, one that is activated to spark lasting change? And what do leaders and champions of the next generation of the church need to lead activated churches? Based on my conversations, observations, and almost twenty-five years of working in ministry, I have identified several key characteristics that successful, activated congregations have in common.

First, an activated church leads, meaning that it actively seeks to understand the community, adapting when appropriate and challenging the community when appropriate. I liken the mission of the activated church to the sending of the twelve disciples in Luke 9:1-6. The activated church knows that it is dependent on the community, just as Jesus called the disciples to depend on those they served for their daily needs. Sometimes we are called to sit at the table; at other times, we are called to shake the dust of an unwelcoming community off our feet. Regardless, the activated church is always about the business of preaching the gospel and healing the wounded for the sake of leading people toward transformation.

Second, an activated church increasingly demonstrates eight key characteristics. The activated church enacts the following behaviors or activities:

Has a clear understanding of its identity in the community.

Practices mission-focused spirituality, which allows it to see the needs of the community and to respond appropriately.

Enacts an intentional strategy for discipleship and faith formation.

Develops and relates to a diverse Christian community, facilitating an interculturally competent community.

Develops strategic community partnerships that help fulfill the great commandment by fostering health, hope, and healing.

Understands and lives out a holistic witness in its context.

Practices and teaches sound stewardship principles, helping members see money and personal resources as tools to bless the entire