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Dear Folks:
We are in a season of resurrection. We are people of resurrection. We are a faith of resurrection. We worship God, who is the love behind resurrection. The crosses in our sanctuaries are resurrection crosses — empty, representing Jesus’ movement from suffering to death to the tomb found empty by grieving women.
Resurrection balances the value that God holds for life and the reality of death around us. Resurrection can only occur after death; tulips and irises can only bloom after the bulbs are buried in the ground; compost is resurrected organic waste to enrich and fertilize our gardens; caterpillars enshroud themselves for a private death, becoming a liquid goo that reforms into butterflies. New life springs forth where we only know death. Resurrection imagines an impossibility turning into a possibility.
Can you reimagine the possibility of being a resurrection church, bringing new life into your church? What must we recognize about our “we’ve always done it this way” attitude that is impeding new fresh ideas coming from new fresh people? What ways of doing church need to die for them to show up and stay in our church? Churches have life cycles, plotted on a bell curve, that begin with an idea, a vision, and energy. Quickly, the church moves into a phase of inclusion, welcome, and deepening relationships. Programs and ministries follow, creating a stable and solvent church, and governance and ministry are focused on maintaining this status quo. However, at some point energy begins to wane, relationships become insular and exclusive of new people, programming becomes stale, overly costly, or ineffective, and the church begins to decline. The final stage, as a church is dying, focuses on maintaining the small number of tight-knit relationships and the administrative functions of paying bills, filling committee seats, and maintaining the way things have always been.
Declining churches need renewal back to God’s original calling or revitalization to live into the changed identity, call, and location of the church. Dying churches require redevelopment -- a new-church start rising out of the ashes of a once thriving congregation. Renewal, revitalization, and redevelopment require new energy, new relationships, ending ineffective programs and ministries, and moving out of maintenance mode. Often that means changes from “life-appointment” leadership through a strong succession plan to newly minted leadership, right-sizing committees, and designing programs that fit the need of the congregation and the community around it. Often it takes an emotional and spiritual repentance from seeing only the lack — of children and young families, of committee members, of robust financial resources — to seeing what is going well, where there is hope, how God is present in the changing times, and who is in our neighborhood.
Resurrection is not just life out of death. Resurrection is a change in form and substance. The resurrected Jesus is categorically different than the once-living Jesus. The renewed, revitalized, redeveloped, resurrected church will also have changed in spiritual form and substance. Good news: we know God can do this. Bad news: it takes hard work on our part. As always, you remain in my prayers as you discern where your congregation is on the church life cycle and how to bring new life into it.
In peace and prayer,
Pastor Tony
Convergence - Beyond the Empty Pew
https://convergenceus.org/2026/05/07/beyond-the-empty-pew/
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