Ididn’t pick up running until my mid-twenties. I’ve never been an extremely fast runner, but I possess one particular talent: pacing. This gift allowed me to finish with better times than many others who would begin too fast, only to fail to finish, or who started their final push to the finish line too soon. In competitive running, a runner who does not understand their pace and have the discipline to adjust their gate accordingly cannot reach their full potential. They might not even finish the race at all.
When I became the lead pastor of a 50 member 90-year-old church in need of renewal. I immediately felt the need to pick up my pace even though I had not yet determined where I was heading. Driven largely by a fear of failure, a need to impress, and an unhealthy does of competition, I packed the calendar with stuff.
It was good stuff, too: a worship night, leader trainings, redecorating the sanctuary and a neighborhood Easter celebration complete with a petting zoo for the kids. Within six weeks, I had built a spiritual machine rather than a sanctuary. And I was good at it. Way too good, in fact.
It felt like the church was given new life. We were growing, and many were excited about the changes. Six months later, I hit a wall. I was physically, emotionally, and spiritually exhausted. For me, the pace was unsustainable. I knew my congregation was feeling the same way.
I didn’t enter the ministry to be a hyper-strategic business executive, faced with the impossible task of maintaining momentum through constant spiritual events. I’ve always wanted my primary responsibility to be leading the people I serve into the sacred presence of the risen Christ. But if this were going to happen, we’d need to slow down and catch our breath. I was the pace leader, and the small church I started with was right behind me. We needed to recalibrate.
God was calling us to build calm, safe harbors of connection rather than culturally relevant centers of activity. Our people longed for a place to be rather than a space to do.
1. Model and preach rest as a value
I began by modeling rest in my own life. I started by observing a weekly Sabbath. I kept my phone on silent and checked it two to three times a day at the most.
But if this was going to stick, it was going to have to be a deep change, not just a quick fix. I took a more deliberate approach to Sunday services, allowing myself to be present with people rather than settling into the role of the frenzied minister on the run they had come to know.
We worked toward a culture of casual excellence rather than slick performance. We left nonessentials undone in the name of peace. If bulletins did not get folded we handed them out flat, rather than asking someone to come in early to get it done. We closed the office on Fridays to give the campus a sabbath as well and I regularly featured rest, an often overlooked spiritual discipline, in many of the sermons I preached.
The response was immediate and overwhelming. Congregants emailed, texted, and stopped me in the store to tell me how the simple idea and experience of rest impacted their life. Most told the same story: they were tired, burned out, and filled with anxiety. They wanted to rediscover what it meant to follow Jesus beyond their phone Bible apps and the seemingly endless treadmill of ministry opportunities.
2. Clarify your church’s vision
Our leadership set about defining the values that deeply mattered to us. Prayer, God’s Word, authenticity, fun, and play were just some of the twelve we decided upon. We scrapped our growth strategy in favor of creating an emotionally and spiritually vibrant community. I removed goal setting from our yearly staff calendar. We didn’t need a goal to know if something was alive and healthy or needed adjustment.
As a result, our staff relaxed and began to enjoy and remember why they were called to the ministry in the first place. We began to experience growth and results far beyond any goal we would have had the spiritual hubris to set. Intentionally living out our primary values allowed us to exceed the limitations of setting and striving toward goals.
Once we’d established the vision of rest, we decided to remove anything within the organization that got in the way of congregational rest. Few things besmirch the sacred like noise and chaos, so we cut anything that resulted in those things. For you this might mean the annual Christmas play or the yearly rummage sale. Whatever it is, only you can determine if the physical, emotional and spiritual cost is worth the reward.
3. Empower and equip your people
All this talk about rest can easily cause some to assume that valuing rest means not reaching our full potential as a church. But let’s be clear: rest is not death. Rest means working wiser, not harder. We still believe that a small local church can change the world, and we aim to do so. To become a local church with global impact, we knew we would have to empower our people to become the mechanism of change. The church would be a place to replenish them for their journey, rather than the destination.
Doing less organized events as a church freed us up to focus on equipping our people to do more in their own community spaces. This encouraged church leaders and volunteers to shift their focus and energy toward their personal living spaces.
Rather than highlighting all the amazing things we were doing as a church, we turned the spotlight towards individuals doing simple yet profound works on their corners. We gave space in our Sunday services to let them tell their stories.
I also used our printed sermon notes to give our people a list of challenges, each a call to do something impactful in their community. Lastly, we began to offer weekly conference call coaching sessions where our people could digitally join into a conversation with me and other ministry veterans to glean wisdom and ask practical questions.
In a sense, this is a hack of the popular multi-site model. Rather than invest the energy and finance into a large and sometimes risky endeavor, we call our people and their addresses to become our venue. Today we have over 400 “sites” and we never had to set up a chair doing it.
4. Make church community simple
Finally, we worked to make the most crucial church services and community as simple as possible for our congregation. We kept the sanctuary open and available for anyone who wanted a place of communal silence, encouraging them to write out the word of God by hand in order to focus their minds on God’s word. We made our prayer gathering a regular weekly event, and started a monthly night of worship through worship. This created a regular rhythm of varied worship within a context of community.
Perhaps the most impactful decision we made was what to do with the remaining finances after eliminating the “noise and chaos” programs. Ultimately, we decided to shift it to our hospitality budget in order provide a free weekly catered Sunday lunch for all those who attend. For less than 10% of our yearly budget, we were able to provide 52 community building, enriching, multi-generational events. Most importantly, we were able to relieve the pressure from our people’s schedules rather than add to it.
Our community is now running at a sustainable and life-giving pace. We have the margin and space to engage beyond the temporal, knowing that while speed might be exhilarating and take you further you will often see and experience far less.
source: http://www.christianitytoday.com/pastors/2017/october-web-exclusives/your-church-can-be-refuge.html