BY REV. HUGH WIRE VOL. 4 NO. 1 FEBRUARY 2000
 

A TASTE OF REVIVAL
-  THROUGH CONGREGATIONAL REDEVELOPMENT
 

We had a taste of revival in the two workshops with George Bullard early this month. These took place in Oakland and Sunnyvale, cosponsored by the Sierra Pacific Synod, ELCA, the Presbytery of San Jose, and Hope-Source Consulting.

There is a revival going on in the church these days. In suburbs congregations are being born and outgrowing their space. Everywhere holiness and Pentecostal congregations are blooming. And in the city young families are turning up in mainline congregations where only elders were before. Denominations are waking to the change in their congregations.

But the hard work promoting and managing change in congregations begs for grace. Walter Rauschenbush, writing during the revival under the Social Gospel, names this well "When one goes up against hard work, conflict, loneliness, and the cross, it is our right to lean back on the eternal and to draw from the silent reservoirs. But what we get is for use [to] serve the Kingdom of God."

That struggle for the Kingdom today is within congregations whose communal life is out of contact with the daily life of their surrounding community, and out of contact, therefore, with much of the life of their own members.

We had 130 church leaders at the two workshops with George Bullard. Not all of their congre- gations are ready for the revival that leaders want for them. This is part of the pain.

Bullard's work provides a kind of healing. He lets us glimpse the whole. He offers a Gestalt in which one can then push deeper with his or her own particular question, as one can be done with a well-constructed web site.

Bullard has worked for years with a life cycle analysis of congregations, seeing congregations moving from birth, through maturity, to aging and then to death.

The character of a congregation reflects four kinds of activities, he says, whose strengths shift during the cycle. On the aging side of the cycle, where most mainline urban congregations are, vision begins to fade, then programs decline, then relationships freeze, leaving management in sole control of a routinized congregation waiting for death.

Finding a captivating vision to awaken an aging congregation takes a different route depending upon whether vision, programs,or relationships have declined most recently. Always an aging congregation's focus on management must first be reduced to give space for other activities to bloom

Bullard adds to traditional analyses of congregational life cycles a clear but sophisticated glimpse of the different path toward renewal at each stage of aging.

What makes the workshops with Bullard healing is more than user-friendly concepts. It is the presence of the Spirit in his stories, particularly in those told in his answers to questions

The issue in revival is readiness for change, openness to the Spirit. And that openness in turn rests upon openness to what is happening among the people in that place.

With Bullard, questions and answers become a kind of probing for what the Spirit is up to, concretely, in each place. The mood grows in these workshops of confidence that each can find that Spirit in his or her own situation.

A revival cannot be forced, but it can be caught. Because of this kind of thinking, and because of the kind of people who come, beginning with Bullard himself, the workshops generate something
contagious.
 

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"STAGES" TO SHAPE FUTURE NOTES:

Quotes about the experience in different stages of the life cycle:

"I was a new pastor, and I went to that first Bullard workshop in Fremont (fall, 1998). I came back to the leaders in my congregation, and we looked at what they knew about this congregation. There had been conflict. They agreed they were suffering the symptoms of the empty nest. We have been dealing with that, building up the programs that connect us in new ways with our community."

'We looked at our declining numbers and decided we had to do something. We organized a revitalization committee, but after we looked again at our congregation, we knew we had more work to do. We are in the retirement stage. We can't just revitalize our program; we have to renew our life," declared one pastor.

"That pastor seems eager to make a change. but, "asked a hearer, "are the members? Will they wait five years for results?"

"I have been using the life cycle material for the past year. We are in old age - in a bad way. I have had some real resistance. Mostly from heads of households in their early fifties. But the older folks are not demanding a maintenance ministry. They will support radical change - or at least they believe they will."

Future Hope-Source Notes will be learnings from stories of congregations in empty next, retirement, and old age stages, and at the critical question of readiness for change.