The SHINE Blog

A Shift In Vision

Glenwood Presbyterian Church was started back in 1914 (or 1908, if you count the Sunday School that started in a house on Gregory Street). Before you doze off thinking this is simply a history lesson, think about how much the Glenwood community has changed in that time. For about 50 years, GPC was made up mostly of people that lived in Glenwood. Now, we have a very small percentage of attenders and an even smaller percentage of members that call the Glenwood neighborhood home. There is currently not one elder that lives in the community or even within say, 5 miles. We have many older members that USED to live in the community and have stayed in the church even as the neighborhood became a foreign land. I would say that for the last 25 years, at least, most of the members at GPC would drive into the neighborhood to attend church, then drive out again, never looking around and hoping not to be noticed.

This paragraph tells you most of what you need to know about why GPC has struggled in growth over the years. Somewhere our focus turned inward on taking care of each other inside the church and stopped being about saving those in our community who don’t know Christ. What we need is a shift in vision.

In their book, Comeback Churches, Ed Stetzer and Mike Dodson studied 300 churches of different traditions that had either declined or plateaued for several years and then made a comeback with growth for several years. They found three things churches that want to comeback should be:

1. biblical
2. missional
3. spiritual

Biblical is fairly self-explanatory; spiritual refered to the finding that comeback churches generally first had a spiritual experience that redirected and reenergized their lives, beginning with their leader; but missional is what really stands out in my mind.

Missional churches are incarnational, meaning they are not focused on the church facilities, but on offering biblical community to a lost world. Missional churches are indigenous, meaning they appropriately their culture. This is more difficult than it sounds. For instance, GPC has a culture that fits with what the Glenwood community culture was 50 years ago, a culture meaningful only to those in the church and not culturally relevant to the present day community. Finally, missional churches are intentional, meaning they intentionally make missional decisions over preferential decisions. They intentionally think like missionaries in their context.

What would happen if the members of GPC starting doing what missionaries do in the context of the Glenwood neighborhood? What would happen if we shifted our vision: if we truly desired to reach lost people with the gospel of Jesus Christ? What would happen if we ate, breathed, and lived in the present day community culture, while sowing seeds of of love, kindness, grace, redemption, and Good News? We wouldn’t have space for all the people that would be filling our building on Sundays and other days during the week.

What will happen if we don’t? Not much. We could probably struggle on for many more years.

More on this, and more from the book Comeback Churches in the next few days.

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Written by Brian Beasley.

"But seek first His Kingdom and His Righteousness and all these things will be given to you as well." Matt. 6:33

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July 22nd, 2008 Posted by Brian Beasley | Glenwood Neighborhood, Glenwood Presbyterian Church | 2 comments