Yesterday, we talked about three things that comeback churches should be. Today, again from Ed Stetzer and Mike Dodson’s book, Comeback Churches, we look at how churches get stuck. Do any of the following describe GPC?
Institutionalized Church: Many churches have regressed into a state of merely functioning as an institution. An institutionalized church focuses on and is more committed to the forms and programs of ministry.
Voluntary Association Church: VAC has unwittingly modeled its organization after a democratic government rather than New Testament principles. It is a church of the people, by the people, but most importantly for the people. Due to an overwhelming need to keep everyone happy, the VAC ends up bound, at the mercy of a rotating vocal minority, and ineffective.
“Us 4 and no more” church: They have determined that if they get any larger, they will lose their sweet fellowship. They want a family feel, which means a group small enough to relate like a family
“Square peg in a round hole” church: In this congregation, people are enlisted for leadership and service, not by their gifts or passion, but by other criteria. You might hear, “We’ve got to fill this position. Who can you think of that we’ve not already talked to?”
“My way or the highway” church: This is the stereotypical church wherein the senior adults are given the new van to use on their apple orchard trips while the student ministry is asked to drive the old van because “those teenagers are so messy.”
Chaplaincy Church: The church hired its minister and expects the “chaplain” to be busy about meeting needs and making the church grow. It’s not uncommon to hear “Preacher, you need to visit Mrs. Gray. She hasn’t been feeling well.” The members identify the needs and the prospects and expect their pastor to respond. Despite the fact that the church’s ministry impact is limited to the staff’s time and abilities, the church body remains committed to an employer/employee model. They want a hired “chaplain,” not a leader.
I can see Glenwood Presbyterian in several of these categories, but less so in the first three categories and more so in the last three. We are deeply ingrained in the “square peg,” “my way or the highway,” and “chaplaincy” pitfalls.
In the next post, we’ll look at three faith factors which help a church regain a missional focus and according to this book are always necessary to lead a comeback church.
July 23rd, 2008
Posted by
Brian Beasley |
Glenwood Neighborhood, Glenwood Presbyterian Church |
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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:
- biblical
- missional
- 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.
July 22nd, 2008
Posted by
Brian Beasley |
Glenwood Neighborhood, Glenwood Presbyterian Church |
2 comments
For those that are under the mistaken impression that GPC is only a “happenin” place on Sundays, we’ve been busy the last couple of weeks. Last week was our “Power Lab” vacation Bible school, which was a huge success. Most importantly, we had five kids who made decisions for Christ during the week! Thanks to all the helpers and teachers for their hard work.
Yesterday, we let G.U.P.Y. use our building for the day - check out this link to see all the fun they had.
June 24th, 2008
Posted by
Brian Beasley |
Glenwood Neighborhood, Glenwood Presbyterian Church, Young People |
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Glenwood Presbyterian Church would like to invite members of GGNA to a special dinner:
*GGNA BENEFIT DINNER*
Sunday, April 20th, 2008 at 6:30pm
Glenwood Presbyterian Church, 1205 Glenwood Ave. (corner of Glenwood & Oak) in the Fellowship Hall Building
The dinner starts at 6:30 and is casual. Then at 7:00 the band Christian Endeavor will play in the Sanctuary followed by a short presentation by GGNA leaders and a Bible Study by Rev. Dr. Charles Howell, who was raised in Glenwood and is now the interim pastor at Glenwood Presbyterian. The members of Glenwood Pres. are all looking forward to learning more about GGNA and recognizing GGNA’s service to the community.
April 18th, 2008
Posted by
Brian Beasley |
Glenwood Neighborhood, Glenwood Presbyterian Church |
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The Glenwood Gladiators, Glenwood Presbyterian’s church softball team, has a practice game tonight at 8:30 p.m. Our game is at the Old Peck ball field in Glenwood (where Lexington dead-ends near Freeman Mill Road), so those of you in the neighborhood can stop by and see the action. Hopefully we won’t get rained out.
March 14th, 2008
Posted by
Brian Beasley |
Glenwood Neighborhood, Glenwood Presbyterian Church |
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The Glenwood Community has been in the news a lot lately, and for a refreshing change it is not about new crimes that are being committed. The talk is about the Glenwood Revitalization Plan prepared by the city.
On another Glenwood note, I’ve added a link in the sidebar to the Greensboro Hive: “A community center established to foster relationship building, dialogue, and resource sharing among individuals, groups, and communities working to build grassroots democracy and community power in and around Greensboro, North Carolina.”
January 10th, 2008
Posted by
Brian Beasley |
Glenwood Neighborhood |
one comment
An excerpt from an article named Fixing Glenwood in the December 11th edition of Yes! Weekly, a local paper.
“Last year people planted peppers, corn, tomatoes, zucchini; we tried cucumbers but they didn’t work out,” says Scarbrough, a prominent member of the neighborhood association, watching her children fiddle with the lights in her car as they wait for her and UNCG students David Smith and Marie Cox to finish raking dried leaves from the garden, which is demarcated into sections by stakes and chain-link fencing. A 20-by-4-foot plot in the garden is available to Glenwood residents for $15 a year, and among its growers is the local Food Not Bombs chapter, which is one of the tenants at the Hive (an acronym for History Information Vision Exchange), a community center intended to improve relations and communication between Glenwood residents. Susan Burkholder, a volunteer at the center, hopes the Hive will become a resource for the neighborhood.
“We hope to branch out and see which needs in the neighborhood can be met.” She is more optimistic in her outlook than some of the other Grove Street tenants. “I’m really excited about the energy and projects that the GGNA has come up with. I think they’re on a great track. [Grove Street] has potential to become a hub if we could get a coffee shop or a small restaurant, a place where folks could connect and feel more rooted.” While Burkholder feels the other Hive tenants have high hopes for Grove Street and “a real willingness to bring it alive,” there’s some question of what to do or how to go about it.
Check out the whole article here and be sure and look at the photos to see some of the Glenwood Presbyterian Youth!
December 12th, 2007
Posted by
Brian Beasley |
Glenwood Neighborhood |
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I ran across this blog post from Suzanne over at Grace and laughed out loud. Our church has been dealing with this very issue lately, as a couple of families and children from the neighborhood have started coming very regularly to our services. Suzanne, if you see this post - take heart. I think it does get better slowly as the kids learn and feel more comfortable in a worship setting…
Here’s the post:
“This is the around the 3rd or 4th Sunday that youth from Glenwood have come to sit with me in the “Big Service” at Grace after middle school Sunday school. I am so very happy that they are coming and can see that they are really learning about God.
But I have a confession… I feel stared at and sometimes embarrassed by their lack of “Church Manners.”
Now I may not have children of my own, but I think that I have a good taste of what it is like for a mother to be in church and her kids to keep squirming or her baby to start fussing. She wants desperately to hear the sermon and to worship yet she is worried her kids are disturbing others and embarrassed as the woman three rows up turns and looks to see where the disturbance is coming from.”
Read the rest at Daring To Hope.
December 4th, 2007
Posted by
Brian Beasley |
Glenwood Neighborhood, Glenwood Presbyterian Church, Young People |
one comment
From the News and Record.
Woman shot in drive-by
Nov. 28thGREENSBORO - A woman was injured in a drive-by shooting, police said.
At 12:30 a.m. Tuesday, Crystal Ashley Smith, 19, told Greensboro police she was walking near the intersection of Haywood and Gregory streets when she saw an older model burgundy station wagon approach the intersection and slow down.
Smith said a passenger rolled the window down in the station wagon and showed a handgun.
Smith told police she heard four gun shots and took cover on the ground. She was walking toward Glenwood Avenue when she realized that she had been shot in her right buttock, police said.
She was transported to Moses Cone Hospital where she was treated for non life-threatening injuries.
Anyone with information about the shooting is asked to call Crimestoppers at 373-1000.
November 29th, 2007
Posted by
Brian Beasley |
Glenwood Neighborhood |
one comment
As I started getting this blog together, I stumbled across several other local blogs that I want to make sure to draw attention to. The Glenwood neighborhood was once a very proud, close-knit community - it has really declined through the years but there seems to be a strong movement currently to make it better. Just last week, a person was robbed at the corner of our church property at 10:30 pm one night.
I’m not sure who really deserves the credit for getting it started, but I know Marshall Benbow, Intervarsity, Grace church, and probably others have treated the Glenwood community as a mission field, having people move into the community and support various programs to help the young people here. I’m ashamed that Glenwood Presbyterian hasn’t done more in response to this problem. Many of our older members grew up in the community and have since moved elsewhere, but most of our members have some ties here. Otherwise, we’d be going somewhere else. Both of my parents grew up in Glenwood.
Unfortunately, almost all of our members drive into the neighborhood for church functions and drive back out again, simply hoping not to encounter anyone on either trip. Our Session (the ruling body of our church) will meet soon to set goals for next year. Hopefully, we will find a way to really get involved. I would love to be able to make a positive contribution - but the vision I have is helping the neighborhood association get rid of some of these absentee landlords, clean up some properties, and exert pressure on the police (and District Attorney’s office) to really get serious about crime in this neighborhood.
But in the meantime, I’ve added several Glenwood related blogs to the blogroll on the right - be sure and check them out.
November 16th, 2007
Posted by
Brian Beasley |
Glenwood Neighborhood, Glenwood Presbyterian Church |
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