Reflections on church renewal
My family’s history runs deep with the Gospel Tabernacle in Aliquippa, Pennsylvania, like it runs deep with the region’s river valleys and industrial waterfronts. When Aliquippa was pulsing with immigrant and migrant families seeking the American Dream at the promise of the community’s steel mill, my great-grandparents made their home in the Plan 12 neighborhood of the city, where I currently live. Down the street from their home on Irwin Street was a small, vibrant church called the Aliquippa Gospel Tabernacle. It’s there they first encountered Jesus.
Many years later after living away from Western Pennsylvania for a while, my parents moved back to the region, and we began attending this same church. Many things had changed since the time my great-grandparents attended the worship and healing services on Irwin Street. For instance, in the 1960s the congregation built a larger facility in a new location after the church had experienced some growth. The church's name had changed a couple of times (at this point, "Crestmont Alliance Church"). Leaders and ministries had, of course, shifted and changed over the years. But by the late 1990s, not all of the change was good. Sadly, the church found itself in a season of static plateauing and even decline. There were always good things happening at the church and good people who were part of it – there was an ebb and flow to health - but the church overall was not the same as it was in its glory days when revival and missional movement were sweeping through the Ohio River Valley.
It’s a long story, but after my theological studies I eventually came back to this same church to accept a position as youth pastor in 2006. I was tasked to lead the youth group (at this point there were two or three teenagers left in the church) while I simultaneously started a youth development organization in the community called Aliquippa Impact. The initiation of ministry in the community was the beginning of a hard, long, beautiful, wonderful story of multiplying missional movement that eventually resulted in the birthing of a network of missional leaders and missional outposts (businesses, non-profit organizations, missional communities, and recently church plants) in our region. Much of that multiplication took place outside the walls of the Gospel Tabernacle, but for this whole journey I have been connected to this church and its journey back into mission with Jesus. Today, I serve as the Gospel Tabernacle’s Lead Pastor with a team of humble, creative leaders.
Currently, The Gospel Tabernacle (lovingly called “the Tab”) is a growing, medium-sized church that is 103 years old and very much alive. It’s not uncommon to see people experience salvation in Jesus and be baptized in water. We’ve embraced our roots in the Spirit, experiencing physical and emotional healing, spiritual gifts, and empowerment for mission. Slowly but increasingly, we are seeking justice and reconciliation across racial and socioeconomic lines. Worship is passionate. Prayer is fervent. People are hungry for the Word of God. New leaders are being developed and released into the expanding, surrounding network of missional outposts. We’ve come to define success as giving power and resources away instead of collecting them. While remaining an intergenerational church, we get to disciple many young adults into leadership and mission. We’re still a deeply flawed church, but we’re a church experiencing renewal.
I didn’t lead us into all of this change alone, as you’ll see below, but it’s been my privilege to be connected to the story these last 16 years. In college, I never thought part of my experience would be walking beside a church with a story like this. I would probably have been more suited to start something new rather than walk beside something old, but all along the way I knew Jesus called me to this church. When people ask questions about the regional missional movement happening around us, they’re sometimes surprised to learn of the story of The Gospel Tabernacle – a century-old church that found its way back to Jesus’ call to the neighborhoods and the nations. In many ways, I too am surprised. But this journey has forever shaped me. I thought it would be valuable to share some of my reflections from this last decade and a half.
I’ll give a caveat before I get into the specifics. While our church had experienced in its history the kind of toxic dynamics that can really injure people and destroy leaders, the vast majority of these dynamics were absent by the time I came on staff at the church. We weren’t the healthiest, but we weren’t toxic either - mainly because leaders prior to me had made really hard decisions, even suffered, to get the church through the worst part of its history. Many of those leaders were wounded in the process and really took it on the chin, and we were building on their shoulders. I’m indebted to their sacrifice. If you’re reading this from the vantage point of being in a toxic ministry environment, I’m sorry. I pray you find the wisdom and healing you need, but I’ll leave it up to you to decide how much of the below applies to your situation.
That’s some background. Now here are some of my personal, non-exhaustive reflections:
PRAYER
The first thing to renew at The Gospel Tabernacle was prayer. Everything else sprung from this one thing. At the time I came on staff, our lead pastor had recently made the decision to bring to an end the weekly, poorly-attended, long-standing prayer meeting of the church. He did this not to eliminate prayer, but to press a much-needed reset button on our prayer culture. A few years later I was co-pastoring with another leader who started a new monthly prayer meeting at the Tab. He discipled a handful of leaders in stewarding these prayer environments. Eventually, small gatherings of people were pleading with God for our neighborhoods and interceding for the nations. More than only asking God for things, these environments became the places where we heard Jesus together. He started to give us strategy for mission and renewal. We became obsessed with His Presence and more sensitive to His voice. Today, prayer is probably the single most noticeable marker of who we are as a church, and I don’t think the renewal we’ve experienced would have been possible without it.
EMBRACING SMALLNESS
Early on in our renewal, mentors told us to embrace small beginnings. We took this to heart. For a long while, our new prayer meetings, while fresh and alive, included only a handful of people. Some people were coming alive to prayer and mission, but not many. I remember one pastor told us, “It doesn’t have to be the whole church. If 10% of the people really embrace what God is doing, you’ll feel it, even on Sunday morning. If 30% of the people really embrace it, it will feel like revival.” She was right. We decided not to obsess about those who didn’t want or couldn’t embrace where Jesus was leading us, and we invested in the people who were leaning in. We decided the smallness of those numbers wouldn’t make us feel discouraged or insecure. God was doing something, and He loves to work in small spaces. Eventually, a few small gatherings of hungry people began to press into the story God was writing.
CELEBRATING HISTORY
The Gospel Tabernacle began in 1918 when a handful of families from Aliquippa visited services happening in Pittsburgh at a sister church in our denomination that was experiencing a move of God. There they encountered the Spirit, and upon their return to Aliquippa they began to meet in a home in my neighborhood for prayer and worship. Those early years were marked by evangelism, earnest prayer, and the mark of God’s miraculous work in healing and deliverance. A mentor of mine told me, “God dreamed of something when he dreamed of your church. Ask him what that original anointing was, and re-dig that well.” We learned as much as we could. At the 93rd anniversary of the church (an odd number!), the leader I was then co-pastoring with had the idea to host a homecoming weekend. Missionaries who had been sent out from the Tab in years past returned, we sang the old hymns, and we told the miraculous stories. But this was more than nostalgia. It gave me, a young pastor, the opportunity to hear what God had dreamed of when He breathed the Tab into existence. What we would eventually become looked so different than what the Tab was in 1918, but it would bear those same identifying marks – mission, prayer, and miracles. We began to ask God to do it again. Some of our most faithful members over the years have been people in their 80s and 90s who have told us that, for all the changes, they recognize God’s Presence among us again in ways that remind them of when they first joined the church in the 1940s and 1950s.
REPENTANCE & STRONGHOLDS
Of course, not all our history was good. In time, we came into knowledge of sins that had been committed over our 100 years – sexual immorality, financial impropriety, racism, and slander. We came to believe that some of these past church sins and the wounds they caused had become demonically empowered as current strongholds, and these strongholds needed to be broken. Over the years, as we came into knowledge of these sins, we repented. We did this even though the leaders repenting were often not the same leaders who had committed the sins all those years ago. We simply humbled ourselves and took responsibility. We also identified where we had participated personally in sin.
As an example, for many years our church really struggled with submission in relationships. We discovered a rift in our past between our church and our denominational district. Although neither our current district superintendent nor any of our church leaders were part of that rift, we met with our district superintendent to repent. He and our leaders asked each other for forgiveness, and we re-submitted ourselves to him. As we participated in these kinds of prophetic acts over the years, some strange things started to happen. At one point, unknown people broke into our church building to perform an occultic ritual, and I found a voodoo doll in the church with its eyes poked out (an assignment against prophetic ministry, we came to understand). In prayer we broke off these attempts to curse our church, and we welcomed God’s activity instead. It seemed to us demons were getting stirred up, being pushed out of hiding, and being shaken off our past and present. I don’t understand it all, but you couldn’t convince me this repentance of our history and breaking associated strongholds wasn’t necessary for renewal.
RELEASE
Change is hard, and there is cost for everyone involved. It’s hard to believe, but at this point 90% or more of the congregation present when I was youth pastor in 2006 has now transitioned out of the Tab. Today the vast majority of our congregation was not present my first day on staff. By God’s grace, this turnover happened without a church split and largely without toxic relational dynamics. It was slow and gradual. I’m sure we didn’t do it perfectly, but we did our best to love people as they transitioned away from the Tab. The vast majority of people who left were also gracious, respectful, and kind. I hugged as many as I could as they left. I wrote nearly all of them letters thanking them for their investment in our church and acknowledged the foundation they left us to build upon. I cried with some of them.
I’m sure people left for many reasons - more than I can know or understand. During my time on staff, we started to really lean into asking how we could work for racial justice and reconciliation, we began to release women to preach and lead, and we re-embraced the present-day activity of the Spirit. I’m sure that was just too much for some people. More fundamentally, we were asking the church to embrace a whole new operating system – one I believed was biblically faithful but unapologetically embraced mission in the world. It had to feel disorienting to some. Others may have just decided, “I didn’t sign up for this,” as the church changed so thoroughly. I’m sure others left because of deficiencies in my leadership or for reasons completely unrelated to the changes taking place. For others, Jesus simply called them to the next assignment. I’m not sure all that happened, but I do know for a solid decade there was a steady trickle of people leaving the church while we were simultaneously gaining new members, new leaders, and new believers. Many of these new folks were early adopters in the new season the church was experiencing.
It was so important to bless and release. We refused to make the changes we were leading a defining measurement of the spirituality of the folks who made an exit. God was working with them, and He was working with us. It was more than we could understand or make a judgement about, so we made a decision to simply bless people as they left rather than try to control them or change them. At many elder meetings over the years, we blessed by name the people who had told us they were leaving. We prayed blessing on their health, finances, jobs, and children. We admitted we weren’t better than them, we didn’t know everything, and God was working a story in them we couldn’t fully see. We released them to God’s purposes, and as we did God provided for us in every way.
FORGIVENESS
But of course, not every act of release is easy. I’d say few if any situations rose to the level of toxic, but in the gentle turbulence of change and releasing people from the Tab, things were said and done that did hurt me and others. This was actually the small minority of situations, but it did happen. When we were hurt, we learned we needed to forgive. This meant verbally declaring to the Lord and to each other, often in elder meetings, that the people who hurt us did not owe us anything. We cancelled their debts to us and prayed blessing over them. We had experienced the Lord cleaning our church from demonic strongholds, so bitterness came at too high a cost. We had no interest in creating room for the enemy to extend his work. I’m certain people had to forgive us as well as we made errors in leadership. When I’ve been aware of these situations, I’ve also had to sincerely apologize.
GRIEVING
I think one reason many churches don’t make it to renewal is because by the time renewal is at hand the souls of that church’s leaders aren’t healthy enough to carry the blessing God is giving. The first round of changes that leaders create in a church come at a cost, and too often that cost is damage to the souls of the church’s leaders. Part of keeping our souls healthy over the years was grieving well. We deeply believed in the change we were leading toward, but that created losses for us that needed to be grieved. Sometimes it was just hard to lead change. I remember pacing the sanctuary of the Tab weeping – just getting all the pain out to the Lord. Sometimes our leaders would weep together. I never thought there would be so many tears in renewal, but learning to grieve and lament is what kept us healthy. It was our church’s capacity to experience sadness as a holy emotion wherein Jesus was present that actually prepared us for all the sadness we would encounter in the world as we followed Jesus on mission. I think a church’s capacity for renewal has something to do with its capacity for holy sadness.
HONOR WHAT IS, AND GO AROUND IT
Over the years, we started to say to one another, “Honor what is, and go around it.” If that sounds snarky or sneaky to you, we don’t mean it that way. We mean just what it says in the purest way possible. In a historic church, truly honor what already is – its history, its ways of doing things, its formal and informal leaders. In fact, make sure you honor these things because this is often what love requires. On the other hand, realize the world is a big place – much bigger than your church - and God is not confined by even the things that are worth honoring. We honor our history, leaders, and practices – but God is not confined by any of it. In fact, He’s right now working in your neighborhood and in your community with or without your church.
I see too many pastors get hung up on what their governing board or bylaws will or will not allow them to do. Those institutional changes can come in time. For now, figure out what God is doing, however small, and go do that thing with or without the structures you have inherited. Don’t unnecessarily or dishonestly break the rules; just discover where the open doors exist. Invest in that leader who isn’t on your board yet. Serve the needs of the community even if the whole church isn’t ready to come along with you yet. Gather a small group of hungry people and pray together even if everyone isn’t ready to lean in yet. Long before our bylaws or operating system changed, long before all our leaders were bought into the mission, long before the Tab was ready to engage its community - I found a handful of college students who were willing to come along with me to serve kids in a neighborhood of our city that was experiencing poverty. Out of that small act of mission sprung a whole story of renewal. All those years ago, I did go to our church’s board to ask for their blessing as we began to serve this particular neighborhood (honoring what is), but they weren’t ready to financially invest. That’s fine. Go around it. People helped me find the money elsewhere, we found a handful of hungry people ready to be on mission, and we started serving our community. It was small, but it seeded the story we’re now experiencing. In time, that neighborhood changed us. Renewal was actually flowing from outside our walls into the church. The things God was doing in our streets began to shape our expectation for what He could do in our sanctuary.
DO IT WITH A TEAM
I offered a caveat at the beginning of this piece saying I never really faced toxicity even in the hardest parts of this story. I’ll offer another caveat here: I never did it alone. I say this because I know many pastors who feel they are trying to turn around their historic church alone. That has to feel nearly impossible. Even before critical mass formed at the Tab, I always had a few people right by my side. Most significantly in this story, I co-pastored with another pastor who wholeheartedly shared the vision and leadership with me for eight years. The experience of co-pastoring was one of the most significant experiences of my life, and it inserted team models of mutual submission into our leadership culture. I always had a team, and that team always had my back.
On the other hand, sometimes I hear pastors say they don’t have a team when I can see potential team members all around them. It’s like their blind to who is nearby and available. Kingdom teams are different. They aren’t always who we think we could be friends with, who we share affinity with, the smartest or most skilled, or who we would pick if we were in charge. Jesus forms Kingdom teams, and they often include unlikely people we would never pick on our own. Some pastors are truly alone. But maybe the reason other pastors feel alone is because they aren’t picking the people Jesus is picking for them. Ask who Jesus is giving you and go with them no matter who they are.
STRUCTURES FOR MISSION
At first, we thought that renewal was only a matter of the heart. This is not completely wrong because apart from heart-level hunger for Jesus renewal is impossible. But as our hearts came alive to His Presence, we discovered our structures were actually inhibiting mission. Our bylaws, staffing, and budget were built on a certain set of ecclesiological and missiological assumptions that we no longer shared. For many years, it felt like we were proposing bylaw changes at every congregational meeting so we could become nimbler and more responsive to Jesus’ voice. Maybe at one time our structures had served missional purposes, but in our present-day context they inhibited the organic movement God was creating. This meant as we built the new thing, we also needed to be willing to dismantle the old thing. Policies and processes that got in the way of what Jesus was doing had to go.
LET IT SHAPE YOU
Leading a historic church will probably wound you, but walking with Jesus through those wounds has the capacity to shape you. Our personal relationships – marriage, friendships, parenting – expose our own sin and weakness in part because we live in proximity to the sin and weakness of others. The strengths and weaknesses of our spouses, friends, and kids have the ability to shape us to become more like Jesus. A similar dynamic exists in walking with a historic church. Its strengths will make you better. But its weaknesses – its frustrating slowness, its uncoolness, its difficulty in embracing change – actually has the capacity to humble you, make you more prayerful, and shape you to look more like Christ. For many years while the Tab was decidedly not the happening thing in town, it was an opportunity for Jesus to shape me in humility. Loving these people and this church – not the church on the other side of town I might wish I was leading – was actually what shaped me to listen better and love better. In that way, the hard, clunky things about the Tab were a gift to me. I’ll always treasure it.
ONLY FOR JESUS
Here’s the thing about walking with historic churches toward renewal: it might happen, but it might not. I’m glad the Tab renewed, but there were times I thought it was just impossible. I recently heard a friend talk about how they had heard President Obama reflect on how much is truly out of control of the President of the United States. Even one of the most powerful people in the world is still in control of so little. So it goes with being a pastor – so much is out of our control. When I look over our story, there are so many elements that, had they not happened at the right time and in the right way, I’m not sure it would have been possible. I’m not completely sure why our church renewed, and I often grieve the stories of other pastors who faithfully prayed and worked for renewal but it never happened. There’s so much that’s a mystery to me. Here’s what I do know: it’s never a waste of our pain and effort and tears if it’s for and with Jesus. Eventually, this thing rose up in my soul that said, “Even if this church dies, I’ll be obedient to Jesus because of His love for me.” Somehow only in that surrender did the Tab come to life.
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People often ask me if I would do anything differently. While I know we didn’t do everything perfectly, my conscience is clear concerning the overall way we led change because I know we did our best to love people in the process. I’m grateful that our story included caring for people along the way because we carried those lessons in humility into our community. For a decade or more, our story was defined by a patient, careful plodding that took the time to listen to and love people even while multiplying mission was gaining momentum outside of and around the Tab. I have no regrets about this.
And yet, if I were to critique our story I might say that taking over a decade was too long. I think, for me, part of our slowness was rooted in the fear of having to pay costs that we hoped were avoidable but proved to be unavoidable. The renewal of our church was tied to the multiplying mission around us. Today, our missional network is serving some of the most vulnerable people in our region. It’s hard to balance moving slow with a historic church against the pressing, urgent needs of our community – a community that is filled with people who do not know about Jesus and are suffering in poverty and pain. It might just be my personality or particular gifting, but if I were to do it again, I’m not sure I’d move quite as slow. I can’t tell. I just know that while some of my slowness was rooted in love, at other times it was rooted in fear. If I knew then what I know now about Jesus and His love as we lead change, maybe I’d feel more confident to lead at a faster pace.
Regardless, I’m so grateful for this ongoing journey with The Gospel Tabernacle. It’s given me immense hope for historic churches who often have a legacy of mission beneath them. What if those wells got unplugged, and these churches re-engaged mission? All indicators would have pegged me as an entrepreneurial, church-planter type, but being submitted to the Tab has humbled me, taught me to listen and move more carefully, and taught me to lead change within existing institutions. That’s a gift I wouldn’t trade.
Recently at a meeting of the Tab’s Leadership Team where we were discussing plans for regional mission, one of our leaders remarked, “The heart of revival says, ‘Lord, please do not pass us by.’” That’s my prayer for existing churches. God is doing something in our time. New structures for mission and ministry are being birthed. Lord, as you do it, please don’t pass us already-existing churches by.
