When changes are introduced, some churches react like angry Henry Ford in Robert Lacy’s bestselling biography Ford: The Man and the Machine. Lacy describes a man who loved his Model T so much that he didn’t want to change a bolt on it.
Ford even kicked out William Knudsen, his ace production man, because Knudsen thought he saw the sun setting on the Model T. That occurred in 1912, when the Model T was only 4 years old and at the crest of its popularity. Ford had just returned from a European jaunt, and he went into a Highland Park, Michigan, garage and saw the new design created by Knudsen.
On-the-scene mechanics recorded how Ford went momentarily berserk. He spied the gleaming red lacquer sheen on a new, low-slung version of the Model T. That he considered a monstrous perversion of his beloved Model T design.
“Ford had his hands in his pockets, and he walked around that car three or four times,” recounted one eyewitness. “It was a four-door job, and the top was down. Finally, he got to the left-hand side of the car, and he takes his hands out, gets hold of the door, and bang! He ripped the door right off! . . . How the man done it, I don’t know!
“He jumped in there, and bang goes the other door. Bang goes the windshield. He jumps over the back seat and starts pounding on the top. He rips the top with the heel of his shoe. He wrecked the car as much as he could.”
Knudsen left for General Motors. Henry Ford nursed along the Model T, but design changes made it more old-fashioned than he would admit. Competitive necessity finally backed him into making the Model A, though his heart was never in it. Even though GM was nipping at Ford’s heels, the inventor wanted life to freeze where it was.
Change can produce similar responses in the church. And in the midst of controversy, pastors can begin to feel like the car roughed up by Henry Ford. But there is another way to view change.
A few summers back, I took my family to tour the majestic giant redwoods in Muir Woods, north of San Francisco. A guide said that one of the secrets of longevity for the gargantuan trees is that they have the ability to mend themselves.
Through the centuries, these redwoods have weathered horrendously violent storms. Thunder crashes. Gale-force winds blow. Lightning strikes, searing the trees. But the trees don’t topple. The redwoods show an amazing capacity to renew themselves. Time, as the Greeks pointed out, is nature’s medicine. I’ve discovered that churches, in the midst of change, may act like Henry Ford or like redwoods.
In the middle of church crises, I remind myself of a bit of folk wisdom: “Some things, if left alone, will right themselves. Some things, no matter what we do, will not be righted. Some things, if we try, can be made right.”
The key for pastors, of course, is knowing when to act and when to let the natural renewal capacity mend the congregation. While trying to sort out the various situations, I’ve developed three principles that help me weather the turbulence.
It’s normal for change to hurt
We hear a lot of maxims about how change brings growth, renews awareness, and builds the character of Christian churches as people bend traditions for the greater good. That reads nicely. But the blunt fact is that in churches, change can produce more hurt and chaos than constructive progress.
One church I served was located in a Colorado boom city that had grown too fast. Most citizens vividly remembered the days when most everyone knew each other. Shoppers met at the crossroads of two meandering avenues.
A key leader offered me words of wisdom about the people of that community. He mentioned that few moved into the town to participate in metro Denver. They wanted to escape the megalopolis. According to this elder, these citizens often confused growth with congestion, expanded streets with Times Square, and annexing more land for development with turning Arvada into another Bayonne off the New Jersey turnpike.
In such a setting, gung ho pastors who talk about the Great Commission bash their heads against a great wall of antigrowth sentiment. “Talk about family,” cautioned this elder. “Speak winsomely about moving toward greatness rather than growth. Who can be against a great church?”
The secret of pastoring in this kind of community was to live with the limitation that most of the citizens wanted a town, not a city. They wanted a church that functioned in a great way, but not in an expansive, impersonal way. Knowing mine wouldn’t be a computerized, thousand-member church by tomorrow, I tried to remember that the tension between numerical growth and maintenance is hardly new.
In the early 1960s, the church had built on property flush against unbelievable suburban growth. In the eighties a stagnant, even blighted, real estate market surrounded that edifice. Church growth experts tell us a neighborhood church, after two decades, needs to regionalize, appealing to a wider area. That was our challenge.
I voiced the concern to elders that we needed intentional outreach, more money allocated for publicity, and a target area for membership growth far beyond our walls. What an uproar that caused! People acted as if I were robbing them of their teddy bears.
Then another Presbyterian church near us closed its doors. Twenty years ago this church had decided to stay “small and caring,” merely appealing to the good neighbors around the block. That neighborhood shrank. Its residents aged. The church nose-dived in membership. The presbytery postmortem confirmed my analysis: “The traditional neighborhood congregations are one of the declining institutions of our society, and therefore a congregation must draw from a larger (regional) base for membership and participation. This makes location, accessibility, and visibility of greater importance.”
The experience of our sister congregation changed our outlook. Finally key leaders spoke of reaching out to many neighborhoods, making intentional growth plans, and advertising who we were. The pain of death overshadowed the inevitable pain of change.
Improvement demands change
A second principle I learned was this: Not all change is improvement, but without change there can be no improvement.
For at least two decades, the church winked at keeping a clean membership roll. No overt negligence or trickery was afoot in our rolls that showed continuous growth. The leaders simply embraced a cozy, small-town model for church membership: Whoever shows up for worship and church functions is considered a member. But more gray hair crept into the sanctuary as the years skipped by.
Eddie Gibbs of Fuller Theological Seminary, speaking at a Billy Graham church growth rally, pointed out the soft spot in churches so family oriented that they don’t track membership. “Membership,” cracked Gibbs, “becomes like the proverbial big-fish story. With every retelling, the fish becomes larger and friskier.”
So it is with churches that ignore membership rolls. Veterans look back and think the church is bigger and more alive with every retelling of past accomplishments.
A month after I arrived as pastor, I knew the church was no larger than, at best, two-thirds its reported size. Basic statistical data was needed to make hard decisions about the church’s future mission. And we couldn’t afford for the sources of this information to be contaminated by emotional ties to the church’s past.
That put me between a rock and a hard place. If I pointed out how the lack of solid membership counts leads to illusions about the church’s health, I would be castigated as a troublemaker. But if I perpetuated groundless notions, our plans would be contaminated.
I was stumped for a game plan, but God let me stumble on a solution.
The clerk of Session, our board secretary, took a shine to me. A close confidante of my revered predecessor, she’d been in the church for half a century. One day I proposed a plan: I asked her to pretend with me that the church had no members. She was to go on a hunt to justify the presence of everyone she retained on the church rolls. I set her mission at getting names straight, finding new addresses, keying in on families that deserved care and pastoral attention. Such an updated membership roll, I mentioned, would make my calling ministry more fruitful.
Before long, she discovered more than two hundred phantom members. She squared this fact with the knowledge that the church paid an annual head tax to the denomination-over ten bucks per year per member, phantoms included. Then she discovered the widow of a former pastor still listed as an active member, even though deceased for thirty years!
How membership rolls changed for the better when this news was flashed among church veterans! No one wanted to throw their good money after members God had claimed in heaven. Despite the initial pain of a readjusted self-concept for the congregation, change came because a few good people wanted to make things right.
To reach second base, you can’t stay on first
As baseball players know, you can’t steal second and still keep your foot on first.
The late Bill Veeck personified this spirit. He changed baseball with revolutionary promotions that rocked the staid baseball owners. Veeck sent a midget up to bat when he owned the St. Louis Browns. When at the helm of the Chicago White Sox, Veeck pressed for night baseball. He advocated promotions such as bat day to give the fans a great time. Other owners despised this overgrown kid, but he helped make baseball what it is today.
At times, pastors, too, find they have to take a risk to get the church where it needs to go.
Longer than anyone can remember, the Lord’s Supper in the Arvada church was observed in the same way, without a wisp of liturgy. After I’d been there a year, I suggested we celebrate Communion at the beginning of each season of the Christian year. When the worship committee studied the proposal, a key member quit the committee and resigned from Session. Though she never expressed it directly, she implied it was because I was just trying to get my way. Since I considered this parishioner a friend that cut me deeply.
Then three years later, this parishioner came to me positively aglow. Why? Because, of all things, Communion tied to the Christian year had introduced her to a biblical faith that meant so much to her. Change came for the better, but it required that we take the risk and leave first base.
There are still occasions when I feel as pommeled as Knudsen’s red concept car, but the times when change brings joy and improvement are worth the beating.
-Jack R. Van Ens
Denver, Colorado
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