Yesterday Once More April 28, 2010
Posted by Dan R. Dick in Change, Church growth, Church Leadership, Congregational Planning.Tags: Church Leadership, Religious Trends, Vision
8 comments
I am constantly amazed at how many churches are looking for their future in their past. It’s a bit like looking in the cupboard to see if we can find the best meal we ever ate. For a people who believe that their Savior makes all things new, we certainly don’t act like it. I cannot tell you the number of Church Councils I meet with to talk about their vision for the future, and what they tell me is what they looked like in their bygone glory days. For example, across the country United Methodist Churches have very little appeal for families with young children who have no desire for anything more than Sunday child care and a fun hour of singing and stories. Yet, we continue to pin our future on recreating a (very brief) golden age from the 1950s and 1960s when our Sunday schools were filled to brimming. Of course, Methodist and Evangelical United Brethren were making more children in those days. However, Christian Educator’s Fellowships coast-to-coast do everything in their power to keep the nostalgia for those mythic days alive. This in a culture where the majority of today’s church-children are born into families of conservative evangelicals who already have a church (non-denominational) affiliation. The secular consultants that most of our agencies have hired to tell them how to be church have admitted to us that we simply do not have much of a “market” with children and youth, yet the majority of our churches still maintain “children are our future.” (Note: “children/youth/young adults are our future” is a dumb thing to say. They are the church NOW, and any “future” that depends on cultivating long-term or lifelong relationships with any one congregation in this day and age is doomed to fail…)
