The church must learn new forms

The American Church is not growing. The new people in the pews are almost exclusively either transplants from another church or people returning after a period of separation.

When churches close their doors in your neighborhood, it’s too late. Closures are the inevitable result of our failure to add any unchurched people to our community for many years, not just the past one or two. As with business, danger signals are outside customer base. The people in our churches aren’t going to signal an alarm; they’re content with our product as-is. It’s the people outside the customer base, those who wouldn’t step foot in our churches if we paid them, who are our danger signals.

We don’t need a new message. Americans already know our message (or think they do).

We don’t need a new church-planting model. There are hundreds of models that have been in play for decades, and few produce more than marginal success. Those who do add substantial numbers of unchurched people to their church cannot replicate their success anywhere else.

We don’t need a new move of the Spirit. Ok, yes, we do need a new move of the Spirit. But if we had one, the only forms we have are the same moulds which have been failing us for years.

We need new forms. New moulds into which the Spirit can pour another wave of Jesus-loving, God-fearing humans from every corner of our cities into a multi-generational, multi-ethnic, multi-cultural assembly.

The business world is a ripe analogy. New business forms emerge, not from incumbent enterprises, but out of countless failures by discontent entrepreneurs who labor quietly on the fringes for years. The “instant” successes of Starbucks, Uber, and others are fabricated stories disseminated after years of failure and learning. They found success, not because they refined an existing product or added a new feature, but because they met a need that existing businesses coudn’t see. Starbucks discovered a huge need, not for better coffee, but for a “third space”.

We desperately need more holy discontents in America who will make hundreds of mistakes to discover our new forms. Incumbent churches will, at best, ignore their efforts. At worst, they’ll mock and persecute them, just as the Jerusalem leadership forbade Peter and John, two untrained men, from speaking about Jesus outside their synagogue and scribe model (see apostles forbidden to teach in jesus name).

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