Posted By Michael Breznau on Oct 15, 2018

Early this morning, Sears, that age-old department store of yesteryear, declared Chapter 11 bankruptcy, hammering several “16-penny” nails into their quickly closing coffin.[1]

100 years ago, Sears-Roebuck and Co. was second to none. They defined the term cutting edge by placing their colorful mail-order catalogs in nearly every home across America. Little children giggled over the huge toy section. Moms coveted the latest Kenmore kitchen appliances. Dads stashed away their pennies to buy lifetime-guaranteed Craftsman tools. But now the former industry leader, once perched on the lofty heights of Chicago’s Sears Tower, is seeing all those warm, fuzzy feelings vanish like a bullfrog atop quicksand.

Change is essential to survival.

Making wrong, maladaptive changes = death.

Making right, adaptive changes = health.

Sears didn’t need to change their product line. Craftsman, Kenmore, Lands End, et al., were rock solid brands. But failure to courageously and creatively present their products to a rapidly changing culture led to total collapse.

Now the privilege of presenting a product has been slowly scraped from their hands.

They battened down the hatches, squeezed employees, chopped marketing, and ignored the opportunity of the Internet (they could have been Amazon on their own, as Elizabeth Olson of Fortune magazine wisely opined six years ago). Sears let their buildings grow both dated and dilapidated. Two months ago, my wife and I wandered through the Sears store in a nearby mall. We were greeted by vacant shelves, dirty floors, and disinterested employees, who had been hired only to shutter the location. A slow, painful demise rolled out in front of our eyes.

CNN’s Chris Isidore reports:

“…many of Sears’ problems were self-inflicted. Its management tried to compete by closing stores and cutting costs. It slashed spending on advertising and it failed to invest in the upkeep and modernization of its outlets. Sears and Kmart stores grew barren and rundown. . . Sears was once the nation’s largest retailer and its largest employer. In its heyday, it was both the Walmart and Amazon of its time.” [2]

So today, Sears, “the store that changed America,” declares bankruptcy. Into the dusty archives she goes, along with former giants like Toys R’ Us, Kodak, and KMart.

A Tale of Church Stagnancy 

Understand this: the global Church of the living God will continue marching forward by the power of the Spirit through the faithful witness of the Gospel. We, as the people of God, are on the offensive. We do not doubt the words of Jesus, who said, “…I will build My church; and the gates of hell will not overpower it.” (Matthew 16:19b)

However, at a local level, thousands of once thriving churches stand in real danger of losing the opportunity to present the gospel of Christ in their communities.

I recently read detailed reports of a Bible-believing church in the Chicago area that used to be over 1,100 worshipers strong. Over the course of 35 years, their Saturday morning evangelism team passed out 17 million gospel tracts, engaged 540,000 people in gospel conversation, led 140,000 people to faith in Christ, sent out 250 men and women into full-time Christian service, and planted 18 churches.

Yet today, their regal building appears cavernous on Sunday mornings with just a handful of parishioners scattered across the hundreds of empty chairs. One look inside the sanctuary shows not much has changed in over 50 years. Their community dramatically shifted over the past several decades and somewhere along the way their evangelistic fervor and creativity disappeared. I’m praying God grants this struggling congregation the courage and faith to reach their community in a fresh way. But their story is repeated from coast-to-coast across North America. 100-200 churches are closing their doors every single week in the USA. Yes, you got that right: Every. Single. Week. [3]

We don’t need to change our product. The saving message of Jesus Christ is timeless, unchanging, and rock solid. The Word of God is an unshakeable guide in an era of uncertainty, fear, and doubt. We have tasted and seen the truth that the Gospel brings radical life-transformation.

But we, as individual believers and local churches, must make the right, adaptive changes to effectively present God’s good news in a rapidly changing culture.

Change is essential to survival.

A few generations ago, mainline-liberal churches chose to make a devastatingly maladaptive change: remove or ignore essential teachings of Christian faith and practice. The result? A slow, painful death. Today, many evangelical churches are shifting their sails and listing sideways toward this same hollow theological-liberalism, desperately hoping they don’t lose the opportunity to offer something to their communities. Sidenote: I wrote my master’s thesis on this subject. Click HERE to access the PDF.

Making wrong, maladaptive changes = death.

Yet for tens-of-thousands of gospel-preaching, Jesus-loving churches, the struggle to change methodology, communication, and aesthetics is slow and often rife with infighting. Even as men, women, and children veer away from our parking lots in search of authentic hope and love, many congregations embroil themselves in debates over interior decor, declining budgets, and pet-programs. While many churches have moved beyond the “worship wars” of the 1990s, still thousands of others remain in the fight, unaware that the very scent of it repels young adults faster than Deet on Michigan mosquitoes.

Making right, adaptive changes = health.

So what kind changes lead toward health? As was the case for the various corporations mentioned above, the answer to this question is different for every local context. Each church must ask: “What would a missionary do because, in fact, we all are missionaries in _____________?” How your church answers this question will probably look significantly different than how we answer it here at Mayfair Bible Church. But here are four simple points to consider with your team:

Flexible. 

Take risks. Act on your faith by trying new approaches to reach your mission field (see 1 Cor. 9:19-23; Acts 17:16-34). Some ideas will sound great but fail miserably. That’s okay. In fact, the process of ideation, implementation, and execution will result in healthy evaluation and long-term ministry effectiveness. Own up to your mistakes and be ready to give grace to others. Free people to use their various God-given gifts and skills in different ways. Don’t force artists to paint with only your ideas on your preferred canvas. Allow missional thinkers to contextualize and form initiatives to reach their spheres of influence. Let go of the top-down approach to leadership that causes organizations to squash and splat like an over-filled ketchup bottle. Don’t take rejection or ambivalence from others personally. Realize you won’t reach everyone. Your church won’t be the perfect place for every family. Get ready for hate-mail (Jesus received lots of it; cf. Jn. 15:18-21; 2 Tim. 3:12). Roll with it and prayer through it (Phil. 4:4-7). Be one in mind and heart as a church (Phil. 1:27), because as Chuck Swindoll often reminded us in chapel at Dallas Seminary, “The things that unite us are far more important than the things that divide us.”

Fun. 

Jesus laughed and sang. He told stories and enjoyed weddings, which most certainly including happy-hearted dancing (cf. Jn. 2:1-11; Lk. 15). Jesus had fun. I’m convinced of it! We should be having fun if we’re loving each other and our community in the same way Jesus loves us. Being the church gathered should cause all of us – the young and old alike – to genuinely smile. We’ll laugh out loud when we remember the goofy idiosyncrasies of our younger years and respond with fun-loving patience toward each other – especially the littlest ones in the church (Matt. 18:2-6; 19:13-15). We won’t make a fuss over things of small consequence, knowing life is too short to not have fun working together for the cause of greatest consequence: the Gospel. (see Phil. 4:2-2; 2 Tim. 2:14)

Fast-Paced.  

Hold on for the ride of your life. Based on my ministry experience in Texas, Montana, India, Mexico, North Carolina, and various Michigan locations, along with current research data, I believe we must recognize how rapidly our mission fields are changing. The breakneck speed of technological advancement, the popularity of neo-Atheism, along with burgeoning movements such as #MeToo, #BlackLivesMatter, #BlueLivesMatter, #AntiFa, #WhiteSupremacy, and heightened political tensions are forming how people respond to church institutions, preaching, and simple neighborly interaction. Many urban and suburban settings in North America are quickly becoming holistically multi-ethnic. God is bringing the nations to cities all around us. Don’t look at this change as an obstacle but as an opportunity. Are you effectively reaching across ethnic and economic divides? The first-century church did (cf. Eph. 2:11-22; Philemon 1:10-16)! Does your programming and interior design look like something left over from the 1960s… how about the 1990s? I’ll go out on a limb and state that none of us would frequent a dentist that hadn’t updated the office decor in 20 years and used methods based on research just as old. Yes, he or she is accomplishing the same task: cleaning your teeth and filling cavities. But using current aesthetics and techniques to accomplish those tasks matters to everyone. Are you living in the past – even idolizing the past – at the expense of effective gospel mission? The late Lesslie Newbigin, a renowned missiologist reminded us:

“Nostalgia for the past and fear for the future are equally out of place for the Christian.”

Are you seeking to communicate the timeless and powerful Gospel of Christ in a way your neighbors will comprehend? Do you know what they value most? Could you articulate their worldview? As I heard a teacher from New Tribes Mission (now Ethnos 360) put it simply, “We must first to understand them before we can reach them.”

Focused. 

Hone everything around the mission. Jesus gave a simple, clear mission to His first-followers and His instructions carry across time to all of us today:

“Go therefore and make disciples of all the nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I commanded you; and lo, I am with you always, even to the end of the age.” (Matt. 28:19-20)

Take the ruthlessly bold action of gearing your programs and ministries – what you do and how you allocate your resources – around making disciples who make disciples. Suspend what is extraneous or ineffective. Pray deeply for God to send laborers into His harvest (Matt. 9:38; Lk. 10:2). Be prepared to serve as His answer to your prayers. Lean into change for the gospel’s sake. Lose your life for Christ…and in losing your life, find life as it was meant to be lived (Mark 8:34-38). As my teacher, Howard Hendricks, proclaimed, “Change is the call of every Christ-follower.” So may we, by the grace of God, not lose the opportunity to present the timeless, saving message of our Savior in a rapidly changing world.