What Leaders Do When Their Plans Are Reduced to Rubble
By Austin Gohn
I was 30 days into my “first 90 days” plan when I closed our church building indefinitely.
After working at the church for seven years and completing a six-month interview process, I stepped into the role of lead pastor at the end of February—barely a month before something called the coronavirus went from a fringe news report to dominating the headlines (and my Twitter feed).
I had read The First 90 Days, a Harvard Business Review book, and created a plan that involved dozens of trust-building conversations, a strategy for generating some short-term wins, and a process for rebuilding our team, which had gone from five to two over the past year.
I imagined myself as an “organizational architect,” a phrase I’d taken from the book, and I was ready to lead our church to the next level. I fasted and prayed about it before putting it into action, and, for my first 30 days as lead pastor, I worked that plan without a hiccup.
That 90-day plan still sits above my desk, taped to the paneled wall, haunting me.
If there was ever a year for casting vision, it was 2020. The phrase “20/20 Vision” had been reduced to a cliché in church circles, but that didn’t stop pastors everywhere from using it. (Admittedly, I was a little sour that I hadn’t thought of it first.) Many of these plans were the result of multiday retreats with staff teams and boards, countless hours of prayer, SWOT (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats) analyses, and the advice of expensive church consultants. These plans included building campaigns, new campuses, growth goals, church-planting initiatives, and sermon series. None of them included a contingency plan for a pandemic. I guess we didn’t have 20/20 vision after all.
Many of our best-laid plans are in ruins. When I walk into my church building, still closed at the time of writing, I see the sign-up for baptisms sitting in our church foyer and the fridge still filled with Communion trays from the week before we canceled—more ghost town, less Holy Ghost.
What do you do when your plans are reduced to rubble?
Develop (and Communicate) Hopeful Realism
In the early weeks of COVID-19, I kept coming back to Jeremiah’s letter to the exiles. Nebuchadnezzar’s armies had already sent out an initial wave of exiles from Jerusalem (Jeremiah 29:1), and the city itself was on the verge of destruction (52:1-30). With the city walls and the temple soon to be reduced to ruins, it was a world in crisis.
Jeremiah’s letter is the definition of hopeful realism in a time of crisis. Despite the false prophets who, in an unfounded attempt to keep morale high, were telling the people “we’ll be back to normal in no time,” Jeremiah was committed to reality—or what Dallas Willard defined as, “what you run into when you’re wrong.” Jeremiah, in effect, said, “This will end, but it will take longer than you think.” It will be around 70 years (Jeremiah 29:10), but a day is coming when you will be restored back to your land (29:14). In the meantime, he told them to stop living out of their suitcases and to establish long-term rhythms of work and family (29:5-7).
I tried to strike his tone in my own emails to the people in our church, who were scattered about in their neighborhoods rather than gathering together on Sundays. “This will end,” I kept writing in various ways, “but it will probably take longer than we think.”
It’s a long-term cultural crisis, by no means on par with the destruction of Jerusalem and 70-year exile of the Jews, but one with losses that are no less real. At the time I’m writing this, we’ve just surpassed 100,000 deaths attributed to COVID-19 in the United States, and many of those folks belong to our churches. Unemployment is the worst it’s been since the Great Depression, and our economy is devastated. Loneliness, depression, and anxiety, already on the rise in an isolated society, have become even more commonplace than before. Some churches that closed their doors for a few weeks or months have found they might need to close them for good.
Just as Jeremiah’s letter to the exiles gives way to Lamentations, a season of crisis requires us to stop and lament what we’ve lost. Before we rebuild, we need to walk around the rubble, name the pain, and look at the destruction rather than pretend it’s not there. We must not only give our congregations space to grieve but lead them into it.
Yet, as Australian pastor Mark Sayers pointed out in his book Reappearing Church, “God allows cultural crises to drive us back to him.” There are hints of this in Jeremiah’s letter to the exiles: “You will seek me and find me when you seek me with all your heart” (Jeremiah 29:13). Even in Lamentations, there are hints of this: “Restore us to yourself, Lord, that we may return; renew our days as of old” (Lamentations 5:21). It’s the vocabulary of renewal, and that’s precisely what happens next.
Out of the ruins of crisis, God raises up architects of renewal. If the beginning of this crisis required Jeremiah to form our imaginative framework as leaders, the middle of this crisis requires us to shift toward Ezra and Nehemiah.
Become an Architect of Renewal
When exiles began returning to Jerusalem, the city was in shambles. The temple had been destroyed and the walls of the city were obliterated. So, they made plans and started rebuilding—beginning first with the temple and later, under the leadership of Nehemiah, with the city walls. The first was a symbol of God’s presence, the second of his protection.
It would have been a mistake, though, to think that rebuilding (or “reopening”) Jerusalem was enough on its own apart from the renewal of the people themselves. God is not interested in merely rebuilding a city or reopening a building. Any architect could do that. Instead, God wants architects of renewal.
Starting in Nehemiah 8, a series of scenes show what this looks like. Ezra opens the Torah at sunrise and doesn’t stop reading it until lunch. As the people listen, their response is spontaneous worship. People shout “Amen!” and bow down before God and weep. The scene then quickly becomes one of joyful celebration. A few weeks later, they spend a quarter of the day confessing their sins and worshipping God, only to end with a renewed commitment to obedience.
Rebuilding without renewal would have created the same conditions that led to the crisis 70 years earlier, and the same is true with reopening our churches. It can be easy to think that once you get your congregation back in the building, which some of you may have been doing for months now, your job is done. But, just like Ezra and Nehemiah, God is looking for architects of renewal in our own time—people who aren’t content with rebuilding the way things were, but renewing the way things should be.
For those who long to be architects of renewal, I suggest three things:
Study past architecture. Look back before you look forward. Familiarize yourself with the patterns of crisis and renewal throughout the history of Israel and the church. Read books like Richard Lovelace’s Dynamics of Spiritual Life or Mark Sayers’ Reappearing Church. Study the history of the church in your geographic region (even outside of the Restoration Movement) and, if your own church has been around for a while, look for spikes in spiritual vitality throughout its timeline. If you know the building blocks of renewal, it’s easier to know where to start.
Inspire some rebuilders. There’s that old saying from Antoine de Saint-Exupery, “If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up the men to gather wood, divide the work, and give orders. Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea.” The same is true with renewal. Leverage the stories of past renewal movements to stir people’s hearts for God to do it again. Don’t worry about who doesn’t want to be part of it yet. Pay attention to those who share your longing for more and invite them to start praying and dreaming with you.
Draft your blueprints. I say “draft” because renewal doesn’t always go according to plan. In fact, as I said in an article in the June issue of Christian Standard, only God can bring about renewal. All we can do is create the conditions. Drafting blueprints is about making plans for habitually pursuing the presence of God, calling people back to the simple truths of the gospel, and challenging people to holiness.
In the end, the connection between crisis and renewal isn’t automatic. In fact, if a crisis doesn’t give way to renewal, it’s likely we’ll go through some form of crisis again and again until it does. Shifting from crisis to renewal requires leaders, architects of renewal, who are willing to trash their 90-day plans and join in what God longs to do through our churches.
Austin Gohn serves as lead pastor at Bellevue Christian Church in Pittsburgh. He is the author of A Restless Age: How Saint Augustine Helps You Make Sense of Your Twenties. He has written for The Gospel Coalition, Fathom magazine, and Gospel-Centered Discipleship (gcdiscipleship.com).
(Be sure to read this article’s companion piece, a Bible study of the Babylonian captivity by Arron Chambers: “I Will Bring You Back.”)
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