What Will We Do If God Doesn’t Restore His Church to ‘Bigger Is Better’?
By Kim Harris
As I sat on the back deck on one of the cooler evenings in July, I compulsively picked up my phone for my routine post-dinner scroll through Twitter, my only connection to the world outside my COVID-19 bubble. I assumed my timeline would again be filled with petty debates about the efficacy of different mask fabrics, some sort of hashtag challenge designed to drown out the contentiousness in the world, or a friend from high school selling skin-care products. I expected to sigh after five minutes or so, set down my phone, and swear off social media for the 15th time since March. Four months into the coronavirus crisis in the United States, I was exhausted by the relentless noise of constant news updates, conflicting recommendations, and perpetual keyboard fights every time I looked at a screen.
As a church leader, I started to closely follow the health and community recommendations for mitigating the spread of coronavirus in early February, when cases were first diagnosed in the U.S. At that time, reports from countries already suffering serious effects from COVID-19 cited churches as environments particularly vulnerable to spreading the virus—places where cases clustered, resulting in church building closures. In March, our church’s executive team responded quickly to state guidance for limiting gatherings. Our church had offered online services for years, so switching to an exclusively online format was a relatively simple task. Less simple was everything that happened after that.
Our leadership listened attentively to conflicting predictions about how long we should expect to keep our services online only. Recommendations varied from “you can return to normal life in two weeks” to “don’t expect to meet again until 2021.” When states started implementing stay-at-home orders, the tone of our leadership conversation changed. The question was no longer “when do go back to normal?” but “what if there is no more normal?”
Pastors and other church leaders all over the country engaged in this same conversation. How do we have church as we’ve always known it if people cannot or will not meet together? What about church camp? What about Christmas Eve specials? What about worship nights and fellowship dinners and women’s conferences? What if we offer all of these things—same as always—and no one comes?
For our church, those conversations continued after we resumed in-person gatherings at the start of June with only about 30 percent of our regular physical church attendance. We met in person for six weeks before some of our locations had to suspend services again due to local COVID-19 outbreaks. Our leadership team read the blogs, listened to the podcasts, participated in the Zoom think tanks, and talked and talked and talked to one another about how to effectively pastor our people amid so much uncertainty.
When Glory Doesn’t Equal Grandeur
It was after one such day of talking and brainstorming about how to restore our church to what it had been just a few months earlier that I found myself on my deck, tiredly looking through Twitter when I came across this 10-tweet thread from Beth Moore (slightly edited).
So, having been raised, most of us, to think bigger is better when it comes to kingdom work, & fruitfulness always looks like advancement, & growth can always be measured in size or numbers, what shall we do when we’re called by God to rebuild from rubble, but glory won’t = grandeur?
What shall we do, having developed ravenous appetites for upsizing, if God has in mind to downsize? What if the way up in this church era is way down? What if God DOESN’T restore everything back to big? Beautiful? Loud?
Let’s make this very personal:
Can you be faithful?
Can I?
I mean, what shall we do with our Instagram if this turns out not to be pretty?
The exiles faced this prospect when they returned joyously, singing their pilgrim songs, to rebuild the Temple—wouldn’t it be grand?—but what they found was an enormous mountain of rubble. The word of the Lord came to Zerubbabel, “Not by strength or by might but by my Spirit.”
This is one of the best parts: the word of the Lord comes through the interpreting angel to Zechariah, “What are you, great mountain? Before Zerubbabel you will become a plain. And he will bring out the capstone accompanied by shouts of ‘Grace, grace to it!’” (Zechariah 4:7)
Do you know how that mountain was going to become a plain? By those exiles lifting up one rock after another from that rubble. And from that rubble the Spirit would slowly raise walls to dwell within again.
There would be those who would despise it because it wasn’t like before. But for those who did not despise the day of small things, the ceremonial bringing forth of the capstone would not be lost on them. They should’ve been dead but were alive. It should have all been over, but God had given them a new beginning. And they would shout, “Grace! Grace!”
So, what shall we do when the pandemic and every other earthquaking, economy-shaking thing has had its way with us? When budgets are blown & members have flown & deep pockets have left in a huff & gone home? What happens when the day of the big shots is done?
Wave bye-bye.
For those willing to be faithful with the rubble, for those who don’t need to be big shots, for those who are capable of downsizing and no longer care to be controlled by the deep pockets, for those willing to find their souls again, it won’t be by might. It won’t be by power.
It will be by the Spirit of God alone.
God’s paring us back. And when we see evidence of real, live fruit—not manufactured fruit, not plastic hype—& lives are transformed—not by programs & systems but by the gospel of Jesus Christ—we will know that it was Grace! Grace!
@BethMooreLPM
As church leaders, we look at our empty church buildings, and our hearts echo the ache of Israel in Lamentations 1:1: “How deserted lies the city, once so full of people!” We mourn the empty baptisteries, quiet campgrounds, and the stillness in our sanctuaries. Every single metric we have used to measure and evaluate the effectiveness of our ministries has been destroyed and reduced to a mountain of rubble.
In that rubble are alarming statistics about overall disengagement with church and faith practices of professing believers since the beginning of the pandemic. In their June “State of the Church 2020” report, Barna Group reported that 32 percent of previous churchgoers had not streamed a single service during the first three months of the pandemic. Among millennials, 50 percent said they had not watched an online service since in-person gatherings ceased. Beyond weekend services, the coronavirus debris field also included church programs and dreams.
The Heavy Bricks in Front of Us
We can argue forever about how we got here. We can curse the darkness of conflicting science, governmental response, and young people who already had one foot out the door. We can disagree about which experts were right, what recommendations should and shouldn’t have been followed, and the best narrative to believe. We can run every single play in every single church playbook to restore our former greatness. But when God calls us to rebuild his church, it won’t be from our playbooks or our plans, but from his Spirit alone.
By his Spirit, God might build something different, something new, something we don’t even recognize. Whatever it is, he won’t build it by our strength or by our might. Many of the Israelites who came back to Jerusalem had never seen the temple—after all, the exile had lasted 48 to 70 years (depending on how scholars date its beginning and end). They likely didn’t have a clear picture of what the temple should look like when they set out to rebuild it. It mattered little, since they couldn’t rebuild the temple by themselves. They sought God’s direction in what to do with every single brick until all those individual bricks eventually formed together to make a wall.
I don’t know what church will look like next week, next year, or in five years. I don’t know how we’ll hold conferences, churn out more content, or continue to make payroll. Moving forward, I don’t expect the lives of church leaders to be easy or simple. At the same time, I don’t imagine moving massive bricks day after day was terribly pleasant, either. But we look at what God did through Nehemiah, Ezra, and thousands of other Israelites, and we consider it a miracle and a testament to God’s power. The Israelites didn’t know their role in God’s overarching story when they went home at night with bloody hands and tired backs. They just knew those bricks were heavy and God was faithful.
There are heavy bricks in front of us. These bricks are made from disappointment, disengagement, and disagreement. We’ll have to move stones filled with inflated expectations and bruised egos. There is no formula and no blueprint. There are no real experts. There are only raw materials in front of us, and they are the same materials God has used to write his story throughout all of history—his people.
God’s people have always faithfully committed to the day of the small things without knowing if what they were building would be grand and magnificent or small and unassuming. And when we, together, raise that capstone to the top of whatever God builds, through his power alone, we’ll cry “Grace! Grace!” that he invited us into the small brickwork of his miracle in our generation.
God, show us the bricks.
Kim Harris serves as multisite director of communications and engagement at The Crossing, a multisite church located in three states across the Midwest.
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