Preaching for Change
The only person who likes change is a wet baby. –Mark Twain (Attributed)
To Change or Not to Change, That is the Question
When do we decide to change? I’m not a Tony Robbins acolyte, but I do like his answer to this question: “change happens when the pain of staying the same is greater than the pain of change.” Lots of churches, from evangelical to mainline, are experiencing boatloads of pain as church after church closes their doors forever. Their search for an answer is crucial, and we’re here to help.
If we are intentional, preaching for change can become an effective component of a broader strategy to implement significant changes to help the church not just survive, but thrive in its local context. Preaching provides an opportunity to re-envision the ways in which the good news gets incarnated into the local church. I am not saying that all these problems can be solved by preaching. As Tod points out in his books, including Canoeing the Mountains, preaching is just one, albeit essential, part of the package when it comes to helping a church make important changes happen.
Why Preaching is Central to Enacting Church Change
Why is preaching for change important? Because it is your best chance at getting the largest percentage of your congregation in the same place at the same time. It’s also the best place to cast vision for the entire congregation. Of course there is the need to communicate more in the context of congregational meetings, small group visits, etc., but there is something unique about the place of the pulpit to connect the gospel to the specific vision that God has called us to.
What I want to focus on today is one crucial way we have the opportunity to effectively and safely (this is always important when it comes to change in the church) navigate this change in a church. Navigating change is a very tricky business in the church, so we need to make it count.
Preaching Change in Action: Parking Lot Problems
I’ll give an example from my own life. Our church rents a building for worship that has, to put it mildly, parking issues. And because we’re growing significantly, they’re going to get worse.
Yesterday, at a congregational meeting,someone asked about how the parking problems might be impacted by the church’s growth. Our pastor said something to the effect of, “it’s going to be a lot easier to love our neighbors on this side of the church than the other.” Why? Because too many folks were crowding an adjacent street, making it difficult for the church’s neighbors to get in and out of their driveways.
In other words, the overflow of parking that was becoming a headache for those living on one side of the church needed to be addressed. It also happened to be the side I generally parked on. I admit our pastor wasn't preaching a sermon. But he was preaching a distinct message to the congregation. And it got to me.
After the meeting, my wife turned to me and she asked, “are you ready to park on the other side?” I acknowledged my culpability and said “yes.” It might sound trivial, but it was a significant moment calling on the church to live out the gospel that required change. And I, having not given it much consideration previously, was sold.
Why? Because I want to be the kind of person that takes the gospel seriously by loving my neighbors. That’s a question of identity, and by appealing to the type of people we are called to be, I was convinced I needed to make a change. When we pair the gospel with concrete opportunities to change our behaviors, folks will listen and lives will change.
They may not always follow through (e.g. The Rich Young Ruler), but the chances are far higher than simply saying, “don’t park on this side of the street.” That’s merely a command, and one that could easily be ignored. In the end, I am willing to schlep our family up and down a sizable hill Sunday morning even though it’s inconvenient because I take my identity of being a Christ-follower seriously, seriously enough to give up convenience for inconvenience.
So How Do We Preach for Change?
Because change is scary, it ought to be couched in the context of who we are—that is, our corporate identity. In other words, we’re not focused on individual preferences, but on what faithfulness and fruitfulness will look like for the body of Christ. One person may prefer x while another y, but can the church leadership demonstrate they chose z because they have prayed, discerned, and ultimately feel convicted that’s what’s best for the whole church.
That way…even though we are asking people to do something that is uncomfortable (organizational change is always going to be uncomfortable), we are asking them to do something that is still in their DNA.
Offering a sermon series on the values of the church, while using examples from the proposed changes as illustrations, will set you up for less friction as you enact those changes.
What the Saint Lucia Parrot Teaches us about Organizational Change
In 1977, the small island of Saint Lucia, located in the eastern Caribbean, had a problem. Saint Lucia was home to its very own species of parrot, the Saint Lucia Parrot. But by 1977 the parrot had almost gone extinct.
Through a combination of habitat destruction, hunting, and poaching there were only one hundred of the birds still alive when Paul Butler, a recent college graduate, was hired to attempt to save the tropical bird from extinction. Butler’s job was simple, with a budget of a few hundred dollars, no real connections or political power, he was tasked with saving the bird from extinction. (Source Material from Chip and Dan Heath, How to Change Things When Change is Hard (Crown Currency, 2010)
The amazing thing is that it worked. In five years, the parrot population had multiplied from 100 to 700, an almost unheard of result for an endangered species.
But how did Butler achieve his success? Especially given the fact that when he arrived St. Lucians were more likely to trap or eat the bird than they were to protect it?
The brilliant stroke was Butler’s focus on shaping behavior based on the already-existing identity of the St. Lucians. As a culture, they were known as a people who “take care of their own,” and so all of Butler’s work, whether it be printing parrot bumper stickers, T-Shirts, songs written about the parrot, all of them were written with the idea of how St. Lucians take care of their own. Shepherd created a one-stop shop for taking care of the parrot. In this case, it meant taking care of their own wildlife to keep the St. Lucian Parrot from extinction.
Bringing St Lucia to the Church
Now, how does this relate to us, those entrusted with leading the church?
When the church has recognized its need to change, it will be much easier if you can connect the need to change with the existing cultural identity of the church. If Saint Lucia is known for “taking care of its own,” what’s a simple statement that is true to your church?
This may at first sound manipulative, but it’s really not. In every individual and organization, there is a gap between our aspirational goals as a community and our lived reality. The goal here is to live into the aspirational vision of the church by leaning into a value statement that everyone agrees with and therefore is willing to change for.
So, when we talk about the cultural identity of the church, we’re talking about a value that already exists in the church, but has for one reason or another, atrophied. The role then of the leader is to remind and remember that identity as the culture approaches change-and the various challenges that go with that change.
So, to better understand this, let’s take a look at a few examples of a value statement that connects to the church’s identity, as well as a proposed change that accompanies the value statement.
Here are a few examples:
“St. Mark’s cherishes the community of Springfield”
“The Foundry has always made discipleship #1”
“First UMC loves its neighbors literally”
Now, let’s take those value statements and build a sermon series around each of them. Not a sermon series person? That’s okay, as you choose your lectionary texts or topics, consider how you might incorporate those values within the sermons.
Let’s take a moment to see how those statements can then get embodied in the teaching ministry of the church.
“St. Mark’s cherishes its city of Springfield”, and because of this, we’re going to preach a three-week series on God’s hope for Christian community.
“The Foundry has always made discipleship their #1 priority”. Because of this, the Foundry is going to be teaching a series on the role of discipleship in the church.
“Because First UMC loves its neighbors” they are going to preach a series on God’s call to love our neighbors from the Old Testament until today.
Describing these changes as they are happening, and the positive results they bring, throughout your preaching (as is appropriate), can serve to reinforce the changes.
Why is it important to name the values behind the change? For one, it honors the legacy of the church, while also offers the hope that changes being made are in keeping with the identity, the values and mission of the church. Any significant change ought to reflect the current leadership’s attempts to remain faithful to both the gospel and to the nature and identity of the local church.
Concretize the Change (if Possible)
Finding ways to honor and respect what has come before will ease the transition. To close out our time, I want to share a true story of an Episcopal church whose leadership had come to a difficult decision that they needed to remove a marble communion table from their sanctuary in order to make possible a contemporary worship service and additional events in the sanctuary.
The vestry knew it would be a difficult ask, they knew there would be significant emotional distress at the proposition of removing the table. But they also believed it was what God was calling them to do. So they made a seemingly odd decision. They decided to remove the table, but not merely remove it-they decided to chop it up!
Well, yes, but into individual tiles, each then presented to the congregation with a ribbon around it. Thanking the church for their generosity and then giving them a small piece of the table they could hold onto as a keepsake.
As you can probably imagine, the results were spectacular. Instead of becoming a massive source of controversy, the tiles demonstrated intentionality and honored those who came before.
So words matter, but ultimately change doesn’t happen in the pulpit alone. We need to find ways to embody these changes to make them a reality. For that reason, we take the three church examples above and come up with concrete actions that will help the church live out the change.
Making the Values Stick in our Three Example Churches
We mentioned earlier that St. Mark’s cherises their community, so they are going to throw three free events, not just for their church, but for the entire community to tangibly demonstrates their love for their town. The preaching team at St. Marks will share either stories from these events or encourage their congregation to volunteer and support these events as they take place.
Either way, the events reinforce the value of cherishing the community, thereby getting more buy-in from the church. A congregant may even think to themselves, “you know, I’d rather be (fill in the blank with whatever activity they enjoy), but this is really important to St. Marks and therefore it’s really important to me, I’ll help out with that.”
What about the Foundry? Because the Foundry values discipleship, during the sermon series, the pastor will share the need for new volunteers to enable three new pathways for disciples at varying places in the discipleship journey. This will enable everyone to have a place where they are learning to follow Jesus faithfully.
What about First UMC? Because of their love for their neighbors, they are going to be starting a food kitchen in their basement to show their neighbors, many of whom are below the poverty line, the love of Christ by serving their needs concretely by providing for their food needs.
In each of these examples, we find a church that is aligning it’s cultural identity with a value statement, and then finding ways to concretely embody their identity.
Wrapping it Up
When do we change? Often it’s when the pain of staying the same is higher than making significant changes to revitalize the church. At the same time, recklessly jumping feet first into change, without taking the time to really understand a faith community’s identity and values is likely to lead to division, resistance, and potentially the leader on the way out.
So how can we intentionally lead churches through change? By discovering the identity of the church-developing a value statement that represents that reality, and then connecting the needed changes to the value statement. Then, as we preach, we deliver content that matches that value statement-thereby attaching the change not to some scary, unknown future, but to the already existing identity of the church. We then find concrete ways of implementing those changes, which offers a chance for our congregants to buy-in to the changes themselves.
The truth is that change, while hard, is absolutely necessary for a people that easily get distracted and stuck in ruts, mission drift as it is often described today. If we carefully follow a plan such as the one described above, the change implemented will become a gift to the pastor and the congregation, because it will allow them to align their vision, mission, and practices with their #1 priority: sharing the good news of Jesus Christ with the world.
P.S.There’s a lot here to digest, and it may be best to bring on a coach or coaching service, like A.E. Sloan to help in the process. They’ve developed a number of resources to help churches and leaders manage change well.
Blog written by guest writer-Stuart Strachan Jr, founder of The Pastors Workshop.
The Pastors Workshop is your trusted hub for enhancing your preaching and worship services. With handpicked insights from top pastors and scholars, our resources are designed to seamlessly integrate into your services. Elevate your sermons and empower your congregation with compelling, transformative storytelling tools. To learn more, visit https://thepastorsworkshop.com/
