The Challenges that Church Change Brings
Books can make great conversation partners! Recently we have been mining Paul Watts’ excellent little volume Gospel Driven Change for answers about the blessings and challenges of working through recalibration as a congregation. The questions asked come from us; the answers come directly from Paul’s writing.
You share quite a bit about your church story in Gospel Driven Change. How do you think this might help readers, and what kinds of lessons does it hold for elders and members navigating change?
My hope is that our story will illustrate the challenges, struggles and mistakes, as well as the minor triumphs, that can occur when gospel-driven change is put in place. Pastors, elders and church leaders, especially, need a lot of wisdom and grace, not to say grit and courage, to navigate such change. We need to gain the trust of the people we serve. We need to lead by example. We need to focus attention on issues of substance rather than style. We need to achieve both cultural relevance and continuity. We need to take the people with us. Above all, we need the wisdom that comes from above.
At the same time, congregations facing change need to hold realistic expectations and to be prayerfully supportive of their leaders, neither campaigning constantly for pet ideas nor resisting all change on principle.
Is there a particular part of the New Testament that is helpful for thinking through the challenges of church change?
The Acts of the Apostles, telling how the good news got from Jerusalem to Rome, is a story of profound, gospel-driven change. A relatively small community faced a massive influx. A predominantly Jewish Christian church had to learn how to absorb Gentile converts. For the people who lived through it, it was not comfortable. Almost every cherished social norm and cultural presupposition went into the melting pot. The radical conclusion of the whole story would soon be, ‘There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female: for you are all one in Christ Jesus.’
We might find it natural to suppose that it must have been easier for them. After all, they had the exceptional, powerful work and influence of the Holy Spirit poured out at Pentecost to propel them through all this change. They had the power not of positive thinking but of God. They had no buildings, no organised campaigns, no trained ministry, no theological colleges but ‘with great power the apostles gave witness to the resurrection of the Lord Jesus, and great grace was upon them all.’
Yet this power did not mean that the changes they faced were less real and, at points, less painful. They needed always to be a praying church, to ‘devote themselves to the apostles’ doctrine and fellowship, to the breaking of bread and prayers.’ They needed definite gospel intent. They did not have a church growth manual. But they did have purpose and out of that purpose grew strategies. They shared their possessions, they submitted their lifestyle to the gospel, they met together regularly, they had recognised leaders. They were a visible, purposeful community of God’s people. At their best, they had only one agenda – to do the will of Jesus Christ, the great head of the church.
What can your experience teach us about the timing and pace of gospel-driven change?
In the first decade of my ministry, gospel-driven change, though significant over that period of time, took a measured, some would say tortoise-like pace. Partly this was due to my own inherent conservatism and reluctance to change. Partly it was because there were still those in the church and congregation who were strongly resistant to almost any change.
If the pace of change had been fast and furious in those early days, we would scarcely have carried the people with us. Being born into the culture, sharing its hang-ups, was in a way a strength – no doubt in other ways a weakness. Issues of gospel-driven change came for me with a lot of emotional and relationship baggage.
One of the principles we have learnt is that there is not only a right thing to do, but a right time to do it. Timing is very important to managing change in the local church. At the same time, it is important not to lose the edge of gospel urgency. With hindsight some of the issues that were causing observable impediments in bringing the gospel to unchurched people could have been handled more decisively and courageously.
Pastor Paul Watts served as pastor in the Hillfields church in Coventry for 35 years, having previously worked as head of Religious Education at King Henry VIII School, Coventry. He writes about change in the local church from a position of personal and prolonged experience, making Gospel-Driven Change an invaluable resource for churches and individual readers. We are currently offering a limited time 10% discount on individual copies of the book for readers of our articles – simply use the discount code GOSPELCHANGE10 at checkout in our shop.
