One of the most significant steps we’ve taken in our revitalization journey is to redefine success. To draw a new target. This didn’t happen overnight. It’s been a long process that started early in our decline and has only recently concluded, years after we bottomed out. In some ways, it’s probably a lifelong project.
Reinventing what we labeled “successful” became a necessity during the four years of rapid membership loss. It was a survival mechanism. We needed some way of dealing effectively with our failure fatigue.
Because we had experienced twenty years of steady growth in members and ministries, we had implicitly adopted a narrow sense of success.
- The number of Sunday morning worship services offered.
- How many had been baptized.
- The level of financial giving.
- The square feet in the building and the acreage of the property.
These are what brought smiles to our faces. These are what filled year-end reports. These are the types of stories we shared with laughter around the conference room table at staff and staff/elder meetings. Budgets. Butts. Buildings. Baptisms.
But when each of these began its own vanishing act, we suddenly needed some other reason just to get out of bed. We didn’t feel successful as we watched giving, attendance and conversions drop consistently for four years. But in our hearts, we also knew that we weren’t necessarily failures. As I’ll mention in another part to this series, the decline was related to our attempts to prioritize an aspect of our pursuit of the mission of God. We were taking hard and costly steps to follow God’s mission, yet we were experiencing failure in critical categories. How could resolve this tension? This tension between being obedient to God’s mission yet watching every arrow shot at every target we thought to be important fall short of its goal?
We leaders were not the only ones struggling to define success. Some of our members were as well. There was a yearning for the past. The golden years of growth. The golden days of bigger and better. There was pressure to return to programs or traditions which some believed would take us back in time to those brilliant days of old.
But slowly, we began to articulate a different view of what it meant for us as a church to succeed. We began to tell a different set of stories around our conference room table. Stories which illustrated an alternate version of success. And, as a church, we began to celebrate a variety of “wins” outside of those traditionally celebrated.
In the words of Thom Rainer, we were struggling once again with what it means to be “great.” Rainer tells of a small-church preacher who approached him. “Dr. Rainer, I hear you are writing a book about [breakout churches]. I can’t wait to read it. But I really don’t have a desire to lead a megachurch. I hope your book will help pastors like me.” In other words “great” = great in size. (Rainer, Breakout Churches, 188). Implicitly, that had been our assumption as well. But we learned other forms of greatness.
Today, four years after the bottom of our decline, we finally have an explicit and more biblical view of success. We call it “7 Practices.” We teach these to every new member. We measure these once a year. These are the kinds of stories we share, the kinds of victories we celebrate. We try to eliminate things from the church calendar if we feel they take time away from these 7. We work now in ways that help each person associated with Highland to engage in these seven practices:
1. Worship God in one of Highland’s Sunday morning services weekly.
2. Grow with others in one of Highland’s adult SS classes/Huddles weekly.
3. Grow closer to God through personal spiritual disciplines one hour/week.
4. Serve in a ministry one hour/week.
5. Share Jesus in one of Highland’s Reach Groups monthly.
6. Give at least 10% to one of Highland’s collections weekly.
7. Share Jesus with others one hour/week.
It’s not a perfect target. We still slip onto old and unhealthy pathways of success. We still occasionally find ourselves aiming at the wrong target. But the 7 Practices are a huge step forward. They keep us directed toward things that aren’t as glamorous but that are more consistent with God’s purpose for us.
