You know the old truth, “Don’t expect anything different to happen if you keep on doing the same things”. It’s a fact, but sometimes overlooked in church circles. There are some things that should never change, no matter what happens, for example the certainty of our salvation, even though numbers around you are dropping. Or the preaching of the Gospel.
However, there are other methods we use today, which may have worked 40 years ago, but don’t work now. Church attendance across most denominations is falling, and leaders wring their hands and say, “what are we doing wrong?” One change is that parents no longer send their children to church or Sunday School, and that has made a big difference!
If the methods we use are working against us, then it’s time to change to something different. It seems a lifetime ago now, but in engineering we were used to watching for the downturn of results, and making corrections before things got too far out of hand, making recovery impossible. We are not good at that in church circles, because we don’t like admitting to defeat, and we tell ourselves not to quit because that would be the wrong thing to do. Or is it? We can be prone to “wait and see”. Unfortunately, in business and yes, even in church, there are times when we have to admit defeat, abandon a particular project, and move on!
There may be no certainty that doing a new thing will work, but one thing is sure, we can always tell when the present setup is not working. As a final thought, It is very true that “numbers are not everything”, but have you noticed that this is usually said by members of a small church, with little history or outlook of growth?
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