How Church Leaders Can Lead Through Change and Transformation

The counter evidence is the early church. When the church grew at its fastest, there were absolutely no tracts written about evangelism. There were none written on church growth. They grew because they focused on formation. They created a profoundly different type of life than the Romans. [Alan Kreider’s] book is famously called The Patient Ferment of the Early Church. And the reason why it’s called that is because fermentation over time changes the nature of the food. The virtue that they spent the most time talking about in the early second-century to fourth-century church was patience.

When I was a pastor [of San Clemente Presbyterian Church], I would often say to the people in our church—we lived in a beautiful idyllic beach town—and I used to say my dream was that someday the realtors would use our church to sell houses, that they would say, “You really want your kids to grow up in a community like this. Let me tell you, there’s a community of people here whose entire reason for being is to make this the kind of place that you would want to live in because you will become a better person. And your kids will be better people.” 

My dream was that someday realtors would talk about our church before they talked about the beach. That notion that we are a community that proclaims and demonstrates a glimpse of what the world is supposed to be like, is to me the heart of evangelism. Every pastor, and I would guess anybody who comes to a conference like [Amplify], is coming with a heart for that. What they have to learn is it really is about transforming the culture of our congregation to be together a living witness to the reality of Christ. 

In this little beach town, an amazing thing would happen every night: People would stop and watch the sun go down. Restaurants would go quiet, and people would be on a trail and they would stop because the sun going down would be beautiful. And I used to say, “If someone at that moment said, ‘What do you think God is like?’ I would want you to be prepared to say, ‘Come and see. We’re not perfect, but come watch the way our church treats people. Come watch the way we welcome the stranger. Come watch the way we honor our seniors. Come watch the way we all love our children. It’ll give you a better glimpse than anything I could tell you.” 

That to me was the goal of evangelism: to make my community, my church, into a place where people could see a glimpse of the good news because we’re all messengers of it in our very being.

How do church leaders model that when they have so many other competing concerns?

The first thing you do is acknowledge how hard it is. It’s not something that we can just muster with our best effort. I wrote a book called How Not to Waste a Crisis, and one of the reasons I wrote it is because we found that the best leaders we knew all were living with a false idea that they could outwork any problem in the world. We could just try harder, we could make it happen.