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June July 2018 Vol 5 Issue 4

CHURCH CHURCH

THE THE

Revitalizer

“A Revitalization Retreat in Every Issue”

LESSONS LEARNED from

Church Revitalization & Renewal

“The only magazine dedicated to Church Revitalization.” ~ Tom Cheyney

ENOVATE R National Church Revitalization Conference

Speakers Include: Tom Cheyney Ron Smith Jason Britt Dennis Mitchell Lee Kricher Terry Rials Jim Grant Paul Smith Walter Jackson Jason Cooper Michael Atherton Bill Hegedus Drew Cheyney Chris Irving Amber Irving Steve Smith Jason Cooper Rob Myers Estelle Myers David Lema & Others

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November 6-8, 2018 Orlando, FL

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National Church Revitalization Speakers

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Main Sessions by Revitalization Practitioners

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“The only church revitalization magazine”

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By Terry Rials

20 24

What I Learned the Hard Way About Revitalization

Lessons Learned from a Decade of Doing Church Revitalization

Planned Absences—the Sheep May Wander but They Will Grow Fonder— and You Can Avoid Burnout By Joel R. Breidenbaugh

38 44 The

From Sorrow to Joy in Church Revitalization and Renewal By Chad McCarthy

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Revitalization Podcast Subscribe to our weekly podcast focused around the revitalization of Churches in North America. To subscribe go to: renovateconference.org/resources

CONTENTS 12

Things I’ve Learned in Church Revitalization By Bill Tenny-Brittian

It Can Be Done! By Ron Smith

THE LEADERSHIP LINK…

Learning the Lessons of Revitalization By Michael Atherton

Don’t Let Social Media Derail Revitalization By Rodney Harrison

Revitalization Lessons: Negative and Positive By Bud Brown

Lessons Learned from Church Revitalization and Renewal

By Lee Kricher

Revitalizer

LIBRARY

Top 3 Children’s Ministry Revitalization Lessons Learned By Bill Hegedus

Universal Lessons Learned While Bringing Youth Ministries Back from the Dead By Drew Cheyney

Little Wins Grow Big Vision By Pete Tackett

Lessons Learned in Revitalization: De-Clutter Your Life! By David Jackson

7 Things I Wish I Knew Before I Revitalized a Church

What Lessons Can We Learn from the Giant Redwoods? By Darwin Meighan

New Research: What We’ve Learned About Church Health and Growth By Mark Weible

It’s About People Not Processes By Jim Grant

The Great Commission Code By Kenneth Priest

64 The Church Revitalizer Book Reviewer: Rob Hurtgen 74 The focus of this edition the Revitalizers Library focuses on de veloping you. The Leader’s Bookshelf by Admiral James Stavridis, United States Navy (Retired) and R. Manning Ancell and When: The Scientific Secrets of Perfect Timing by Daniel H. Pink. Both books are excellent in their aim of developing leaders.

June/July | Vol 5, No 4

By Bob Whitesel

Revitalization Is like Baseball Not Golf By Rob Myers Lessons Learned from Church Revitalization and Renewal By Steve Sells

THE

CHURCH

Revitalizer Volume 5, No. 4

The Church Revitalizer Is published bi-monthly by Renovate Publishing Group 1906 West Lee Road Orlando, FL 32810 Email: ChurchRevitalizer.guru

PUBLISHER Executive Editor Dr. Tom Cheyney Associate Publisher Mark Weible Associate Publisher Circulation & Marketing Tom King Brand Manager Tom Cheyney Magazine Designer & Format Editor Gerald Brown Director of Advertising Renovate Staff Web Ad Traffic Director Mark Weible Digital Media Associate Ashleigh Cheyney For subscription information contact this office at: www.churchrevitalizer.guru/subscriptions. Subscriptions donations are $30.00 per year for six issues, $52.00 for two years (12 issues). Outside the U.S. add $10.00 per year prepaid.

ChurchRevitalizer.Guru

By Tom Cheyney

Welcome to the Church Revitalizer Magazine: A Church Revitalization Retreat in Every Issue! Each and every one of us as a church revitalizer have been learning multiple lessons relating to our work of renewal. We are the sum total of all of our lessons. A portion of our lessons have been learned through natural transitions we make in doing the work of ministry. Another portion comes from the giftedness we have been given by the Lord for the work of the ministry. A third portion of the lessons we have learned comes from others who have shared valuable lessons they have encountered in revitalization and are offered up to you so that you can gain a degree of learning from their work and ministry. There is a final portion which most of us have encountered throughout our work in the renewing of churches and these are the lessons learned the hard way in church revitalization and renewal. In this edition I want to look at the Lessons Learned from Church Revitalization and Renewal. Church Revitalization presents us with daily lessons to be learned. It is our choice as to whether or not we will make the effort to embrace these lessons. Here are a few ideas to get us started thinking about the lessons we have learned in Church Revitalization. Not everyone who works in church renewal and revitalization is wired the exact same way! Few will be able to make everyone happy. Moving forward and making key decisions is risky. Both Pastor and laity will make mistakes! Take the time and make the time to get the proper training before you move forward in church revitalization. Prepare yourself spiritually and then prepare your leaders spiritually. Then begin preparing your church spiritually. Stay connected, more is coming!

Dr. Tom Cheyney is the Founder and Directional Leader of Renovate National Church Revitalization Conference and Executive Editor of the Church Revitalizer.

Lessons Learned from a Decade of Doing Church Revitalization n the ten years that I have worked feverishly in the field of church revitalization, I have learned so much and I am learning more every day. I have to say that I have learned more working in the field in church revitalization than I ever did in the doctoral seminars or from reading books on the subject. Just about the time that I think I have seen and heard it all, I hear a new story that blows my mind. That said, there have been some incredible lessons learned in this experience of working with hundreds of churches, pastors, and denominational leaders. I would like to share just a few of those lessons with you.

Lesson One: Everybody is looking for a quick fix, which hardly ever happens. As we have said many times, revitalization takes a considerable amount of time to accomplish, at minimum it takes 1,000 days. Please don’t let that scare you off! There are some quick gains that will happen as soon as you begin to implement your strategy. These are very exciting and are a quick lift to the life and ministry of your church. They feel like the refreshment that comes to your church from a good revival. Please don’t stop there because there is much more to do and much more to come. Seeing a bump in attendance, involvement, giving, decisions, and

member excitement will only be a temporary phenomenon if you stop there. It takes time to unravel the problems in the church and to address them biblically. You will attempt new ministry approaches, some of which will fail and cause you to go a different route. This just takes time. The Lord is patient, we should be patient too.

Lesson Two: Staying power is key to a successful revitalization. There will come a day in your revitalization project where you will want to abandon the whole thing

The Lord is patient, we should be patient too.The Lord is

“

patient, we should be patient too.

“

By Terry Rials

and do something else. I think the desire to jump onto something new and refreshing is hardwired into the hearts of pastors. Like a frog jumping from one lily pad to another, we jump on one interesting project after another. At first, this seems normal and comfortable, but if you were to look at the pattern of pastor leadership, it would meander more than anything else. Charting the path of most pastors in their leadership would look like Stevie Wonder’s driving. My advice get on this church revitalization

project and stay on it. I know you don’t want to do that sometimes, but stay on it. It may not make sense to you at the time, but stay on it. I love the old Karate Kid movie, especially the part where Mr. Miyagi has Daniel-san wax on, wax off, sand the floor, paint the house, paint the fence. It made no sense to Daniel at all until one day, when Daniel was ready, Mr. Miyagi brought it all together for him! The Lord will bring all this together for you too.

Lesson Three: Pastors are not soothsayers. They do not understand the mind of God nor can they predict the future. I wish I had recorded in a journal the number of times that a pastor has told me that he doesn’t know if he will be at his church for the next three years, so starting revitalization should wait until the next pastor arrives. I don’t have any way of proving this, but my guess is that a substantial number of those pastors are in their same positions three years later. This is especially true of pastors who are close to retiring. Many times we are convinced that we are about to be called to the next church which seldom happens. Since when do we as pastors have the ability to predict the future? Only a very few prophets had the ability to predict the future, like Elijah in the Old Testament and Agabus in the New. Careful here, the demonic slave girl in Philippi also had the

ability to predict the future! The point is that they could, you can’t. God has you where you are, and as far as you know, you’ll be there for the rest of your ministry. Stop trying to predict the future. Only the Lord knows what tomorrow holds. We must only hold his hand.

Lesson Four: Doing a little every day is better than a whole lot at one time. It is very possible to wear yourself out doing revitalization stuff. As you are working in it, you just see so much more that there is to do. Like working on the farm, there is always more to do, more work than daylight will allow. My great farmer/rancher friend has taught me, “It will be here tomorrow.” Some things you can’t get in when you want to. There are so many interruptions and unplanned events that enter the life of pastors, we can get over-worked and discouraged from the sheer quantity of responsibilities that come our way. Recently, I had four deaths in my church in the same week. Needless to say, precious little else got done that week. The important thing is this, get back on track as soon as you can and do something, even if it is seemingly insignificant. Let me illustrate it this way. When I built my house,

we put in our well and septic systems. The man who put in the lateral lines was not careful about where he dumped the gravel. I got so sick of picking up gravel. Then I decided that every time I went outside I would pick up one or two chunks and not try to do it all at once. Now, you cannot find any gravel in my yard, all because I picked up one or two each time. You can knock your revitalization project out-of-the-park if you will just stay on it and do a little every day.

Lesson Five: Be sure that there is sin in the camp. I am sad to say that virtually every plateaued and declining church has at its heart a sin problem. I visited with a church in need of revitalization recently and when I asked what the sin problem was in their church, the phone line went very quiet. They obviously didn’t want to talk about that. They probably didn’t want to deal with it either. One church I worked with had the Chairman of Deacons and the Church Clerk living together across the street from the church, and they had been living together there for ten years and no one in the church said a thing to them. Shades of 1 Corinthians 5! If you are wired like I am, you would

rather not have to deal with confrontation and remediation of sin. That ministry task is not the most pleasant of pastoral tasks. However, we bring shame and reproach to the name of Jesus when we tolerate sin in the church. We might be able to talk about the sin as long as no one uses the people’s names or looks in their direction when it is discussed. The fact is, these are evil people. Ephesus tolerated evil men (Rev 2:2), and Thyatira tolerated the evil Jezebel (Rev 2:20). Sometimes the sin is in the life of the pastor. We can become angry, bitter, hateful, and hurtful. We can be good a blaming others and deflecting responsibility. We can become slothful, unaccountable and selfish. We must remember that we exist for the church; the church does not exist for us. Find the sin in the camp and confront it. I hope the lessons I have learned will help you as you progress in church revitalization. My hope is hat you will learn from my mistakes and learn from victories. I would love to spare you the heartaches that I have experienced and would love to see you have an outstanding example of a revitalized church. Blessings!

Dr. Terry Rials is the founder of ChurchRevitalizer.com, serves as the Senior Pastor of the Crestview Baptist Church of Oklahoma City, and leads the Church Revitalization Team Leader for Capital Baptist Association. He earned his doctorate in Church Revitalization at Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary and is a frequent conference He is co-author NutsIssue” & “A speaker. Revitalization RetreatofinThe Every Bolts of Church Revitalization! RenovateConference.org/magazine 11