The Great Re-Evaluation Is Underway, Part Two

by Mark Tidsworth, Founder and Team Leader

NOTE – This is the second in a series of articles growing out of Mark’s new presentation on The Current Situation. We plan to release a video soon to serve as a learning tool for churches and their leadership. Mark has started giving presentations and training experiences with The Current Situation. Contact us to explore options.

Yes, the Great Re-Evaluation is underway, including reflection on one’s relationship with one’s church. Did we expect churches would escape the scrutiny other organizations are experiencing? Regardless, many are reflecting on the place of church in their lives.

My primary response to this is… thanks be to God.

This is excellent timing for God’s church, for church as we have known it. Here’s what I mean. I’m recalling what it was like working with churches in pre-pandemic times, which seems so long ago now. Let me remind us all what church life was like in the recent past.

We at Pinnacle regularly received requests from churches looking for how to revitalize their congregations. They observed their downward trajectory in terms of energy, vitality, participation, and relevance and they were appropriately concerned, looking for help. Then, when we responded with processes for moving into adaptive change, many churches pulled back. Some were ready to move boldly ahead, making the shifts necessary to respond to the Modern to Post-Modern large-scale shifts that were already underway long before the pandemic arrived. Many others though were only interested in small incremental shifts, not convinced that more was needed. Their paradigms and forms for being church were working well enough they believed, (oftentimes just barely well enough), they could convince themselves that a few tweaks to their paradigms would restore their vitality.

So before we romanticize pre-pandemic church life, let’s remember what was happening. Christianity in North America was sliding down a precipitous slope toward irrelevance and churches were scrambling for how to respond. I’m pretty sure we don’t want to return to that, lest we find ourselves snapping back to the exact same predicament we were in pre-pandemic as if nothing happened.

It turns out then, that this pandemic, along with all the other volatility in our society, is perfect timing for church as we have known it. These large-scale shifts and seismic changes make it very clear to so many more of us that church-as-we-have-known-it must adapt. This is like that transition period during the Protestant Reformation. The Christians of that age recognized things would never be the same… seizing the adaptive moment and moving forward with courageous faith.

In our Current Situation, this pandemic initiating the Great Re-Evaluation is awakening the Church to the startling and wonderful adaptive opportunities right before us.

NOTE – Next we will move to three pivots the church must make. We described the first pivot (Getting Ourselves To Good Space in this blog post, https://www.pinnlead.com/blog/2022/10/6/get-yourself-to-good-space). The second is the next blog post coming.