Church Vitality

by Rev. Mark E. Tidsworth, Founder and Team Leader

How do you describe it? How do you describe what enlivens and invigorates your church? How do you articulate what your church has discovered which meets this world’s great need while animating your common lives (your fellowship)?

The pearl of great price. A treasure buried in a field. Springs of living water. Winds of the Holy Spirit. Becoming new creatures and creations… Images drawn from the pages of scripture describing the essence of our faith.

We at Pinnacle could recommend all kinds of techniques your church might use for attracting people to your church, many of which are effective toward doing just that. At the same time, “technique-ing people” into church rarely yields the intended outcome of ongoing church participation. In fact, when a church is not spiritually centered in Christ, then the techniques become window-dressing so to speak, without substance behind those windows, leading to disappointment. Churches who are spiritually vitalized may find certain technical changes helpful, since they are engaged with something substantive.

So, where is your church? How in touch are you as a congregation with something life-giving and vitalizing? How do you articulate this?

Those participating in my presentations in recent years will recognize this phrase:

Living in the Way of Jesus is beautiful.

How will you spend your one precious life (thanks Mary Oliver)? I don’t know any better way than to be caught up in the Way of Jesus. When there, we are animated by hope beyond ourselves, generous love, and openness to God’s good creation. When we are there, fruits of the Spirit tend to show up in our lives. When we are there, caught up in the Way of Jesus, we drift into poetic language filled with images, metaphors, and analogies since this way of being is beyond more technical jargon. We know it when we are there as churches, when our hearts are strangely warmed like the Emmaus road walkers, energized for loving God, others, and ourselves.

This is the essence of church vitality. There are many “tools” that might help us get there, but the bottom line is the death and resurrection pattern woven into the fabric of our lives. When we die to self, to our own agendas, and rise to Christ, to God’s will for this world, then we are caught up in something extraordinary.

We don’t have a technique for that. We do have transformation processes which position churches for engaging their faith in this way, but still, that spiritual work is theirs. When we are centered in the Way of Jesus, in touch so to speak, we cannot help but share it with our neighbors and communities, for that kind of things won’t stay contained.

Living in the Way of Jesus is beautiful.

And makes for a grand way to spend the lives God gives us, collectively leaning into this way of being that’s centered in Christ… mostly beyond words. Thanks be to God for the beautiful Way of Jesus available to every church everywhere.