Tradition can be a powerful tool. If tradition is used right, it can connect us to past generations, teach us important lessons, and serve as a rite of passage into the next stages of our life. Liturgical Christians, like Catholics, Anglicans, and Orthodox have a fantastic grasp on great ways to use tradition well.
I love tradition, when it’s done right.
But tradition can also be overly romanticized and kind of stupid.
Gold fish are often a child’s first pet. They’re low maintenance, inexpensive, and easy to handle. I mean, you need a bowl and some cheap food, just add water and BOOM! You have a pet.
But there’s a fun fact about gold fish that I remember hearing years ago – if you place a small gold fish in a large fish bowl, it will grow to proportionally fit the fish bowl. This means that you can take a fish you win at the fair and watch it grow if you place it in the right environment. (To be fair, I don’t think you can get a bagged gold fish to turn into koi).
This same principle applies to churches. And no, I don’t mean physical buildings (this time). Churches have little ‘fish bowls’ all over the place – little things that stop them from growing any bigger than they already are.
A lot of churches are struggling to connect with Millennials, for a large number of reasons. The biggest reason I’ve noticed, while wearing both the “church leader” hat and the “millennial” hat, is that the church isn’t sharing information in to social ‘watering holes’.
A ‘watering hole’ is a hub that the community gathers regularly. In ancient times, it was often a well or a marketplace. More recently, it was the downtown area of a city or village. Now, the ‘watering hole’ has moved online to social media. Before, you’d look for ‘Help Wanted’ signs in windows to find a job, now we go to different websites. If you wanted to get to know even a little bit about someone, you’d have to go to their house. Now, we have virtual living rooms on Facebook.
Many churches continue to make community announcements, celebrate birthdays, and organize events using the techniques they did twenty years ago: passing clipboards and having the pastor tell the congregation what was going on. The problem is that the churches kids (Millennials) can’t hear them, because we’re not there.
Church leaders face a big struggle when it comes to revitalization of their congregations. 90% of churches are either in decline or stagnant, which means only 10% of churches are growing. Many churches (and, if we’re being honest, church leaders too) want simple solutions to make the process of turning around a decline quick and painless. But the reality is that revitalizing a church will take time. It may be helpful to think about the process of revitalization as the process of “eating an elephant”.
When I was in ROTC, I remember an instructor asking our class of cadets (who had noticeably become frustrated by our perceived lack of progress) a seemingly absurd question: How do you eat an elephant?
His answer?
The Dead Drop 