ARTICLE – From Near-Death to New Life: A Rural Church’s Revitalization Journey

ARTICLE – From Near-Death to New Life: A Rural Church’s Revitalization Journey

June 5, 2024 by Pierre-Alain Giffard News, Recommended Texts

In the small rural town a little church called Life Point was circling the drain. Once vibrant and counting around 200 members, it had plummeted to only about 25 people, most of them elderly. The facilities were dilapidated, the finances struggling, and the church seemed to have one foot in the grave. When the new pastor arrived, “the church was at its lowest point financially, numerically, and spiritually”.

The church facilities were worn and outdated. Unattractive hand-me-down furniture filled the lobby. The building smelled like a strange mixture of mold and wet paper because stacks of outdated magazines were stored under a desk in the lobby meant to be a welcome center for guests. The carpets were rotting and dusty from lack of maintenance. The bathrooms, once bright and inviting, were dreadful and malodorous, replete with torn linoleum, ripped wallpaper, faded paint, and a stench left from malfunctioning toilets. Well-intentioned members had tried to find the cheapest way possible to maintain the facilities but just could not keep up. (Davis, Danny. Rural Church Turnaround: Real Life Experiences of Rural Pastors and Lay-leaders, Ch.4)

“Our church is six funerals from dead,” one long-time member commented grimly. They had cycled through different pastors over the decades, each one arriving with fresh vision for change only to inevitably move on as those efforts stalled. “We suffered from ‘vision fatigue.'” The congregation had, because of their history, adopted the attitude of “most change initiatives fail”. The members were fatigued and deeply skeptical that any real transformation could happen. They just knew they were dying.

But then Pastor Danny Davis arrived in 2013. He quickly realized that for revitalization to occur, the entire culture and mindset of the congregation would need to shift. “These wonderful people knew instinctively that without drastic change, the future of the church was in peril,” Davis said. Merely applying fresh coats of paint wouldn’t be enough.

Crucially, Davis recognized the need to get the church’s leadership team on the same page about what a missionary church looks like. He facilitated them through a year-long process of prayerful discussion, study, and collaborative visioning around the key characteristics of a healthy church: service, growth, connecting, going, and worshiping.

“We had to discover each other’s worldview about how the church should function,” Davis explained. This focused process helped surface both shared perspectives and points of tension within the leadership team. Davis credits the involvement of an experienced third-party coach as being invaluable for helping them gain a healthy perspective and set actionable goals aligning with their newfound unified vision.

The coach also engaged us in robust dialogue to establish our change goals and priorities. Through these processes, we developed a strategy for moving forward based on a shared worldview of the church and its mission and our capacity to make the transformation from dysfunction to health. Now it was time to do what very few leaders and organization do: execute the plan. (Davis, Danny. Rural Church Turnaround: Real Life Experiences of Rural Pastors and Lay-leaders, Ch.4)

They asked the members to see the community around them in a new way. They challenged them to give up long-held preferences and consider what kind of church would attract new and younger members. Members had to reconsider what it meant to welcome “outsiders”. “These changes (and more) required current members to reconstruct practices that were second nature to them but foreign to the community we intended to engage”.

The, initial change efforts were met with fierce headwinds. As revitalization moves became more tangible and daunting, many leaders and members who had been part of formulating the vision ended up exiting the church. “I was so focused on vision and turnaround that I had forgotten about the people,” Davis admitted. “I pushed change at an unsustainable pace.” It was a devastating setback that had Davis desperate to abandon ship. “I begged God to release me from the pastorate of this ‘God forsaken church and town,'” he said. But God had other plans.

The arrival of about a dozen new members from a recently closed church plant breathed new hope and vitality into the revitalization work. “That group of people picked up the vision and ran with it,” Davis recalled. “God revealed to me that He loved Odessa and the church more than I did.”

In the years since, the transformation of Life Point Church has been striking. The facilities have been remodeled, new pastoral initiatives have flourished, and a mentality of growth and vibrancy has taken root. While Sunday attendance has grown to around 60, the more powerful growth has been qualitative. “Members are growing deeper in their relationships with God, each other, and the community,” Davis said.

Crucially, Life Point’s revitalization was only possible through a combination of factors coming together: embracing a vision for a missionary church, unifying leadership through a collaborative process, receiving wise third-party coaching, persevering through adversity, and above all, humbly submitting to and depending on God’s reviving power.

From near-death, Life Point has been resuscitated into a vibrant church. As Davis reflected, “A church once focused on survival is now actively involved in its community.” Their story offers hope that even seemingly dying rural churches can experience new life when God’s people are willing to take bold, prayerful steps to become a missionary church that reaches out to the unchurched and welcomes them.

The story of Life Point’s revitalization can be found in Danny Davis’ book, Rural Church Turnaround: Real Life Experiences of Rural Pastors and Lay-leaders (CrossLink Publishing, 2020).

Pierre-Alain Giffard, Director of Pastoral Work

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