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Welcome to the Church Revision podcast.

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A podcast all about church revitalization and church health.

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We are passionate about helping churches regain energy and excitement about their church's vision.

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Our goal is to help you trade frustration and ineffectiveness for a healthy, thriving.

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You can learn [email protected].

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Now, here's your host, Jeremy Wallace.

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Welcome back to the Church Revision podcast.

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One of the things that we strive to do on this podcast and through our ministry is to highlight other organizations and ministries that exist for the purpose of helping and encouraging pastors and churches.

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We want to expose you to them and we want to.

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From them. That is one of the reasons why we are excited to welcome Chris Reynolds to the podcast today.

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Chris is the founder of the Reynolds Group, which is a ministry that works both with churches and pastors as well as with networks, denominations, and denominational leaders.

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The Reynolds Group has developed the prism process that we are gonna learn a little bit more about today.

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Chris has served in churches in Tennessee, North Carolina, and South Carolina.

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He has worked in church revitalization efforts and really along some of the leading consultants in the country.

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Chris is passionate about helping conscientious leaders create strategic solutions for future growth, and he desires to see those leaders thrive in their personal church and network lives.

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You can learn more about Chris and his. At the prison process.com.

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In this episode today, we are gonna talk to Chris about an article that he wrote that generated all kinds of interest on social media.

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We're gonna talk to him about what he is learning and what he is seeing in church revitalization across the country.

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And then we're also gonna learn about the process that they have developed that they call the Prism process.

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Let's dive into this episode.

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Chris. Hey, thank you for taking a little time to be with us.

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Absolutely. Thank you so much Jeremy, for asking me to, um, come on the show.

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I'm looking forward to it. Yeah, it's been, it's been fun researching and learning and reading more about what you're doing.

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So kind of reading through your, your background, you've spent many years working in the local church as a lead pastor.

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What did you see in those churches and in the churches, maybe in your communities that made you want to work with churches and networks from more of a consulting standpoint? Well, you know, in, in large part what I saw, I saw that people were spiritually asleep in the pews and, and it was something that broke my heart.

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Um, as a pastor, I've always labored to be lovingly honest with those whom are under my care in.

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My calling specifically is really as a pastor to leave them without excuse.

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And, and I can't begin to express to you how many people I've, I've met with one-on-one who are lifelong attenders of churches, but who do not have a basic understanding of the gospel of Jesus Christ or his individual call in their lives.

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Um, I've served in churches that run 40 people to 2,500 people, and the reality was still the same regardless of the size culture.

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They were spiritually asleep and slipping into eternity, having completed a life of faithfulness to a place of worship rather than the prince of peace.

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Wow. And, and it's something that absolutely would grieve me, and it grieves me that, that pastors, in some part, they, they just, they don't know how to stop the weekly machine and change the paradigm in their context.

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I once asked a pastor how many years? Before he was able to wade through the mess of pastoral ministry and see a true disciple come out of what he was doing in his context, his answer absolutely blew me away.

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He said it took him 12 years at the same church.

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Wow. And, and I just sat there with my mouth open.

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And network leaders, associational leaders, nominations, and, and churches, they're, they're losing ground.

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A lot of the reasons why is because the younger generation, they want to see a relational sincerity, right? That connects their faith and the life they live on a daily basis.

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This, this was the call in the New Testament authors, and yet over time it's something that we've lost and the church has become a.

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Where worship is a program and religion has become a political baseball bat.

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Therefore, I wanna work with churches and the networks and with denominations, really to help return to the biblical model of Christianity, which is seeing Christ or seeing God as our object of Ultimate Ado.

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And then living our lives of making disciples as Jesus would if he had our jobs, our families, our bills, and our circumstances.

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Um, so I know it was a long answer to a short question, but, um, that's really what fuels me.

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Yeah. And it seems like, I mean, there's a lot packed into what you just said.

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So as you, obviously now you're on this side of it, you're, you're working with churches, denominations, associations, leaders.

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Um, what do you see as the most common hindrance to church health? And again, I'm not talking about church growth yet.

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I'm just talking about church health, but what do you see as standing in the way of that? Yeah.

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Um, so I don't just a forewarning you in, in what we do.

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We often avoid the word health because health is such a nebulous term.

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That's good. And so we really focus on vitality and vibrancy.

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Does that exist in a church body? Because somebody could be, you know, a weightlifter and be 230 pounds and be healthy and somebody be 130 pounds and be unhealthy, right? Um, and so, you know, we use those terminology, but, but to answer your questions, The most common hindrance.

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It actually connects to, um, a great quote by GK Chesterton.

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Um, in his book, All Things Considered, he, he makes the statement, he said One of the great disadvantages of Hurry is that it takes such a long time, Now he was speaking of articles that he had written in a hurry, and because he didn't take enough time, he wasn't quick in getting to his point in whatever it was that he was saying.

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Um, the, the most common hindrance to a church's vitality is that people don't desire to invest the time it takes to make it happen.

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Oftentimes what they want is they want an easy and quick solution that fixes their acute pain, where there is a lack of enthusiasm and excitement when, if they took the time to consider the facts of the situation.

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They would realize that the dull ache that they feel feel in the pit of their stomach is a lack of spiritual vitality and shared congregational vision, and that's what's keeping them from stepping in to a future that God would have for them where they would be spiritually vibrant and vital as a.

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Yeah, that's good. And I, I think your differentiation between health and vitality is actually a needed differentiation because it's easy to use the term health and means so many different things by it and define it completely differently.

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Mm-hmm. and that, that kind of leads into you.

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You wrote an article, um, I think last week that received a lot of attention on social media, that the article you wrote was entitled for Pivotal Questions for a Dying church.

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Why do you think that article receives so much attention? There.

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I, I think there really are a couple of reasons why, number one, I mean, just being honest, there are a lot of dying churches out there.

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Um, there's a lot of churches that are no longer reaching their communities.

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Churches that have become cultural enclave, churches that have become museums, or the pastor and the staff or the curators who keep the exhibits running.

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Um, number two. These are practical questions that lead a congregation down a logical pathway to ultimately arrive at a predetermined destination.

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And, and pastors and church leaders, they struggle to get people to acknowledge that their congregational situation or their structure isn't what it's supposed to be.

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And, and so this process, these questions, it provides them a means to get them to that point.

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Just through a conversational manner. If I had to do it all over again before I stepped into any sort of pastorate, um, before I stepped into any church that was considering me for a pastorate, I would ask them, Can I have four weeks just to teach through these four questions? And when we got to the fourth question, what are our options? Depending on what their answer is, it's going to reveal to me whether or not the congregation is ready to hire me for revitalization.

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Or ready to hire me in order to make the necessary changes in order for us to live into God's future story of missional ministry for our context.

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Yeah. So, so if, if, if you were having that conversation with, with, with a church and you did not mm-hmm.

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You got to that fourth question. We'll, we'll mention the questions here in a second, but you, you got to that fourth question, What are our options? And you did not sense or feel, um, or believe that that church was ready to take those steps.

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Would you not go to that church or would you go in just understanding the reality of the situation? Uh, how would you approach it? Could, I can imagine pastors kind of walking through that and they're wondering, is this church really ready for.

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Perhaps change and, and to, are they willing to do what is needed to grow? If you sensed early on that they weren't ready, how would you respond to that before you ever even accepted the call? So you're talking about from a pastorate standpoint? Yeah, from a pastorate standpoint, Yeah.

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That's not gonna be for me because my calling, I mean, just being honest.

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No, that's good. I know my calling, My calling is ultimately to help conscientious c.

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Create strategic solutions for future growth.

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It it's in order to help those that want to grow, right? And if I'm in a place in which people don't legitimately want to grow, then I'm not able to fulfill the calling that God has placed on my life.

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And therefore, it's not gonna be helpful for them and it's not gonna be helpful for me to be.

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What what they need is at that point, if they're not wanting to ne not wanting to change.

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And they're wanting to stay the same. They're, they're ultimately gonna need a chaplain of some sort that's gonna come in.

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He's just gonna love on them. He may, he may push them a little bit, but really he's just gonna hold their hand.

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Um, because it's really hard if the majority of the congregation is want, is not wanting to move forward, it's really hard to get them to move forward in any significant way because it's a spiritual work.

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Right. Um, it's, it's not. It's not a circumstantial work, It's not a, you can, you know, you know, install the right programs and then convince them this is a, a spiritual condition in which they have, they've placed themselves in that position where the church is, is ultimately dying because that's what I think is, I think that churches die because of a spiritual condition more so than a circumstantial condition.

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Right. I, I, I think you're spot on with that and that, that.

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That's a good distinction. Now, one of the things that you said a minute ago, and you you've referenced it in some of your articles, is that you seem to emphasize the importance of pastors leading their congregations to their own understandings of what needs to change rather than just leading and change.

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Why is that an important distinction to make? Well, we, we emphasize the importance of pastors leading their congregation to their own understanding that things need to change because.

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The church is comprised of the interdependent parts that make up the whole of the body of Christ.

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The church is an organism. The people who make up the existing body of the church, regardless of their spiritual condition, are made in the likeness and image of the creator God.

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These are people that are of worth in value, and we desire for them to experience a spiritual awakening and vitality that ultimately pulls them into the future.

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With faithful obedience to God.

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So if we were to skip the step of helping to lead a congregation to their own understanding that things need to change, what we're doing is we are removing an opportunity for spiritual growth in that person's life.

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We're also furthering the lie that often exists that's unspoken between the pastor and the parishioner, and, and the parishioner believes this lie overwhelmingly, the pastor knows how to follow God's leading, therefore I'll leave that up to him.

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It leaves the, the parishioner spiritually handicap when we don't lead them through the process.

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The other thing is, is vision is easy for most pastor.

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But we don't want just vision.

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Vision is not sufficient. There needs to be shared vision.

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We want a congregation to have a shared vision of the future into which God is pulling them.

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We, we, we leave them out of the work and out of the process.

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Then ultimately the staff, the pastor, the.

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The leadership team, they're gonna have to work 2, 3, 4 times as hard in order really to create a culture that embraces that vision.

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Hm. That's good. That's good. Now in this article you wrote that you again, Entitled Four Pivotal Questions for a Dying Church.

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You presented four questions. Whose church is this? Mm-hmm.

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Um, the second question is, what is God's mission for the church? Third question, Are we accomplishing God's mission through our methods? And then the fourth question, what are.

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Our options. So as, as you've walked churches through your prison process that we're gonna talk about in just a moment, what, which of these questions do you think the church struggles? Um, maybe to answer correctly or to answer honestly, um, uh, correctly is, is an interesting perspective.

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Right. But I'll, I'll stick with the, the, honestly.

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Aspect of it, because I think that's the most important and, and it's still the last one.

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What are our options? Um, the reality is, at the end of this, they are coming face to face that they are either going to turn to Christ and say, We need you to remake us, or they're going to willfully choose to ignore the reality.

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That they're walking in disobedience to the commands of scripture.

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Part of my calling is to help bring people to the line of genuine faith and what it means to follow after Christ.

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And I have watched untold numbers of long-term.

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I'll do me untold numbers of long term church members.

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Look at that line. and with tears in their eyes know that if they step across it, it's going to change their, their families.

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It's gonna change their friends, it's gonna change their jobs, their social circles.

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It's going to change their life.

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And then I've watched them turn and walk away.

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And, and from a pastor standpoint, it absolutely breaks my heart.

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But from a pastoral standpoint and a shepherd standpoint, I've done my job.

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I've left them without an excuse.

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Now I have been faithful to walk them up to that point.

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and tell them the truth that Ephesians four exist and that you know, the saints who do the work of the ministry are those that profess to be followers of Christ and know it's not the pastor's job to share the gospel and do evangelism and make disciples only.

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It's also the church member's job and know it's.

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Not going to be the organ or the pews or the hymnals or the guitar or a choir that saves the church, but ultimately it's Jesus who saves the church and we return to his word to say, This is what it looks like to be a Christ follower.

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And when you walk them up to that line and they see that, then they go, Okay.

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I'm making a decision, right? A willful decision.

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And so a lot of the times it's that last question, whether or not they're going to be honest and say, Yeah, we need to turn and follow Jesus or.

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Yeah, I think we're fine and Jesus is happy with us, even though we're not being obedient to what it is that he calls us to do.

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Yeah, so you're really then viewing your responsibility as bringing them to that line, to that place where they understand and can make a conscientious decision either step across that line or to turn away from that, that that's good.

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We are gonna pause the interview right there and we will pick up again next week.

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Next week's focus is specifically going to be on unpacking the prism process that Chris and his team has developed.

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Hey, let me say thank you for listening to the church revision podcast.

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This week if you've not already done so, take a little time.

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Check out our [email protected].

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We have all kinds of articles and resources and other podcast episodes that we think will be a help and an encouragement to you and all of these flow of out of our desire to be an encouragement and a help to pastors and churches.

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Listen, if I can help you in any way, if our ministry can serve you in any way, please reach out.

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You can reach me at Jeremy at church revision.

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Com. Hey, thank you so much for listening.

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I know you'll want to check back next week for the second part of this interview with Chris Reynolds.

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Do not miss that. We look forward to seeing you again next time on the Church Revision podcast.