This book came into my hands by the recommendation of a pastor friend of mine after a discussion over how churches are going to survive the transition of the generations we are experiencing right now. Most everyone has heard of or seen Thom Rainer's Autopsy of a Deceased Church, but fewer are familiar with this prequel to that edition entitled Anatomy of a Revived Church.
In this book, Rainer (who has over 30 years of experience as a church consultant) gives insights about how churches that have been revived explain their success and the difficulties they overcame. The book begins with a heartbreaking discussion that Rainer has with a man who says that his home church has died. He doesn't say that it closed, or that it dispersed. He says that it died. Many people understand that feeling, and many of us look at our current churches and have that thought echo in the back of our minds when we think about the future - "Will we survive?"
The man challenges Rainer regarding his book Autopsy, by telling him that he should have written it earlier. Not that Rainer should have published that book earlier, but that he should have published a book placed earlier in the process for these dying churches so that they might change their ways and save themselves. Rather than addressing simply the autopsy of the dead church, could Rainer write a book that diagnosed dying churches, gave them a prognosis of their fate if they do not change, and then prescribe treatment that could alter the course of their lives? In Anatomy of a Revived Church, Rainer certainly tries.
Dying churches blame others. Revived churches accept responsibility.
There is an old poem called "The Psychiatrist" that I like very much. I won't recite the whole thing here, but I'd like to give the final lines because they land with such weight. They read, "But I am happy, now I know the lesson this has taught! ... Everything I do that's wrong, Is someone else's fault!" Many people today make a habit of trying to trace our problems to their source, but in the act, we often neglect the actual source and in an effort to disguise it we "keep digging" past it to find the real source. The cause of my depression is not my decisions, or my diet, or my habits - the cause of my depression is the way I was raised! The cause of my anxiety, the cause of my obesity, the cause of my lack of self-confidence - none of it is my fault, all of it goes back to somebody else.
With this sort of thinking, we ought not to shame Hitler for what he did, we should blame his mother and neighbors for the influence they had on such a harmless person. Of course, that's nonsense, but it's the way many people treat themselves, and as Rainer points out, it's the way many churches treat themselves. He begins by laying out a series of excuses that churches commonly make to disguise their own faults. This includes everything from blaming other churches, to blaming the pastor, to blaming the community - and it is this last one that seems to permeate the book the most.
Churches that refuse to accept that God maintains a remnant within each generation, and that this generation will always look differently from the previous one, are churches that will inevitably die out with the deaths of those in the generation is maintains to be the "last of the faithful." Unfortunately, many of the things that some see as foundationally Christian are completely unrelated to Christianity. Rainer shows his true experience by sharing stories that any pastor will recognize from our own experiences. One example is a church that could not fathom "taking away" a specific service time from a group of people - as if that service belonged to them. Rainer points out that traditionally, service times accommodated farmers who had lots of chores around the farm to complete before they could come to church, while that is no longer the case. However, often enough the service time is still set in the era in which it was appropriated for farmers. This no longer fits, but some see it as "inherently unchristian" or even disrespectful to the longstanding tradition to reschedule the service to accommodate a new generation. This sort of thing, along with many other traditions, will keep many churches from seeing the people around them and meeting their needs.
Do not count for number's sake. Count to make certain you are on track.
One thing that I truly appreciated about the book was the practicality of its insights. Many church revitalization books are so vague and broad (complaints you'll read in other reviews), but Anatomy is an exception to that rule. The most helpful insights that are given in this book are very specific, and include success stories of how it works and what ways it has been perfected. These insights include simple factors like keeping attendance records and records of giving, to how to structure a new-members class to improve the meaning of what it is to be a member at your church.
One of the more humorous chapters to read, for me at least as a pastor, was the chapter giving a point-for-point description of what a "toxic" church member looks like and how to deal with them. One line that I have to share because it is so true is: "Critics come and go. Toxic members stay forever." For any pastor that has experienced a toxic person in their church, or has had to engage such a person, reading this chapter will be both anxiety provoking because it will conjure all those old feelings as he describes the exact situations you went through, and it will be encouraging to hear that other people have gone through it, and that on the other side there is hope for a revived church.
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