In 2017 I became pastor of a church in suburban Tampa that had been shrinking for a long time. About 35 people were in the room my first Sunday, and even counting my family, the median age was over 70. They were tired, and nobody acted like they were expecting visitors. A lot of people who drove by assumed the church had already closed.
A lot of what gets written about revitalization focuses on the turnaround itself: the vision, the hard conversations, the first new families coming through the door. The problem I kept running into was more ordinary. Who was going to lead with me? And if the church did come back to life, who would carry it after I was gone?
I took that question into my doctoral work. I wanted pastors from across the evangelical world, but I was surprised how few I could find who had turned a declining church around at all. Most of the ones I did find were over 40 and in their second career, usually after the military. I’ll admit that described me too. For my dissertation I interviewed eleven of them about how they’d developed new leaders when they were starting with almost nobody.
Now I’m turning that research into a book for pastors of small, struggling churches. It won’t read like a dissertation. (Nobody wants that, me included.) It’ll also be broader than my original study in two ways.
The dissertation looked at how pastors developed men as leaders. The book will look at developing the next generation of leaders, women and men, because that’s who these churches need.
I also want to hear from more than eleven pastors, and I’m hoping to find the ones I couldn’t find the first time: revitalization pastors, women and men, from across evangelical traditions. I’d also like to hear from the people on the other side of the story, the younger leaders who were raised up in those churches and now carry real responsibility. They often know things about how it happened that their pastors don’t.
Your story may fit if:
- When the pastor arrived, the church was small and had been declining for several years.
- The pastor stayed at least three years.
- Things turned around: more people, younger people staying, new leaders stepping up.
- At least one younger leader was developed who now carries real responsibility.
A turnaround doesn’t have to be dramatic. A church that grew from 30 to 70 and now has a 28-year-old deacon who never would have been asked before is the kind of story I’m looking for.
If that sounds like your church, there’s a short screening form at truebearing.press/research/revitalization. It takes about five minutes and doesn’t commit you to anything. When a story looks like a fit, I’ll get in touch and we can talk more from there. It’ll be a good deal less formal than my dissertation interviews were. Churches and people won’t be named in the book; I’ll use pseudonyms or leave out identifying details.
If someone else’s church came to mind while you were reading, I’d be grateful if you’d send this to them. The pastors I most want to hear from are usually too busy keeping the lights on to go looking for a researcher.
Bart Denny