Simon Cox Blog: The Five R’s of Gospel-Centered Church Revitalization, Part 1

Tuesday 12 June 2018

The Five R’s of Gospel-Centered Church Revitalization, Part 1

We must never take our eyes off the need for church revitalization.

What does it mean to revitalize a church in a way that that is gospel centered? Let me share the five R’s of revitalization: reframing grace, realigning mission, recasting vision, remembering the journey, and renewing all things. Today, we will look at the first two.

First, reframe on grace

When we consider what good church revitalization looks like, we must ask God to reframe us on grace. I read an article a few years ago from a secular publication. In the article, someone was sharing that he had visited and became involved in a church, dropped out, and didn't have a spiritual transformation. Instead, this person felt like part of a multilevel marketing scheme.

That’s not the intended message, I assure you.

Let’s be honest: church revitalization does not come through you getting more volunteers into your spiritually tepid church. There must be a reframe on grace, and this is ultimately not something we do. We don’t try harder or recruit more people.

The gospel is not "you do"; the gospel is "Jesus did."

Because He has changed us, reshaped us, remade us, and transformed us, grace ought to overflow out of us.

I was on a plane recently flying to San Diego to speak at a meeting, and woman sat next to me. We started having a conversation that led to spiritual things. (To be honest, I tried to lead the conversation to spiritual things.) She started to talk about some of the bad experiences that she had had in church as a kid.

She called it a cult-like experience and she said she was now on a spiritual journey, exploring all kinds of different things like gurus and scriptures of other religions. I asked her, "Could it be that your experience of Christianity was just a warped, broken, ...