Kara Powell: How to bring about change in your church

Change isn’t easy. But it can be made easier, says Kara Powell of Fuller Theological Seminary.

Powell and co-authors Jake Mulder and Raymond Chang blend theology, original research with diverse churches, and business literature to offer guidance for congregational leaders in their new book, “Future-Focused Church: Leading Through Change, Engaging the Next Generation, & Building a More Diverse Tomorrow.”

“We are optimists about the future of the church. We’re very aware of some of the really discouraging data about the fatigue of pastors, churches shrinking, young people disengaging,” said Powell, who is executive director of the Fuller Youth Institute, founder of the TENx10 Collaboration and chief of leadership formation at Fuller.

“But fundamentally, we’re optimists because of what we believe about God,” she said. “God is always working and redeeming.”

The book describes four phases — called “zones” — in the change process and includes stories, research findings and reflection questions. The book ends with a chapter called “A Suggested 18-Month Change Journey,” in which they describe a step-by-step process to implement the learnings of the book.

“It includes our research with 1,000 churches, our literature review of really great organizational and leadership and change research, and also Scripture,” Powell said.

Powell spoke with Faith & Leadership’s Sally Hicks about the book and why she is excited about the future of the church. The following is an edited transcript.

Faith & Leadership: How do you hope people use “Future-Focused Church”?

You’ve highlighted a second type of diversity that we encourage, which is diverse viewpoints. It’s so much easier as a leader to spend time with people who agree with us. But the flip side is, first, we often learn from those who disagree with us. Usually people who disagree with us have important insights that we need to factor into our change process.

The second reason to keep building relationships — even with those who disagree with us — is our change principle. People support what they create. The more we can involve people [so that they are] being heard and feeling like they are helping shape the change, the more they’ll tend to support it.

In general, people want to be listened to more than lectured to, and so we recommend that for leaders across the board.

F&L: The inclusion of young people isn’t just the goal, it’s the process, right? Why do change leaders need to engage young people?

KP: First, I try to start always with theology, and there’s so many examples in Scripture of how important it is to bring the generations together. That’s what the early church was, all generations coming together. I would say it’s theologically grounded.

Second, it certainly is vocationally grounded for me. I feel a calling to young people. And even as my roles keep expanding at Fuller, I’m trying to spend at least 50% of my time on young people because that is the tree trunk of my calling. I have other branches, but young people are the tree trunk.

But the third level that comes to mind for me is that if we don’t engage young people, our churches are going to die. There’s just an inescapable reality to that. It’s not just placating young people and getting them to come join what we’ve always done. It’s handing the keys to young people and co-creating with them.

That’s part of what’s really exciting about this generation, specifically Gen Z and Gen Alpha; they want to co-create. They don’t want to be spectators; they want to be participants. They’re created in God’s image with amazing gifts and have expertise that we need.

F&L: Listening is often recommended for various reasons, but you say that one of the reasons you listen to people is to understand their “mental model.” What do you mean?

KP: Our colleague Scott Cormode has helped us understand mental models.

We have limitless mental models. We have a mental model of what a car is: When you and I think of a car, we have a picture in our mind. When you see something that’s markedly different from the cars you’re used to, it’s startling. You usually reject it.

It’s only as we spend time with people that we understand, What is it they think church should be? What is it that they think worship should be? What is it that they think youth discipleship should be?

As we spend time with them, we understand, Oh, they think of worship as two hymns and then a sermon, and then a hymn and response. If we’re going to change that, we need to understand where they’re starting from and then offer them different mental models.

Maybe instead of two hymns and a sermon and then a hymn and response, we might integrate five minutes of discussion time where people turn to each other in their pews or seats. Because we want a mental model where we’re not just listening but we’re building community with each other, not just engaging with God but also engaging overtly with each other. Listening is so key for mental models.

Another reason listening is so important is because of the lack of trust people feel toward institutions. If you look at data in the U.S., trust in institutions is declining; trust in religious institutions is declining. Young people’s trust is especially declining.

The research on trust shows we don’t rebuild trust through a grand heroic gesture. We rebuild it through everyday acts of integrity, of listening, of caring, of following up when somebody shares a need with us. I think listening is how we’re going to rebuild trust with people who are understandably a little skeptical of the church based on what they see these days.

F&L: Is there anything I didn’t ask that you’d like to add?

KP: A leader can read this article on their own, but they can’t bring about change on their own. Even if it’s two other people who can be part of your transformation team, whatever size church you are at, can you please involve a few other people in your change? Because we’re meant to lead in community, and change happens more effectively in community.

Familiar Bible stories can be some of the hardest to read as adults. The children’s Sunday school versions, with their accompanying crafts and upbeat sing-alongs, can obscure the full range of nuance and complexity in a given passage. Take the parable of the sower from Matthew 13.

In all the illustrations I’ve seen, the sun is out, the sower happily scattering seeds over an artfully textured ground. Given the bounty in the “good soil” harvest, the seeds that aren’t so lucky don’t seem to matter. The classroom drawings never fully capture the scope of loss present in the story — the seeds pulverized in the bird’s beak, withered by the sun among the rocks, strangled by the weeds.

Suddenly, this cheery parable fills me with discomfort. Why wasn’t the sower more careful? Surely there are ways she might have minimized the risk and maximized the yield.

I feel frustrated that the sower seems entirely unconcerned about failure. As she walks, she tosses handfuls of seeds to fall where they will. Some will grow; most will not. No attention is given to the soil quality. The sower simply keeps on sowing.

I’ve realized that this reading is challenging me to reconsider the parable’s lesson. Perhaps this story is more about consistent faithfulness and less about engineering results. But that is not what I want to hear in a moment of great change and uncertainty for the mainline church in America.

Congregations are aging. Membership numbers are declining. Churches are closing their doors and selling their properties at an unprecedented rate. This does not seem like the moment to be scattering our limited precious seeds with abandon.

And yet what if this is the exact right moment for the church to be taking risks and embracing failure?

Jeremy Utley and Perry Klebahn lead and teach at Stanford’s Hasso Plattner Institute of Design. They help organizations innovate in a rapidly changing world by cultivating cultures of experimentation — what, for the church, could be seen as the spiritual disciplines of listening, humility, courage and holy playfulness all rolled into one.

In their book “Ideaflow,” they write, “What are the chances you’ll make an interesting discovery doing something in the exact same way you always have?”

I wonder what this imagination might do for the church. If doing what we always have is no longer working, could this be the moment to experiment and try something new? Sometimes an experiment will produce 30 times what was sown. Sometimes an experiment will fail. Often it takes many failures before a successful solution is found. Recall the story of the light bulb.

I believe failure is essential for vibrant congregations. But failing is scary. In order to survive, the church must create a culture where failure is expected, welcomed and even celebrated.

Utley and Klebahn offer some suggestions on creating this kind of culture.

First, individuals and groups need to feel a sense of safety in order to take risks. When we’re afraid that we’ll fail — or that we or our ideas will be judged, laughed at or dismissed — our creative ability withers. Our brains (and that infamous entity called the church committee) are masters at naming why new ideas won’t work. While this instinct can keep us safe, it can also be wrong. We don’t always know where the good soil is. Scattering with abandon creates opportunities for learning and even surprise.

To scatter with abandon, shift the goal from finding “good” ideas to simply getting as many ideas out on paper as possible. Get playful. Bring snacks and colorful Post-it notes. Ask a middle schooler to join the conversation. Pull your chairs into a circle or move to a space with lots of light and big posters on the walls. At this stage, the goal is quantity over quality. The only rule is that ideas cannot be judged or deliberated.

Initially, ideas might come slowly and feel obvious. Keep going! One leader who uses the ideaflow process told Utley and Klebahn that it’s always excruciating for her — but only at the start. “As soon as she gives herself permission to write something truly outrageous, ridiculous or just plain illegal,” they write, “the floodgates open.”

Second, make space in the schedule to fail. Utley and Klebahn write, “To learn something new, you must try new things, and experiments always have a risk of failure. To take that kind of risk regularly, you can’t chase 99 percent efficiency every moment of your day.”

Not every new idea will bring in more young people or help balance the budget. But when framed with intention, every new idea is a learning opportunity for a congregation. Start talking about the congregation’s latest experiment and the learnings it produced, regardless of how well it achieved the anticipated results.

Utley and Klebahn note Thomas Edison’s response to a friend who lamented Edison’s lack of results on a project despite his hard work: “Results! Why, man, I have gotten a lot of results! I know several thousand things that won’t work.”

Not every project needs to be “the solution” as long as we are able to learn from it.

A few Sundays ago, I heard a pastor retell the parable of the sower and recount the harvest it produced as “thirty-, sixty- and even one hundredfold.” That’s how Mark 4 tells the story, but it’s not what Matthew says. Instead of saving the largest, most remarkable yield for the end, Matthew’s version says the yield was “in one case a hundredfold, in another sixty, and in another thirty” (Matthew 13:23 NRSVue) — concluding with the smallest. Even the smallest yield is worthy of note, Matthew seems to be saying.

Failure happens when we take risks. Our call is to be faithful sowers who scatter with abandon.

On Sunday, Feb. 16, people gathered after worship in our church’s fellowship hall. It looked, in many ways, like a regular potluck. A large pot of soup was set on the buffet, someone dropped off a bag of clementines, and people brought lots of baked goods. As the food came in, folks who know our church kitchen as well as their own pulled out plates and serving utensils.

There was a mix of people — some of the 125 folks were members of our congregation, but many were neighbors, friends and co-workers. Word had gotten out.

Earlier that week, we sent out an all-church email with the subject line “Organizing Against Cruelty.” It was one way we could respond as the church to the radical disruption in our community caused by the new presidential administration.

Our church, a 375-member PCUSA congregation, is located about 3 miles from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), part of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. We have 15 to 20 families in our church whose livelihood depends on work for the CDC, which was among the first targets of spending cuts by the new administration. The agency had become a “public enemy” during COVID because it advocated for restrictions on personal freedom in order to save lives. Now I was receiving emails and text messages from people afraid of losing their jobs.

You don’t cut “an agency.” The CDC is not nameless or faceless. It is a collection of rather remarkable human beings. I am a pastor for some of them. They sing in our choir, play games with our youth group and lead our congregation as elders. They also keep humanity safe from illness. In my experience, they are people of deep faith, who love God and others — commitments that align with their work at the CDC.

My CDC-affiliated congregants were not prepared for this. They all know that when a president is elected, priorities can change; several had shared stories about job pivots under a new administration. But they are stunned that a president could demonstrate such disregard for something as foundational to the common good as public health, and they mourn the loss of the programs they have worked so hard to build.

“Those of us in global health and development are not in it for the money or to push some sort of radical agenda. We want to ensure that people do not die of things like contaminated drinking water, measles, polio, mosquito bites or HIV,” one of our CDC-affiliated congregants told me.

The people I spoke to for this essay asked to remain anonymous, fearing repercussions.

Virtually all their work has been put on hold as they await impending cuts. There has been no explanation from the administration about where there is waste or fraud at the CDC or why the positions being eliminated are not essential to public health — some of the reasons the administration has given for the cuts. It’s randomly inflicted harm.

“The field of global health and development is being decimated like a toddler swiping at a Jenga tower,” one congregant said. “I feel such grief over the lives of U.S. citizens and people across the world that will be lost or irreparably harmed by these changes.”

They are grieving the loss of lives and the loss of programs that have proved to work. They also are grieving the loss of their vocation. Each knows their calling is aligned with the ministry of Jesus, an itinerant healer, who made healing the sick a sign of the inauguration of the kingdom of God.

“My career is truly how I live out my faith — using my hands and feet to care for those whom the world would rather forget,” one told me.

Another said, “I’m a resilient person. My job is hard — I travel to places where I deal with health emergencies, and so I work all the time with people experiencing real trauma. I can deal with a lot of things — I usually just put my head down and think, ‘We’ll get through this; it can’t go on forever.’ But this feels different. I’ve never had my fundamental worth so questioned.”

What can a church do in a moment like this? Pastoral care, for one. Not only the one-on-one engagement with the pastors but also the strength that comes from belonging to a community of people who love you. That is the real help in a time of trouble. We need to be seen. We need to feel valued.

When authority figures question your worth and have the power to make you feel worthless, you need a community of people that affirms a truer narrative: “The work you do is amazing. You are amazing.”

Some of our church’s retired members are among those who now stand outside the gates of the CDC holding signs saying “We love the CDC” and “Protect Public Health.” Several people have mentioned how much this small gesture of support buoys their spirits.

Our finance team at church has a reserve fund ready to help members who lose their jobs pay their bills and rent. We are also quietly preparing for a loss of income if our CDC members are fired.

The Organizing Against Cruelty community gathering was a second kind of response, bringing people together to act. In the first few weeks of the new administration, many people expressed something like, “This feels terrible. What can I do?” Older adults especially may not be online and may not be plugged in to networks for action and activism.

At the gathering, we invited people to share resources with one another — one hungry person telling another hungry person where to find bread.

We talked about how to contact our legislators and what groups are active in our community. We set up breakout rooms for specific needs — support for transgender poeple, caring for immigrant neighbors — and a room for federal employees to share their experiences and talk without fear of recrimination.

While this role for the church, as a steward of the power of grassroots organizing, is important, there is another, perhaps paradoxical role the church can play: we can hold our human suffering as part of a larger story.

One of my CDC members said, “Lent always feels timely, but this year, my soul desperately needs it. Observing Lent helps prepare for loss, and the reminder that Christians have been marking this season through different crises and times of fear and change is welcome at this moment.

“We don’t have to do everything perfectly, but we do have to take care of each other, knowing we will all meet the same end that Jesus did on the cross.”

Not all suffering is redemptive, and the suffering of my congregants and other federal workers right now feels particularly unnecessary. But the church, when we are faithful, helps us understand that our suffering is woven into the great story of God’s love.

Our sensitivity to this suffering helps us be agents of healing. When I asked one CDC employee how she is holding up, she said, “It’s awful. … But I know that I am going to be fine.”

She told me about her volunteer service with a partner organization supporting refugee families and said, “There are so many people who are much more vulnerable in the face of this cruelty than I am. It’s them I’m worried about. I’m going to be taking care of them.”

Chicken Little — that prophet of doom — creates mass hysteria with the ominous proclamation, “The sky is falling! The sky is falling!”

The panicked frenzy that ensues in the well-known folktale is both unfortunate and instructive for incredulous readers who are privy to reality: this apocalyptic declaration and dread of Armageddon is, in fact, sparked by a falling acorn.

Often, the story of Chicken Little resonates with our experiences as pastors or leaders in congregations where problems are pervasive. Financial stress, aging facilities, discord among members, technological challenges, scarcity of resources, lack of volunteers, crises in the community — these all have the potential to keep leaders pacing the floor at night.

Congregational leaders and their teams can find themselves in a perpetual posture of chasing and triaging problems, becoming deflated and exhausted because they never reach a point where everything seems to be fixed. The pessimism that wafts through the air of the organization is more insidious than the problems themselves, creating a culture of despair where everyone seems to be glum and on edge, waiting for the sky to fall.

Pastors don’t surrender to God’s call because of an insatiable desire to simply “put out fires,” so remaining inspired as visionary leaders under such circumstances is extremely challenging. The yes we give to God, generally after intense, internal wrestling, is because we believe, as professed in the simple grace prayed over our meals as children, “God is great, and God is good.”

Pure, unrelenting hope is found in this great and good God who will perform wonders to drive out evil and bring about God’s good purposes in this world. This conviction ignites a fire and passion for participating in God’s redemptive work. After all, we are proclaimers of the euangelion — the good news — who seek to galvanize others around a common dream for good.

In my own context, it was our compelling vision to disciple the next generation that opened the eyes of two staff members to the possibility of outside funding toward this effort. Lilly Endowment Inc. was seeking applicants for its Nurturing Children Through Worship and Prayer Initiative; they saw the alignment with our vision and encouraged us to apply.

We had never pursued a grant of this magnitude before, but our faith in the power of God led us to magnify possibilities over potential impediments. We prayed, applied, prayed some more. In God’s abundance, we were notified that the church was awarded a $1.25 million grant!

I share this to encourage any pastor or leader who is doing the good work of galvanizing God’s people to pursue good. Continue pointing and looking upward, because God’s blessings still rain down.

Orienting our congregations and ministries around promising possibilities and expectation of good is more personally rewarding and congregationally enriching than staying in a constant orbit of the ominous. This orientation, which really is a reorientation for many congregations, does not happen on its own but rather through great intentionality on the part of the leaders in shaping a culture of expectancy and hope.

Working strategically in this vein is critically important, because the culture of our organizations will determine whether we are prepared to receive God’s generosity or whether God’s goodness will be missed or dismissed by doubts and fears. As evidenced in Numbers 13:25-33 when the negative report of the spies infects the Israelites’ hearts with doubt, it is possible to be on the edge of experiencing the miraculous and talk yourself out of seeing the good. How many times has this happened in church business meetings?

Leaders, therefore, must first cast and continue to reiterate a God-size vision that is rooted in a deep conviction of the truth of God’s powerful ability, as communicated in Ephesians 3:20 (ESV): “Now to him who is able to do far more abundantly than all that we ask or think, according to the power at work within us …”

As nervous as this might make leaders, who are equally susceptible to being overly pragmatic or pessimistic, such a vision supplants problems as the new goal to run after and inspires congregants to offer their gifts and talents to see it come to fruition. A compelling vision can also be the seed for collective creativity in addressing challenges.

Yes, problems will arise, but problems can be viewed as barriers to overcome in pursuit of a greater purpose rather than as the purpose themselves. And problems can become further impetus for expectancy that God will “show up and show out.”

After casting a vision, our proclamation must set the people’s gaze upon God and encourage them to look with anticipation for God to give provision for the vision. We should keenly focus people’s hearts and minds on God’s omnipotence.

Acknowledging God’s power challenges our own doubts and insecurities. If God’s potency surpasses our impotence, then we cannot tailor dreams to fit what we deem conceivable or possible in our strength. This power causes the seams of our intellect to come undone, and the only appropriate response is awe and wonder; what we cannot explain or fully comprehend, we must simply believe.

Finally, our belief should be heard in our corporate prayers and seen in our response when God answers them. We must not be like the church that, praying for the imprisoned Peter in Mary’s house, decried Rhoda as being “out of [her] mind” when she reported that the liberated Peter was knocking at the door, their prayers answered (Acts 12:15).

Hope-filled congregations don’t pray puny prayers. As we pray big prayers, we must also encourage our people to open the door when God’s answer shows up. Through casting vision, proclaiming God’s power, and praying with expectancy, leaders are encouraging their congregations to look up — not at a falling sky — but at a good and great God.