The Church is resilient

July 17, 2025

By Rev. Rick King

With the vote approving the Plan of Union last Sunday, we’ve entered a new chapter, wherein we move into life as a new church, with a new mission, vision, and identity. Carey Nieuwhof, one of my favorite church futurists, wrote an essay in 2015, “13 Predictions about the Future Church,” and these are remarkably relevant to what we’re trying to do. This is the first in a series of columns on these predictions.

This first prediction essentially says that the potential to gain is still greater than the potential to lose.
Now, we might easily dismiss this as the declaration of an eternal optimist, someone who always sees the upside of everything and the glass as always half-full.

But think of how long the Church has been around and how many cultural crises and changes it’s weathered, how many times it’s been essentially reinvented: wars, plagues, the rise and fall of countless empires, monarchy, dictatorships, threatened and flourishing democracies, officially atheist policies of governments—you name it, the Church has weathered it.

Phyllis Tickle and Diana Butler Bass have both written extensively about the every-500-years’ reformation the church has undergone several times, one we’re in the midst of now.

It’s tempting to despair when we see low attendance, a dearth of volunteers, decaying buildings too expensive for small congregations to maintain. We see these symptoms and we think it’s got to be some failure on our part, a problem to be solved or a simple question of finding a way to do what we do, only better.

But every major historical shift presents the opportunity for the Church to be reborn. If we’re Easter people, we need to be okay with this cycle of dying and rising, for out of deaths, new things are born.

And as Carey Nieuwhof says, the Church “will survive our missteps and whatever cultural trends happen around us. We certainly don’t always get things right, but Christ has an incredible history of pulling together Christians in every generation to share his love for a broken world.”

But what are you and I willing to give up so the new church can share that love?