THERE are few things more humbling than a church-growth strategy document that tries to quantify mystery. Metrics, dashboards, KPIs, engagement rates — these are the buzzwords of our age, the language of results and performance. Somewhere along the best way, the Church began to talk it fluently.
We have borrowed the tools of business to unravel a crisis of presence, and have turned the sacred into something to administer. Although intentions could also be earnest, the tone has develop into hole.
This isn’t to say that strategy has no place. Stewardship matters; so does governance. But, when the spreadsheet becomes the lens through which every little thing is viewed, we lose something that can’t be regained through efficiency. We lose wonder, and the slow patience of the Spirit; we lose our soul.
You can’t growth-hack holiness. You can’t benchmark a burning bush. The Church doesn’t exist to impress shareholders, but to point to a reality that can’t be measured: to proclaim a Kingdom that’s hidden — a Kingdom that appears in tears at a bedside, or in silence in a sanctuary, or in bread broken at an altar, even when only six persons are present.
When we speak of audiences and content as in the event that they were central to our mission, we confuse the fruit of the Church with its function. The fruit may sometimes be measurable. The function is just not.
TOO often, now we have softened our theology while sharpening our strategy. We worry about attendance greater than about reverence. We write sleek vision statements while the sanctuary grows cold. We spend hours in consultation and minutes in prayer. The irony is that the majority of those returning to the Church should not on the lookout for cleverness. They are on the lookout for depth, for reverence, for the echo of God.
Young people should not fools. They see through branding, and so they don’t desire a church that looks like a start-up. They want something older than themselves, which can outlast them: a half-empty church lit only by candlelight; a voice cracking barely in the course of the Exultet; a moment of silence so full that it aches. None of these items will appear on a dashboard, but they’re the moments when the Kingdom draws close. They can’t be reported, but they’re remembered.
THE things that the majority shape a soul are sometimes invisible: a whispered prayer, a look on the cross, the Holy Spirit’s quiet and unseen tug of the soul. When we trade these mysteries for clarity and measurability, we may find our churches more efficient. They may even be filled with people there for a “good time”. But also they are more empty of spirit.
Somewhere along the road, reverence began to be treated as optional. Incense and vestments became “style selections”, and silence became awkward. Beauty became an afterthought. But liturgy is just not an adjunct: it’s the beating heart. It is how the religion enters the body. It is where we’re formed.
Symbols and seasons, psalms and processions — these train our attention on what’s real, not only what is beneficial. To attend mass with seriousness, to mark time through the calendar, to kneel and confess — these items should not nostalgic: they’re obligatory. They shape the soul in a way that no strategic document can.
THERE is a form of priest who now spends more time in governance meetings than at hospital bedsides, who knows diocesan finance systems higher than the rhythm of morning prayer, and who’s measured more by paperwork than presence.
People aren’t on the lookout for managers. They are on the lookout for shepherds: who will sit with them in silence and who still consider in mystery.
The priest is just not called to run a programme, but to face on the altar and proclaim the mystery of religion. The Church’s strength comes not from relevance, but from holiness.
To resist managerialism is just not to reject order, but to recollect what order is for. The Church needs structure, but it surely is structure in service of mystery, not the opposite way around. If we get well reverence, we may additionally get well resilience. If we get well beauty, we may get well belief — not because persons are drawn to pretty things, but because beauty still evangelises. It points beyond us.
We cannot programme a revival, but we will prepare for one. We can light the candles. We can tend the altar. We can let the silence stretch long enough for God to talk — because, when he does, we won’t need a method to clarify it.
