Ponder: a narrative of doom becoming a theology of panic

"Secularisation functions as a theology of doom.  People believe it.  The goading analysis of 'death' and 'endgame' enters the Christian psyche.  Experts with often-limited feel for the religious cultures they study are somehow allowed to set the agenda, the problem going beyond the numbing tyranny of statistics to an insidious language of disintegration and decay... As David Martin, one of the leading exponents of secularisation theory, later reflected" 'when we said the church was in trouble, we didn't expect the churches to believe us.' Martin had 'not anticipated how enthusiastically the churches would collude in their own demise'--rolling over to appease the new secular culture.  This was not a scientific process unfolding.  It was a self-fulfilling prophecy: a narrative of doom becoming a theology of panic."

Dominic Erdozain, "New Affections: Church Growth in Britain 1750-1950," in Towards a Theology of Church Growth (2015), 219.

Ponder: ministry and domestic work

"We tend to conceptualise working harder as producing more.  Yet the wisdom of the medieval theologians of church growth would suggest that the work of ministry might be more helpfully seen as parallel to domestic work--washing, ironing, cooking a meal and washing up--which needs to be done, but then needs to be done again, than to artisan or factory work, which produces a measurable product.  This does not mean that growth does not take place, but it is more analogous to natural, organic growth--the growth of a garden or a child--rather than to capitalist expansion and productivity."

Mirada Threlfall-Holmes, "Growing the Medieval Church" in Towards a Theology of Church Growth (2015), 195

Ponder: "We do not strategize"

We are never inventing, or constructing the Church anew, as if your congregations or dioceses or national structures — as if Israel — could be invented anew or constructed by the Israelites. The issue is not invention; it is always and ever “obedience.”

We tend to pursue our ministries on a continuum between activism and quietism, which orders most of our lives: do this; build that; organize, strategize. Clergy conferences are all about that, as are all the books and blogs of the world. And if that’s too much — as it surely is — we then give in to fatigue, withdraw, hide. Most clergy end up doing that.

But there is an alternative continuum to the activism/quietism spectrum. It is simply to do what God asks; to follow where God leads. And only that. No more, no less.