LEANING INTO THE FUTURE
Ministry momentum springs from great expectations.
Leith Anderson
January 1, 1990
When Leith Anderson arrived at Wooddale Church in suburban Minneapolis more than a dozen years ago, he came to a congregation that had plateaued-in fact, declined. "People tended to talk about how much better the church was 'back then,' " Leith says. Eventually, the congregation began to look forward, and as a result it relocated, changed its name, and overhauled its constitution in order to better reach people. But "probably the most significant change of all," Anderson reflects, "was taking people's eyes off the past and putting them on the future, off how great the church had been and onto how great the church could be." What does it take to make that happen? In this article, excerpted from Mastering Church Management, a forthcoming book in the Mastering Ministry series copublished by LEADERSHIP and Multnomah Press, Leith discusses the factors in looking ahead rather than behind. As soon as people walk into a church, they can tell if it is oriented toward the past or the future. They don't discover that by what they see as much as by what they hear. When I visit a church or catch conversations in my congregation, I listen to how people talk about one subject: the greatest days of the church. At one well-known mid western church, for example, visitors may hear people say: "I remember when folks lined up to get into evening services. Conventions of major national associations were held here. When people came to town, they attended here." Their glory days are past, not future. The result, for both the listeners and people speaking, is an overwhelming feeling of sadness. When I came to Wooddale Church, people spoke similarly: "I remember when we used to. … I remember when attendance was growing instead of declining." I ...
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