I get many questions from people who are interested in knowing how they can transition their ministries. Those are challenging questions for me, because we’ve never really faced that situation at Granger. Mark Beeson planted the church 20 years ago with a vision to reach people who had either given up on church or never given church a try. Because of that vision, Granger has a unique DNA. Because of that, I know that our story is different from the story that other churches share.

With that in mind, I thought I’d get the perspective of a good friend of mine who has led his church through a significant transition. Scott Hodge is the lead pastor of Orchard Valley Community Church in Aurora, Illinois. Scott shares part of his story in the guest post below. You can read more about him and his ministry by following his blog. Here’s what Scott had to share on this topic:

Here are a couple of thoughts about a few things that I tend to see in so many churches when it comes to change and attempting to turn a church a “new” direction.

First of all, I think it’s important that pastors understand the difference between CHANGE and TRANSITION.

Change has much more to do with adjusting the “externals” of our churches. Things like: church name, musical style, conversational style teaching, etc… Believe it or not, that is usually the easy part. At least for us it was. Thankfully, we didn’t have a bunch of “red tape” or multi-levels of bureaucracy to deal with.

Transition, on the other hand, has to do with changing the internal culture or DNA of the church (i.e. people’s hearts & mindsets.) THIS is the challenging part. And it costs. A LOT. Which is why, I think, most pastors are so afraid to go for it.

Let me get Biblical for a sec… What tends to happen over and over again for so many pastors is instead of pouring NEW wine into NEW wineskins, they instead waste tons of time pouring NEW WINE into OLD WINESKINS and then wonder why things don’t seem any different EVEN THOUGH a bunch of changes have been made. Sure, on the surface you have the “flavor” and appearance of new wine but as you dig deeper, you find that the culture and DNA of the church is the same as it’s always been. (It might look shiny on the outside, but the inside reeks like 14 day old diaper… Sorry, I have a two year old.)

I am convinced that part of the reason our culture at The Orchard looks completely different now than it did four years ago is because we literally threw away the old wineskins and as a result paid a HEAVY, HEAVY price for new ones. We lost a LOT of people, which led to the loss of a LOT of money, which led to losing almost EVERYTHING. I kid you not when I say this, but there were weeks when we thought that our next Sunday MIGHT be our last one. Now, four years later, we have almost quadrupled in size and our culture/DNA is COMPLETELY different then it was just a couple of years ago. It’s really amazing. And very, very humbling!

PS - William Bridges does a great job explaining the difference between “change” and “transition” in his book Managing Transitions.

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