Live Blog From Renew Conference – Creating an Atmosphere of Change and Pastoral Succession

Bishop Walter Scott Thomas, Brian Dodd, and Odell Dickerson

For the next several days, I will be attending the Renew Leadership Conference hosted by Union Baptist Church and Bishop Sir Walter Mack in Winston-Salem, NC.  I have been dispatched by INJOY Stewardship Solutions to add value to those in attendance and capture the best leadership insights I gleaned from an all-star lineup of speakers.

If your church needs to raise capital in the next year, the INJOY Stewardship wants to add value to you as well.  Simple click HERE to learn the giving capacity of your church and how much you can raise in your giving effort.

The final day’s first session was Creating an Atmosphere of Change and Succession by the incomparable Bishop Walter Scott Thomas.  Bishop Thomas is a great friend and leads New Psalmist Baptist Church in Baltimore, MD.  The following are 42 quotes from his incredible session:

1. I believe this is a season when a lot of God’s leaders are going to lose it.
2. We have too many prejudices against groups of people. We do not extend the Gospel message or ourselves to them.  We will send money across the globe to someone we’ve never met rather than go across the street to someone we have met.
3. They are your assignment not your problem. Most people have made them our problem and not our assignment.
4. Emerging – Growing – Consolidating – Declining – Scrambling – Dying. The life cycle of a church.
5. Every church has a growth cycle that leads to death.
6. When there is birth there is excitement. There is rapid development.  It’s the emerging stage.  They grow because they are new, exciting and they grow.
7. Young churches have creativity. Older churches have ability.  Young churches can make bricks with straw.  Older churches have lawyers, doctors, and IT.
8. You have to give older churches ideas. That’s when you know you need to transition staff – when you have to give them ideas.
9. With growth comes growing pains. We have to start putting order, structure, and people in place.
10. When you put structure in place, you put bureaucrats in place. Rarely do churches put spiritual people in charge.  They put people in charge who can do tasks.
11. We get managers with no spirit. Form takes more importance than function.
12. We have five meetings and begin declining.We are not who we were but now we are an institution.  Our energy is dissapated.
13. The institution absorbs power to protect itself.We become Sau’s army instead of David’s army to fight Goliath.
14. The church is dying because of who you put in charge and what you’ve done. You enter the scrambling stage.  You start doing what other churches are doing.
15. Once a church falls below a certain number it will die.
16. The goal of every church should be to recognize where you are.
17. How does a church lasted 75, 99 years? They shift the curve.  How did New Psalmist shift the curve?  They called me to replace a 75-year-old church 44 years ago.
18. What glory does God get from a dying church?
19. The citadel of hope is stormed and destroyed, what hope is there for the people who live there?
20. In our own minds, we don’t age until we recognize we age.
21. It’s hard to get young people to join a church when they don’t see any.
22. When was the last time you had respect for someone who was 25?
23. If no one would have trusted me at 25, then no one would have an opportunity to trust me at 69.
24. Most of the people I serve with are the people I have served with. We worked together so well I stopped looking for other people to work with.
25. They (young people) are in the growing stage while I’m in the declining stage.
26. We’re in the declining stage so what makes me think we know what it’s going to take to make the church grow.
27. The reason I was successful at 25 was I had the declining members supporting me.
28. We’ve got to make passion real again in the church, not just on the wings of a song.
29. Passion is so low you can come tomorrow for last night’s service.
30. We don’t even raise children to be passionate about church anymore.
31. We make the child’s career and the NFL, MLB, and NBA more important than church. When they’re old, they’ll have NBA problems but no church foundation.
32. We are passionate about going to church. We are not passionate about the Christ of the church.
33. If it ain’t broke, break it. We have become comfortable with the success we have.  We have made the methods of our success traditions.  Traditions are nothing more than our methods.
34. When you buy groceries you expect there to be no products beyond the expiration date.
35. It worked last year because it was new. It’s obsolete this year.
36. Never trust people to fight a battle for you only God can win.
37. Build allies but have an allegiance with God.
38. “I want to die preaching.” Where in the Bible does that glorify God?
39. What are the metrics we use to measure our vitality?
40. The new models INJOY Stewardship gave me gave us new money.
41. I want the young people in our church to meet a grandfather, the father they don’t have, not a peer.
42. I give young people the Gospel and me at the same time.

This has been an amazing event.  I learned so much this week which will help me be a better Christian and American citizen.

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