Last Thursday was primary election day where I live, in Tennessee. And I was on the ballot.
I won’t pretend that decision was an easy one. For a long time, I did what a lot of us do when we sense something needs to change: I waited. I hoped someone else would step up, that circumstances would shift on their own, that the problem would resolve itself if I just prayed hard enough and stayed patient. Eventually I realized that waiting was its own kind of choice — and not a faithful one. If I wanted a different outcome, I had to become someone willing to act toward it. So I got on the ballot.
I’ve been thinking about that decision all week, because I see the same crossroads in front of so many of our congregations.
Church after church tells us some version of the same story. The pews aren’t as full as they used to be. The pledge cards come back thinner each fall. The budget conversations get harder, and the mood in them gets heavier. And underneath it all sits a quiet, corrosive belief: that decline is just what’s happening to us, that we are the objects of a story being written by demographics and culture and time, rather than authors with any real say in how the next chapter goes.
I don’t believe that. I’ve never believed that.
Scripture doesn’t hand us a faith of passive endurance — it hands us a faith of active stewardship. The parable of the talents isn’t subtle: the servant who buried what he’d been given out of fear was the one rebuked, not praised. God did not entrust us with congregations, buildings, budgets, and callings so that we could simply manage their decline with dignity. We were entrusted with them so we could do something with them.
That’s the shift I want to name plainly: your church’s future is not simply happening to you. It is, in real part, still yours to shape. Low membership is not a final verdict. A shrinking stewardship base is not “a given.” These are circumstances — real, difficult, sometimes painful circumstances — but circumstances respond to discernment, strategy, and courageous action in a way that fate never does. The congregations I’ve watched turn a corner didn’t do it by waiting for revival to fall from the sky. They did it by getting honest about where they stood, imagining a future worth building, and then doing the patient, unglamorous work of building it.
But I also want to be transparent about my own struggle. I didn’t decide to run for office by myself, in a vacuum, on willpower alone. I leaned on people who had done this before — who knew the terrain, who could tell me which instincts to trust and which fears were just noise. Discernment is a communal act. It always has been. And that is exactly why I want to lift up Convergence to you today.
Convergence exists to walk alongside congregations exactly like yours — progressive, faithful, and standing at a real fork in the road — and help you do the discerning, strategic work that turning things around requires. That might mean a fresh look at your governance and staffing. It might mean rebuilding a culture of generosity from the ground up rather than just running another fall stewardship drive. It might mean facing your building, your budget, and your future with a consultant who has helped other churches face the exact same thing and come out the other side more alive than before. Whatever your particular fork looks like, you don’t have to face it with only the wisdom already sitting in your own fellowship hall.
I hope your church can say, in a year from now, that the road was easy, but that when you stood at your own fork in the road, you chose partnership over disappointment.
If that’s where your congregation stands right now, reach out to Convergence. Let’s have the conversation. Your destiny is yours to take hold of — you just don’t have to take hold of it alone.