By Marv Knox

Imagine figuring out how your church can thrive by experimenting with innovation, unafraid to fail in pursuit of transformation.

Imagine learning from innovations that didn’t work. Then trying even-newer initiatives that eventually work.

Imagine experimenting alongside other churches in situations like yours—learning from and encouraging each other—and guided by a coach who knows innovation inside-out.

Imagine using creative experiments as tools for church transformation and vitality.

Imagine spending most of a year charting a course that will enable your church to thrive for years to come.

Imagination like that is a growing reality for churches participating in the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship’s Thriving Congregations Initiative, now beginning its second year.

“Thriving Congregations helps church leaders develop habits and practices that enable them to find creative solutions to their problems,” Thriving Congregations Director Chris Aho said.

“It’s a cliché to say, ‘Everything has changed,’ but it has,” Aho acknowledged. “The world most of us grew up in is gone and won’t come back just because some of us wish it would.

“Many of the congregational changes we are acutely aware of today find their roots in how the U.S. culture and economy changed from the 1970s through the ’90s. Until Covid hit, we managed the decline in our congregations, realizing tomorrow would be similar, but just a little smaller than today. But since Covid, we face a tomorrow that won’t look anything like yesterday. We must adapt to circumstances we could never have envisioned before.”

To help churches adapt, CBF received a $1 million grant from the Lilly Endowment and launched the Thriving Congregations Initiative in the fall of 2022. The program trains congregational leadership teams of four to six members in accelerator-style learning communities. During the learning community year, teams meet 10 times online and three times in person. They start by learning principles of thriving congregations and later experiment with initiatives that can cause their own churches to thrive.

A key component is understanding and implementing what CBF believes are the five traits of thriving congregations:

 Compelling Clarity involves “knowing who you are, your giftedness, the importance of your ministry and being clearly defined by what you are rather than what you are not,” Aho explained. “Clarity is based on the call God places on a congregation because of its unique set of relationships.”

 Rooted Relationships reflect “a life and faith marked by deep, meaningful relationships that help us hear and clarify God’s call,” he said. Thriving Congregations teaches churches to identify the relationships that matter most and to nurture them better.

Dynamic Collaboration entails “carrying out work and ministry in ways that bring forth the life-giving koinonia (fellowship) the Apostle Paul mentions in the book of Philippians,” he said. It extends from collaboration within the congregation to partnerships with other churches and groups, both locally and globally. Collaboration multiplies the assets available for enabling congregations to thrive.

Faithful Agility calls on congregations to be flexible and innovative in the face of changes and challenges, Aho added. For example, the book of Acts describes how the Early Church grew exponentially as it adapted and responded to constant change in first-century culture and politics.

Holy Tenacity demonstrates “persistence that flows from a growing faith,” Aho said. “It is not surrendering in the face of challenges and not merely enduring difficult seasons.” Jesus’ parable of the sower illustrates Holy Tenacity, because the seed that grew in good soil multiplied a hundredfold.

“Thriving Congregations participants learn to see those five traits in two clusters,” Aho said.

Compelling Clarity, Rooted Relationships and Dynamic Collaboration all work together, he noted, explaining: “While churches seek clarity, it doesn’t exist in a vacuum. The clarity of calling comes and goes according to circumstances. But relationships provide stability. And while collaboration finds its direction in the clarity of a common calling, the calling is unclear and impossible to fulfill without relationships.”

Similarly, Faithful Agility and Holy Tenacity exist in creative tension with each other, he said. Faithful Agility gives congregations the capacity to shift their calling according to circumstances, and Holy Tenacity enables them to robustly pursue the possibilities. “You can’t have one without the other,” he insisted.

After participants understand these five Thriving Congregations traits, they begin to apply them to their own circumstances, Aho reported. They clarify their callings and explore their relationships. They consider the other churches and groups with whom they might collaborate. And they think about how transformation requires both agility and tenacity.

Then they consider problems or challenges that need their attention. After identifying and defining a problem, they brainstorm possible solutions and conduct “holy experiments” to address the problem. Indeed, experimentation is the decisive ingredient in the overall process.

“Thriving Congregations gives churches not only permission but encouragement to experiment with initiatives that can transform a besetting problem into a strategic asset,” Aho said. In that context, failure is not a setback, but a lesson learned. Churches gain knowledge when they try something that doesn’t work, moving ever closer to a solution.

Experimentation—accompanied by questioning and risk-taking—provides Thriving Congregations its superpower.

“Mostly, Thriving Congregations is about helping churches ask questions that maybe they haven’t thought about before,” explained Brian Foreman, CBF’s coordinator of congregational ministries. “We were so well-equipped for doing church in the 1980s and ’90s. But today, churches that are equipped to ask new questions about God’s leadership might find new directions—new opportunities for doing ministry.”

Beyond that, Thriving Congregations “gives congregations permission to ask questions about risk,” Foreman added, posing a couple of questions: “What risk is suitable for our church? What are new ways to think about how God could be leading us?”

Holy experiments in real life

Thriving Congregations’ emphasis on openness to questions, risk and experimentation resonated with cohort participants from Yates Baptist Church in Durham, N.C., noted Pastor Christopher Ingram and Courtney Thornton, a lay leader in the church.

“One of our key takeaways was that it’s okay to experiment and to take those risks,” Thornton said. That counters the typical church response, which compels leaders to spend a long time developing a new program or project and not roll it out until it is “perfect,” she acknowledged.

“We learned a different way of thinking and doing,” she said. “We learned something good can come out of the (experimentation) process, and we don’t have to wait for perfection.”

That attitude empowered the church to take a novel approach to building relationships as it seeks to recover from Covid, Ingram reported.

“Coming out of the pandemic, we realized the church was really thirsty for and withering from the absence of meaningful fellowship,” he said. Leaders who participated in Thriving Congregations also realized they didn’t need just another program, but something more like a movement, a flexible response to a broad need.

So, they invented IFFY—Intentional Fellowship for Yates. Call it a pop-up fellowship. The church can sponsor an IFFY event as needed if it meets three criteria—

(a) it is fellowship-focused, (b) it provides an intentional moment to get to know someone or get to know them better and (c) people of every age and ability can participate.

Yates launched IFFY last spring, the Sunday after Easter, with a churchwide donut taste test on the front steps. The risky part? Delaying the start of worship by 15 minutes to take advantage of the maximal time people are on campus.

“It hit the spot. It just flowed,” Ingram said. “The experience confirmed we had a lot to work with here,” enabling the church to address a major “discipleship issue” hinging upon how well the congregation knows, trusts and cares for each other.

Leaning into the lessons they learned in Thriving Congregations, Yates’ leaders are bringing its risk-tolerant, experiment-embracing approach to other church challenges, Ingram and Thornton said.

Realizing the importance of outreach to the caregivers of neighborhood teens who participate in the church’s youth group, they recently “did reconnaissance” with parents and grandparents, Ingram said, adding: “We discovered what we thought they want and need from us is not what they want and need. We’re back to the drawing board, but we’re so glad we learned from them.”

The church also has applied Thriving Congregations’ emphasis on creativity to thinking about staff vacancies. They’ve learned to first consider how best to structure the ministry rather than how to find someone to fill a staff slot, he said.

And now Yates’ leaders are looking to incorporate Thriving Congregations’ principles into the church’s DNA, Thornton said. “How can we make this inclusive beyond our team?” she asked. “We want our whole church family to think and function this way.”

Thriving beyond the cohorts

Thriving Congregations extends beyond the annual cohorts to other groups. For example, Aho and Foreman led a team that conducted a Thriving Congregations retreat for leaders of camps affiliated with the Seventh Day Baptist General Conference.

Participants attended the retreat seeking a “reframing” of the context of their camps to discover options for transforming their ministries, said Carl Greene, Seventh Day Baptists’ executive director.

“The goal was to get us thinking about uncovering assets we have that aren’t evident in our day-to-day work. This was a kingdom opportunity,” Greene said. “The fruit of what came together was more than I dreamed.”

Thriving Congregations enabled the camp leaders to develop a new process for considering their ministries. Implementing the process enabled each group to experiment with ideas and pitch new possibilities, like the approach modeled on the TV series Shark Tank, he said.

One such idea led a “reeling” camp—whose facilities had fallen below state standards and had not been operational since before the pandemic—to see how it could creatively partner with another camp to open up a completely new multi-church family camp.

The Thriving Congregations process led to “curating the creativity of the group,” Greene said.

The work done by the Seventh Day Baptist camp leaders—what Greene lauded as a unique process—shows Thriving Congregations is “a way of thinking more than it is a template for a how-to program,” Foreman said. “What Chris teaches them to do is recognize why they care about what they do, why it matters and what gifts and strengths they already have to do it.”

Getting connected…

Thriving Congregations sounds similar to Dawnings, CBF’s original church renewal/discernment program.

“They’re both discernment processes,” Foreman acknowledged. “But Dawnings leans into spiritual practices, while Thriving Congregations leans into pragmatic discovery.”

The primary difference is between discernment by contemplation and discovery by action, Aho added.

The 2023-24 Thriving Congregation learning communities are meeting in Florida and North Carolina. In early 2024, learning communities will convene in the Atlanta and Washington, D.C., areas, Aho said, noting one or two cohorts will be located west of the Mississippi River in 2024-25.

But geographic proximity is not a requirement for participating. “These learning communities are open to any congregational leadership team that commits to attending the monthly online meetings and the three retreats that are part of the program,” he said.

Thriving Congregations is also expanding the availability of resources. Modules based on each of the five Thriving Congregations traits are in the works. A preaching guide and set of Sunday school lessons will be released this spring.

“We also are actively looking for ways to distill the year-long cohort work into smaller pieces for leadership retreats, Thriving Congregations sprints, congregational renewal weekends or workshops that we can provide in a smaller period of time,” Aho said. “We want to get tools in the hands of our pastors and congregational leadership any way we can.”

“We absolutely believe God has given congregations what they need to thrive. Sometimes, it takes a process, like the Thriving Congregations cohort, to learn how to discover and maximize those assets God has given,” Foreman said. “We’re not bringing a magic bullet approach. What we’re bringing is another tool to discover and implement God’s vision in their community.”

For more information on Thriving Congregations, visit http://www.cbf.net/thriving or contact Chris Aho at caho@cbf.net.

This article first appeared in the Winter 2023 issue of fellowship! magazine. Check out the issue and subscribe for free at www.cbf.net/fellowship.