Making Room for What Matters - Part 1

When the Method Becomes the Mission
For much of the twentieth century, the name Kodak was nearly synonymous with photography. Families captured birthdays, vacations, graduations, weddings, and ordinary moments on Kodak film. The phrase “a Kodak moment” became part of our vocabulary.

Kodak’s success, however, created a serious challenge. The company became deeply invested in producing film and processing printed photographs. When digital photography emerged, the way people captured and shared memories began to change. Remarkably, a Kodak engineer had developed an early digital camera decades earlier. The company saw the future coming and even invested in parts of it, but it remained heavily dependent upon the business model that had made it successful.

Kodak had not forgotten how to make film. It had failed to adapt quickly enough when film was no longer the primary way people wanted to preserve their memories. After dominating photography for generations, the company entered bankruptcy protection in 2012.

The lesson is not that Kodak’s previous work was bad. Film had served people well for more than a century. The mistake was confusing a successful method with the company’s deeper purpose.

A church is not a business, and people are not customers. Our mission comes from Jesus, not from the marketplace. Nevertheless, Kodak’s story raises an important question for every organization, including a church:

What happens when we become more committed to maintaining our methods than to fulfilling our mission?

Programs Are Tools, Not the Mission
Church ministries usually begin for good reasons. Someone sees a need. Faithful people respond. Volunteers give their time and energy. Lessons are prepared, meals are served, children are welcomed, relationships are formed, and the gospel is shared.

We should thank God for every person who has served in these ways. We should also recognize that God has used our ministries to touch lives. Considering a change does not require us to deny the good that has happened in the past.

But even a good ministry is still a method. It is a tool intended to help us fulfill the mission Jesus has given us.

Jesus did not command His church to preserve every program it begins. He commanded us to make disciples. We are to help people come to know Christ, learn from Christ, obey Christ, and help others follow Christ.

Programs can support that mission, but they cannot fulfill it by themselves.

A child can attend church activities for years without developing a faith of his or her own. An adult can complete many Bible studies without learning to obey Jesus in everyday life. A person can be surrounded by church events without ever developing the kind of relationships in which believers confess sin, ask hard questions, pray for one another, and speak God’s truth in love.

Attendance can create opportunities for discipleship, but attendance is not the same thing as discipleship.

That distinction is important because successful programs can give us the comforting impression that ministry is happening simply because the calendar is full, the rooms are busy, and an event is well attended. Those things may be encouraging, but they cannot tell us by themselves whether people are becoming mature followers of Jesus.

The question is not merely, “Did people come?”

We must also ask, “Are people learning to follow Jesus and help others follow Him?”

Caring More About People Than Programs
Programs are relatively predictable. People are not.

A program has a beginning and an ending. It has a schedule, a lesson, a room, and a list of tasks. We can prepare for it, conduct it, clean up afterward, and mark it complete.

Personally ministering to someone is rarely that orderly.

People’s needs do not always fit our schedules. Relationships require patience. Sharing the gospel involves listening as well as speaking. Discipleship requires us to walk with people through questions, failures, grief, family struggles, doubt, and change. It asks us to open our homes, rearrange our plans, and allow another person’s life to become part of our own.

If we are honest, programs can sometimes become a way for us to participate in ministry without becoming personally involved in people’s lives. We can support an event and assume that the event is accomplishing the work Jesus has given to all of us.

But a program cannot love our neighbor for us.

A class cannot have a spiritual conversation with our friend.

A church event cannot welcome someone into our home.

A children’s ministry cannot replace parents and grandparents speaking about God throughout ordinary life.

An outreach strategy cannot take the place of a believer patiently building trust with someone who does not know Christ.

A program cannot notice the person who is quietly hurting unless someone within that program cares enough to notice.

The ministry of Jesus was deeply personal. He taught crowds, but He also ate in homes. He welcomed children. He stopped for individuals others overlooked. He asked questions, listened to stories, touched people considered untouchable, and invested His life in a small group of disciples.

If we want to follow Jesus, we must care more about people than programs.

Equipping the Church for Ministry
Ephesians 4:11–12 says that Christ gave leaders to the church “to equip the saints for the work of ministry, for building up the body of Christ.”

That passage gives us an essential picture of the church. Pastors and ministry leaders are not called to perform all the ministry while everyone else attends. Their calling is to equip God’s people for ministry.

Every Christian is called to participate.

The church gathered equips the church scattered. It does not replace the church scattered.

When we gather, we worship, hear God’s Word, pray, encourage one another, and prepare to live faithfully throughout the week. Then the church scatters into homes, neighborhoods, schools, workplaces, friendships, and ordinary conversations.

That is where much of the church’s ministry happens.

It happens when parents talk with their children about Jesus.

It happens when a believer invites a lonely person to dinner.

It happens when someone asks a hurting friend, “How can I pray for you?”—and then actually prays.

It happens when Christians open Scripture together, confess sin to one another, offer practical help, share the gospel, and patiently teach others to obey Jesus.

Our programs should equip and encourage those relationships. They should never become a substitute for them.

Why We Believe Change Is Needed
Over time, churches naturally accumulate activities. Each ministry may be valuable by itself, but together they require volunteers, planning, communication, facilities, finances, and leadership attention.

Because each program represents people we love and memories we treasure, evaluating it can feel like rejecting its worth. Ending or pausing something can feel like declaring that it failed.

But evaluation is not condemnation. Sometimes good tools have completed their purpose. Sometimes circumstances have changed. Sometimes a ministry needs to be redesigned. Sometimes continuing one good activity prevents us from giving enough attention to something even more important.

Faithful stewardship requires us to ask not only whether a ministry is good, but whether it is producing the fruit for which it was created—and whether it is still the wisest use of the people, energy, and opportunities God has entrusted to us.

This is one reason our church leaders believe God is leading us to prepare for a Seventh Year Sabbath beginning in 2027.

We believe it is time to rest from some programs and events to create room to seek God together, recenter ourselves on Jesus, immerse ourselves in Scripture and prayer, and examine whether our ministries are truly equipping people to make disciples.

This does not mean we intend to stop being the church. It means we want to become more intentional about being the church.

In future articles, we will explain the biblical ideas behind the Seventh Year Sabbath and what this season will involve. Before discussing specific changes, however, we want everyone to understand the reason behind them.

We are not trying to do less for Jesus.

We are asking whether doing fewer things together for a season could help all of us follow Jesus more faithfully every day.

The Courage to Follow God
Change can be painful. Familiar ministries carry memories, relationships, and meaning. Questions and concerns deserve to be heard with patience and answered with humility. We do not want to pursue change carelessly or treat people’s feelings as unimportant.

At the same time, fear cannot be the compass that directs the church.

We cannot make decisions primarily from fear that someone may become upset, disagree, or leave. Our responsibility is to seek God through His Word and prayer, listen carefully to one another, discern as wisely as we can, and then courageously obey where He leads.

There are two dangers before us. One is changing simply because something new seems exciting. The other is refusing to change because something familiar feels safe.

Therefore, as we pray for our church, let us ask God to free us from both a reckless desire for change and a fearful resistance to it.

Change is not automatically faithful. Neither is staying the same.

Faithfulness means holding tightly to our unchanging Savior and His unchanging mission while holding our methods with open hands.

Kodak’s mistake was not that film had never been useful. Its mistake was remaining too dependent upon a method after the world around it had changed. As a church, we must be willing to ask whether our familiar methods are still helping us fulfill our mission—or whether maintaining them has slowly begun to consume energy that should be invested directly in people.

Programs are tools. People are the ministry. Making disciples is the mission.

May God give us gratitude for all He has done in the past, wisdom to recognize what He is doing now, and courage to follow Him faithfully into the future.