Church Revitalization: A Picture of the Resurrection

A couple of weekends ago I had the pleasure of attending a 9 Marks Weekender at Capitol Hill Baptist Church in Washington, DC. I learned a lot, and gained hope by seeing a healthy church in action. It was no longer and idea or theory, the healthy church is real. One of the lectures the has stuck with me was Mike McKinley’s on church planting and church revitalization, and not so much because of what he said, but what the Spirit revealed to me through what he said and my time thinking of it afterwards.

Mike said more than once that planting a church puts a Gospel witness in a place where it wasn’t before, and that revitalizing a church does this as well as taking away a mar on the Gospel witness from the community. This is correct, but the more I thought about it the more I realized it is bigger than this, there are also key theological truths being taught as well. Church planting is a picture of creation, while church revitalization is a picture of the resurrection. A revitalized church, a living community that once was dead, is a powerful representation of the Gospel.

When a church is revitalized we show that God has taken something dead and brought it back to life, just as he has taken us, dead in our sin, and brought us to life in Christ. This now thriving church can point people to God in a way that nothing else can. This isn’t to say that church planting isn’t valid and important but that revitalization is too. If you’ve felt God calling you to start something new have you that that maybe he is calling you to bring new life to something old?