The Great Re-Evaluation Is Underway, Part One
Part One
by Mark Tidsworth, Founder and Team Leader
NOTE – This is the first in a series of articles growing out of Mark’s new presentation on The Current Situation. We plan to release a video soon to serve as a learning tool for churches and their leadership. Mark has started giving presentations and training experiences with The Current Situation. Contact us to explore options.
We sense it, we feel it – the intuitive types among us are keenly aware the current of our culture is changing course. The logical analytical types among us are observing the fact that change is occurring. Now there is even research indicating major change in post-pandemic church life is underway.
After observing the major shifts in vocational life due to the extreme volatility in our world, Dr. Anthony Klotz, a psychologist and professor of business administration at Texas A&M University is credited with coining the phrase, The Great Resignation. I love how he captures the impetus for these changes in the workplace with this statement: “From organizational research, we know that when human beings come into contact with death and illness in their lives, it causes them to take a step back and ask existential questions”… “like, what gives me purpose and happiness in life, and does that match up with how I’m spending my right now? So, in many cases, these reflections will lead to life pivots.”* Insider Online Magazine, 10-2-21
Existential questions… like what gives me purpose and happiness in life, and does that match up with how I’m spending my right now?
In the workplace, supervisors and managers are questioning themselves. “Should we try to get our people back to in-person working rhythms or do we stay online? Are we permanently hybrid companies and organizations now?” They are trying to adjust and makes sense of these moments.
Others are reevaluating their very vocations. Given the existential crisis of the pandemic plus all the other volatility in our world, people are questioning how they want to spend their “right now.” Who knows what tomorrow may bring, so do I continue to serve as a teacher, as an attorney, in insurance sales? What’s my vocational calling look like now given the shifts in our world? Ask any workplace recruiter and they will tell you that people are clearly reevaluating their vocational lives.
But we can’t limit the influence of large-scale seismic change to only the workplace and our vocations. Anthony Klotz was right to identify the Great Resignation, but I think what’s happening is much greater in scope. People, you and I, are actively evaluating everything… our personal relationships – how we engage with our family and friends, where we live, how we spend our time and resources, our overall way of engaging life as we know it… and, our relationships with our faith and with our churches. This Great Re-evaluation includes reflection on how we will engage our faith and our churches.
Research on church trends confirms what we at Pinnacle are observing in churches… very few have as many people participating in in-person worship as they did before the pandemic. According to one large-scale survey done by the Hartford Institute on Religious Research, the volunteer base in churches is half of what it was before the pandemic… half as many people are volunteering to serve through their churches compared to before the pandemic. It appears as if those persons in churches who were nearly Dones pre-pandemic, became Dones during the pandemic. It also appears as if those who were participating out of only a sense of duty, obligation, or traditionalism… their motivations were broken during the pandemic.
Doesn’t it make sense, during the time when people are re-evaluating everything in their lives, people of faith would also re-evaluate their faith and their relationships with their communities of faith? People are asking themselves what it means to be a Christ-follower and how and if they are going to relate to their churches given the seismic shifts in their lives.
Everything around us is changing and the Great Re-Evaluation is underway.
By leading our churches into clarity, with increasing understanding about this current situation, we position them to respond faithfully, discovering how God is reshaping churches into greater expressions of the body of Christ.