“Playbook” Chapters I Need To Add: Help Your Congregation Discover Their Riches In Christ

Just a note: In 2025 we launched “The Revitalization Playbook.” The “Playbook” is similar to the ones used by football coaches on the sidelines.  The coach’s playbook contains all the plays that the coach is confident that his team can run. Conditions on the field determine which play he chooses next.

In my “Playbook,” knowing that every church is unique, we began with five “scripted” plays (which football teams usually begin the game with as well) followed by fifteen “optional” plays. I mentioned in the “Playbook” that some of the plays (chapters) were going to get longer in subsequent editions and that completely new plays were going to be added as I worked closely with pastors and their in-need-of-revitalization churches. It has since been my joy to work with two Revitalization Cohorts, as well as other pastors who are not involved in the cohorts but are “deep in the weeds” of church revitalization.

Because of what I’ve seen and heard, here’s the first of which will likely be several additional plays for the “Playbook.” I am praying that you are blessed and helped by these efforts.

……………………………

“Are you so foolish?  After beginning with the Spirit, are you now trying to attain your goal by human effort?” “What has happened to all your joy?”   Galatians 3:3 and 4:15a                                                             

This book is about giving church leaders a compendium of “plays” they can run, actions they can take, to help their churches experience heaven-sent revitalization. Since the book was launched, I’ve had fun listening to my friends and colleagues argue (I know, it’s a strange way to have fun) about which plays should have been listed as “scripted” (mandatory) plays and which of the optional plays should have been listed first, fifth or fifteenth. While I keep insisting that the optional plays are NOT listed in any sort of order, readers continue to give me their opinions as to which of them should have been prioritized.

A play which I utterly missed

Here’s a play I missed completely with my first edition: making sure your people understand their riches in Christ.

This, of course, is a subject which I can’t begin to do justice to in one chapter, but I can at least alert you to the need and get you headed (if necessary) in the right direction.

Here’s why this is so important: No matter how clear we are in our articulation of the pure gospel of eternal life through Christ, it is nevertheless possible for us to teach a version of, a caricature really, of the Christian life that is “legalistic” in the sense of thinking that while we have been saved (justified) by grace through faith, the Christian life which we subsequently live is basically lived in our own strength, with our own resources.  It is, as is said in some circles, “our gift to Christ,” just as our salvation (again, our justification) was “God’s gift to us.”

The results of this are tragic, and I know this all-too well, for I experienced it personally. I trusted Christ as my Savior at nineteen years of age and was dramatically transformed, from the inside out, by the Spirit of God. As the Apostle Paul said to the Galatian Christians, I “was running a good race” (Galatians 5:7).

But a couple of years into my Christian life, I found myself in a “tribe” in which the Holy Spirit’s position in believers was barely mentioned and the believer’s position in Christ was not spoken of at all. The amazing “identification truths” (as they are sometimes called) of the letters of Paul to the Romans, the Galatians, the Colossians, the Philippians  and the Ephesians were treated as if they were “expired blessings” from a time of signs and wonders and miracles that has long since expired.

What was spoken of, clearly, loudly, and often, were lists of things that we shouldn’t do and additional lists of practices which we must do if we wanted to be “right with God.” God was depicted as having become our Father through our justification and regeneration and adoption – so far so good – but a Father who was never very happy with us; a perfectionistic, impossible to please, demanding Father was the one we were asked to worship. The blessed judgment seat of Christ, clearly a place of reward in Scripture, was depicted as a place of humiliation, where our cranky God was going to expose our failures for all the world to see.

While we gave lip service to the Holy Spirit and to the Bible’s promises of victory, the blessed Third Person of the Trinity was treated almost like a family member who embarrassed us, and our victory over our indwelling sin was depicted as a noble struggle we were called to fight pretty much on our own.

All of this got so bad in our own church – which we had helped to plant – that there came a time when a church member told me that she wouldn’t want to lead somebody to Jesus and usher him or her into a life as miserable as her own!

God’s rescue of Brian and Donna

Making a long story as short as possible, God graciously delivered us from this “bootcamp” version of Christianity and showed us how we could live the Christian life the same way we entered it: by grace through faith, or a little more completely, by the Father’s grace, by Christ’s saving death and resurrection and by the Holy Spirit’s regeneration, infilling, empowering and directing.

While it took us several years to recover from our caricatured version of the Christian life, I’ve since had the joy of teaching many believers the exhilarating, joy-producing truths about the degree to which we have been forgiven by justification, set-apart by sanctification, embraced by adoption, transformed by regeneration and set free by our baptism into Christ’s death, burial and resurrection.

My experience would suggest, in fact, that we need to keep returning to these life-changing truths for “refresher courses,” for even the oldest, most knowledgeable and most committed among us – pastors included – can easily slide back into an exhausting existence of “working for Jesus.”

What does this have to do with church revitalization?

Simply everything. Christians who are not walking in the Spirit and rejoicing in their position in Christ are not experiencing joy. Their “victory” feels like a battle, not a gift. They’re not much interested in serious, intercessory prayer. Evangelism feels like a punishment. Love for fellow believers is a chore. Worship is fun only if you really like the band. “Fellowship” is about football and food. Bible study is a game which we win by learning more facts than the next guy.

Does any of this sound familiar?  Is this what is really wrong with your church?  Let’s face it; fifty “dead” (at least in the sense of Spirit-less, joy-less, legalistic lives) Christians comprise one thoroughly dead congregation.

Fortunately, congregations such as that described above, can live again, because God can raise the dead!  So here are some

SUGGESTIONS FOR GETTING STARTED:

• Pastor, you’ll need to start with yourself. If you’re not enjoying Christ on a daily basis, like the Apostle Paul under house arrest in Rome, you’ll need to start soaking or resoaking in these truths until your life sets the right tone for the believers in your church. Do whatever you have to do to experience your own revival, from doing a sermon series for the sake of your own soul (you’ve done this before!), to taking a long sabbatical, to reading a stack of Bible commentaries by scholars who understood these truths, or attending a retreat or conference sponsored by organizations or individuals who understand their riches in Christ.
• Stop telling your congregation to “do stuff” for a while. Give them a vacation from action and work. Take your “sweet time” teaching Romans 5-8, Ephesians (the whole thing) and Galatians (the whole thing) until your people are basking in and celebrating their position in Christ. When people “get it,” they worship, they sing, they share their faith and they fix broken things at the church building. When your people understand, they will rejoice in Christ and you will rejoice to see them do so.
• Be careful about couching your teaching in extra-biblical (I’m not saying it’s unbiblical) jargon, diagrams and teachings that demand that followers learn a new language and experience a catastrophic failure in the Christian life as the only way into victory. None of this is helpful or necessary. Just teach what Scripture actually says in the language of the Bible itself.

QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION:

1. How well do our people understand their riches in Christ? What do YOU think?
2. How does our people’s great understanding – or poor understanding – of their riches in Christ, show itself in the life of our church?
3. Do we, as leaders, understand our riches in Christ? Are we rejoicing Christian leaders, like the Apostle Paul as he was writing his letter to the Philippians?
4. If our church needs a “revival” of understanding of our resources in Christ, what kind of teaching style or format would work best in our congregation?
5. How can we make sure that our pastor has the time and opportunity to enjoy his own ongoing, personal revival? Is he too “harried” by the demands upon him to even enjoy his own Christian life?