The Great "Rechurching" Hits Home
The frustrations of being faithful to the Gospel in an ear-tickling era
We had a fantastic Easter service at our small nondenominational church in the back of the shopping plaza in mid-town Lynchburg. We thought the guests that always come for Easter would make up for the regular attendees, particularly our college-age students, who might be out of town on an extended Easter weekend break. However, we had most of our congregation present and a healthy number of guests, and we nearly ran out of the free coffee we offered during the mid-service break. Our guest speaker delivered an inspired and unique message on the resurrection, and the elders, of which I'm one, marveled at what we were witnessing, given that we are at risk of having to close the doors for good in a little more than a year.
Our giving is not keeping pace with our expenses, which means we are challenged to fulfill the terms of our current lease, much less extend it for another three years. It’s a sad story when churches that have made different and controversial decisions about how to appeal to the faithful seem to be thriving. However, before I proceed on that point, let me introduce you to Mosaic Church.
Rick Ouimet, a pastor with a heart for at-risk youth, and his wife Mimi moved to Lynchburg, Virginia, from Las Vegas, where they met and married. They started a parachurch ministry called Straight Street to provide a safe place for young people to congregate, play, and socialize while getting to know Christ and the Gospel. After a couple of stints as a youth pastor in local churches, they founded Mosaic Church, holding the first service on March 31, 2007. They initially met on Saturday nights, and the decor was more like a coffeehouse or someone’s living room than a church. Rather than a typical sermon, the congregation engaged in group discussions resembling a home Bible study.
In a 2010 profile on the church, Rick described the church and its target audience:
Ouimet started Mosaic three years ago, wanting to reach the twentysomething set as they navigate a time in their life when they’re making so many big decisions.
“We want to provide a place where the older could teach the younger.”
So he’s geared everything toward them, including the coffee house atmosphere, which they decided on after conducting focus groups, and the time of the service, which starts at 7 p.m. on Saturdays.
“We found a lot of people want to sleep in on Sunday,” he says.
“When you think about the Sabbath … it was (originally) Friday night to Saturday night.
There’s nothing wrong with church on Saturday night. It was man who put it on Sunday.”
The set-up and atmosphere has appealed to an even broader group than originally expected. Ouimet says services usually attract between 50 and 75 people who come from all age groups.
“A lot of people are turned off by church,” Ouimet says. “They see a lot of hypocrites.
“We really want to reach those who are … far from God. Those who have been disillusioned.”
Many of those who attended a recent service say that it’s the discussion that keeps them coming back.
Over time, the nondenominational church moved to Sunday services and a typical sermon. However, the coffee house informality, including a 10-minute break in the middle of the service for people to mingle and get coffee, hot chocolate, or whatever their favorite morning beverage might be, remains to this day. It’s what strikes first-time visitors the most when they enter the doors.
The decor is just one aspect of Rick's desire to do church differently from what he witnessed in Lynchburg or elsewhere. His background as a pastoral counselor and his emphasis on the mental and emotional wellness of his congregants, highlighted by his willingness to recommend and pay for professional counseling help for those who needed it, came from the trauma of growing up with an alcoholic, abusive father who took his wrath out on Rick’s mother, brothers, and Rick himself. Mimi grew up in a home where mental illness prevailed. Their combined life experiences gave them a heart for broken people, and they invited them to come to Mosaic Church, even if their brokenness happened in a church, to be safe and heal without judgment.
The congregation is multi-generational, the music contemporary, and the messages infused with Christ’s grace for all people, especially the “weary and heavy laden.” He taught that Jesus’ sacrifice on the cross was the total and irrevocable payment for all our sins for all time, a novelty in a city of churches that taught a laundry list of dos and don'ts, suggesting a lifetime of striving to win God’s favor. He emphasized that once we accepted Jesus as our Lord and Savior, our identity was, to use one of what we called “Rickisms,” “saints who occasionally sinned,” and our only challenge was to allow what was already inside of us to grow and manifest itself in our outward behavior.
These things drew my wife and me to Mosaic Church in 2013. We moved to Lynchburg in 2011 for me to take a job at Liberty University, and while we eventually found a megachurch in the area whose worship and teaching style appealed to us, there was no sense of community; people came, participated in the worship service, and left. While Annik managed to find a niche in a women’s Bible study, I could not make a connection, which was unusual since I’m supposed to be the extrovert in the family! When a couple we met through my son’s friends on the high school football team mentioned their church was a little different, Annik replied, “We can do different!” We first attended Mosaic in late January or early February of 2013 and never left.
Eventually, Rick began to call on me to help with church administrative matters and to teach occasionally. Over time, I became a de facto church leader and was installed as the church’s first elder on New Year’s Eve, 2017.
I was joined not long thereafter by two other church elders, John Stroud, and Jeff Nitz, and the leadership team comprised of Rick and the elders led the church through the pandemic with minimal losses despite outdoor services in the spring, live stream services during the summer, and social distancing and mask-wearing in the fall. We had a few dissenters, but we believed we set an example by showing Christ-like care for others in our actions and respect for the governing authorities doing their best to keep people safe during a once-in-a-century public health emergency. Rick did an excellent job of framing our actions during the pandemic as being about others, not ourselves or our “rights.” We weren’t being prevented from coming together; we had to be innovative and find different ways to gather, and I was proud of our church for how we conducted ourselves.
However, as the fall of 2020 approached, it was apparent that the stress of 40 years of full-time ministry was taking a consequential toll on Rick’s health and marriage. After emergency quadruple bypass surgery, he decided to retire and gave his last sermon at Mosaic Church on March 31, 2021, exactly 14 years after the first. Not long after he retired, he and Mimi divorced. He is now a part-time pastoral counselor and a cancer survivor and seems more energized than ever as he writes the next chapter in his story.
After Rick’s retirement, we three elders held town-hall-style meetings with the congregation to affirm what kind of church we hoped to be. Our mission remained unchanged; Rick always said that Jesus already wrote the mission statement for the church and we didn’t need another:
“Therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you. And surely I am with you always, to the very end of the age.” (Matthew 28:19-20)
Our vision remained the same: “To establish ourselves as an authentic community of believers who Live by Faith, are Known by Love, and are a Voice of Hope.”
Rick believed in leadership training and conducted it. He encouraged his staff to attend as many faith-based leadership conferences and seminars as possible. One of the things that grew out of his leadership training was a set of values that established how we in the church would interact with each other, without which he believed our mission and vision wouldn’t be realized. These values are helpful not just in a church setting; shortly after I assumed the position of interim dean of the Helms School of Government at Liberty University, I had Rick come on campus to train my leadership team on them.
The one thing the elders added was a list of “distinctives” that describe Mosaic Church to those seeking to know our culture. These distinctives, arrived at through our congregational meetings and their feedback, collectively define the character of our church, and we’ve been heartened to hear from visitors that our description hit the mark.
Our doctrinal statement is theologically conservative but also very concise. We believe that too many churches, to use another phrase Rick favored, “major in the minors” when it comes to doctrine, so when he and I and Steve Weaver, another church leader before the formal installation of elders, met to determine our doctrinal statement, we began with over 30 items and through Bible study, prayer, and deliberation, whittled the list down to seven essential positions. We invoked the maxim typically attributed to St. Augustine, although there is no record of him saying or writing it: “In essential beliefs, we have unity; in non-essential beliefs, we have liberty; in all our beliefs, we show forth love.” Outside of our doctrinal statement, we believe there is room for interpretation, differences of opinion, and differing practices. Most importantly, we believe these secondary or tertiary issues, as Jeff likes to call them, are not fundamental to our salvation. In other words, if your church does things a particular way and ours another, neither we nor you are condemned to eternal separation from God because we aren’t the same.
For example, one of our recently installed elders, Brian Stroud, was told in another church that he could never be an elder because he and his first wife had divorced due to her unfaithfulness in the marriage. Because they interpreted the elder qualification in 1 Timothy 3:2, “the husband of one wife,” to mean a man can only have been married once, Brian was denied an opportunity to which he felt called. However, we viewed the Scriptures differently since the Bible allows for divorce in cases of sexual immorality on the part of the spouse (Matthew 19:9), and concluded that since Brian was happily married to his current wife, Denise, there was no prohibition on him becoming an elder. He has been a valuable and grounded addition to our team.
Because we grant one another liberty on non-essential matters, we’ve had disagreements that have caused us to lose congregants. I use that term because we don’t have “members.” Rick never liked the connotation that some people were privileged over others due to “membership,” and he said all believers are the church, no matter where they attend.
One of the things we do differently is diffuse church leadership among the elders. There is no single senior, lead, or teaching pastor or head elder; we share in teaching and decision-making. We are all volunteers with full-time jobs elsewhere, so we are not dependent on the church for our livelihood. We also have deacons primarily focused on congregational care; they are also volunteers who make their living full-time elsewhere.
We chose this leadership model for our church for practical and philosophical reasons. After Rick retired, many people who came to Mosaic solely to sit under his leadership departed, and their giving went with them, so we weren’t immediately able to afford a full-time pastor. Moreover, we attempted a pastor search, but disagreements over the process and the finalists caused such friction in the church that we suspended the search. It was so taxing on my mental health that I took a brief sabbatical from church leadership in March 2022, proclaiming at the time that “it is challenging to pour out God’s grace to others from an empty chalice.”
After nine years at Mosaic Church, having served as a de facto and ordained elder for eight of those years, I find myself in need of some time away to rest and be restored. My mental health, in particular, has been declining recently, and as a lifetime sufferer of depression, I am mindful of when I am approaching the red line that separates normal functioning from a major depressive episode. In this time of transition for our church, I owe you my best, and I’m simply not able to give it at this time. My other obligations have suffered also, and I need to give them more attention than I have.
After seven months of rest, with occasional engagement in church matters when necessary, I was back on track and more committed than ever to retaining our leadership model. Aside from the practical considerations of not being able to pay a full-time pastor or agree on a candidate, we concluded the pressures on a single paid full-time pastor were significant.
Congregations tend to have outsized expectations of a pastor that are difficult to meet, and the pastor’s dependence on them for financial security introduces another pressure point, compelling them to go along with congregational demands to preserve their livelihood.
Moreover, the presence of a single pastor is treated by some congregants as absolution from being engaged in ministry themselves, and we’ve always believed that making disciples is everyone’s ministry and should be happening daily as we go about our lives, not just in a religious setting.
These pastoral pressures lead to high levels of ministry dissatisfaction and burnout; the Barna Group, the preeminent Christian research firm, has recorded unprecedented drops in pastoral job satisfaction and physical, emotional, and spiritual well-being in just the past seven years, calling it “a crisis that the church has to address.”
Perhaps more ominously, the pedestalization of pastors has led far too many to assert their authority over others rather than humility in the service of others. As we know far too well, many have abused their authority and done great harm to individuals and the church as a result. While a body of elders could do the same, the diversity and equality of status within the group provide some defense against it.
Ultimately, we decided to leave the elder-led model in place, supplemented by a cadre of guest teachers vetted and selected by the elders. Other churches have made different leadership decisions, and we respect that and see nothing unbiblical about it, and we hope they see our decision in the same light. However, some in our congregation insisted on a single pastor, so our decision caused other giving families to leave.
Another point of departure in our church is our determination to keep partisan politics and the idolatry of nationalism outside the sanctuary walls and our practice of faith. The tensions generated during the pandemic caused some congregants to jump on political bandwagons, and they didn’t embrace our decision to focus exclusively on compassion and respect for the authorities and other people. In general, our total commitment to the universal Kingdom of Jesus Christ and not the individual kingdoms of the world, including the one we call home, caused us to lose congregants to other churches that embraced narratives implying America was God’s chosen nation. So be it; we worship Christ alone in word and deed and acknowledge that His Kingdom spans all time, borders, and generations. Christ is not the sole possession of any nation or faction, and even Israel, the one that received God’s covenant, was simply the conduit through which “every nation, tribe, people and language” (Revelation 7:9) will one day bow before His lordship.
There are other decisions we’ve made on matters of doctrine and practice that moved people to seek another place to worship, so the integrity of our beliefs has had a tangible cost in numbers and giving. Frankly, it’s caused me to question why churches and Christian institutions that lean into practices like political and nationalist idolatry, legalism, or the demonization of fellow image-bearers of God are seeing the seats and the offering plates fill up while churches striving to be humble, gracious, and entirely devoted to the simple message of the Gospel are begging for bread. I noted this phenomenon in a recent book review of Tim Alberta’s best-seller, The Kingdom, The Power, and the Glory: American Evangelicals in an Age of Extremism:
Some of the pastors he interviews are torn between pandering to their congregation’s demands for political engagement to preserve their numbers or standing firm on religious instruction, thereby losing people to more aggressive, publicity-seeking clergy. However, others are intoxicated by the benefits of appealing to the fear, mistrust, and anger prevalent in the population today. Of one such pastor, Alberta writes, “He discovered that there was a market for being irrational. He came to appreciate that wrath is a business model, that “crazy” is a church-growth strategy, that hating enemies is far more powerful—at least in the immediate sense—than loving them.” Pastors who loudly defied the government during the pandemic and kept their churches open saw dramatic increases in church attendance and donations. They see no incentives to put that genie back in the bottle.
I offered the observation from Alberta’s book that these leaders “rely on religious themes, worship, and imagery to push a dangerous and decidedly unbiblical narrative about America, its people, and the world we live in.” However, this shouldn’t be a surprise to us. It was foretold by the apostle Paul centuries ago:
For the time is coming when people will not endure sound teaching, but having itching ears they will accumulate for themselves teachers to suit their own passions, and will turn away from listening to the truth and wander off into myths. (2 Timothy 4:3-4)
So, we are prepared to embark on a faith journey. The Lynchburg metropolitan area has about 279 religious organizations, and at an elder retreat in October 2022, we addressed the question, “Must there be a Mosaic Church in Lynchburg, Virginia? If so, how must it be led?” We concluded that our region needs a church centered on Christ’s exclusivity, grace, and love, and we plan to keep Him “before all things” (Colossians 1:17).
I don’t know what the future holds. Still, I see a congregation that loves Jesus, loves one another, and loves others, especially those who suffer and seek rest. Whatever happens to the building, when I look over the congregation on Sundays, I see the ekklesia, the church, the called-out assembly of believers. When Jesus says the gates of hell shall not prevail against His church, He speaks His truth into the world, and it shall not be denied. “Lord, I believe; help my unbelief!” (Mark 9:24).
Love it. Thanks, Ron. Interesting overlap here--I went to Straight Street a couple of times in the late 80s/early 90s. Fun connection!