Adopting Slow and Steady Work
A Feature Review of
Remissioning Church: A Field Guide to Bringing a Congregation Back to Life
Josh Hayden
Paperback: IVP, 2025
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Reviewed by Jennifer Burns Lewis
Josh Hayden crafts a helpful structure for addressing decline in congregations through what he terms “remissioning”. Rather than thinking of the framework for new direction and growth as transformation or revitalization, Hayden offers a “field guide to bringing a congregation back to life” in Remissioning Church. A book for pastors as well as church boards, Hayden offers both theory and praxis for responding to the challenges of congregations with a need and a desire for new energy, direction and vitality. The author takes deep dives into theology, peppered with stories and verbatims of pastors and churches leading and accompanying churches into authentic, biblical, and creative ways to be the church in the first half of the 21st century. While there is little that is brand spanking new about this volume, it’s a thoughtful and accessible volume of current thinking, current experience and practice, and the distinctive differences between remissioning and revitalization. Hayden writes,
“Revitalizing a church is like updating an app on your favorite device. Revitalization helps individual programs run more smoothly, use less battery, crash less often, and work more efficiently. Remissioning is upgrading the entire operating system so all the apps, messaging and processes fit into a new system and work in sync with multiple other devices across the world.”
Hayden cautions that remissioning is a long journey, and one that involves discovery while troubleshooting existing issues while on the road. Today’s congregations need an infusion of faithful imagination. Most are busy and drained by maintaining a vision and structure they’ve inherited. Many need the gift of remissioning to assist them in bringing new energy and life to their congregations. Along with a failure of nerve, as Edward Friedman suggests, Haydon asserts that a failure of imagination of what God can do in and through God’s church is one of the many stumbling blocks for congregations.
There’s a lot of repentance, retooling, reimaging, and recalibrating in Hayden’s book. What is strong about Hayden’s premise is that it is deeply grounded, based on a theology of hope, rooted in realistic assessment of a congregation’s place for repentance, forgiveness and grace, inviting congregations and pastors into a critical assessment of their measures of “success” versus faithfulness. Remembering is an important facet of most established churches. We practice remembering well, but often forget to assess the broken pieces of our memories and history. Hayden writes with artistry about how important it is for congregations to include painful memories as well, so that the church can learn from its history and heal.
Personal transformation is deeply a part of Hayden’s premise in this book. When individual lives are remissioned, reformed and renewed, the church is as well. Hayden offers many examples of pastoral leaders and church members whose own leadership was transformed to care more broadly for the community and context of the church, whose personal and professional lives bear the marks of such remissioning.
In the midst of arguing for deep change, Hayden offers these compelling words,
“Remissioning a church isn’t flashy, easy, fun or hip. In fact, the more flashy, easy, fun or hip you try to make things, the more pushback you will often experience… At the core of remissioning churches is a deep missional impulse that requires multiple conversions. The first conversion is for the church leadership to shift from wanting to make converts/consumers or get more Christians from other churches into the pews and classes. This is a conversion to a new telos- a new vision of what faithfulness and fruitfulness look like for your church. The second conversion is to a missional life for the sake of the world and your neighbors- and yourself.”
Remissioning Church is a helpful compendium of what it means to deeply change and what it means to look outward—to be missional—to resist the temptation of a template that invites no new thinking and attempts to carbon copy churches with celebrity pastors and slick presentations. Remissioning involves everyone in the church, purposely inviting a variety of voices into leadership conversations. Hayden writes of the APEST leadership of apostles, prophets, evangelists, shepherds and teachers. This variety of voices, Hayden suggests, creates a holistic, shared and grounded set of mission, vision and values in Christ, for the work of the Church.
With examples of remissioned churches throughout this book, Hayden reminds the reader that this work is not easy, but rather more of a slow percolation of systemic change in individuals and institutions. “Everyone wants a revolution,” he writes” but no one wants to do the dishes.” But adopting the slow and steady work– born from a change of heart and mission– is authentic, vulnerable and can lead to true transformation in our communities. Josh Hayden offers a terrific field guide to the work of the post-pandemic church that invites existing congregations to ministries of integrity and relevance in a changed and changing world.
Jennifer Burns Lewis
Jennifer Burns Lewis serves as the Visioning and Connecting Leader for the Presbytery of Wabash Valley in northern Indiana. A minister of Word and Sacrament in the Presbyterian church (USA), her work is with 70 congregations, some of whom are engaging wholeheartedly in remissioning.
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