When the Lights Go Out

On the church, the Prodigal, and the renewed imagination

PART THREE

Come Home

THURSDAY · A THREE-PART SERIES

He was a long way off when his father saw him.

That detail always stops me. A long way off. Which means the father was watching. Which means the father had been watching — scanning the road, morning after morning, the way you only do when someone you love has not come home and you have not stopped expecting them.

Jesus tells this story in Luke 15 as if it is the most natural thing in the world — a father who runs. In the ancient Near East, a man of dignity did not run. Running was for servants and children and emergencies. A patriarch gathered his robes and walked. But this father, when he sees his son still far down the road — dusty, broke, rehearsing the speech he hopes will at least get him a job on the farm — this father runs. He hikes up his robes and he runs. He falls on his neck. He kisses him before the boy can get a single word of apology out of his mouth.

That is God for you.

Not a program. Not a system. Not a strategic initiative or a five-year plan. A father, running, undignified and entirely uninterested in maintaining the distance that would have been his right.

I have been thinking about this parable for weeks now, as I have written about the crisis coming for the church in North America — the emptying pulpits, the aging pastors, the churches going dark one by one across the landscape of this country. And I keep coming back to this image. Because I think the answer to the crisis is hidden inside it. Not a technical answer. Not a list of things to do, though there are things to do. Something more like a posture. A way of seeing. A renewed imagination about who we are and where home is.

— ✦ —

Let me say something that might sound strange after two essays full of statistics and urgency:

I am not primarily worried about the church as an institution.

I am worried about us. About what happens to us — to you, to me, to the people on our street and in our neighborhoods and in the wreckage of our interior lives — when we wander too far from home for too long and forget what home felt like.

The far country is real. I have been there. You probably have too, in one form or another. It is the place where you spend everything you were given — your energy, your faith, your idealism, your capacity for wonder — and find yourself staring at an empty account, trying to remember what you were so certain about when you started. The far country can look like outright rebellion or it can look like quiet drift. It can look like leaving the church in anger or it can look like sitting in the pew every Sunday and being entirely, secretly, gone.

What the far country never tells you is that the hunger you feel there is not a problem to be solved. It is a compass.

When he came to himself. That is how Luke puts it. Not when he came to his senses. Not when he figured it out. When he came to himself — as if the real him, the true him, the him that existed before the wandering began, had been waiting somewhere back home all along.

The hunger was not the disease. The hunger was the beginning of the cure.

This is what I want to say about the church: the answer to its crisis is not primarily a leadership strategy, though we need better leaders. It is not primarily a funding strategy, though we need more generosity. It is not primarily a communications strategy, though we need better storytellers. The answer is homecoming. A return, in our own lives and communities, to the one place where the father is still standing at the road, still watching, still entirely willing to make a fool of himself running toward us before we can finish our apology.

That place is the local church. With all its cracks and failures and inconsistencies and people who are difficult to love, including the one you see in the mirror. That is home.

— ✦ —

On Why People Leave — and Why Leaving Isn’t the Answer

I want to be honest about something.

I know why people leave. I am not naive about the church’s capacity for harm, for smallness, for institutional self-preservation that masquerades as faithfulness. The church has wounded people — badly, sometimes — and those wounds are real and they deserve to be taken seriously. I count myself among that tribe.

But I also know this: leaving is not the answer. Not because the church doesn’t deserve critique — it does. Not because the pain isn’t real — it is. But because you cannot reform from outside what you will not love from within. And because the church is not, finally, an institution with problems to be fixed. It is a body. A living, breathing, stumbling, occasionally singing body of people that God has decided, in his inexplicable mercy, to call his own. And you cannot remove yourself from a body without it costing something. Both the body and you.

To call yourself a Christian means that you are not a private member living it out alone, but a citizen of a larger commonwealth — and that citizenship carries a responsibility to the other citizens.

Reforming the church is not a program. It is a participation. And participation is what we have been designed for — not spectatorship, not criticism from a safe distance, not the clean conscience of the unconflicted outsider. Participation. The messy, costly, glorious work of being present to a community that is always in the process of being made and remade by the Spirit of God.

You do not find home by analyzing it. You find it by going back.

— ✦ —

What the Church Needs Most: A Renewed Imagination

Here is what I believe the church needs more than anything else right now, in this moment of crisis and confusion and empty pulpits and closing doors:

A renewed imagination.

Not a new program. Not another conference or curriculum or consultation. An imagination — the ability to see, in the ordinary and unremarkable life of a local congregation, the actual work of God.

“Right now, one of the essential Christian ministries in and to our ruined world is the recovery and exercise of the imagination… It is time to get aggressive, time for the Christian community to recognize, honor, and commission its pastors as Masters of the Imagination, joining our poets, singers, and storytellers as partners in evangelical witness.” — Eugene Peterson

To see the bread and cup on a Sunday morning communion table as participation in the life of God, not a religious habit. To see the grief support circle in the church basement as the kingdom of God showing up on a Wednesday night in folding chairs. To see the Sunday evenning gathering — even the imperfect one, even the one with the off-key singing and the sermon that ran seven minutes too long and the parking lot conflict that has been quietly simmering since 2019 — as the body of Christ assembling in time and space, which is, when you think about it, extraordinary.

I worry we have lost that imagination. Or rather, we have let it be stolen from us — by cynicism, by overfamiliarity, by the relentless comparison to what church is supposed to look like according to whoever is currently most impressive on the internet. Using “church hurt” as permission to leave is often a kind of self-protection that costs more than it saves — something else happened first, something deeper, and what we need is not an exit but a recovery of sight.

The renewal of that imagination is not something you can download or attend a seminar about. It is something that happens when you go home. When you walk back in the door, dusty and a little ashamed and not entirely sure of your welcome, and find that the Father has already seen you coming and is running down the road before you can get your apology organized.

That is what worship does, when we come to the table and listen to the family stories and eat together. When we do it like we mean it, it recalibrates the imagination. It trains us to see — slowly, imperfectly, over years — what has been there all along. Not a zero-sum game based on scarcity. Not a competition for relevance or attendance or cultural approval. Something more like an expanding geography of abundance, of gifts and wonders and relationships that were waiting for us to show up and receive them. It was right there the whole time. We just lost the ability to see it.

— ✦ —

A Credo For Everyone

I believe in the church.

Not because it is perfect — I have been in this work too long to entertain that particular illusion. Not because it is always right, or always healthy, or always the wisest institution in the room. I believe in the church because God has promised to build it. Because Jesus called it his body and said the gates of hell would not prevail against it. Because in two thousand years of history, through schism and scandal and plague and persecution, it has kept showing up — broken and beautiful and stubbornly, inexplicably alive.

I believe in the big church and the little church. The rural church meeting in a building that needs a new roof. The urban church planted in a storefront between a laundromat and a nail salon. The tall-steeple church with the pipe organ and the endowment fund and the institutional memory that goes back a hundred and fifty years. The house church gathered around a kitchen table. The church in the prison, the church in the hospital, the church in the elementary school gym that set up chairs this morning and will fold them up again this afternoon. The church that worships in English and the church that worships in Spanish and the church that worships in Korean and the church that worships in a language you have never heard.

All of it. Every cracked and struggling and sometimes luminous piece of it.

Because that church — your church, the one you left or the one you are barely holding onto or the one you have been meaning to get back to — is nothing more and nothing less than people that God loves. Which means it is, on its best days and its worst days alike, a place where the Father is standing at the road.

Waiting.

Watching.

Running.

Making a fool of himself because you are coming home.

— ✦ —

This is why the work of identifying and forming and sending exceptional pastors matters so deeply to me right now — not as an organizational strategy but as an act of love. Because every congregation deserves a shepherd who has been genuinely formed, not just trained. Who has sat long enough with the gospel to let it work on them. Who can stand in a pulpit and speak not as a performer but as a participant — someone who has been there, in the far country, and who has experienced the father running.

That kind of pastor does not just manage a congregation. They help a community recover its imagination. They give people the language to see what is already there — the grace already at work in the ordinary Tuesdays of their lives, the holiness already hidden in the unremarkable rhythms of gather and scatter, worship and work, bread and cup and benediction.

We need those people. Desperately. And we need to say so — clearly, urgently, with the same energy and love we would bring to anything else that matters.

— ✦ —

So this is where three essays end.

And I want to be honest with you about something before they do.

I did not write these pieces primarily as a case for an institution. I wrote them because I believe something is at stake that we are in danger of losing without quite knowing what we’ve lost — until we are standing in the silence that used to be full, trying to remember what it sounded like when it was.

I have felt that silence. I suspect you have too.

So here is my closing word, and it is not a strategy:

Come home.

Not because the church is perfect — you know it isn’t, and so do I, and God knows better than either of us. Come home because home is not a place that requires perfection. It is a place that requires presence. And your presence — yours, specifically, with all the doubt and weariness and hunger you are carrying — is exactly what the room is missing.

The father has been watching the road. He has been watching since before you thought to leave, and he has not stopped watching since. And when he sees you — still a long way off, still working on the speech you’re not going to get to finish — he will run.

Not walk. Run.

That is what we are fighting to preserve. Not a program. Not an institution. A father, running. A word, spoken. A room where the broken and the beloved gather every week to remember who they are and whose they are.

We need pastors to fill those pulpits. We need people to fill those pews. We need you.

The lights don’t go out on their own. And they don’t stay on without us. The answer to the coming crisis is wholeheartedness. Wholeheartedness to God and God’s body the church.

So…my friend.…it’s time…Come home.

- Trygve Johnson

Published on behalf of the PreachFor Foundation

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