Jim smiled as he drove up the highway to work. Yesterday had been another exciting Sunday. The singing had been incredible, the packed building swelling with the sound of 350 voices lifted together in praise. Jim’s sermon had gone well. No, actually it had gone great, and afterward, another family had walked down the aisle to join the Fairlawn Church. That makes three families in three weeks, Jim thought. The church was growing, its members were excited, and its leadership was unified. Jim rolled down the car window and let the fresh springtime air fill his lungs. The Monday morning sky was clear, and Jim Parker’s life was good.

All this goodness was still rolling around in Jim’s mind as he slowed to turn into the church parking lot . . . and saw it. Once again, the church lights were on, left burning all night from the previous evening’s service. Jim knew already that the doors would be unlocked, every single one of them. His smile wilted into a frown as he parked his pickup. What if one of the thousands of people driving by happens to notice the lights burning at midnight and decides to explore the unlocked building? Jim wondered. What if someone comes inside, but doesn’t leave? Jim shook his head at the thought of Linda, the church secretary, confronting an intruder inside the building.

This wasn’t the first incident, and Jim knew it wouldn’t be the last. As he hiked through the empty halls checking rooms, locking doors, and turning off lights, Jim thought back a bit. When he had arrived nine years earlier, the church had included two hundred members, and the building was never, ever left unlocked; now, it seemed to be a monthly ritual.

Surely the members of the congregation cared as much about locking up now as they had back then, and there were almost twice as many people now to make sure it happened! So why was the job not getting done? Jim shook his head again and added "lights and locks" to his mental list of things that seemed to have gone from "working well" to "just squeaking by." Lately, that list seemed to be getting longer and longer.

Sitting alone in his cluttered office, Jim drank his coffee and ran down the list in his mind. It included several seemingly trivial things that used to work, but didn’t seem to anymore—things like the lights. It included some serious concerns as well, and a few that Jim wasn’t totally sure how to describe. For what seemed like the hundredth time, Jim wondered aloud, "What is happening to the Fairlawn Church?"

By almost any measure, the Fairlawn Church was healthier and growing faster than at any other time in its seventy-five-year history, and a bit of euphoria was understandable. After all, church attendance had barely budged for a decade or more, and when growth finally came, it had excited everyone, including Jim. But Jim’s excitement was tempered with the certainty that growth usually brings struggles, and while he was not a pessimist, he wanted to be ready for them.

The problems had come, of course, but right along with them had come solutions. More chairs were brought into the worship area. The parking lot was expanded. Members were repeatedly encouraged to introduce themselves to anyone they didn’t know. Teachers were trained to deal with an influx of kids who had no idea how to behave in Bible class. All these problems had been expected and dealt with, and Jim was proud of the members for their willingness to adjust.

But these simple items weren’t on Jim’s mind at all. Instead, Jim was concerned with the other problems, the unexpected ones that seemed to be appearing almost weekly, the problems that made no sense.

After all, why should rising attendance cause the lights to be left on? And what possible connection could exist between numerical growth and the debate currently simmering over the church’s small groups ministry? And why, with more members than ever, did the Bible class coordinator seem to be having more trouble than ever finding teachers for the kids’ classes?

Perhaps most perplexing of all was a problem that Jim couldn’t even put a name on; instead, he simply called it a "shadow" over the church. It was as if a general uneasiness had descended on many of the members, for no objective reason they could cite. Jim heard it in their conversations in the hallway. He picked up bits and pieces of it in leadership meetings. He got large doses of it in his office, during closed-door meetings in which otherwise rational men and women ranted and raved over trivial things. And if Jim were honest, he felt it himself, that queasiness in the pit of his stomach that meant something was just not right, but for the life of him he couldn’t figure out what it was. This was what frightened Jim the most: his inability to comprehend and quantify what was going on. This was the part that kept him up nights.

"It’s almost like this has become a different church," Jim announced to the empty office, knowing that wasn’t the answer. Even with the influx of new arrivals, the vast majority of members were "old-timers," folks who had been around for ten or even twenty years. Same people, same building, same leadership, same theology. He said it aloud, one more time, just to be sure: "A different church." No, that definitely wasn’t the answer.

Jim sat for several more minutes, his mind running down a dozen different paths, then retreating in frustration. "But if this is the same church, why have so many things changed?" Jim asked the picture of his wife Cindy. The picture just smiled. "If it’s the same church, why have so many things that once worked quit working?" Jim asked the ministry and leadership books on his shelves. "And if this is really the same church, then why do I feel so overwhelmed doing the same job as before?" Jim said to nobody in particular.

Jim had asked these questions before, at least a dozen times, without ever finding the answers. But somehow today felt different. Today, Jim felt that irrational confidence he sometimes got while balancing his checkbook, an unexplainable certainty that answers were just about to appear, and it was this conviction that pushed Jim to dig deeper for a solution.

Deep furrows lined Jim’s forehead as he struggled to grasp the idea he was working on, a unifying concept that somehow made all the changes logical and understandable. Finally, Jim tried to put into words an idea that had been growing in the back of his mind for weeks. Very softly, very slowly, as if almost afraid to hear his own words, Jim Parker said aloud for the first time ever: "It’s not a different church. But it seems like Fairlawn has become a different kind of church." He paused, testing the words in his mind, then tried again, louder this time. "Fairlawn has become a different kind of church." He listened to the sound of the words as he said them, nodding ever so slightly as they sank in.

"A different kind of church."

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