Many churches have run a program hoping it would bring renewal. A church-wide study, a discipleship course or a season of focused teaching is planned with care. People sign up, most of them finish, and some are genuinely helped. Yet afterward, the renewal the church hoped for, in people’s lives and in the life of the church, has not come in proportion to what was invested.
Often the reason has less to do with the program than with what renewal is. Scripture describes renewal as God’s continuing work in each believer as they keep responding to Him in their own lives, and a church is renewed as its people are. A program can serve that work. It cannot produce it, and it cannot finish it.
Renewal Is Something God Keeps Doing
Paul wrote to the believers in Corinth from the middle of a hard ministry, marked by pressure, persecution and exhaustion. Yet he wrote:
“That is why we never give up. Though our bodies are dying, our spirits are being renewed every day.”
2 Corinthians 4:16, NLT
Two things stand out. Paul’s spirit is being renewed: the work is God’s, done in him. And it happens every day. Renewal was going on as Paul wrote, and it would go on for as long as he lived.
The same is true for every believer. Paul calls the Ephesians to “let the Spirit renew your thoughts and attitudes” (Ephesians 4:23, NLT). The Spirit does the renewing, and the believer keeps responding to what He shows. That is a work that lasts a lifetime.
Why a Program Cannot Contain It
Seen that way, the limits of any program become clearer, however good the program is.
A program has an end. It runs for a set number of weeks, and then it is over. When the last session finishes, it can feel as though something has been completed, and in one sense it has. But the work God was doing in each person during those weeks is meant to carry on in the weeks that follow, when there is no session to attend.
A program gives everyone the same thing: the same material, the same teaching, the same discussion. Renewal happens in each person’s own life. God’s Word has to reach that person’s marriage, work, temptations and habits of thought, and those are different for everyone in the room. A program can point toward those places. It cannot go there for anyone.
And taking part is not the same as engaging. Someone can attend every session, complete every lesson and agree with everything taught without bringing any of it into the situations where they actually live. Renewal involves that engagement: responding to what God shows them, in the moment, and again the next time. Attendance and completion can be counted. Engagement mostly happens where no program can see it.
What a Good Program Can Do
A good program can still serve renewal well. It can give people time set apart for God’s Word, a clear path through it, other believers alongside them and a reason to keep coming back. Many believers can point to a course or a study where God began to change something in them.
What matters is what the program helps people do. It serves renewal when it helps each person engage God’s Word in their own life. And because every program ends, what happens afterward depends partly on what participants leave with. Many good programs teach Scripture well without ever showing people how to keep bringing it into their own circumstances once the sessions stop. Knowing how to do that, and leaving with something concrete to guide them in continuing, can make a real difference to what comes next.
Renewal remains God’s work throughout, and no program or leader can do it for anyone. But a church can ask more of its programs than attendance or completion: whether, months after the last session, people are still bringing God’s Word into their own lives. That is harder to see, but it is much closer to what renewal is.
The Next Question
That leaves a practical question for any church that wants its programs to serve renewal. What helps people keep bringing God’s Word into their lives week after week, long after the last session? And if structure cannot renew anyone, what is it actually for? Why Consistency Requires Structure answers both from Scripture, beginning with why the Bible describes growth as training rather than a good season.
Scripture quotations are taken from the Holy Bible, New Living Translation, copyright © 1996, 2004, 2015 by Tyndale House Foundation. Used by permission of Tyndale House Publishers, Carol Stream, Illinois 60188. All rights reserved.
