This is not working
We are still doing church, but something vital has gone missing.
We hold services, recite creeds, and fill rotas. We plan, rebrand, and manage decline, but if we’re honest, much of it feels hollow. The fire we speak of at Pentecost—where is it? The joy, the boldness, the devotion of Acts 2:42–47—what has become of it? We are busy, but not burning. Faithful, perhaps, but not alive.
Andrew Root names what many instinctively know but dare not say: God feels absent, and more troubling still, we’ve built churches that can function without Him. We perform ministry as though it were a profession, manage it as though it were a company, and measure it as though it were a product. Something has broken, and we have not stopped long enough to name the loss.
A Managerial Silence
What do churches do when they no longer sense the presence of the living God?
They get busy.
They plan, restructure, form teams, hire consultants, draft vision statements, and run courses. They try to “fix” the sense of loss with tools borrowed from the corporate world. And often, the busyness itself becomes the point. In a culture obsessed with productivity, activity becomes a virtue. But in the Kingdom of God, activity without presence is a false economy.
When God no longer seems near, when the Spirit no longer seems to stir, many churches double down—not in prayer, not in confession, but in strategy. The unbearable silence compels us to fill it with programs, positivity, and surface harmony. We speak of renewal without waiting for it to happen. We speak of the Spirit without depending on Him. We settle for a God who fits within our planning cycle and our budget forecast.
When a church loses the fire of the Spirit but continues to operate as though nothing has changed, a strange and destructive dynamic begins to take hold. With no shared experience of God’s presence to unite us, something else rushes in to fill the void: control, resentment, and conflict.
This is not incidental. It is the predictable outcome of a community that has lost its shared sense of awe for the living God.
In such a climate, people become projects or problems. Leaders, especially clergy, find themselves trapped in a relentless cycle of managing expectations, calming tensions, filling gaps, and absorbing blame. Endless demands often crowd out the work of listening for God’s voice. The deep work of spiritual leadership is replaced by firefighting.
No wonder clergy are burning out.
They were called to lead people into encounters with the living Christ, but now spend their days troubleshooting dysfunctional systems. They prepare sermons no one hears, attend meetings no one remembers, and absorb the anxieties of a congregation that has forgotten how to wait on God. As Cal Newport observes in Deep Work, the modern condition prizes availability over depth, and reactivity over reflection, the same holds for the church. We have traded spiritual depth for managerial efficiency, and we are exhausted.
This is the hidden silence under all the noise: a silence not of peace, but of absence.
And if we do not face it, it will continue to deform us.
But the Scriptures do not teach us to fear silence. They teach us to wait in it.
When Elijah fled to the mountain, it was not the wind, earthquake, or fire that held the presence of God. It was the silence—the thin, quiet sound. God speaks, but not on demand. God moves, but not by our schedule. He is not a consultant to our church growth strategy. He is the Holy One. And silence, however uncomfortable, is where He often begins to make Himself known.
But waiting is costly. Silence exposes us. It reveals the vacancy at the heart of so much religious performance. It forces us to admit that we may have built churches that no longer need the presence of God to function. And that is our crisis.
This is the seduction of managerialism: it promises control. It offers measurable outcomes and tidy structures. But it can never produce the fire of the Spirit. It cannot generate repentance, joy, or awe. It cannot create a Church. Only God can do that.
To be blunt: we have become masters of church management and amateurs of the presence of God. We have trained ourselves to lead, but not to kneel; to strategise, but not to listen.
Until we are willing to sit in the silence and say, “Come, Holy Spirit—we do not know what to do without You,” we will remain competent, polished, and spiritually dead.
Monastic Silence and the Fire We Forgot
But what if this isn’t a dead end? What if this crisis is a mercy?
The monastic tradition has long known what the modern church forgets: silence is not absence—it is invitation. The Benedictine life begins with listening: “Listen, my child, with the ear of your heart.” The point is not withdrawal from the world, but the formation of a people who can receive the world rightly—because they have first received God deeply.
Michael Casey writes that in monastic life, transformation comes not through activity, but through “exposure to the divine.” Monastics submit to rhythms that are not their own. They learn to live without constant affirmation. They are dispossessed of control. And in that dispossession, they are made open—open to grace, open to one another, open to fire.
What if the Church today must recover a kind of monastic courage?
To stop talking. To refuse to fix. To wait in the aching silence, not to fill it, but to be filled. To recognise that the Spirit is not a background presence, but a blazing fire—and that fire will not be managed.
The early Church did not grow because it planned well. It grew because it lived a life the world could not explain. It carried a presence that broke chains, healed wounds, and turned strangers into family.
We will not see that life again until we are willing to live like those first disciples—waiting, empty, surrendered, and utterly dependent on God to move.
It is worth remembering that those quiet, disciplined monastic communities—the early Benedictines and later the Cistercians—were not marginal to the life of the Church. They were some of the most effective evangelists Europe has ever seen. They did not win people through marketing campaigns or spectacle. They simply built lives so saturated in prayer, stability, hospitality, and love that others came near to see what kind of fire made such a life possible. Their monasteries became centres of renewal, healing, and spiritual awakening. They were converted by burning. By being utterly Godward, they drew the world in.
When the Church Stops Working
This is not a crisis of theology. It is a crisis of presence.
The Church still meets, still sings, still preaches. But something essential has gone missing. And we’re afraid to name it: God no longer feels close. The Spirit is no longer trusted to lead. The people are no longer being changed.
Yet the machinery rolls on.
Andrew Root describes the modern church as a machine still turning after it’s been unplugged. It performs the appearance of faith—competent, structured, measured—but it has lost its centre. We’ve mastered the mechanisms of ministry. We know how to gather people, build a team, run Alpha, host a harvest supper. But do we know how to encounter the Holy God?
And what happens when church “works” in form, but not in power?
People leave, quietly. Or stay, bitterly. Energy drains away. Passion turns into politeness. Risk disappears. A suffocating sense of duty replaces the joy of salvation. Eventually, the call to transformation is reduced to gentle advice: “Try a little harder. Be a little nicer. Don’t rock the boat.”
But Pentecost is not polite.
Pentecost is fire. Pentecost is collapse and rebirth. Pentecost is the death of self-sufficiency and the arrival of divine power. And if that sounds threatening to the tidy rhythms of your local church—it should.
We are not in need of tweaking. We are in need of resurrection.
The real crisis is not external. It’s internal. It is not the culture’s fault, or secularism’s fault, or Sunday sports. It is that the Church has grown used to functioning without the felt presence and direction of the Spirit. We have come to see the Spirit as a doctrine, not a person; a metaphor, not a fire. And in doing so, we’ve made the Church survivable, but not holy.
The early church didn’t survive the Spirit. It was created by Him.
When the Spirit fell, the church was born—not as an institution, but as a body: alive, interconnected, surrendered. People were “cut to the heart.” They asked, “What must we do?” And the answer was not, “Join a rota.” It was “Repent, be baptised, and receive the Holy Spirit.”
This is not the language of mild reform. This is the language of transformation.
And unless we are willing to undergo that same transformation, we will continue to run churches that are functionally post-Spirit—churches where God might be referenced, but is no longer encountered; where lives are managed, but no longer changed; where we do everything but burn.
So let us not pretend: if the Spirit does not come, we have no future. We do not need to be encouraged. We need to be undone. We need the fire that purifies and the voice that convicts. We need to be cut to the heart—not nudged in the right direction. If Pentecost means anything, it means that the living God does not bless our strategies—He disrupts them. He baptises. He breaks open. He rebuilds. And He does not come where He is not wanted.
The question is not whether our church is struggling. The question is whether we are willing to die to the version of church we’ve built, so that the Spirit might raise up something unmanageable, uncontainable, and holy.
Because if He does not—then the thing we’re protecting is not the Church.
It’s just the echo of something that once was.
Pentecost: Not Nostalgia, But Reckoning
This is not about going back. It is about waking up.
We are not called to recreate the early Church as a museum piece, nor to dress up decline in fresh language. We are called to rediscover who we are—and to become the kind of people who cannot live without the Spirit.
Pentecost was not an inspiring memory. It was the birth of the Church. The violent arrival of the living God changed everything, and it did so not through planning, consensus, or committee, but in a way that was neither safe nor neat, yet undeniably real.
If we are honest, most of our churches today would not know what to do if that same fire came again. We are too afraid of the disruption, too invested in our equilibrium. We want God, but only if He fits. We want revival, but not repentance. We want new life, but not death to self.
But the Spirit will not come as an accessory. He comes as Lord.
If the Church does not exist to bear witness to the living presence of Jesus Christ in the power of the Spirit, then what exactly are we preserving? If our community does not lead people to hunger for the Spirit, receive Him in power, and be remade—then what are we really offering? A tradition? A brand? A memory?
No.
We were made to burn. And the fire of Pentecost has not gone out. The Spirit is not missing. He is waiting—not to be invited into our plans, but to undo them. To set us ablaze again.
So let us stop defending a church that no longer knows how to kneel. Let us name the loss. Let us confess the silence. And let us fall, without strategy or script, before the living God with only one cry:
“Come, Holy Spirit. We have no plan but You.”
Because the Church that was born in Acts didn’t survive history, it changed it.
And that is still possible—if we are willing to die to what we’ve made, and be raised by what we cannot control.
Books and Authors
Andrew Root, When Church Stops Working: A Future for Your Congregation Beyond More Money, Programs, and Innovation (Baker Academic, 2023)
Michael Casey, Strangers to the City: Reflections on the Rule of Saint Benedict (Paraclete Press, 2005)
Michael Casey, Coenobium: Reflections on Monastic Community (Morning Star Publishing, 2014)
Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World (Grand Central Publishing, 2016)