The Presbytery of Western New York, of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), is made up of 62 churches, the majority of which are struggling to remain viable in an area of decreasing population and economic decline. There is an expressed need for redevelopment but the Presbytery has struggled to find programs or ideas which will respond to the needs of its member churches. Several redevelopment programs have been tried with little success. The program presented here, Living Faithfully in a Changing World, helps to prepare churches to enter effectively into redevelopment. The program comes out of my experience of working with the congregation of Fredonia Presbyterian Church and is consistent with the concept of adaptive change as outlined by Ronald Heifetz, Alexander Grashow and Marty Linksy in The Practice of Adaptive Leadership. By guiding program participants through basic grief work, and introducing them to the stages of adaptive change - observation, interpretation and intervention - they come to a more profound understanding of the nature of change in the church and the role of the church in the current challenges their community of faith is facing. The biblical foundations for this work are found in the covenant kinship relationships of the early Israelite community and the communities rooted in the fellowship of Christ in the early church. Using this model of covenanted community, the participants examine both the faithfulness of the changes in the church through history, and the faithfulness of their own ecclesiology. The purpose is to enable the congregation to open itself to fundamental changes in keeping with this new self-understanding.
