





































Ecclesial Futures
2024 – Volume 5 – Issue 2

105
Ecclesial Futures – DOI: 10.54195/ef20162

B O O K  R E V I E W

DOI: 10.54195/ef20162

Root, Andrew, and Blair D. Bertrand. 2023. 
When Church Stops Working: A Future for Your 
Congregation beyond More Money, Programs, 
and Innovation
Grand Rapids, MI: Brazos Press
ISBN: 978-1-58743-578-2

Reviewed by Felix Eiffler

Andrew Root and Blair Bertrand wrote a book about the crisis of the Church in the 
West (especially in the USA). But their identification of the crisis differs from the way 
the ecclesial crisis in the West is mostly described: it’s not primarily about shrinking 
Church attendance, reduced financial resources or a lack of innovative potential. To 
highlight those issues (attendance, money, innovation) shows a deeper problem of 
the Church in the West: it is deeply shaped by the secular age (Chapter 1). To think 
that a smart ecclesial innovation could help deal with the challenges the Church 
faces, reveals a secular approach to questions of Church development. The two theo-
logians state that the call for effective ecclesial innovation is already over 50 years 
old but hasn’t changed the Church much for the better. They “do not believe that the 
cure for the secular age is some kind of new sacred age. That ship has sailed” (13). 
The cure is also not to fight against secularism, because the danger lies in fighting 
secularism with secularism. Instead: “If you want a healthy church, you are going to 
need to imagine a cure that doesn’t depend on the secular age” (13). A secular imag-
ination that affects most areas of societal and personal life (and that also affects 
many churches) is acceleration, and with it comes efficiency. Root and Bertrand iden-
tify resonance as the opposite of acceleration (Chapter 2).

The authors suggest “Stop All the Having and Just Be” (Chapter 3). Part of being 
Church means waiting and this is the even deeper and older crisis of the Church: 
waiting for God: “A waiting church is waiting for God, waiting for the Spirit to move, 
and waiting to connect with God. Our crisis becomes the crisis of God’s action. As 
we wait for God’s action, we open ourselves to God’s arriving by ministering to one 
another. In humility, we attend to our connections” (50). The church waits for God in 



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Ecclesial Futures – DOI: 10.54195/ef20162

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worship and prayer as means for resonance. The Church does this as a community 
and not as individuals: “This waiting is all about this moment with these people” (55). 
Root and Bertrand point to the book of Acts, where Jesus calls the Church to wait 
for God to act (Chapter 4). So, waiting and praying together is basically the essence 
of being church: “The apostles wait; God acts. … The apostles act only because God 
moves them out of their waiting. Yes, they go and do things, and they lead others in 
doing things, but they always return to waiting” (70). And thus “The stars of this story 
are God and the world” (74). This removes the church from the center of attention 
and the position of initial action.

This waiting for God is described by Root and Bertrand as the real crisis of the Church 
(Chapter 5). Why? Because the Church waits for a living God, she cannot control but 
is completely depending on God. This is the central idea of the book and thus it is 
worth a longer quote:

The real crisis is encountering a living God who is God. God is real. God is God, and we 
are not. To encounter this real God as humans constitutes a crisis. We’ve become so 
focused on the crisis of decline that we deny or push aside the crisis that we are broken 
and sinful people, a weak church, who are called to wait for the God who is God to act 
in our midst. We come to think that waiting for a God who is God to act in the world 
is not a crisis worth our attention. We come to believe that the crisis of encounter 
with this living God is not something worth capturing our attention. This misguided 
assumption is the real cancer! (88)

According to the real crisis of the Church the important questions should be:

How do we discern God’s action? How do we help our people experience, know, and 
follow this living God who acts? … How can we help our people encounter the living 
God in a secular age that blinds them to anything beyond the here and now? (88–9)

Instead of writing a mission statement the authors suggest finding a watchword 
(Chapter 6), as a mutual task of a group of believers. A watchword is a “shorthand 
story of how these people in this moment have witnessed and encountered the living 
God in the world” (p. 108). A watchword is not static, but dynamic in the sense that it 
tells a story and helps to remember when and how God acted in a specific time and 
in this very place. Thus, it is not only about finding a watchword but also clinging to it 
(chapter 7). At the same time watchwords usually are limited to a certain time, space 
and group of people, because God and life move on, and a new word is needed. To 
find it, an ongoing listening is required (chapter 8).



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The book makes a bold claim and offers a variety of reasons for it. Some are more 
profound and convincing than others: the theological reminder that the Church 
is a spiritual entity and not only a civic endeavor seems reasonable – especially in 
Western contexts. But a general statement may miss the specific circumstances 
and challenges of a certain ecclesial context. Although the book contributes a lot 
of helpful thoughts and insights for the Churches across the globe, it cannot deny 
its North American origin. This does not reduce the importance of its claims, but it 
is something the reader should be aware of, because the sketched out minor crises 
might be different in different contexts. Thus, the observation that the church is 
deeply shaped by secularism might be true for the Church in the West. Also is eccle-
sial decline first and foremost a Western phenomenon? Other contexts have other 
challenges, which the book is not referring to, such as limited civil rights for the Chris-
tian minority, discrimination or even persecution or corruption as well as inappro-
priate political entanglements etc.

In summary: the book offers its readers a critical perspective on the deeper layers of 
the current ecclesial challenges in particular (secularism) as well as in general (waiting 
for God to act). Consequently, the book is not only relevant for Western readers.

About the Reviewer
Felix Eiffler, Head of Research Unit Missional Church Development at the Center for 
Empowerment Studies, Martin-Luther-University Halle-Wittenberg.
Contact: felix.eiffler@theologie.uni-halle.de


