Church Renewal Lab Adapted for Native American Churches

In March, the Center for Church Renewal’s New Horizons project received a $1.2 million grant from Lilly Endowment Inc. to tailor church renewal labs for Latino and Navajo congregations over the next five years. Larry Doornbos, a retired Christian Reformed pastor and director of New Horizons, and Kris Vos, executive leader of the Center for Church Renewal are behind the project.

A renewal lab takes a cohort of churches through six areas of church life, seeking to develop structures that will encourage continual renewal. The Center for Church Renewal’s labs have existed since 2013, but focused mainly on anglophone congregations in North America. The application for a new grant with a different cultural focus was rooted in Doornbos and Vos’s experience. Doornbos pastored for eight years at Rehoboth CRC in New Mexico, where there are several Christian Reformed Navajo congregations, and Vos serves Sunlight Community Church-Lake Worth, a multicultural Christian Reformed congregation with a Latino population. “It really does come out of the roots of the ministry that Kris and I have,” said Doornbos.

Herb Beyale, an elder at Bethel CRC in Shiprock, N.M., in a video taken by the Center for Church Renewal, spoke about seeing numbers “really decline to (the point) where there are no programs.” The lack of youth in Navajo churches is something several participants commented on. It’s happening all over the denomination—the CRC classical statistics for the past 10 years show that 82% of churches are in decline. “I really do see it as how we're all in this together as Navajo churches,” Beyale said, “how we need to work together, pray for each other, and then reverse the things that are happening right now.

“I've always had in my mind, in my heart, the declining numbers. I've always carried that with me. And to see a tool like this kind of makes me very happy,” Beyale said.

The first question, Doornbos said, when presenting the Renewal Lab to Navajo and Zuni churches, was to ask, “Does this work?” Doornbos and Vos had already thought through some changes: “We don’t want to use the word ‘mission’ because that goes back to the mission schools and has negative connotations.”

“I was hoping for six to eight people for the first listening meeting for the Native American churches, and over 20 came,” said Doornbos. More than 10 churches were represented at that first meeting, which took place in Albuquerque, N.M., in May. Doornbos and Kris reworked their Renewal Lab Tool Box after hearing feedback like using the First Nations version of the New Testament. In late October, the first Native American Renewal Lab began in Farmington, N.M.

Seven churches are involved, all of them part of the CRC’s Classis Red Mesa. Five churches are majority Navajo, one is multiethnic, and one is majority Anglo. Renewal labs take 18-24 months; the Navajo churches are meeting four times a year for two years, addressing the six areas or “tools” of renewal over that time. The next lab session is scheduled for January. Part of Doornbos and Vos’s vision is that, through this process, leaders will emerge in the community who will take over leading other churches through labs.

“We’ll keep honing it until it makes sense,” Doornbos said. They’re hoping to take the revised Renewal Lab to churches in Washington state, British Columbia, and a network of Apache churches in Oklahoma associated with the Reformed Church in America. “We’ll take what we learn here and hopefully it’ll be good for translating into other spaces,” Doornbos said.