Signs of Life: Nurturing Spiritual Growth in Your Church

By Jay Sidebotham

Forward Movement, 176 pp.

I was two years into my vocation as a priest before I began to gain clarity as to my purpose within a gathered community of Christian disciples. Seminary taught me hermeneutics and homiletics, liturgy and history, ethics and moral theology. These fields of study were great foundations upon which I would build a vocation. Two years into my presbyteral vacation, having run up against the inevitable, intractable stubbornness of the human heart (both my own and those within the community I served), I became clearer about my own hunger for God, a hunger that I saw reflected in my community. In this hunger I was reminded of a less-quantifiable seminary experience, one not easily measured by the General Board of Examining Chaplains—but hopefully discerned by bishops and commissions on ministry: transformation. Jay Sidebotham’s Signs of Life: Nurturing Spiritual Growth in Your Church speaks both to the hunger and the transformation of the Christian life and is a great read for leaders who are interested in discovering ways to jump start a spiritual revival within their communities.

At its heart, Signs of Life is about leading spiritual renewal within your community through spiritual practice and leadership development. In other words: discipleship. Sidebotham begins by exploring RenewalWorks’ continuum of spiritual engagement, a model devised through years of research and iterative experimentation. This tool places people on stages from “exploring” to “centered” based on their responses to questions like how often they pray or how essential they feel a relationship with God is. What follows are methods and strategies for moving people through these stages of spiritual engagement under the belief that “the primary reason for coming to church is spiritual growth.” According to research, Sidebotham identifies four “catalysts for spiritual growth”: engagement with scripture, transforming power of the eucharist, deepening prayer life, and, finally, the heart of a leader. Sidebotham then spends the remainder of the book exploring what each of these catalysts mean and how congregational leaders can introduce them into their communities.

I have been familiar with RenewalWorks research and strategies for most of my vocation. I appreciate that both RenewalWorks and Signs of Life frame church growth as more than merely the increase of butts and bucks (butts in seats, bucks in the plate). This is not to suggest that average Sunday attendance, membership numbers, and other metrics are unimportant. Rather, Sidebotham makes the growth of the spiritual life primary, believing deeply that the more a church is engaged in active spiritual growth, the more likely it is that a church will grow numerically. It isn’t accidental that when the book of Acts names the numerical growth of the apostolic church towards the end of chapter 2, it follows a narrative where the community is described as “continuing the apostles’ teaching and fellowship, in the breaking of the bread and in the prayers” among other practices like generosity and gratitude.

I also appreciate that Signs of Life offers practical and actionable wisdom. Who among us has not gone to a conference or had a continuing education experience where we left with a more acute awareness of the challenges before us, but with little or no actionable strategies to address them? Sidebotham offers practical, actionable wisdom that ranges from embedding scripture in everything from church signage to vestry meetings to cultivating a community of leaders through expanding the sermon to allow people to respond in time. Needless to say, every strategy won’t work for every context. The point to offering these strategies is to engender a sense of curiosity and creativity in congregational leadership.

Finally, I am grateful that Signs of Life encourages, indeed expects, the readers to be in conversation with the text and with their community. With all the angst around the decline of the church, the book that offered a fool-proof strategy for church growth would fly off the shelves and be an instant New York Times Bestseller. Signs of Life is not that book. The book doesn’t, and likely can’t, exist. Rather, Signs of Life is a book that encourages a congregational leader to go on a journey with their congregation, together gaining clarity about where a church is, and collectively dreaming about where they might go. Each chapter ends with a series of questions, which makes this a wonderful book for vestries, bishops committees, or other congregational boards to read together. For Signs of Life, the ultimate sign of life is the willingness to go on a journey with God and to allow that journey to transform us.

I have served three parishes in my vocation and through my current role as a college chaplain serve as the de facto Episcopal campus minister at Trinity College. I have noticed that, although these contexts are vastly different from one another and separated by hundreds of miles, what connects each of them is a hunger: for God, for growth, for transformation. Aware of this, I have sought to introduce these catalysts into these congregations and I have seen life spring up. I have witnessed vestries transform from governing boards hyper-focused on endowment draws and declining plate and pledge receipts to a community of leaders, engaged in the story of the Bible and trusting God to guide them through the wilderness. I have seen fragile communities weather global pandemics with an assurance of God’s abiding presence and a passion for God’s mission in their context. I have seen skeptics be drawn in the fellowship of the church through engagement with the Bible. I have seen dysfunctional committees become collaborative ministry networks. For me, it starts with my own willingness to be transformed, to see a church with tenuous finances, an aging building, and a small congregation as a sign of God’s grace within a local community and to know that wherever I am called to serve, I will meet people who want to know God, to know that they are forgiven, and to know that the world is filled with the very life of God. Signs of Life is a great resource for leaders seeking to be transformed in order to catalyze transformation within their communities.

I would highly recommend this book for every priest, pastor, and lay leader who wants to catalyze renewal within their congregation. I would particularly recommend this book for leaders who find themselves stuck in how to facilitate this sort of transformation within their communities. The wisdom we seek as leaders is often dispersed among the body. This book could help gather that dispersed wisdom. Whether read and discussed at the beginning of vestry meetings, read by a small group of congregational leadership, or alone, this book is like going to an inspiring church conference, without the hassle of air travel and awkward nametags. Signs of Life assumes that the life of God can be found within any congregation, if only we would open ourselves up to the transformation and renewal God’s life promises each one of us.