Make Do With Less: A Grassroots Approach to Church Transformation

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Special to United Methodist Insight | May 29, 2025

Earlier this month, the Council of Bishops released a new vision statement: “The United Methodist Church forms disciples of Jesus Christ who, empowered by the Holy Spirit, love boldly, serve joyfully, and lead courageously in local communities and worldwide connections.” According to Bishop Tracy Smith Malone, President of the Council of Bishops, the new guiding vision is intended to be “a catalyst for transformation.” Bishop Hector Burgos-Nuñez called it “a call to renewal, hope, and action.”

The usage of the words “catalyst” and “renewal” provides insight into the larger concerns that are on church leaders’ minds as they consider the scope of the task that lies ahead. The United Methodist Church looks to turn the corner after years of strife as disaffiliation consumed the attention of episcopal leaders and annual conferences, but many deep-seated challenges remain. For one, Moses Kumar, the top executive of the General Council on Finance and Administration, delivered sobering news to the 2024 General Conference in Charlotte, N.C., when he presented the 2025-2028 denominational budget that was 38 to 41% lower than the one passed during the 2016 General Conference.

As the denomination faces the lowest budget in 40 years, the message is simple: make do with less. United Methodists and churches can no longer assume support at the general-church level that they have in the years past. Expect significantly less funds as the belt-tightening will affect the Church across the board. As a result, people in local congregations are grappling with the reality that institutional resources that had long supported congregational development may no longer be what they used to be.

As the denomination’s budget shrinks, how are churches supposed to pick up the work of church with fewer resources available? It’s clear that the Church is weathering through trying times, but the situation also presents an opportunity to consider outside-the-box approaches to church transformation and vitality. For a long time, we thought the success of any kind of church growth depended on the development of a particular method or strategy that offered unique insight into reaching a group or community.

What if the ideas, instead of flowing from institutional sources, originate from the laypeople in our churches? This grassroots approach to church growth is the basis of my recently published book, Freestyle: Evangelism as Expressing Jesus (2025), in which I ask, “Imagine if everyone in the church pews were activated to freestyle and released their latent evangelistic impulses?” To some, elevating the role of laypeople as the vanguard of evangelistic encounters may seem unfamiliar and perhaps risky, but current circumstances in the Church have left us more willing to consider experimenting with non-traditional ways.

Imagine what the church would look like if we enabled our laypeople to release their atypical gifts and unique passions. It would be an eye-opening experiment. From my experience of conducting freestyle experiments with people and congregations, not every project succeeded but, on the other hand, success-or-failure is not a classification that freestyle subscribes to.

The objective of freestyle is the release of laypeople to express Jesus in their own way. In freestyle, people partner with the Holy Spirit, who plays a critical role in igniting holy combustions. Freestyle, I write, “is the ‘letting go’ approach to evangelism whereby we rely on the Holy Spirit to break hardened soil in the individual, rather than humans feeling the burden to ‘make something happen’ in evangelism.” From a freestyle perspective, evangelism is re-framed “from a human-based enterprise to a Holy Spirit-driven initiative.”

From my observation and research, the freestylers’ ability, with the Holy Spirit’s prompting, to inspire excitement—not only from the audience but also within themselves—is the most thrilling part. Since freestylers express Jesus in an authentic way, their release can be incredibly contagious, but not because it was intended to—and that is exactly why it is infectious. Freestylers have no agenda, other than being themselves and releasing Jesus. More than ever, people are looking for authentic expressions of faith, and individuals’ excitement for Jesus, which cannot be manufactured, has the most infectious effects on those around them.  

Contagiousness starts locally and is in larger part a function of someone speaking the language and culture of a community. Consider outreach—not as a program or method from institutional leadership, but as locally produced by ordinary laypeople who know the local pressure-points that elicit the greatest joys or sorrows. If locally-created initiatives sound unfamiliar, it’s likely because we are unaccustomed to releasing home-grown passions in our midst.

As congregations are faced with “make do with less,” freestyle presents a laity-powered model that uses existing resources at the local level. As I write in Freestyle, laypeople are called to become “creators of their own evangelism.” When we ignite holy combustions in people and release their excitement to the world, we will be surprised by what we unleash.

The Rev. K. Kale Yu, a United Methodist elder, teaches World Christianity at High Point University. He has spoken to districts, conferences, and campuses about church vitality and transformation.