If your church attendance is slipping and your ministries are drying up, consider the following story:

Travel back 50 years to the mahogany-paneled office of Sewell Avery, then chairman of Montgomery Ward & Company. Avery was responsible for Ward’s failure to open a single new store form 1941 to 1957. Instead, the big retailer piles up cash—and then sat on it. Ward’s amassed $607 million even then a very large sum of money!, earning them a dubious Wall Street nickname: "the bank with the department store front."

So why didn’t Avery join in the nation’s postwar expansion by following Americans to the suburbs? He held firmly to the belief and vision that a depression had followed every major war since the time of Napoleon. “Who am I to argue with history?’ Avery demanded. “Why build $14-a-foot buildings when we soon can do it for $3-a-foot?”

On the other side of Chicago, Ward’s rival, Sears, Roebuck & Company, had a different idea. In 1946, Sears gambled its future and began a costly expansion into suburbia. Had another depression occurred, Sears would have been financially devastated. Instead, Sears doubled its revenues while Ward’s stood still. Sears never looked back, and Ward’s never caught up. In fact, Ward’s eventually went bankrupt.

How could corporate planning go so wrong? Montgomery Ward’s postwar troubles sprang from its firm adherence to an idea from a different time and culture. Because Sewell Avery thought a depression would follow World War II, and because he failed to see that middle-America was moving to the suburbs, he misread the cultural waves and consequently his business was wiped out.

Christian leaders also, and not just business executives, need to read the waves of cultural change.

The city of Enterprise, Alabama, calls itself the "City of Progress." Founded in the 1880s by John Henry Carmichael, it is a proud little town that still today revels in its ability to move forward and thrive despite hardship.

Initially, cotton was at the heart of this community's prosperity. But by 1915, the progress and prosperity of Enterprise were both threatened by an invading force that that was literally eating the little town alive. The boll weevil had made its way from Texas into the cotton crops of Coffee County and nearly 60% of the Enterprise's cotton production was destroyed.

Their town motto, "Pull for Enterprise, or pull out!" rang loud and true, as the small town pulled together to forge new avenues of productivity. The town turned to peanuts and other hearty crops unsusceptible to the bothersome vermin. By 1917, Coffee County produced and harvested more peanuts than any other county in the nation.

From the town's own website:

In gratitude for the lessons taught, residents erected the world's only monument to an agricultural pest, the Boll Weevil Monument. The monument, dedicated on December 11, 1919, stands in the center of the downtown district at the intersection of Main Street and College Street. The Boll Weevil Monument is a symbol of man's willingness and ability to adjust to adversity. Citizens continue to remind visitors and newcomers to the city the lesson of the boll weevil.

The base of the monument is inscribed: "In profound appreciation of the boll weevil and what it has done as the herald of prosperity this monument was erected by the citizens of Enterprise, Coffee County, Alabama."

Tenants let their apartments burn while they asked a rabbi whether a call to the fire department on the Sabbath would violate Jewish law.  Three apartments were gutted in the fire in the predominantly ultra-Orthodox city of Bnei Brak, near Tel Aviv, but no one was hurt.  Normal Jewish law considers using the telephone on the Sabbath work because it involves the breaking of an electric current.  They are, however, permitted to break the Sabbath in case of an emergency, which required a rabbinical ruling.  They contacted the rabbi; thirty minutes later, he said yes.