By Ian Morgan Cron, author of Chasing Francis: A Pilgrim's Tale
Eight hundred years ago, a young man knelt in a crumbling chapel outside Assisi, Italy and heard Jesus say, “Francis, go and repair my house. You see it is falling down.” Here’s the detail most people miss: at that moment, the church was the most powerful institution in Europe. Wealthy. Politically connected. Culturally dominant. From the outside, nothing needed repairing.
Sound familiar? Today church attendance is sliding, trust in institutions has frayed, and good people are quietly leaving. And yet, on paper, American Christianity has never looked more impressive. But a church can look strong and need repair at the same moment. That was true in Francis’s century, and it’s true in ours—which is oddly encouraging, because it means somebody has already solved this problem once.
Here are four things Francis knew that I think our churches need again.
1. He rebuilt with a life, not a program.
Most conversations about church renewal reach for something new: a fresh strategy, a rebrand, a hipper pastor, a more innovative gospel presentation. Francis never relied on personal charisma or programs. He simply lived a better story, and people couldn’t look away. Countless thousands abandoned their lives to follow his path! Before you launch the next initiative, it’s worth asking what your congregation is actually watching you do.
2. He offered a bigger wineskin, not a sturdier defense.
Jesus said, “No one pours new wine into old wineskins. Otherwise, the wine will burst the skins” (Mark 2:22, NIV). A faith built only to defend itself gets brittle, and it cracks precisely when people need it most — at the funeral, the diagnosis, the crisis of doubt. Many of the people leaving our churches aren’t rejecting Jesus. They’re leaving a faith too small to hold their pain and grief. Francis offers a different wineskin: room enough for mystery instead of a system that manages God.
3. He went down instead of up.
His culture measured holiness by ascent—more power, more wealth, more certainty. Francis gave away his inheritance, begged for bread, and knelt to dress the wounds of lepers he’d once crossed the street to avoid. Paul describes the same movement: “the old has gone, the new is here” (2 Corinthians 5:17, NIV). Not an upgrade. A death, then a birth. Every pastor I know has faced some version of this choice, usually during a season they wouldn’t have chosen.
4. He treated the Sermon on the Mount as a field manual.
In 1219, Francis walked unarmed across a Crusade battlefield to meet Sultan Al-Kamil—the man Christian armies were trying to defeat—and came home with the sultan’s respect. He believed “Blessed are the peacemakers” (Matthew 5:9, NIV) was meant to be practiced, not admired from a safe distance. In a moment when congregations are splintering along political lines, that’s not medieval trivia. It’s a leadership strategy most of us haven’t tried.
Francis’s repair of San Damiano didn’t stay confined to one chapel. Word got around Assisi, and ordinary people started showing up with stones of their own. That’s still how it works: “you also, like living stones, are being built into a spiritual house” (1 Peter 2:4–5, NIV). Not a museum. Not a machine. A living structure, built one willing, imperfect stone at a time.
HOW TO USE THIS BOOK
Chasing Francis is a novel, which makes it unusually easy to put in people’s hands—it disarms readers who’ve grown wary of being taught. A few ways ministry leaders have used it:
● Leadership team read. Have your staff or elders read it together over six weeks. It surfaces honest conversations about mission, money, and burnout that a strategy retreat rarely reaches.
● Small group or Sunday school study. The book includes a discussion guide with questions for each chapter, so it works as a ready-made curriculum with no prep required.
● A gift for the disillusioned. Keep copies on hand for church members who are hurting or drifting, and for pastors in your network who are running on empty. It tells them they aren’t alone without telling them what to think.
● A sermon series backbone. Francis’s core themes—simplicity, community, beauty, dignity, peacemaking—map easily onto a five- or six-week series on what a renewed church could look like.