Rebuilding Year

by Kate Kennedy | published on Jul 21, 2025

Discussion Questions 

  1. Read Ecclesiastes 3:1-8. Then read the devotional, “Rebuilding Year.”   
  1. Have you ever gone through a rebuilding season? If so, what did you learn during that time?  
  1. Is there an area in the life of your church that could use this kind of transformative work?  
  1. If you could create the most faithful version of the church, what would it look like?

For everything there is a season and a time for every matter under heaven: a time to break down and a time to build up. – Ecclesiastes 3:1, 3b (NRSV) 

Sports fans may know about a concept called a “rebuilding year.” It’s new to me—I’m more into sports snacks than sports—but as I understand it, a rebuilding year is when a team chooses not to focus on winning. Instead, they regroup and lay the groundwork for future victory by letting go of veteran players, stockpiling draft picks, developing young talent, and taking short-term losses for long-term gains.  

To the fans, rebuilding years are painful. It’s no fun to sit in a half-full stadium only to watch your team lose, all on the promise that they’ll win again someday.  

But when done right, this fallow time pays off. Team after team has proven it: The 76ers intentionally lost for three straight years in order to build a consistent playoff presence. The Astros went from the bottom of the league to the World Series champs in 2017. After narrowly avoiding relegation in 2014, Leicester City shocked the world by winning the Premier League in 2016. 

If your church is in a season where the scoreboard doesn’t reflect your labor, don’t mistake that for failure. Rebuilding years invite us to ask harder, more faithful questions: What’s costing us too much? Who are we investing in? Is our ministry prophetically expansive, or nostalgically narrow? What are we willing to lose today to win tomorrow?  

Rebuilding might not look impressive from the outside—but it could be exactly the play God is calling for now. 

Prayer
Holy One, coach us in braver ministry, so that we might embody your love in big, beautiful, triumphant ways. Amen.

Kate KennedyAbout the Author
Rev. Kate Kennedy is a New Hampshire-based UCC pastor pursuing a career in family therapy.