Crowdsourcing

Due to unusual circumstances surrounding my seminary's academic calendar, I have been working for three semesters straight now with hardly any time to breathe between them.  So you would think that after sending in my final paper last week, I would take a big sigh of relief, kick up my feet, and find a new show to binge watch on Netflix.  Alas, that just doesn't seem to be in my make-up.   Or maybe I am just that excited about what I'm learning next.  The reason I can't give myself a break is that I am designing an independent study course for next semester.  It is circling around in my brain all the time and I'm looking for help to pull my plan of action together.

Background:
The church we left behind when we moved went through a series of changes during our time there and was struggling when we left.  So Hubby T and I have been discussing what makes a successful, healthy church off and on for awhile now.  Then after our move we had to decide what factors we were looking for in a new church, and when we had a difficult time finding a good fit, we considered again what we thought made for a successful, healthy church, and why is it so hard to find one?  Are we holding the wrong standards, or are many churches operating in ineffectual ways?  My Old Testament professor last fall threw into my thought mix an oft-repeated message from the Old Testament prophets of what the work of God's people should be, and a lot of the work that I see done in churches isn't part of that work.  Again, are we doing things all wrong?  Over the holidays we had a chance to catch up with an old friend who is Presbyterian seminary educated like me and is choosing to use his gifts and talents to pursue a completely different concept of church than what I hold.  So I'm left spinning and wondering about the whole concept of "church"...

Questions to answer:
What is church?  What could it be?  What should it be?  These are really important questions for me because I'm preparing for a career in the church but there is plenty of evidence that the church, at least as we have known it in our country in recent decades, is a sinking ship.  How do we make God and church relevant to people again?  Can/should God be relevant without church?  (My favorite artifact of this right now is Maren Morris, "My Church" - such a great song and such an intriguing message!)  So what will my future role look like?  Should I try to save the ship?  Redesign the ship?  Abandon ship?  And what does God have to say about all of this?

Plea for help:
Have you read or seen or heard anyone discussing these questions?  Please share your resources with me!  Books, blogs, articles, conferences, offers to share your own personal thoughts and experiences with me...I'll take them all!  I have to come up with a proposal/syllabus to share with the professor I'll be studying with and I'm not sure where to start.  I'm sure if I went to my seminary library and asked for books on what church should look like and how to address the contemporary problems of the church, I would be overwhelmed.  But I have a surprisingly large number of friends who work in the church (or maybe it's not at all surprising) and many, many others who don't work in it but are involved and deeply care about the church.  If you have any resources that you think might be helpful, I would love to consider them in my research.  It's only as a community that we the church can continue to be a community, and I'd love to hear what my community has to say about these questions I am wrestling with.  Thanks friends!