A Breath of Fresh Dreaming

Recently, I was lucky to sit in on a meeting with a church’s governing board, their interim pastor and a church consultant.  The congregation had planned to seek a settled, full time pastor.  But when they began their search process, they were forced to examine their dwindling financial resources.  It appeared they were going to have to make some tough choices.  They could either do some serious building repairs OR  hire a full time pastor.  Not both.

Well, you know the old saying:

“When you have two choices, take the third.”

Instead of getting stuck between a rock and a hard place, they asked their Presbytery for help (this particular Presbytery offers 50/50 financial assistance to churches in discernment who work with a qualified consultant–what a great idea!!).  They were wondering: Should we search for a part time pastor?  Should we seek another church to merge with?  Is there another option to help us survive? 

The consultant helped them talk about their history of staffing, programming and membership changes.  They were clearly proud of their ministry, their music program and their church’s progressive theology.  But their concerns were realistic.  Attendance was down.  Giving was down.  They had experience working with part time pastors and were reticent about trying that again.  These people were not desperate to keep the doors open.  But they enjoyed their ministry and wanted to keep doing it.

After some conversation about their options and limits, it was pointed out that, whatever step they chose, they could do it for one of two reasons: they could choose a path that might help them survive for a longer time, or they could choose a path that might strengthen their mission and make carrying it out more fun.  When they began to think about their choices in this way, a change came over the room.  The mood lightened.  They started talking about other churches they might partner with, and a non-profit organization that needed space.

They started to dream.

Can’t you just feel the way that cool, spring breeze washes over your face when you allow yourself to dream?  It feels so different than the winter of worrying!

That church has a long way to go; dreaming is only the first step.  But it’s probably the most important step.

Do you remember the last time your congregation dreamed together?  What did you and God do to help make that happen?  What are you dreaming of now?

Here’s a story about three congregations that are beginning to feel the fresh  breath of the Spirit since they started working together as one merged congregation.

First Responders of Last Resort

Whenever something sad or evil happens in the world, I think of the church.  I mean, that particular church on the corner, up the street, where there may be a pastor, weak or strong, and a congregation, weak or strong, a little band of pray-ers and lovers and singers and sinners.

I think of what might happen if you knocked on the door of that church and someone actually opened it, in the middle of the afternoon, when you were alone and scared and maybe even bleeding.  What would you expect, and what would happen?  Would the person inside know what to do for you?

Maybe at least they would let you in and give you a quiet place to sit.  Maybe they would offer a phone to make a call, like the ancient rotary phone one of my churches still had in their kitchen (“How do you use this thing?” the teenagers would ask.)

Someone might give you a ride, or a $15 voucher for gas to get to the next town, like one of my churches offered stranded travelers.  If you were lucky, someone might listen to your story, hold your hand and pray with you.

I like to think there was a time when the Church was full of First Responders who were prepared to offer comfort and band-aids and a warm meal to anyone who asked.  Today, we are more like a Last Resort—the last stop for the desperate who have been turned away at County Social Services because they don’t have a street address or a credible story.  And thank God we are still the Last Resort, because the world needs that.  Thank God for those churches who are still patiently, heroically opening their doors to the lost and broken, often in ways nobody notices.

But I am going to confess something that makes me sad: it seems like, as soon as I leave active church work, I am surprised to enter a world teeming with deeds of kindness.  All these people who wouldn’t be caught dead in a church are living out here, inviting strangers to sleep on their couches; walking into fires to save the elderly; wrapping tourniquets around crushed limbs.

Where did these people come from?  Who made them and showed them how to be so human?

What do they have to teach us church people?

Instead of wondering what we will do when they knock on our doors, maybe we should be knocking on theirs. 

Photo by Aaron Tang/Wikimedia Commons

Should Two Churches Merge?

When I started researching churches that had declined, sold their buildings or closed, I couldn’t find many happy stories about church mergers.  Some judicatory leaders would say dismissively, “Oh, we’ve tried those, but they never work very well.”  In one urban area, I found a cluster of churches that had chosen what they called “blending”–informal mergers in which one church sold their building and migrated en masse to another church, taking their assets with them, but without enacting a legal merger.  Some of these “blendings” have worked out fine in the long term; one resulted in disappointment over the management of  financial legacies.

Some of the misgivings I’ve heard about mergers include:

• One church always resents giving things up to merge with the other;
• When two struggling churches merge out of desperation for survival, they generally become ONE church desperate for survival, which is not really an improvement;
• Although two churches might share denominational roots and geographic location, they may be light years apart culturally or theologically, or may even have some enmity between them in their past.

These kinds of comments made me reticent about suggesting churches explore merger.  But recently, I am seeing more positive stories of successful mergers.    Here’s an article about two Episcopal churches in Akron that discerned the call to gradually merge their churches and sell one of their buildings.   It seems to have worked because each congregation was sensitive to the others’ differences and needs, and they took their time developing common ministries and worship before they made a final decision.  One sign of their success is that a substantial number of members have joined since the merger occured ten years ago.

I have a couple colleagues who are currently working on a merger project.  They have painstakingly formed joint exploration groups to study how different aspects of their two ministries might become one.

And a 2012 publication, “Better Together”, by Jim Tomberlin and Warren Bird, suggests that new approaches to merger may hold some promise.

There is more for me to learn  about mergers.  (This may require adding a chapter to my book!).  Let me know if you have a happy or sad merger story to share.

Thanks to Joe Duggan for sharing the above story on his Facebook page: Congregational Seasons.

Ecclesiology for the Jaded

Photo by Kevin Bauman

A few colleagues have pressed me on the question of ecclesiology.  That is–in an age where the existence of some local churches is threatened, what do I believe the Church must still do?  What is its continuing nature and purpose?

Well.  After a decade of watching the implosion of a local church, I have to confess that I have thrown ecclesiology to the wind and settled for finding some way, any way, to make it through the next stewardship campaign.

But after reflection, I wonder if there might still be some kernel of hope for a Greater Purpose in the dark closet of my heart.  There must be some reason we churchy types are still beating ourselves blue to keep the institution afloat (I mean, besides the need for a paycheck).

In a desperate attempt to cure my cynicism, I turn to Bonhoeffer, Gabriel Fackre, and the Presbyterians’ Five Great Ends of the Church (I know, there are six, but only five will fit into a Lenten series, so I have condensed a bit).

Of course, the main reason the Church must continue to exist is because it’s God’s Project, and God gets to decide what happens to it.  But here are a few other reasons I came up with:

The Church must exist because…

1) People need to tell and hear stories; and not just any stories, but in particular, that one Good Story that keeps not ending.  We need to rehearse its lines until we feel ourselves to be characters within it.

2) People need a connection to each other that is about more than the expedient exchange of goods and services.  We need soul companions who recognize Christ in each others’ features.

3) People need to get together and worship Someone, not because God needs to be worshiped, but because we need to celebrate God’s obvious greatness and cry about our obvious unworthiness, in a place where there are other people who are just as amazed about it all as we are.

4) People are wired for compassion and need to take care of each other and our world .  We are not descended from hamsters, who eat their young.  We are descendants at least of the chimpanzee, who shares food with those outside her own family.  A few of us have even attained the level of the Bonobo, a primate who, when he finds meat, will feed it first to a stranger before feeding it to a friend.  We  need to be part of communities that care for the vulnerable.

5) People tend to second-guess anything that might actually be good, so we need evidence.  We need to occasionally walk into a place or stare into a glass darkly and glimpse a world different from our own, a parallel universe of generosity and truth telling.  We need to splash in that other universe until we are at least a little bit hosed down by it.  We need to believe that we, and our world, can really change.

These are some reasons I believe the Church must continue to exist.  And this begs the bigger question:  Is your church or my church accomplishing any of these things?

Why Are You Kind?

We played  “Stump the Pastor” at my church last Sunday.  Everyone wrote down a question about the bible, the Church or theology, and I drew them out of two baskets, one for kids and one for adults, and tried to answer them on the spot.

Of course, we only got a few answered in the 15 minute sermon slot.  The rest of the questions were left on my desk to rummage through on Tuesday morning.  Some were designed to trick me (How many animals did Moses take on the ark?); some were skeptical (How many mistakes has God made?) and some were sad (If we are spirits in heaven, how will I recognize my loved ones?).  And then, one question made my heart skip a beat:

“Why are you so kind?”

It was written by a child who, I imagine, has seen her share of unkindness.  I was touched, at first, that she experienced me as “kind”, but I also recognized that this was not a compliment.  It was a question.  It was asked from her world, where kindness is not a given.

Entering the Church, that child has found kindness, and not just from me.   And this makes her wonder why.  What makes us Christians kind?

I consider the family I was lucky to be born into.  I think of the many people who taught me kindness as I grew up in the Church.    I watched and emulated these people, but I have also experienced a lot of worldly unkindness, some of it in the Church, and sometimes I have absorbed it, so that, if you don’t happen to catch me on Sunday morning, you may find me in a not-so-kind state.

Finally, I remember Christ, who embodied kindness in the face of all sorts of evil.  If I am sometimes kind, it’s because I have been drenched in the stories of his rough kindness, a kindness that embraced filthy children, shook evil spirits out of the sick, and shouted a dead man out of his tomb.

It is not really my nature to be kind.  I think, without the Church, I would be a  lonely curmudgeon, actually.  The Church turns out not to be a place where kind people gather, but a snare for sinners who get sucked into the claws of kindness– and transformed.

I am posting this entry under the category of “Reasons to Stay Open”.  If a church is to remain open in the future, this is one reason why it must: to provide that “claw of kindness” in a troubled world that draws a child in and makes her wonder, until the day it overcomes and transforms her.

*Digital art by Sakazaki at deviantart.com; Creative Commons license.

Learning to Love Volatility

Consider it a  sheer gift, friends, when tests and challenges come at you from all sides.  You  know that under pressure, your faith-life is forced into the open and shows its  true colors.  So don’t try to get out of anything prematurely. Let it do its  work so you become mature and well developed.”  (James 1, The Message)

Nassim Nicholas Taleb (Professor of Risk Engineering at NYU) wrote the book “Fooled By Randomness”, in which he put forth the concept of “black swans”–unexpected but highly influential events that “profoundly shape our world”.  Now he has written a new book, “Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder”, which examines the way systems (economies, large institutions) adapt to unexpected change.

In a Wall Street Journal article you can read here, Taleb summarizes ways an “antifragile” system can learn to thrive in atmospheres of volatility and adversity.  So, of course, I had to try to apply his theories to church decline.

1) He says we should consider all systems to be more like organic bodies than machines.  An organic system has natural ways of regulating itself through ups and downs, without outside intervention.  So you get a fever when you have an infection because the body is engaged in an attempt at self-healing.  In the same way, churches in decline should practice getting comfortable with instability and adaptation, instead of trying to foster stablity while the unseen “infection” spreads.  In my experience with a church in decline, I had to learn to stop putting out the fires and let them burn so people got uncomfortable enough to start adapting to change.

2) Reward systems that learn from their mistakes.  Churches are not used to failure, but failure is part of growth. To grow, we have to take risks and try things that may flop.  The Presbyterian Church recently announced it wants to start 1001 new churches in 10 years.  What if 75% of them fail?  They will have 250 new churches, hallelujah!  But more than that, with each failure, they will learn more about what works.  Allowing ministries to take calculated risks and fail is a way the whole Church, ultimately, advances in a positive direction.

3) Small and efficient often wins the day.  Taleb argues that the old “economies of scale” argument doesn’t hold up when large systems are highly leveraged and not very pliable.  I have seen that small churches are often more resilient and sustainable. They don’t have debt and their maintenance is largely volunteer.  Smaller systems also tend to adapt faster, if they are forced to.  In contrast, when the Crystal Cathedral came down, it came down hard and fast.

4) Trial and error is the best way to learn new ways of behaving in systems.  In the book I’m writing, the stories are about real churches that tried different things and got from Point A to Point B by taking the “scenic route”.  Denominational leaders seem to want a “system” for analyzing and addressing churches’ needs, but remember #1 above: your church is a body, not a machine!  It wants to be massaged, not “repaired”.

“Things that are antifragile only grow and improve under adversity,” writes Taleb.  I believe the Church of Jesus Christ is, by nature, an antifragile system.  It is the Body of Christ, and it is wired to thrive and grow.  But to do so, it must endure the stressors of change, loss and experimentation.

…don’t try to get out of anything prematurely, writes James.  Decline in your church may not be a sign that you are headed for closure.  It may be an invitation to volatility, and an increased ability to ride waves of change.

What do you think?

Thanks to my husband Charles for sharing this article… And thanks for reading to the end of this long post!

God With Us Now

And a little child shall lead them.     Isaiah 11:6

I’ve supervised a lot of Christmas pageants over the years, but perhaps the most memorable was the year I started ministry at one of my former churches.  This church had been through a very rough patch and its membership had plummeted to about 40 in weekly worship.  I got there the first Sunday of Advent and they were clearly depressed.  They had been through some trouble with previous pastors and they weren’t too sure about me.  Some of them probably thought I had been sent to close their church.

There was no Sunday School, and no Christmas pageant was planned.  That didn’t seem right to me.  So I rummaged around in the unused classrooms and came across an old box of bible costumes.  (Every church has a box of bible costumes somewhere in its catacombs!)  Basically, they were all bathrobes.  I took them home, washed and ironed them and gathered up all my scarves.  I made three crowns out of gold paper and found a big stick out in the woods.

The Sunday before Christmas, I hung all the costumes on a portable wardrobe in front of the church.  I read the Christmas story from Luke and then explained to the congregation that we were going to perform a  pageant.

“Who wants to be Joseph?” I asked.  After an awkward pause, a man raised his hand.  It was our choir director.  I put a bathrobe on him–it fit pretty snugly around his belly.  People smiled as he put on a scarf.

I picked up a baby doll.  “Who wants to be Mary?”

A woman in her sixties came forward and put on a bathrobe and took the baby.  An elderly man donned a sheepskin hood with ears sewn on it, and a boy took up the shepherd’s staff.  This went on until we had a complete cast of characters to make up the manger tableau.  I read the story again and each person, without direction, came forward to play their part in the drama.  When it was over we sang “Away in A Manger”.  It was the first time I saw people laugh in worship.

The make-shift pageant coaxed them out of their grief about the past, at least for the moment.  It also suspended their uncertainty about the future.  It was a ritual performed in the present, focused on Emmanuel: God with us right now.  It brought us all to realize that, no matter what had happened in the past, or what might happen in the future, God was coming to be with us now, if only we would wrap ourselves in light and take our places in the pageant of his arrival.

There would be ten more Christmas pageants for me with that congregation.   There would be awkward teenage kings and tiny toddler lambs and grown women holding real babies, and once: a live goat.  And then, the pageants at that church would end.

But I feel certain that Jesus came to all of them.

Flash Mob Church

My friend Wendy sent me this video of a group of singers from a church who orchestrated a flash mob singing of Christmas carols at a shopping mall.  It’s interesting to see the reactions of the crowd; you can’t tell for sure which people are part of the choir and which are bystanders.  While the act might have been offensive to a few, it clearly touched others.   There are probably a lot of people who don’t go to church on Christmas, but who still feel some connection to the ancient story of Christ’s birth.  The flash mob brought a holy moment into a secular setting.

A wise colleague reminded me this week that Christ is not only the Lord of the Church, but also the Lord of the World.  We have so carefully contained our version of “Christ” in our churches that we are hard pressed to recognize or acknowledge his presence anywhere else.

Those of us who struggle with how to maintain our beautiful church buildings may want to reflect on what shape our religious practice might take if we had to practice it out in the world, “in front of God and everybody”.  I wonder what it would feel like  if we had to gather for Communion in restaurants, or meet at the beach for baptisms, or sing hymns in the mall.  Would it change the way we experience our rituals?  Would it change the way the “bystander”  experienced us?

How is your church visible when you are not in your building?  And is it possible that your church might continue to be visible even if some day you don’t have a building anymore?

Thanks for the inspiration, Wendy!

David Schoen on the Importance of Place

Photo by Kevin Bauman

Rev. David Schoen works in the area of church vitality for the United Church of Christ.  In his Congregational Vitality Newsletter he wrote recently that an increasing number of congregations wonder what to do with their buildings when the building no longer matches up with the mission of the church.

He says, “Older generations in our churches…tend to be attached to buildings, sanctuaries, and places.  Their spiritual journey is a journey of place in which they identify with a place that has significant meaning for their faith.  Anyone younger than most baby boomers is on a different spiritual journey.  What is important to younger spiritual seekers and disciples is relationship.  They are on a journey defined by building relationships and being engaged in missionally driven congregations.  So place and facilities don’t matter so much to new generations or disciples – they are most concerned about the community and the mission of a congregation.”

His remarks may be a broad generalization, but they remind me of churches I’m acquainted with that give much of their energy and attention to their beloved, historic buildings.  The facilities may be in great shape and beautiful to look at, but their dwindling congregations have little time for outreach and mission after they are done repairing windows and tuckpointing the brick.

By contrast, Schoen offers examples of younger churches using new kinds of worship space like retrofitted commercial or rented space.  They are growing, not through “bricks, butts and budgets” (as one of my interviewees put it), but through souls bonding to one another in Christian community.

Nevertheless, one emergent church I’m aware of began by renting and has since attempted to buy a building.  The pastor says they have already been forced to move once by landlords, and now he doesn’t want to have to cut ties with another neighborhood.  They want to stake a claim, to be accountable to a community.

Older Christians must keep in mind that our attachment to our beloved holy places may not be inherited by the next generation.   Younger Christians might   consider how we can root ourselves in a mission field, whether we own or rent.

As Rev. Schoen reminds us, either way, it is the mission that must define where, how and why we gather, not the building.

But of course the question remains: what happens to the buildings…? 

Any ideas?

Tony Robinson and Learning to Capsize

If you don’t have time to read Anthony Robinson’s excellent book “Changing the Conversation”, this article is a good summary from the Alban Institute’s website. Robinson writes that church decline is partly about the culture, but also about our behavior as churches, and he invites congregations to engage in adaptive change in the face of circumstances we are not necessarily in control of.  It is primarily a book for churches that want to rebuild their ministry in new ways, but he also acknowledges that

 “There are some congregations where death is not the worst thing that can happen. It may even be the best thing that can happen, because without a death there can be no resurrection.”

Thank you, Rev. Robinson, because that is basically my thesis in a nutshell!

I heard Robinson speak last year and he talked about taking kayaking lessons.  He explained that the first lesson in kayaking is how to get out of the kayak when it turns over.  This is for safety.  After you have mastered capsizing and escaping your kayak, the next lesson is how to get it turned back over and getting back in.

The lesson for me was: we churches need to learn to fail!   Not to seek out failure, but to expose ourselves to that possibility and see what happens.  And when we fail, we need to learn how to get back up and try again.  We need to take risks and make mistakes and fail until we get used to recovering.  That is called resilience.  It is not a new lesson historically: there are ancient churches that have been engaged in public worship and mission for centuries, through the failures of war and natural disaster and migration.  God’s Church is resilient by nature!

But remember: resilience is quite different than rigidity.  To be rigid means you refuse to yield to changing circumstances.  To be resilient means you hold on to the core of who you are and adapt your form as needed to survive in the torrent of change around you.

Thank you, Rev. Robinson, for your wisdom.  And thanks to my reader Jenny for inspiring me to write today!!