A Perennial Passion

Mr. Baker  loved to teach Sunday School, and he did so for over twenty years with elementary children in one of my churches.  He also led adult studies and a book group, and studied different methods of faith formation in his free time.  He was a man with a passion for Christian education.

But a time came when his lifestyle changed.  He and his wife both retired and were ready for more travel and freedom. So, during my interim pastorate (a time when leadership roles often shift), he decided it was time to step away from teaching– at least, he said, for awhile.

That spring, the church gave each Sunday School teacher a flowering annual bedding plant, as is their tradition.  I had the children hand out plants to each teacher, but on a hunch, I prepared a different gift for Mr. Baker: a flowering perennial.  I explained to the congregation that, although Mr. Baker was stepping away from teaching, he was, at heart, a perennial teacher, and we might see him in the classroom again some day.

The following spring, after a year of travel and relaxation in retirement, Mr. Baker came to my office.  He wanted to talk about the next fall’s Sunday  School curriculum.  I was pleased that he was still interested in faith formation, but wondered what he was really there about.  Finally he confessed: “I miss teaching.  I want to come back.”

He reminded me about the perennial flower we had given him the year before, and told me it was in full bloom.  He even sent me this picture of it, above.  “Like my desire to continue teaching, that plant continues to thrive,” he said.

I have watched lay leaders step away from leadership after becoming tired or burned out.  But beside that challenge is the joy of watching new leaders, who are curious and adventurous, say “I can try that.”  In my former church, I watched volunteers who took over for Mr. Baker try their hand at teaching. It’s exciting to see people learn what they are capable of.  Not every experiment goes well, but we all learn by engaging with the church in new ways; including me!

In Mr. Baker’s case, his absence re-affirmed his perennial passion for teaching; it’s part of who he is and how he lives out his mission from God.

An interim period is a good time to try on a new role or encourage someone else to.  Sometimes, when you take a break from leadership, someone else gets a chance to step in.  Maybe you will find a role you like better than the one you’ve been filling for awhile.  Maybe you’ve never taken a leadership role and it’s time to try it.  Or maybe, like Mr. Baker, you will take a break and then come back to “bloom where you are planted!”

 

The Outsourced Church

With all the struggling churches out there, it is likely that some of you are asking yourselves: how much can we cut from our budget in staff expenses, and still be seen as a respectable church?

For example, what happens if your church is unable to afford a preacher? Can you still worship together?  Well, you might turn to “A Sermon for Every Sunday”, a lectionary based resource that offers videotaped sermons by the likes of Brian Blount and MaryAnn McKibben Dana, among others.  For $4.99 each, you can pop one of these babies in the DVD player and project a thoughtful, intelligent sermon drawn from the scriptures for the week.

Or what if your wonderful organist injures her foot?  (This has happened to me twice!).  Everyone knows how hard it is to find a good organist these days.  Well, search no more!  The UCC has in existence a collection of recorded organ accompaniments on CD, covering every hymn in the New Century Hymnal.  Any congregation with a decent sound system can sing hymns accompanied by a world class organist.

When it comes to governance, a lay Moderator runs the governing boards of UCC churches; no pastor needed!  In the Presbyterian Church (USA), a pastor is required to moderate a Session meeting.  But if there is a pastoral vacancy, provisions can be made for a pastor from another congregation to moderate a Session meeting.  In other words, you can “rent” a pastor to govern your Board.

Deacons may be trained to visit and serve communion to the home-bound.  Lay ministers can be licensed to baptize and bury the dead.  These people, while not ordained, may still have authentic spiritual gifts for ministry.

Of course, if you really need an ordained minister, anyone can get a certificate of ordination that authorizes them to perform weddings or other pastoral functions.  If Conan O’Brien can do it, you can too!

Staffing is often the biggest piece of a church’s budget, and many people assume the success of a church hinges on its having a qualified pastor.  Yet, we live in a world where MOOCS* are intruding on traditional education and knee replacements are being outsourced to India.  Churches I observe are moving from two pastors to one, from full time to half time, from ordained to licensed, and from Christian educators to volunteers, all in an effort to lower their costs.

This trend may be both perilous and full of potential.  Mormon and Jehovah’s Witness churches have functioned without paid clergy for many years, relying instead on lay leaders.  Eugene Peterson, in his latest book, “The Pastor“, tells of his church appointing a cadre of women who took turns volunteering in the church office (in the 70’s).    These models seem antiquated at a time when many households are chronically over-scheduled.  But I wonder if there is anything for us to learn from them.

Progressive Protestant churches want educated preachers and teachers, patient, mature youth leaders, qualified administrators, musicians and custodians.  But how do we attract these human resources if we can’t pay them very much or anything at all?  Should we be “outsourcing” our sermons?  Delegating more tasks to already exhausted volunteers?  Sharing staff with other churches?  Narrowing the range of ministries we provide? Asking professionals to work for free?

What do you think?

 * Massive Open Online Courses

Churches in Conversation

 

 

 

In November, I was invited to meet with clergy and lay leaders in the Hudson River Presbytery in New York.  There, under the direction of Rev. Rhonda Kruse, their Connections and Change Presbyter, I had several occasions over two days to help foster conversation about creative responses to church decline.

The first was a shared Sunday worship service with three small churches who are located near each other but had never worshiped together before.  The church we met in–Bethlehem Presbyterian– was established in 1729 (see photo).  Talk about resilience!  With a combined choir to inspire us, four pastors led worship and gathered with members over coffee afterward.  The common refrain I heard was, “Maybe we should do this again!”

Later that afternoon, 70 people from around the Presbytery gathered to hear a summary of ideas from my book and talk among themselves about their own experiences of decline and revitalization.  It was a time to be honest about the struggles they were experiencing, and to recognize that they were not alone.  Presbytery staff were on hand to listen and respond to concerns, encouraging churches to consider options for revitalization, merger, or closure, depending on their circumstances.

On Monday morning, I was taken to the beautiful Stony Point Retreat Center, where the Presbytery Committee on Ministry was meeting.  Once again, I shared stories from the book and judicatory leaders clustered in small groups to talk about how to help struggling churches they are in contact with.

Over meals and on car rides, I listened to stories of churches facing incredible obstacles and still finding divine creativity in the thick of it!

At one point, I said to my gracious host, Rhonda: “I don’t feel I can do much for these leaders.  I’m just coming and going, but they are staying here to do the hard work.”  Her response encouraged me: “You’re helping them start the conversations they need to have.”

Since I started the book project, I have always believed that honest conversation, whether it includes lament, idea sharing, critique or celebration, is the best way to hitch our hearts to the Holy Spirit’s power to make all things new.  By listening and learning from each other and our neighborhoods, we recognize that God is already at work in us; we just need to catch onto what God is doing.

I appreciate the foresight the Hudson River Presbytery has had in helping their churches team up to converse about their future.  All our local churches are really Christ’s one Church, so why do we keep struggling alone?

If you are interested in having an honest conversation with other churches in your area about change, decline, and God’s new thing, and if you want help starting the conversation, contact me, and maybe we can make it happen.

Pressing Where It Hurts

I had a massage from an excellent massage therapist recently, and discovered my body is full of knots.  What was supposed to be a relaxing experience became a confrontation with unaddressed pain, as I discovered that I am in pretty bad shape.  Stress, age and poor posture are taking their toll.

“Your body is full of toxins,” the therapist said flatly.

What, like a skunk?  Or an industrial waterway?

Whenever she found a knotted up spot in my body, she came at it from the edge with her thumb and pressed gently down.  I flinched.  I yelled, “Ouch!”  I got tears in my eyes.  But I did not ask her to stop.  And she didn’t stop.  She never said “I’m sorry”.  My knots are not her fault, after all.  She just kept gently pressing in, hurting me in the kindest way.

Finally, between moans of pain, I said, “I wish I could do for my churches what you do for your clients.  You press down on the pain because you know that’s the only way they will heal, and you don’t stop, even when they yell at you.”

On hearing this, she didn’t laugh or make a remark.  She just kept pressing.  I was awed by her strength, both physical and emotional.

In pastoral work with struggling churches, I have tried to learn the hard lessons of pressing down on the pain: listening for the rough but loving judgments of God and interpreting them for congregations who feel stuck in ruts but have no real interest in changing their behavior.

Pressing on the pain might mean asking: “What mistakes did you make with your former pastors?” Or displaying the hard truth of their situation (“You will run out of financial reserves in X years”).  Or something like the confession I had to make to a lay leader once: “I don’t trust you…yet.”

I really hate this part of my job, and frankly I’m not good at it, either.  But speaking the truth in love is the leader’s job.  It’s our job when the truth to be told is part of a church’s healing and reconciliation, or when it’s needed to correct behavior that is leading a church away from God’s mission for them.

When the massage therapist was done with me, I felt relaxed and pliable for the first time in a while.

But that was two weeks ago.  Now I’m back to my old, toxic self.  In the dysfunctional body, things bounce back to default disease pretty fast.

The good news is, my massage therapist is coming tomorrow to press all my pain buttons again.   I know it will hurt.  And I know I’ll feel better when she’s done with me.

* Photo licensed by Creativecommons.org

Who Is Your Hope?

“Hope” is the thing with feathers –

That perches in the soul –

And sings the tune without the words –

And never stops – at all –

Emily Dickinson

 

Hope is the name of one of the waitresses at my favorite café.  She waits tables with eager determination and a bird-like alertness as she darts around the place making sure everyone is happy and well fed.  She always seems cheerful, with her sing-songy voice and a tendency to call everyone “Honey”.

But one day recently, she confided in me that one of her regulars had gotten the bad news: he has terminal cancer.  Every day, he comes in for breakfast, and now he needs more than just eggs and hash browns.  He needs a hand to hold, a shoulder to lean on.

“I don’t know why they always find me,” Hope said that day.  “It must be my name.  I always attract people in desperate situations.”

I told her,  “It’s not your name.  It’s that you live up to your name.”

She went on to tell me that, when she’s not waiting tables at the café, she works in an oncology ward at the hospital.  I’m not sure what she does there, but she comes in contact with people who need more of what she represents: hope.  And she finds herself listening to their sad stories a lot.

“I’m going to have to lean on you a little,” she said to me that day.  And I was honored to think she trusted me as a pastor, instead of as just another plate of poached eggs.  She was telling me, in not so many words, that bearing another’s sorrow is a load, even when it’s not your load.  And that she was going to need a little help holding up for her loyal customer.

A few days later, I had a bad day at work.  And the next morning, I headed to the café, found my corner table and sat brooding for a long time.  Hope wasn’t there that day.  But there was another customer watching me nearby, a retired cop who is a regular like me.  Finally, he came over and sat down.

“You’re deep in thought today,” he said.  So I told him my story, and he listened.  And afterward, I felt lighter.

We are all of us here to hold each other up.  Sometimes that is all hope is: the kindness of a neighbor to get us through the rough parts of our lives.  But sometimes there is a bigger hope: a hope in something or Someone beyond  us that is urging us to move toward the better country.

If you are a leader in a struggling church, chances are you are one who has listened to some sad stories.  Where do you go when you need to tell your own stories?  Who do you lean on?  Who is your Hope?

*Photo by Don McCullough

Crushing the Butterfly

A friend I will call Jean came to a summer party at our farm recently.  Jean is an animal lover who   entertains raccoons,  squirrels, ravens and even bears in the woods near her home.  When they appear sick, she feeds them with syringes or takes them to the wildlife refuge.    All the neighbors know where to drop the stray cats.

But she surprised us the night of the party when she found a monarch butterfly and brought it to show us.  Apparently, it was injured and could no longer fly.  She held it gently in her palm while we beheld its stained-glass window wings. “So beautiful,” she said.  “but I’m going to have to crush it.  It’s been injured.  It can’t fly anymore.  It needs to be put out of its misery.”

Suddenly, before anyone could protest her assessment of the butterfly’s prospects, she placed it on the ground and stomped on it squarely with her foot.  Shudders and groans swept through the group surrounding her.  The action was so swift, so authoritative, so seemingly heartless, we were all speechless.

I have thought about that action again and again.  What kind of impulse drove her to it?

I believe it was love.

Most of us love animals because they entertain and amuse us.  We imagine that they exist for our pleasure.  But Jean’s action expressed a deeper love, a compassion for the butterfly itself, not for its elegance or the hopeful symbolism it offered her.  More important than its resplendent wings was its unseen soul, its anguish, however imperceptible, at being injured and unable to fulfill its truest calling.  She put herself in the position of the butterfly and did what she thought was best for it.

To Christians, the demise of a church is a tragedy.  We love our churches and all churches.   We love what they represent and the good they have done in every corner of our world.  When we see them shrinking and closing, we recoil.  We want to hold those colored windows in our palms and preserve them forever.

But those who truly love the Church know that it was made to fly by the power of the Holy Spirit.  And a dying church can be a place of spiritual injury, a cluster of injured souls straining to survive as a human institution instead of reaching for the sky as a creature of God.  The Church should not exist to avoid hurt feelings, to maintain friendships or to preserve historical character in the neighborhood.  The Church exists to make disciples, and when the disciples are at the end of their rope, tired and thirsty for spiritual nurture, maybe someone needs to put the institution out of its misery.

Nobody wants to be the one to crush the butterfly.  It makes you look heartless and cruel.  But there is a kind of love that knows when it’s time to do just that.

The butterfly, remember, is living its second life.  It has already experienced resurrection once, so it has no fear for its future beyond the grave.  Shouldn’t this also be true of the Church?

 

* Photograph by Estela Romero, licensed by Creative Commons.

A Favorable Review

I was honored to read a review of my book “Toward the Better Country” in “Preaching and Pondering”, a blog written by the the Rev. Jerrod Hugenot, Associate Executive Minister of the American Baptist Church of New York State.  You can read it here.

I was especially pleased to read that Rev. Hugenot was compelled by the book to get in touch with his own grief about churches facing decline.  I think it’s healthy for judicatory leaders and pastors to stay self-aware about our emotions and assumptions regarding struggling churches and the impact we can have on them.

Thanks to Rev. Hugenot for sharing my book with others in his region!  If any of my readers would like to write a review of my book, favorable or not, you can post one on the Amazon.com page where my book is sold.

 

More Lessons from Jazz Camp

Clay Jenkins

I wrote here a couple years ago about my annual visits to a fabulous jazz camp in the northern Wisconsin woods, staffed by jazz professors from around the country who teach  amateur, just-for-fun jazz lovers how to make great music.

Recently I again attended jazz camp and came away with another lesson on leadership.  I was assigned to a combo directed by trumpeter Clay Jenkins of Eastman School of Music.  Clay has devoted his life to teaching jazz trumpet to young people, and he has a friendly but determined focus on getting the best out of his students.

This year, he presented us with a Sonny Rollins piece called “East Broadway Rundown”.  The Rollins piece is dissonant, chaotic and avante garde, not exactly easy listening, and not the kind of thing we usually perform at jazz camp.  But Clay had a vision.  He assessed his students: two saxophones, a flugelhorn, a trumpet, a trombone, a piano player and a vocalist, all of varying abilities and temperaments, and he made a plan.

On the first day of jazz camp, he taught us the short, choppy, repetitive melody, going over it again and again until we got it.  On the second day, he encouraged everyone to improvise on the piece, and layered in a dissonant harmony, pressing me to sing a fourth below the horns with his leading.  On the third day, he called on our best gifts.  He let some musicians do solos while others teamed up with each other for supportive roles.  He convinced me and the female trombone player to engage in a musical dialogue, echoing off each other from voice to horn.  He drew us all into an extended, planned chaos, calling on some musicians to play counter melodies against others, creating a wild cacophony of musical layers.

On the final night of jazz camp, when we were to perform the piece in front of a live audience, I had no idea what we were doing.  But I wasn’t worried, because I trusted Clay.

We got up on stage and followed his lead.  I concentrated so hard, I forgot we even had an audience.  Everyone was forced to listen to each other one minute, and then to tune each other out and listen only to ourselves the next minute; we had to watch Clay and keep counting, and trust his hand beating the air when we lost count.  We didn’t worry about what it sounded like to our audience.  We were completely absorbed in the moment.

Amazingly, the audience loved it.

Clay’s leadership of our combo helped me understand why he is not just a great trumpet player, but also a great leader: he capitalized on the abilities we each brought to the table while pushing us out of our comfort zones.  He brought his own personal vision of a seemingly unplayable piece, but he coaxed us through it and kept the expectations light.  He was helping us each to be different, and all to be unified.  We didn’t even know how much fun we were having until it was over.

When the concert ended, I pulled Clay aside to thank him for his leadership.  “That’s the kind of leader I want to be in my church,”  I told him.

* Photo by Donald Jackson

 

 

To Weed or to Seed?

The gardening season is upon us now in Wisconsin, and I am pondering the  wildflower patch.  It was started as a 4H project when my daughter was young, and it was fun–until the white cockle took over.  White cockle is a noxious weed disguised as a flower.  It produces a little balloon seed pod that, when you’re six, is fun to pick and pop.  But when you’re a grown up and you have to pull out the cockle because it shades out all the prettier wildflowers, it’s just, well…noxious!

I used to spend hours battling the white cockle on summer afternoons.  There was no end to it, and truthfully, it was hard to tell if the more desirable flowers appreciated my efforts.  I told myself I was being industrious.  But year after year, the cockle just got worse; it was winning the battle.

So last year, I gave up.  I told my family I was letting the wildflower garden go to seed.  We would mow it over and be done with it.  But after we mowed, things just started coming up as they had before.

About mid-way through the summer, I looked closely at the little patch.  Indeed, it had gone to seed.  The seeds had flowered and filled the garden with color.  Sure, there was some white cockle, but it wasn’t out of control.  It was just another color in the garden.

I wonder: is it really worth the effort I put into removing the noxious weeds?  Or should I let nature take its course and see if the good flowers don’t win out on their own?  Maybe instead of weeding, I should be seeding more and more wildflowers so they can take root, flourish and crowd the cockle out without my intervention.

Gardening always makes me think about the church.  We work so hard to “fix” our churches, trying to weed out all their bad habits and lazy assumptions, their dusty rituals and moldy hymns.  We pray quietly–but regularly–that the more troublesome members will move to Florida. We try to muster up the strength  to shout down the demons.  But sometimes it seems we are getting nowhere.

An alternative to weeding might be seeding.  While it is sometimes necessary to call out bad behavior and eliminate outdated practices, we can also be strengthening our churches by relentlessly casting out our best ideas and observations (even when we think we are being ignored), nurturing the church culture with Christ-like behavior, bravely singing a new song, and fertilizing the most faithful and creative members with support and affirmation.  Maybe by empowering what is good to grow toward the sun, those noxious aspects of church life will stay close to the ground and out of trouble.

This spring, I ordered a big bag of wildflower seeds.  I’m going to mow down last year’s stubble again, mix the seeds with sand and broadcast it over the garden.

Take that, cockle! 

 

 

 

Toward the Better Country

Toward the Better Country: Church Closure and Resurrection

by L. Gail Irwin

is now available from

Resource Publications/Wipf & Stock Publishers 

You can order your copy here,

Web price:$17.60 plus shipping

Copies are also available online at Amazon.com

Book Synopsis

The pews of many mainline churches are clearly not as full as they used to be.  While committed Christians are trying everything they can to keep their churches open and thriving, history has shown that no local church is meant to live forever in its current form.    Like people, churches are born, live and breathe, fulfill their missions, and pass away.  And recent history shows that more churches will be closing or re-shaping their ministry in the near future.

Toward the Better Country tells about the grief stages, discernment processes and creative options explored by lay leaders, pastors and regional leaders who have dealt with this sensitive time in the life cycle of a church.  These are woven in with the author’s own experience of leading a church through steep decline toward closure.

This resource, based on interviews with over thirty lay, clergy and judicatory leaders, will offer healthy, practical ways for congregations to move through the terrain of loss, discern God’s path for their future and pass on their legacies to emerging ministries.  It can be used for personal reflection, leadership training, or in discernment groups in local churches.  Scripture readings and questions for conversation are included at the end of each chapter, along with a list of additional resources for churches struggling with decline.

Chapter Titles:

1. Introduction

2. The Rise and Fall of Sacred Places

3. Expressions of Grief in the Faith Community

4. Discerning the Failure to Thrive: Lay Leaders

5. Discerning the Failure to Thrive: Pastors

6. Discerning the Failure to Thrive: Regional Pastors

7. Multiple Paths to the Future

8. A Tale of Two Closures

9. Laying the Foundation for Future Ministry

10. Seven Ways to Say Goodbye

11. New Wine for New Wineskins

Appendices, Additional Resources and Bibliography