Bandits No More

June 10, 2010

NOT the meaning of life

Filed under: Texas Annual Conference,United Methodism,church growth — rheyduck @ 3:43 pm

Of my many experiences at the meeting of the Texas Annual Conference last week, perhaps that most striking was Bishop Huie’s mention that the West Ohio Annual Conference was losing 42 positions for Elders this year. She didn’t share anything of the context, so I don’t know how retirements, church closings, mergers, consolidations, etc., come into the picture. I know nothing how this compares with trends there over the past decade. But 42 – that’s huge!

When Bishop Huie arrived in our conference (about five years ago) she observed that fewer than 50% of our congregations showed a single profession of faith during the previous year. “Profession of Faith” is church-speak for “a person who was not a practicing Christian or a member of any church became one.” Yes, it’s hard to imagine, given Jesus’ attitude on the matter, that so many churches would not be winning a single person to faith in a year.

This year we learned that we have improved. Now something like 63% of our congregations have had at least one profession of faith. We cheered the good news. But it’s only a start. Nothing was said of the reality that so many of our churches are dominated by older generations. When over half of your active, dedicated members are over 70 years old, where does that put you in ten years – even if you manage to add a new person by profession of faith each year?

The Texas Conference is awesome! The Texas Conference is great! The Texas Conference is the largest in the country (not true, though I’ve heard it several times)! Bad things – like losing openings for Elders – might happen in places like Ohio, but never here. Or so we seem to believe. But demographics alone ought to lead us to action. I see three actions we need to take now.

First, we need to get on our faces before God and pray. We need to confess our apathy, complacency, our love for playing church games. We need a fresh outpouring of the Holy Spirit on all our people, all our congregations.

Second, we need to regain evangelistic passion. This will be hard, because it will be easily confused – by us an others – as stemming from a fear of institutional survival. “Our ship is sinking – come join us as we bail!” Not veyr attractive is it? As Leonard Sweet & Frank Viola urge, this will mean dealing with our JDD – Jesus Deficit Disorder.

Third, we need to plant churches. Here in the TAC we’ve been better at that these past five years. We’re still not at the Bishop’s goal of 10 new plants a year. She identified the two major impediments as a lack of people equipped to plant and a lack of churches who will “mother” the plants. Our congregation gets to mother a plant beginning this year, and I’m excited to be able to contribute. The harder barrier of church planting will be beginning to plant churches where “new churches aren’t needed,” that is, in locales where we “already have a United Methodist Church.” Sure, that church may not be growing our reaching anyone – though they did have one profession of faith last year – but if we only pour more money into it they will turn around, they will become a powerhouse for evangelism. I wish.

May 25, 2010

The problem of technology

Filed under: Albert Borgmann,Max Weber,Ministry,United Methodism,church growth — rheyduck @ 8:21 pm

I read a fair number of books. When they grab me, I’ll apply myself and read them quickly. When they don’t,  I’ll work more slowly. Albert Borgman’s Power Failure: Christianity in the Culture of Technology is one of the latter. I received it as a Christmas gift in 2008 (don’t you wish your presents were as good as mine!), and am still reading it.

In chapter 4, “Contingency and Grace,” Borgmann talks about our perception that our culture is unfriendly to the Christian faith, though he takes what we perceive as “unfriendliness” (or outright hostility) is better described as indifference. The root of this indifference is a culture closed off to grace, and the root of that closure to grace is our rejection of contingency.  He says:

Grace is always undeserved and often unforethinkable, and a culture of transparency and control systematically reduces, if it does not occlude, the precinct of grace. A technical term for what lies beyond prediction and control is contingency. What we need is to recover then as a condition of receiving grace is the realm of significant contingency. (p. 65)

You can tell right away that Borgmann is one of those philosophers comfortable with neo-logisms – “unforethinkable.” At least I’ve never seen it before, though its meaning is fairly clear. We don’t like the unexpected. We want to be able to control and predict our world. We think we ought to be able to understand everything.

Christians are not immune to this attitude. In fact, I wonder if what we see in our broader culture isn’t a secularization of a Christian desire to eliminate contingency. The Christians who aspire to this may not look to science, technology and human control of all things, but they do look to God as the One who controls everything. If this is the way God operates then there is no contingency. Everything that happens has been determined by the active willing of God to so happen. There is nothing that happens that is not in accordance with God’s will. What our current society has done is take this desire for non-contingency and brought it fully into the human realm. We humans ought to know and understand everything. If we understand the initial conditions of the system, we ought to be able both to predict the future of the system and to bring about our desired state of affairs. A perfect Newtonian worldview.

Borgmann identifies this aversion to grace and contingency and its love of control with “modern technology.” (p. 66) I’m spurred by this to not think only of our common understanding of technology, that which deals with physics, chemistry and other physical sciences, but our social technology. My beef isn’t so much with computers, cell phones, and the like (at least not right now), but with Max Weber’s routinization of charisma and rationalization of social processes.

I agree with Borgmann: our culture’s infatuation with “transparency and control” has been an expression of closure to grace and the contingency that would make room for it. Inasmuch as I am an inhabitant of this culture, I share that concern. But my greater concern is that the church has completely bought into Weberian social technology, whether implicitly or explicitly, leading to the church disallowing contingency – and grace – in favor of command and control.

Some of our churches express our dedication to Weber with our command and control bureaucracies, our commitment to systems of rational administration, management and accountability. Other churches turn away from mid-twentieth century bureaucratic forms, embracing instead a pursuit of “leadership.” Books, videos, conferences and courses in this “leadership” have been multiplying over the past decade or so. Once upon a time pastors flocked to Evangelism or Prophecy conferences. Now we flock to Leadership conferences. We need to hear the latest digest of leadership “principles” that we can take home and apply to our churches. Once we master these principles, we will be able to assure the right results.

You may notice the problem with both these approaches, the bureaucratic (my own denomination’s favorite) and the cult of leadership. Who needs grace? Sure, we can look back on people who had charisma, the founders of our movements. They did awesome and amazing things. But now we have their “principles” and “systems” to go on. If we work the system, apply the principles, things will turn out right.

But I’m an anti-Weberian on this. I think our commitments to bureaucratic rationality and the cult of leadership are forms of institutional atheism. Who needs God, when we have the right methods, the right principles? I’d argue instead that the need in our churches is not a more efficient bureaucracy, a more effective system, or better crafted principles. While none of these are evil – or even bad – in themselves, they have become for us a substitute for the Holy Spirit. We will not be the church we want to be – or need to be – apart from a fresh filling and empowerment by the Spirit. I say this knowing full well that one of the problems of the Spirit is unpredictability. When the Spirit leads, we don’t know what will happen next. Our penchant for planning is marginalized. But I’d still rather have the Spirit.

Some will say, “That’s all very nice. But Weber was just describing the way things are. Organizations do start with charismatic leaders. When the next generation lacks the charisma of the founder, they rationalize and routinize what they see in the founder. That’s just the way it is.” Maybe so. Maybe what Weber says is an accurate description of the way organizations have worked. So what? Must they be that way? Must we reject grace in favor of a completely naturalized rationality? I’d rather not.

May 18, 2010

Learning from North Point, part 9

Filed under: Evangelism,North Point Church,Spirituality,church growth — rheyduck @ 3:01 pm

(Picking up from an old series)

North Point’s fifth “Principle for Effective Ministry” is “Listen to Outsiders.” Pretty strange idea, isn’t it? After all, what can we expect outsiders to know? If we want to know what to do as a church and how to do it, we need to listen to the experts, the people who have been there all their lives.

But North Point has the audacious idea that their primary reason for existence is not to take care of insiders and keep them happy. Rather, their goal is to create environments where outsiders can come to faith in Jesus. They reason that if all their language is purely the language of insiders, the outsiders will not be able to follow along- if they even bother to show up.

By “listen to outsiders” they don’t mean “water down the Gospel to make it easier to swallow.” If they perceive in the culture of those they’re trying to reach a commitment to a vague spirituality (whether what Christian Smith calls “Moral Therapeutic Deism” or some variant of the Americanized Buddhism so common today), they’re not thinking about tossing Jesus out the window. “You know, outsiders really want vagueness. Tolerance is the thing. Different strokes for different folks.” Though some might interpret “listen to outsiders” as entailing a change in basic theological commitments, Andy Stanley and crew have nothing like that in mind.

Of course, that’s part of the problem of focusing so much on methods. While it would be surprising to find a book called 7 Practices of Effective Ministry that didn’t focus on method, methodology is not as neutral as we would like. If we just take the 7 Practices, we could lay them on top of just about any organization, religious or not. North Point, though not officially a Southern Baptist church, comes with the basic theology and ethos of that ecclesial tradition. Adapting their practices in an institution like the United Methodist Church – or in a single United Methodist congregation – would be more difficult because of our tendency to lack a shared doctrinal vision. We have folks in our pews who are convinced that we need to “listen to outsiders” and that doing so would leads us away from our narrowness of talking only about Jesus.

In Good to Great Jim Collins describes how the successful companies he studied were ruthlessly narrow-minded when it came to their core purpose and completely flexible when it came to the methods of fulfilling their purpose. Though I don’t recall Andy Stanley mentioning Collins in reference to this, the contexts certainly match. Our traditional UM churches, however, tend to go the other way around. We are ruthlessly narrow-minded when it comes to our methods (we’re Methodists) and completely flexible when it comes to our core purpose. While we have made some progress of late, I think of our official mission statement – to make disciples of Jesus Christ for the transformation of the world – we still have a way to go when it comes to gaining a shared understanding of what we mean by “disciple.”

Since most of our churches are institutionally conservative, i.e., focused on doing what we’ve always done, and oriented around taking care of our current members, we can learn from North Point. One of the texts Stanley uses in his exposition is Jesus’ story of the shepherd who left the ninety nine sheep to find the one that was lost. Is it possible that in listening to outsiders and making moves to draw them in, make them comfortable enough to stick around and hear the Gospel, that we might lose some insiders who are unhappy we’re no longer catering to them? Sure. In fact, if we consider previous movements that were effective in reaching people (whether we think of Jesus, John Wesley, or others more contemporary), they always did things that made some insider decide to go another direction. If we are truly reaching people for Jesus, we won’t keep everyone. It’ll be hard, since some – if not most – of those who decide to go another way will be people we count as our friends.

North Point calls their evangelism strategy “Invest and Invite.” Ordinary church folks invest in the lives of friends, neighbors, family, and co-workers, and then invite them to one of North Point’s environments. Two things happen through this approach. First, outsiders are exposed to the Gospel – as lived out by church folks, and as articulated in the environments they visit. Second, those who are investing and inviting are sensitized to the questions and culture of their friends who are outsiders. Because they have listened to outsiders they know that churches have to do more than just engage in insider lingo to communicate with them.

One of the downsides of pastoring a traditional church is that I have plenty to keep me busy just spending time with church folks, limiting my exposure to outsiders. One reason I stay plugged in to Facebook is that it is a great way to stay in touch with outsiders. In our community even most of the outsiders I’m around are only outsiders from my congregation, not from the Christian faith. I’m not out to empty all the other churches by bringing their people to my church. In this kind of setting non-professional Christians can be much more effective in listening to outsiders.

I’m sensitive to outsiders on Sunday morning (“Sunday morning worship” is our main environment attended by outsiders). I want them to be able to grasp what we’re doing and saying. But here’s a twist. I also agree with Francis Chan when he says, “Something is wrong when our lives make sense to unbelievers.” So what is it – do we make sense or not? Yes! We need to be clear enough in our communication that people can understand that they don’t understand – that the logic of following Jesus is profoundly different than the logic of the world. We gain the ability to help people clearly fail to understand by listening to them. And this realization of not understanding is a preliminary to true understanding.

January 20, 2010

What Kind?

Filed under: Leadership,Local church,Spirituality,church growth — rheyduck @ 3:45 am

Bishop Will Willimon passes along some good questions from Lloyd John Ogilvie:

  1. What sort of people does Christ want to deploy in the world?
  2. What sort of church do we need to produce those people?
  3. What sort of leaders do we need to produce that sort of church?
  4. What sort of pastor do I need to be to produce that sort of leaders in that sort of church?

First, I like the teleological approach. We’re going somewhere. We have ends in sight.

Second, these are complex ends. My telos as a pastor doesn’t end with me. It is connected with the teloi of leaders, the church and its people.

Third, I can ask these questions wherever I am in relation to those ends, wherever I am situated in time and space (as long as I ecclesially located). When I first become a pastor of a given church, I can ask these questions. When I’ve been at a church for X years, I can still ask these questions. They will never be outmoded.

Fourth, my asking these questions is not a solo activity. While I have some insight into what kind of pastor I need to be to to produce a particular kind of leader to produce a particular kind of church that produces a particular kind of people, so do the people around me. I am not sitting at the top of the heap commanding all around me.

Fifth, and this aspect appeals to my personality type, these are general questions. They are not tied to any particular church model or program structure. As people questions, they are framed to prioritize people over structures, opening the way to flexibility in methodology.

Finally, the questions begin and end with Jesus. We pursue what Jesus wants. We want to achieve his purposes his way. What will it take to make us those kind of people?

October 22, 2009

Our Audience

Filed under: Discipleship,Ecclesiology,Evangelism,Jesus,church growth — rheyduck @ 7:39 pm

Eric Bryant asks, “Has listening to church attenders led to the decline of the church?”

Declining churches, in his experience, focus on the people they already have. What do they want? How can we keep them happy?

Innovative churches, on the other hand, listen primarily to people outside the church, people they want to reach.

My first thought was: Which was Jesus’ strategy?

If we consider the establishment represented by the scribes, Pharisees and Sadducees to be the insiders of the day, they were clearly not Jesus’ main audience. Jesus spent much of his time with outsiders – people those insiders didn’t think worthy of inclusion in the work of God. The insiders were increasingly peeved at him for his actions.

But that’s too simplistic. From an Israel point of view, all of Israel were the insiders. The Gentiles and the Samaritans were the outsiders. Jesus spent most of his time with the insiders. Sure, he had a few dealings with Gentiles, and at least one with some Samaritans. But most of his ministry, at least as depicted in the Gospels, was with Israel. When he sent out the twelve he explicitly commanded them to go only to the “Lost sheep of Israel.”

Notice he didn’t call them “the sheep of Israel.” They’re the “Lost sheep of Israel.” While all of Israel is, in a sense, on the insider, Jesus puts himself on the outside, and approaches them with the voice of the outsider. Not just any outsider, however, but an outsider whose design was to be the insider who defined their very essence: God.

There’s more to this insider/outsider picture. It is not exactly correct to say Jesus spent most of his time with outsiders. Rather, he spent most of his time with his disciples. These folks, drawn from the periphery of Israel, became a new Israel – the Remnant, to use OT terminology, or to use contemporary jargon, Israel rebooted. It was specifically with these peripheral Israelites, these insiders to the new work of God, that Jesus went to the outsiders, both the “lost sheep of Israel” and to those who were not Israel. Going to those folks was not what these new insiders desired. They were profoundly uncomfortable with the places Jesus took them.

So if the church wants to reach people today, to whom do we listen – insiders or outsiders? That way of putting the question guarantees the wrong answer. Our starting place is Jesus. We begin by listening to Jesus. When we leaders listen to Jesus, Jesus will lead (or shove?) us out of our comfort zone. He will direct us to those on the periphery of the church and to the outsiders.

The trouble with listening to Jesus first, is that comfort (except comforting the broken hearted) never comes into play. We don’t relax in church, comfortable with the way we’ve always done thing. We don’t morph the church into a spiritualized version of what the world calls comfort. We’re taking the message of Life to a lost and broken world.

Church ministry – or innovation – is never about tickling the itching ears of either church members or currently-outside-but-maybe-future-church-members. I know I never would have been reached by the church if they had only sought their own comfort. I also never would have been reached by the church with the Gospel if they had only sought to meet my “felt needs.” I was an American teenager. To the extent that I recognized my felt needs, many of them were misguided. The innovation that built a bridge to me enabled me – over time – to gain a clearer and healthier understanding of my needs (to begin to feel some needs, and to stop feeling other needs) and to see Jesus as not merely the meeter of my needs, but as the Lord of the universe who calls me to follow him.

I want to lead a church that follows Jesus, a church that is willing to tolerate discomfort, change and innovation to be faithful to him, and to connect with people we aren’t now connecting with.

August 29, 2009

Success in ministry

Filed under: Leadership,Local church,Ministry,church growth — rheyduck @ 8:35 pm

Several years ago we had an after-school ministry for upper elementary aged children. By the time we stopped it, it looked like a whopping success. Our little small town church would have 40-50 kids, mostly not from our church, show up on Wednesday afternoons. Sounds great, doesn’t it?

But there at the end, it was mostly chaos. Our few volunteers lacked the energy to keep up with the kids. We felt a day was a success if no one had been seriously injured or broken anything. Did the kids learn anything? Hard to tell, since most of our time was spent working on behavior issues.

Our current after school ministries are much smaller. But they are also orderly enough that the kids can get something out of them.

The mistake we made earlier – and are still prone to make – is to think our primary focus should be on ministry to children and youth. In a declining church full of old people, it’s really easy to argue for that position. Despite our lack of younger folks, both locally and denominationally, I think seeing our ministry to children and youth as primary is a mistake. What we should see as primary is a discipling ministry with adults so that these adults will then be the doers of ministry with children and youth. Why?

A first reason to focus on adults is that parents have the primary responsibility to disciple their kids. Sure, it’s rare for parents to do that. We’ll teach them to hunt, fish, cook, drive, and other things of life. But do we teach them them to pray? To read and understand the bible? To share their faith with others? To interpret their lives and encounters with the world in terms of the Kingdom of God? Usually not. At least in many UM churches, many of the adults are too spiritually introverted to feel “comfortable” doing these things. Better leave these really important things to the professionals, i.e., the Sunday School teachers and church staff.

I know the temptation here. We on staff reason that if the parents aren’t doing it, we ought to. It’s too good a thing to leave undone. True. But we’re displacing the parent’s responsibility. They will still have to answer to God.

A second reason to have a primary focus on adults is pragmatic. Parents are the ones who have control over their lives. Sure, their control is relative, but compared to children and youth, their control is immense. If they want to go to worship on Sunday morning, for instance, all an adult has to do is get up on time, get ready and go. In this age when you get to church gatherings in a car, children are at the mercy of their parents. Parents have more power to bring children along than children have to bring parents along.

The major consequence for those of us who are in leadership is that our primary job is not performing functions. We don’t hire people to do what we currently think of as our primary ministries (even if we can’t find anyone who is willing). We hire people to invest in the lives of others who will then become the doers of those ministries. Perhaps once upon a time churches could afford to hire people to do all the ministry that needs to be done. Not any more. The people we hire need to be leaders, catalytic people, who develop others to do ministry.

August 17, 2009

Wanting It

Filed under: Evangelism,Worship,church growth — rheyduck @ 7:10 pm

Dan Dick has another good post at United Methodeviations. Talking about growing a church, he observes that mainline churches tend to go after the same group of people over and over again. We have trouble moving beyond the middle class folks just like us. He identifies other populations we should consider if we really want to grow our churches.

The first group, those of lower income and tending to have less in the way of formal education, are the primary group of non-church folk we have around here. We do a really poor job reaching them. Dick observes that churches in general are sometimes willing to do ministry to them, but since they have little to offer (think here of “money to support our ever more strained budgets”), we rarely want them to join us.

The folks I know in this group are often genuinely interested in Jesus. But the church – at least as we currently do it – is culturally distant from them. They feel like they don’t fit in. I think most of our folk would be happy to have them here, but I don’t think we’re willing to make many changes to accommodate them.

One tactic we keep talking about is what is popularly called “contemporary style worship.” In conversation with Dave Herman last week, we observed that neither of us had experienced much in the way of United Methodist “contemporary worship” that felt more recent (culturally speaking) than the 1970s. I suppose this is to be expected, since most of us in leadership have been so immersed in church culture for so long that we’re not open to any other ways of doing things.

But I find it curious for a couple of reasons. On the one hand, in our church, and in many others, there is at least an undercurrent of resistance to “contemporary worship.” One of the complaints I’ve heard is a fear that it will steal folks away from the already existing services. Yet on the other hand, we design our new services to so they’ll be attractive to the people we already have. Do you see the irony here?

My idea is to design a worship service that our current people don’t like, yet is culturally relevant to the people who are not now here. After all, we’ve already reached the people who are here (except maybe the younger generation who come as captives of their parents, who will leave us as soon as they can – but they don’t get a say in what we do anyway). If we do something our current folks like, we’re missing the boat.

So how do we do this? I think that designing a worship service for outsiders will require that the design team be dominated by those living on (or very close to) the borders, folks who are following Jesus, but not at the center of church life, folks who still have at least one foot in the world. These folks will have significant relationships with outsiders (unlike most of the rest of us) and have Jesus working through them to draw people in.

July 30, 2009

Driven

Filed under: Ecclesiology,Leadership,Simple Church,church growth — rheyduck @ 12:24 am

I’m reading, Dave Browning’s Deliberate Simplicity: How the Church Does More by Doing Less, one of the books I was given for my birthday. I’m only in the second chapter, so this post will be far short of a full review, but rather more of an initial thought.

I’m ambivalent about simplicity. On the plus side, my animosity toward a Weberian routinization of charisma, leads me to think we over do the program and activity side of church. We think, “If we build it, they will come,” or “If we program it, they will show up,” both predicated on the assumption that “If they come, they will become disciples.” I’ve seen lots of activity that was only activity. Simplicity can be part of the antidote to that way of thinking.

On the other hand, my personality type sees complexity everywhere. Browning simplifies his church doctrine to four points:

  1. God and his word are trustworthy.
  2. Christ is the Savior and King.
  3. There is hope for the future and forgiveness for the past.
  4. The church holds the hope of the  world in its hands.

If your objective is simplicity, and you’re starting with a blank slate,  I suppose these are ok. But why these? Christian doctrine is rooted in history. It’s not just that it happened at particular times in history, but that the doctrines arose as they did because of particular questions and needs arising in particular cultural and historical settings. While it might be the case that these four “simple” doctrines might be a response to the questions of our age, our age flows from what has gone before. The new “simple” church has not appeared form nowhere.

How well does doctrinal simplicity work? Well, if these four statements are all we have, we haven’t said anything about Jesus. Oh, we’ve said that “Christ is Savior and King,” but what doctrine do we have that connects “Jesus” with “Christ?” Our age certainly doesn’t assume that. Plenty of folks today are happy to say that Jesus is A Christ, not the Christ. Maybe the connection comes from doctrine number 1 -  “God and his word are trustworthy” – and since we see an equation between Jesus and Christ in the bible, we don’t need to worry about finding it elsewhere. But how do we make the connection between “his word” and the bible? Do we have a doctrine somewhere that identifies “word of God” with the bible? Do we have one that limits it to the bible? Why or why not?

Don’t get me wrong. I understand the desire for doctrinal simplicity. I think if you want doctrinal simplicity Islam is probably the way to go. They have a simple confession, “There is no God but God and Mohammad is his prophet.” You confess that, you’re a Muslim. What could be simpler? No Trinity. No resurrection of Jesus. No complicated relationships between faith & history. They have a simple theory of scripture. The Quran is an exact dictation of what God has said eternally in heaven. The believer’s job is to submit. What could be simpler?

We could also come at this from the back side. In the second chapter Browning references Rick Warren’s theories about church “drivenness.” He (and Browning agrees) says that all churches are driven by something. It could be tradition, personality, program, finances, buildings, events, seekers, or purpose. I bet you know Warren’s pick. I understand that. I even sympathize with it. But again, complexifier that I am, I don’t think it’s so simple.

They suggest that a church driven by tradition is one that majors on “doing what we’ve always done.” I understand the critique here. I’ve seen too many churches that are driven (if we can dignify their institutional conservatism with the term “tradition”) into the organizational hospice by doing what they’ve always done. But what if there’s more to tradition than “doing what we’ve always done?” If you read my book, you know that I’m convinced that God calls us to be willing participants in his ongoing action in history. Through Jesus, we’re part of the same story we read in scripture. We were called to be part of this story a thousand (hundred, fifty – put in a number of your choosing) years ago. Now since this is a story, a drama, the appropriate action on our part might differ from year to year or setting to setting. But as part of the same story, there are clear limits on what can do that will make sense, i.e., constitute a faithful performance of the story.

Or perhaps we can pick on the driven metaphor a bit. What kinds of things are driven? I drive a car. I can drive a lawnmower. I can (in theory) drive a golf ball. The first of these depend on a mechanical metaphor. Mechanical things are driven. All depict what is driven as inanimate objects. Is the church an inanimate object? Is it merely a machine? Or is it just a human institution? If we were Weberians (or Lockeans) we’d say, Sure! It’s just another voluntary association, trying to routinize the charisma in our founders (Jesus, for the primary tradition, folks like Luther, Wesley, Calvin, Wimber, for subsidiary traditions). But if we’re neither Weberians nor Lockeans (or other variants of good moderns), maybe the driven metaphor and its dependence on  non-animated-ness falls apart. At best, it seems, we could talk about being Spirit driven. That doesn’t do the work that Purpose (or simple, or program, etc) do though, because the Spirit isn’t reducible to a formula or simple statement.

So how do we decide what to do? That can be described fairly simply: We walk in the Spirit, in a constant relationship of dependence on God, listening and paying attention so that we know what our role is in God’s ongoing story. Pretty simple, isn’t it? Listen, pay attention, obey. What could be simpler? But then maybe these simple things aren’t so simple. Sometimes our appropriate action will be to do something we’ve always done (like, Pray, Worship, Witness, etc.). Sometimes we’ll be doing one of these things in the same way we’ve always done it. Other times we’ll have to step out in faith and do them in some new way, perhaps even a way that challenges us and leaves us crying to God for help.

So Deliberate Simplicity? Again, I like the basic idea, but it depends on what we mean by that and what it entails. We’ll see.

May 13, 2009

What does it take to Grow a Great Church?

Filed under: Local church,Spirituality,church growth — rheyduck @ 8:35 pm

Many things have been suggested over the years. Here’s my list – these are the things I pray for:

The Manifest Presence of God. The bible tells us God is omnipresent (everywhere). We believe God is with us every time we gather. So what is this “manifest presence of God?” By that I mean that we are aware of God’s presence – that God is changing lives in such a way that there is no other explanation but God. We can do the best preaching, music, programs, architecture, and friendliness in the world. But without God it won’t amount to anything in the long run.

A Willingness to Do Hard Things. Going with the crowd is easy. Living a life indistinguishable from the world is easy. Rationalizing our own righteousness and refusing to forgive those who have hurt us? Perfectly normal. But we’re not called to be normal, we’re called to follow Jesus. Because Jesus gives the Holy Spirit to those who believe we are equipped to do awesome and amazing things. But most of those things aren’t easy. Many won’t be popular.

Openness to Failure. I learned a long time ago to ask a key question of each person seeking employment: ‘Tell me about some of your failures in ministry.” If they’ve never tried anything that didn’t work they don’t get the job. People matter so much to God that it is worth our while to be willing to fail if it means some might come to faith. I pray for a church full of people who are not only willing to fail, but willing to extend grace to others when they fail, so they’ll have the courage to get up and try again.

Jesus-Like Love to Rule. Jesus said, “By this will all people know that you are my disciples, by your love for one another.” He clarified this by telling us our love is to be modeled on his love. I pray for a church where people genuinely love each other, a church where when we have problems – and we will! – we have a deep enough commitment to Jesus and to each other that we are willing to work things out.

A Greater Concern to Serve than to be Served. Jesus said, “The Son of Man has not come to be served, but to serve, and to lay down his life as a ransom for many.” I pray for a church that is passionate to reach out to and draw in those who are on the outside. I want a church that attracts sinners—to be a place where they see a hope for deliverance.

May 5, 2009

“Let them eat cake”

Filed under: United Methodism,church growth — rheyduck @ 8:07 pm

The last couple of issues of the United Methodist Reporter have featured articles on GracePoint UMC, a recent church plant in Wichita, Kansas, that grew quickly, but let the denomination this spring. It’s depressing to invest so much money, energy and excitement only to lose the fruit. But it shouldn’t be surprising to people familiar with the way the UMC tends to operate. With few exceptions, we don’t know what to do with high energy innovate leaders. High energy leaders who excel at working within the system, yes, we have plenty of places for them. But people who push hard and are non-conformists? Our system pretty much pushes them elsewhere.

The Reporter spoke with Dan Dick, a UM leader (soon to be on staff at the Wisconsin Annual Conference):

He feels the denomination got off track in the 1990s “when we veered off and started pursuing the church-growth movement” so popular among nondenominational churches. He likens that model to a new business start: Select a location in a growth area, get a dynamic CEO-type leader and find “two or three very deep pockets to draw from, to be able to launch a really nice facility, good parking, good equipment and technology.”

While that formula may work in a congregational setting, he said, it’s not especially beneficial to a connectional system like the United Methodist Church, which seeks to create communities of faith that are accountable within a denominational structure.

Focusing on numerical growth and expansion isn’t really central to the Methodist identity, Dr. Dick argues. And while United Methodist churches want to reach as many people as possible, the Wesleyan focus is instead on building communities that equip people to live as Christian disciples.

“That’s a very different thing,” Dr. Dick said. “It’s one of the reasons why we are traditionally and still are fundamentally a small-membership denomination.”

Most successful United Methodist church starts, he said, tend to have three things in common: They are a satellite of an existing congregation, they have a committed core group of leaders and they are designed to meet a specific need, such as a different racial or ethnic demographic.

GracePoint was a fairly good model, but its expansion was “poorly executed,” Dr. Dick said. Though the church plant sought to launch satellite campuses to reach different audiences, he said “they operated congregationally in a vacuum” and weren’t as concerned about where other United Methodist congregations were present. “They were going into a head-to-head competition rather than seeking ways to be collaborative and connectional.”

I read this and hear that (1) we need to keep our churches mono-cultural and (2) work hard to make sure everyone is happy. If Dr. Dick’s theory is correct that would explain why our denominational membership and evangelistic efforts boomed through the 1970s and 1980s, only to crater in the 1990s when we started to pay attention to the Church Growth Movement. But if that’s the case, why have we had so many books and articles before the 1990s decrying our lack of evangelism and our failure to reach people and grow churches?

I am in a position of no authority in the denomination. I pastor a small church in a small town. I am not charismatic in any sense of the word. My gifts are more in teaching and academia than in growing organizations. But I do know a few things.

1. We need to repent of our compulsion to keep people happy. In our local churches we work so hard to keep the long time members happy that we’re unwilling to make changes that might reach new people – even if those “new people”are our own children and grand children.

2. We need to be more concerned about people becoming followers of Jesus than we are concerned about them becoming OUR followers of Jesus.

3. We need to not only say we want young people in our churches, but we need to stop making them act like retired folks before we allow them to have a say in what we do.

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