If you’re a church planter – or a leader of a church that is engaging culture and trying to reach people for Jesus – you need to check out Cutting Edge put out by the Association of Vineyard Churches USA. You can find pdfs of the past issues at their website. You can also find information about how to get yourself a free subscription.
March 31, 2007
On Not Knowing What We’re Doing…
If you’ve been following my posts over the past year, you’ll know that the Texas Annual Conference of the United Methodist Church is undergoing a major change initiative. The major impetus for this change – in personal terms – is our bishop, Janice Riggle Huie. In impersonal terms, the impetus is the reality that our churches haven’t been reaching people for Christ. In plain english, we’re doing a lousy job at reproducing – at making new Christians.
If we only look at ourselves, we’re not doing as bad as most annual conferences. We actually grow in membership some years. But when you compare the rate of change of our membership (or our attendance) with the population of our region, you see pretty quick that we’re not even close to keeping up. Instead, we fall farther and farther behind.
So what are we doing about it? After last years district realignment, 2 big things come remain. First, the conference is instituting more minute accountability for pastors and churches. Second, conference finances are being realigned so we can move toward planting 10 new churches a year.
I don’t think the average church member grasps the increased accountability yet. So many other local issues are closer on their radar. We pastors, however, are quite aware. We report our statistics regularly (attendance and professions of faith weekly, people in “hands on mission” and apportionment payment monthly). We’re now all supposed to be in accountability groups. We have more “trainings” and meetings to go to than ever. Some of us are finding it a challenge to find the hours in our schedules to do more things beyond the local church – while being expected to grow the local church.
The local church may notice the financial realignment a bit more. Church camp went from $160 per kid last year to $200 per kid this year since funds have been moved away from our camp. Campus ministries are also feeling the pinch – we hear that some may even be closed. Note: I’m a strong believer in campus ministry. I know we have at least a few in the conference that have been very effective, not only in making disciples, but as places of call for many pastors now in the conference. But I’ve also heard of several where only a few students attend, while requiring all the expenses associated with employing an ordained Elder (we’re much more expensive than our take home pay alone indicates).
Will all these changes work? Will they reverse our decline? Those of us on the bottom of the line – local church pastors and leaders – can get the impression that the folks at the top of the heap know exactly what they’re doing. After all, we’re paying thousands for consultants and new programs. Surely they know what they’re doing.
Personally, I have my doubts. But that’s ok.
Why do I think it’s ok for our leaders not to know what they’re doing? First, because I’m doubtful whether this is an area where one is likely to find certainty. If they went around claiming to know that what we’re doing will bring progress (they’re not), then I’d surely doubt them. Second, while change for the sake of change is frequently not a good thing (though it does seem to be something we Americans enjoy), in this case I think it can serve the important task of breaking us out of the inertia of doing what we’ve always done. We desperately need to break that inertia.
So – do we know what we’re doing? On one level, probably not. On another level, sure we know. We’re trying to follow Jesus – we’re trying to figure out how to lead our people to obey the Great Commission in early 21st century East Texas. And that’s a good thing.
March 27, 2007
Why Kidnap British Sailors?
You’ve probably all heard about the Iranian kidnapping/capture of 15 British sailors. Why would they do that? Assuming that they’re not just (a) exercising a bad habit of holding hostages as a foreign policy tool, or (B) trying to take the heat off their nuclear proliferation, or (C) trying to staunch the flow of defectors, what might they be up to?
If you follow the oil markets, you’ll note that this event has brought oil prices back up. After falling for several months, they are back up over $60 a barrel. When oil was getting cheaper Iran (and some other OPEC types) wanted to institute production cuts so the price would go back up. Saudi Arabia and others who were njto friendly to Iran decided otherwise. So what do you do if you need high oil prices to fund your nuclear aspirations and prop up your ramshackle economy? Why, the answer is obvious: create a crisis that strike fear into the hearts of the oil traders. They’ll take the prices back up for you and you won’t even have to cut production. Ka-ching.
March 20, 2007
Free Creativity
At the end of the second service Sunday, while we were singing the last hymn, my wife and Rhett M came up to join me. This is typically the time people come to join the church. Both are already church members, so I knew that wasn’t what was going on. Christi had been off doing children’s church, so for all I know something bad had happened over there. Rhett told me he had something to tell the congregation – that’s all I had to go on.
So, after the hymn, I give Rhett the floor. He announced that it was “Pastor Appreciation Day,” and they’d prepared a big lunch for our family as a way of saying thank you for our ministry. The next hour or so was filled not only with food, but with most everyone coming by and thanking us for our ministry. It was a great event.
It was also a total surprise.
I’d heard of groups like Focus on the Family sponsoring “Clergy Appreciation Month,” but that was in October. So it came from clear out of the blue. It’s nice when the things that come out of the blue are good things.
I was impressed by the creativity and coordination of so many people to pull off the event. Though it’s great to be appreciated, it’s even greater to know I’m part of such a creative group of people. Our church has an awesomely huge mission. Reaching the people of Pittsburg, Camp County, and beyond is clearly beyond our (current) ability. If we’re going to accomplish this mission, it’ll take lots of our people stepping up with creative ministry ideas and “just doing it.” It’ll take people with the courage to step up and do things, even (and especially!) things we’ve never done before.
March 7, 2007
Assessing Changes in the Texas Annual Conference
Bishop Huie, Rick Goodrich, and District Superintendent Jerry Neff led the 2 hour meeting in Longview yesterday. This meeting was mandated last year as a way of assessing the changed in the Conference. You can find a power point version of what they shared at the Conference website (http://www.txcumc.org) or you can get a pdf version (much smaller file) here. I turned in my sheet (which was much too small) with some of my questions and comments. Here are a few of the things I wonder about.
First, a number of pastors are still skeptical. They’ve been in the System long enough that they’ve seen big plans for change come and go. The latest was Vision 2000 which was supposed to turn us away from decline, but for most churches did nothing lasting. They figure this is just another occasion of people at the top telling the lowly peons in the churches to be quiet and do what they’re told.
While some of the leadership seems to frame it this way – last week at Elder’s retreat a response to some questions was put in those terms – I very much doubt that is what Bishop Huie intends. Unfortunately the trust level is so low in some parts of the connection that she has to work overtime to get the pastors to believe her. As for the laity, my perception is that the vast majority don’t have a clue what’s happening yet.
Following closely on the first point is the issue of discontent. In his work on leading change, John Kotter says one of the most important things leaders need to do is create discontent with the status quo. My reading of the church on the conference and the local levels is that we have plenty of discontent, but that discontent is not aligned, it’s not about the same things. Bishop Huie (and at least some clergy and lay leaders) have a primary discontent with the lack of success in winning people to Christ. The bishop’s articulation of that discontent is what makes the project so important to me. But in our churches we have many other discontents: our buildings, our programs, our staffs, our ever-rising apportionments. Here in Pittsburg we’ve done pretty well over the past few years. Attendance and giving is up. People are feeling good about what’s happening. When people are feeling good it’s harder to create discontent. “Didn’t 6 people join last Sunday? Isn’t that god enough?” Well, if we’re trying to help people come to know Jesus, it’s not enough that some saints have moved to town and joined us. That’s a good thing, but not enough.
I’ve served on a few committees in the local school district, so I’ve had many occasions to interact with teachers. Their field is also dealing with calls for increased accountability. In Texas education accountability means doing well on the TAKS. Because the TAKS is the Measure of accountability, they are finding they much teach to it. This “teaching to the test” goes as far as scripting the whole teaching process on some grade levels. And this at the same time more demands are put on teachers to be “highly qualified.” A third thought is that this looks an awful lot like what we’re seeing in the TAC. We need increased accountability. We make that happen by offering more programs and “trainings” to go to. So pastors, who are required to invest years of their lives and tens of thousands of dollars getting their education to be pastors, are now treated as program-using-automata. From what I hear, this is especially true with regard to summer camp. Without including local camp coordinators in the evaluation process, the powers that be have decided that all camps will use a uniform curriculum. If we’re going to get buy in from these leaders (and we say we want more clergy leaders involved in camp) we need to find better ways to draw on their creativity, education, and experience.
At the same time, and I will stop here for now, we need to find ways to multiply the options. If the vision is, “Vibrant growing congregations changing lives and reshaping futures for Jesus Christ,” and the mission if to “make disciples for Jesus Christ for the transformation of the world and to the glory of God,” then surely there are multiple ways to do that. Granted we have discovered many ways of NOT doing that over the past generation. I suspect there are more theological reasons we’ve failed in our mission than our talk admits to, but our practices (and lack thereof) have also contributed to our decline. We have a wide diversity of churches in a wide diversity of settings across the conference. Surely we can develop multiple models for achieving our goals. Perhaps we can rely on something like the Open Source model used now in much software development (you can find some discussion of that phenomenon here). We shall see.
March 4, 2007
Kids & Families
The Wall Street Journal tells us it costs from $279,000 to a million dollars to raise a kid nowadays. Reading their article one sees pretty quickly that they’re talking about the rich folks of America. These are the families that think their little kids need $1000 birthday parties, $800 strollers, private schools, and daily music downloads. I know kids are expensive. I don’t think the government does, though. Or they think that kids get less expensive as they get older. While I have been led to believe finding transportation (and insurance) would raise our expenses, now that our son will be turning 17 this year, this is also the age at which the tax code eliminated child tax credits. Hmmm.
I also read today that the insitution of marriage, while seriously in decline, is claimed most often by the educated and affluent. Here’s the report from the Washington Post:
As marriage with children becomes an exception rather than the norm, social scientists say it is also becoming the self-selected province of the college-educated and the affluent. The working class and the poor, meanwhile, increasingly steer away from marriage, while living together and bearing children out of wedlock.
“The culture is shifting, and marriage has almost become a luxury item, one that only the well educated and well paid are interested in,” said Isabel V. Sawhill, an expert on marriage and a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution.
Anecdotal evidence shows that despair over the possibility of a good marriage is a major cause:
Arguments that marriage can mean stability do not seem to change their attitudes, Smock said, noting that many of them have parents with troubled marriages.
Victoria Miller and Cameron Roach, who have been living together for 18 months, are two such people, and they say they cannot imagine getting married.She is 22 and manages a Burger King in Seattle. He is 24 and works part time testing software in the Seattle suburb of Redmond. Together, they earn less than $20,000 a year and are living with Roach’s father. They cannot afford to live anywhere else.
“Marriage ruins life,” Roach said. “I saw how much my parents fought. I saw how miserable they made each other.”
Miller, who was pressured by her Mormon parents to marry when she was 17 and pregnant, said her short, failed marriage and her parents’ long, failed marriage have convinced her that the institution is often bad for children.
Is marriage worth doing something about? Though I’m not as convinced as some that supporting the institution of marriage is a direct imperative of Christian faith, I think it can be seen as an indirect imperative. Here are a few reason, in no particular order:
My hope is that we Christians can demonstrate to people that marriage is the best way to do family. Clearly we have our work cut out for us.