Reverse Evangelism: How to Shrink Your Numbers
2×2 has written before about math in the church. Often when church leaders with a flair for management put pencil to paper they end up recommending the merger or consolidation of faith communities.
Looks good on paper. It might make sense on the map. But the equation is faulty.
We’ve experienced the failure to understand Church math before in East Falls. We’re seeing it again. This time our Roman Catholic neighbors are the victims of Church managers wanting what is best for the bottom line —their bottom line— rather than the congregational mission.
It is textbook church math, where 1 + 1 can equal 0.
The proud neighborhood school of St. Bridget’s had fairly steady enrollment for the last six years, dipping slightly to 198, a loss of only 26 students in the midst of a terrible recession. Not bad!
Two or three miles away, Manayunk’s Regional School—already the product of several closed churches or church schools—had experienced a much sharper decline during the same period (about 50%) — 213 down from 419.
So the Roman Catholic Blue Ribbon Commission looked at the map and the numbers. Here’s what they came up with. Pick a new name for the Manayunk school (where consolidation is already failing) so that there is no heritage or loyalty. (Where has Redeemer encountered that logic?).
Which direction should the schools merge? Real estate is hot in East Falls. There are likely more lucrative options with that property in a collegiate neighborhood. Decision: Send the East Falls kids to the crowded streets of Manayunk.
The magic number to make the new St. Blaise viable was 255. Manayunk already had 213. They needed — a mere 42 willing Fallser children.
Except it doesn’t work like that with families and their passion for their children’s education, their faith and their loyalty to their neighborhoods and traditions.
Despite desperate pleas from parish priests in Manayunk and East Falls, the math wasn’t working. In this case, 213 + 198 = 155. Neither school community liked the idea. They fell short of the minimum by 100 children. Nearly all the families in both neighborhoods decided that some unknown solution was superior than the one dictated to them by the Church. There will be no St. Blaise. No Holy Child. No St. Bridget. No Saint Lucy, Saint Mary the Assumption, Saint John the Baptist or St. Josaphat. The last four disappeared in previous downsizing.
Down. Down. Down. More damage is likely as the churches suffer from the loss of community and tradition which the schools created and fostered.
And still church leaders turn first to closing churches and merging churches — as if fiscal sense makes evangelical sense.
It doesn’t.