Seth Godin speaks words of wisdom regarding possession and power.
Will SEPA publish these in their next newsletter?
It is very interesting that the Southeastern Pennsylvania Synod has discovered the blog of Seth Godin. 2×2 has long been a follower of Seth’s.
Seth thinks and Seth acts on his thoughts. He’s a good model for Christian leaders to emulate. He’s responsible for spurring a lot of change in the business world. It is not hard to apply his thinking to the world of church.
It’s actually not that easy to give something substantial away. That’s because accepting it means a change (in lifestyle, responsibility or worldview) of the person receiving it. It’s stressful.
Far more stressful, though, is taking something away. Once a person or an organization comes to believe that, “this is mine,” they erect a worldview around their possession of it. Taking it away instantly becomes personal, an act far greater than living without a privilege or object in the first place would be.
We care more about the change than the object or privilege itself.
This describes the conflict between Redeemer and East Falls to a T. SEPA took something that was not theirs and has ever since been protecting their newfound right. In the corporate world, it is likely the courts would have stopped them. They are not following their own governing rules. But they are protected from court scrutiny by the First Amendment. They can’t be touched except from within the church. Not likely when the strongest church leaders are busy protecting their status. This undefined chain of responsibility—protecting the clergy at the expense of the most vulnerable laity—is causing the ruin of the Roman Catholic clergy system. Lutherans aren’t far behind.
SEPA has adopted their worldview around “rights” not found in their founding documents—treating congregational properties as their own. Early on, they will attempt congregational votes but if the congregation does not vote the right way, they will declare synodical administration and do as they please. This very scenario happened twice in East Falls. Once with Bishop Almquist, who to his credit gave up the ruse a year later. Bishop Burkat picked up where he left off and made the SEPA worldview a personal vendetta.
Seth is one smart cookie.
SEPA, don’t pick and choose from Seth. If you are his disciple, present more of his advice.
By the way, a lot of good advice is in the Bible, too.
One afternoon at Redeemer, we hosted the choir from the public school across the street. The sanctuary was filled, people were standing in the aisles and down the steps. I found a seat in the choir loft behind the choir. It didn’t hurt the sound one bit.
They started an anthem that featured a soloist. She had a hand-held microphone, hardly necessary in the small sanctuary, but it gave her confidence. She was singing with every ounce of her heart and the solo was reaching its climax, building phrase by phrase.
All I could see was the back of the choir. The middle school girls in the back row had a tacit communication going. They were anticipating the soloist’s coming high note. Each of them literally had their fingers crossed, their wrists punctuating every beat as they waited for what they hoped was coming.
And when that singer hit that note, you could feel them rejoicing within the decorum of the choir. But even if they jumped for joy, it wouldn’t have been out of line. The congregation was on its feet applauding in the middle of the anthem.
And so the congregation returns to routine. It’s Wednesday evening. For the last six decades Wednesday evening has been filled with church choir practice.
Every week the choir meets to make sure their Sunday music is as fine as they can make it. Every week the choir pools all its talent and raises voices to God. Even with all that practice, none of the members sitting in the pew expect them to be perfect. They won’t always hit that high note. But they’ll be back working on it next Wednesday night.
What about other skills of church leadership? Where’s the time for practice, honing skills, attempting something a bit beyond the usual, growing together, cheering for one another when a tough job goes great, laughing together when efforts bomb.
Maybe we need to hold Monday—evangelism practice, Tuesday—teaching practice, (Wednesday’s taken!), Thursday—prayer practice, Friday—stewardship practice, Saturday—social ministry practice.
It might be worth considering making these other skills as much a discipline as we expect from our musicians. Practice may not make perfect, but it builds confidence and it opens doors for new ideas. Skill sets grow.
Let’s practice mission. Try some new things. Be intentional enough to work at them weekly. Cheer when we succeed. Back to the drawing board when we don’t. We will experience both failure and success. Failure feeds success. But not if we don’t practice!
A newsletter from the Southeastern Pennsylvania Synod (SEPA) of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA) today begins with a quote from futuristic thinker, Seth Godin.
There is the mistake of overdoing the defense of the status quo, the error of investing too much time and energy in keeping things as they are.
And then there is the mistake made while inventing the future, the error of small experiments gone bad.
We are almost never hurt by the second kind of mistake and yet we persist in making the first kind, again and again.”
Words of wisdom. Except that SEPA has shown no inclination to follow them. Their decisions tend to be status quo-oriented at best—and remarkably retro overall.
Redeemer’s Ambassadors have visited 54 churches and we see the same ministry plan with few variations in most of them.
SEPA’s vision:
You will have a congregation led by a pastor which we will choose for you—but we will pretend it is your call —because that’s the church way.
You can worship any way you like, but if you aren’t celebrating communion weekly, you are just not with it.
Accepted worship innovations include drums and an audio-visual screen.
Your budget will maintain your building and pay for a pastor, organist, choir director, sexton and church secretary. If money allows, your next hires will be a youth or visitation pastor. That’s the church way. Employing clergy is your major missional purpose.
Your mission efforts will coordinate with our mission office (keeping us employed as well). Otherwise, any success will not count and your ministry will be judged as uncooperative
Your ministry will be supported by offerings from a dwindling number of supporters in a volatile economy. That’s the church way. Go ahead. Keep trying. We’ll wait a reasonable amount of time before we celebrate your failure. Pastoral help? Sorry, no one is available.
When at last our prediction of your poor ministry potential comes true, we will make sure any remaining assets benefit synod.
Redeemer’s members, most of whom are entrepreneurial in their private lives, determined that we had to have a different kind of ministry. We had worked with Synod’s plans for a decade. Some showed promise, but SEPA’s support for their own proposed ministry plans was self-serving and ephemeral. The interim pastor we agreed to call for 18 months was recalled by Bishop Almquist after three months. He was needed in Bucks County. The covenant we signed with Epiphany was broken with the support (and to the benefit) of SEPA.
Redeemer’s vision:
Relying on offerings will guarantee failure. Providing pastoral needs as a priority will deplete resources with no measurable benefit.
Serve the community with profit center ministries.
Use the educational building to operate a community day school (with religious instruction) which might also reach the neighboring public school. Projected revenue $6000 per month.
Invest the skills of members in ministry that would serve the immigrant community while generating income. Projected revenue $10,000 per month (anticipated to grow with experience).
Experiment with social media, sharing ideas and potentially creating an income stream. Projected revenue within two years ($1000 per month with much more potential).
So Redeemer set about reinventing its ministry. Redeemer presented a detailed plan to Bishop Burkat who never reviewed it with us before (or after) announcing her plans to close our church. No questions, no answers, no complaints, no discussion, no congregational vote — just a declaration of closure. SEPA had a six-figure deficit clouding its vision. Redeemer, on the other hand, was living within its means.
Redeemer was willing to take calculated risks with its own resources for the benefit of its own ministry. Redeemer asked nothing of SEPA except their approval of the pastor we hoped to work with and who was entirely qualified and agreeable to the plan. He disappeared after a private meeting with Bishop Burkat. He resurfaced with an interim call to good old Bucks County.
While reinventing our future, we were willing to make mistakes along the way and planned for careful monitoring to maximize success. We set about our new ministry by rallying the support of members, involving them in the planning and shaping of their own ministry.
Outsiders, with no interest in our assets, have commented that we were doing a pretty good job. (Some of them were Lutheran!)
But status quo SEPA, facing its own murky future, decided that they had better plans for Redeemer’s assets. And so there has been no SEPA-sponsored ministry in East Falls in four years—Redeemer’s assets serving no ministry purpose. A legacy of distrust growing daily.
Meanwhile, Redeemer continues as much of its ministry as we can, under hateful conditions, while SEPA uses our resources to sue us.
If only SEPA had come across Seth’s words of wisdom before they fouled the baptismal waters in East Falls.
Looking for Success in the Wrong Places
As it struggles, the Church tends to misidentify success. They look at the largest dozen or so churches that attract larger numbers. They can still afford a few pastors and a staff. Careful analysis will show that the larger churches are also struggling. It just isn’t as noticeable. So their “success” is emulated.
We are emulating failure.
The Small Churches and Laity Are Pivotal to Change
Small churches are keenly aware that complacency endangers ministry. Most small churches have strong lay leadership. Synod shows no interest in serving them. It’s a waiting game. A death watch.
If SEPA Synod is sincere in wanting to foster innovation, they must turn to their smallest congregations and work WITH them.
Here’s why the laity are key to innovation.
Lay people do not rely on the approval of hierarchy for their career trajectory. They are more likely to take innovative risks.
Lay people tend to circulate among other churches, religions and denominations — fodder for creative ideas.
Lay people are dedicated to the church and the neighborhoods where they live. They have no plans to move on to a bigger church in seven years.
Lay people provide the funds that support ministry. They care about how THEIR offerings are spent.
Lay people collectively bring the wisdom of many disciplines to the Church. Clergy get similar training in whatever seminary they choose.
Lay people serve with no expectations of reward or credit.
Church has long recognized that it has trouble connecting with the young. For several decades it was taken for granted that our youth would disappear in high school and return with their children in their twenties.
The benign neglect of this demographic is now haunting us.
Young people began putting off parenthood until their 30s or 40s. A two-decade absence was insurmountable. Add to that the demands of the modern family, including high divorce rates and intensive community commitments, and you have an entire population missing from church life.
Time has only widened the demographic.
Our Ambassador visits reveal that the problem demographic is now pre-school through 40.
This should alarm congregations.
We won’t pretend to have all the answers, but we had some of them. Redeemer’s membership, though small, had every age group represented with a good representation of families with young children and a small group of active youth. Our cradle roll was showing particular promise when SEPA Synod decided to vote us closed without our knowledge.
Whatever it was we were doing right, we have learned even more in the last few years.
We took our ministry online. 2x2virtualchurch.com is the voice of Redeemer, East Falls. We are about to celebrate the second anniversary of our launch.
We are pioneers in social media ministry and we have attracted attention from church leaders all over the world.
As of this month, we average more than 2000 readers per month. This doesn’t count readers who subscribe by email, Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter. This adds another 200 daily readers.
These social media channels are valuable in growing our ministry. They help us identify our readers.
Surprise! Most of our readers fit the very demographic missing in bricks and mortar churches. Our subscribers tend to be in their 20s and 30s. They are from any number of ethnic backgrounds. They tend to be adventurous in lifestyle and involved in making spiritual connections online. Many of them blog on spiritual subjects.
They are timid to comment online but tend to write to us by email.
Another demographic is beginning to emerge. From time to time (we wish more often) we publish resources we hope are helpful to other small congregations. Some of them are from our archives of things we used in our own worship.
Our church was unique in that most of our members spoke English as a third language and learned music by ear, not by reading from hymnals. Our early attempt to use published resources flopped. We started writing our own resources that could be performed simply and without expensive professional leadership.
Last year, we posted an Easter/Holy Week play that Redeemer produced and performed for the community in 2008. It sat there all year getting little attention.
At Christmastime 2012, readers started to find it. It has been downloaded 700 times in the last month.
Our Adult Object Lessons, based on the Common Lectionary and published weekly, are also attracting a following and are beginning to engage readers.
Will our ministry ever be seen as worthy to the Southeastern Pennsylvania Synod who claimed our assets with the unsupported rationale that we were incapable of fulfilling our “missional” purpose?
They are unlikely to budge.
Meanwhile, Redeemer will keep moving! We think the survival of the church in the next 100 years depends on learning the skills we are pioneering today. We’ll be glad to share our adventure.
Mystery writers follow an old adage. If there is a gun hanging on the wall in Act 1, shots had better be fired by the end of Act 3.
Today’s objects are a small glass of water and wine.
We are now in Act 1 of Jesus’ ministry. Jesus has already left home, been baptized, and collected his disciples. They travel to Cana for a wedding—major entertainment in those days, typically lasting a week.
The stage in John’s Gospel is set with two things. Water and Wine.
Water has already played a role in this mystery. Jesus was baptized. Dramatic anticipation.
Wine is the gun hanging on the wall, or in this case crowding the edges of the stage in the form of six huge wine bottles.
But we are not yet finished with water!
John writes about two people whose lives were very much interwoven with his own. He was an invited guest at this wedding. Yet he tells this story from a distance.
There by Jesus’ side is his mother, unnamed by John, who was charged at the foot of the cross with her care and well-being.
Jesus’ mother prods her son. Now is the time, she encourages. Your special talents are needed now.
Jesus, like many sons coming of age, resists. What do you know, woman? My hour has not yet come? Suspense!
The common humanity of this situation is in contrast to the sign that is about to happen. Mary ignores her son and takes control. She puts Jesus in a position where he must perform. This mother will have her way.
The Spirit is reentering the story. We heard about the Spirit last week. It’s what made Jesus’ baptism different from all the baptisms gone before.
And so the water, which has come to mean so much in the story of Jesus, once again takes center stage. It is to become wine—extraordinary wine.
It’s still Act 1. Wine will continue to play a role as the plot unfolds. Wait ’til Act 3 for the gun to go off!
Our pastor is admittedly old school. (He isn’t official but we love him anyway.) He carries his Bible with him always. I’ve always admired that about him. It is well-worn (falling apart to be honest). He lovingly covers it in paper as we used to have to cover our school texts in grade school. Would that our Bibles were as in danger of wear and tear as our school primers!
The only Bible I carry with me is on my smart phone. The internet has made Bible-toting so unnecessary that I’ll never feel guilty. I read a lot more of Scripture since it is accessible with the size of type adjustable and with any number of translations available at the click of the mouse. Just Google a key word and the passage you are trying to remember pops up. How spoiled can we Christians get?
To think of the time I wasted memorizing the books of the Bible! At least I got a prize for my effort. While it still provides an understanding of the structure of the Bible, it is no longer necessary for easy reference. It’s almost like the Dewey Decimal System. Remember that?
How I remember the arguments among my elders when I was a child! Which was the real Bible, the true Word of God? King James or Revised Standard? My old Sunday School teachers would suffer apoplexy at the number of versions available today!
And so, I was reading some suggested passages this morning, when I noticed the requisite banner ads. Bibles were for sale.
How would monetizing Scripture fly with the people who shaped my faith? But then that’s nothing new. Each of those translations is copyrighted and you can be sure that new translations will pop up when the copyrights expire. Yes, someone on earth will always claim ownership of those wonderful words of love!
One ad caught my eye.
The Message Remix Solo New Testament Brown Imitation Leather Slightly Imperfect
Six dollars were knocked off the list price.
Does “imitation leather” cheapen the Word?
Slightly Imperfect. Are they referring to the cover—or the translation—or the Bible itself? Is that sacrilege?
Back to the adage(s). You can’t tell a book by its cover. The proof of the pudding is in the reading—and the living.
We celebrated Epiphany last week. The season of revelation of Christ as Messiah is short this year.
Just four weeks from now we will embark upon the season of Lent.
In our analytics of our website, we noticed that beginning on Christmas Day, our readers were searching for resources for Easter. So we are going to try to provide some resources to help with Easter’s prelude—that mixed-up season of Lent.
Lent is confusing. It is the season of repentance. Didn’t we just go through this a few weeks ago in Advent?
It is also a season of mixed messages. Centuries of tradition have become muddled with modern sensibilities.
Ash Wednesday has always been a puzzle. We routinely read the passage from Matthew which tells us repeatedly to NOT make a show of our repentance and NOT distort our appearance. Then we defy the gospel we have just read and make a show of our repentance and distort our appearance.
Then some well-intentioned theologian came up with the concept of “burying or sealing the Alleluias”—banning the utterance of the traditional word of praise during the season of Lent. This flies in the face of the fact that Lent is structured to observe 40 days of repentance (modeled from Christ’s 40 days in the wilderness) and those 40 days EXCLUDE Sundays. There are NO Sundays in Lent. Every Sunday is reserved for a celebration of Easter. Alleluia!
We never sealed the Alleluias at Redeemer. The custom was unknown to us until we shared a pastor with a neighboring congregation. Their pastor surprised us when he announced during the service that the Alleluias were now sealed.
Our worship service for the next Sunday had already been planned and it was to feature an adaptation of Leonard Cohen’s mournful song Hallelujah—which repeats the Hebrew version of Alleluia countless times in a way entirely appropriate for Lent. (Rules tend to hamper creativity!)
Except for the fact that this was preplanned it would have given the impression that we were defying our pastor, which was in no way our intent. We tabled our plans for a year.
The pastor apologized for making the assumption that this was our custom. No conflict resulted.
But every year since, we have used this song, which retells the story of Christ’s temptation. Here’s a link.
Jesus never used the word church. He didn’t tell his disciples to build churches. The idea of church just happened. For sure, the Spirit was involved.
The earliest church makers had a sense of power. They were fighting the establishment, undaunted by law or convention. They were doing a good thing, a revolutionary thing. They were changing the world. They had a very real sense that God was leading them.
But that was the beginning. It wasn’t long before the sense of power became centralized and the focus shifted. What’s in it for us?
This has been a temptation all along for both those who wield power and those who submit to power.
In the Church’s heyday, people flocked to church for many reasons in addition to and sometimes instead of faith.
Social acceptance
Guidance
Comfort and well-being
A carefully fostered sense of guilt
Business connections
Perceived access to God
Access to the power-makers of the day
Some of these factors are still in play, but there is a new social dynamic that the Church is not recognizing.
The emerging citizens of the world have a new sense of personal power.
They have ready access to information. Have you had dinner with a 20-year-old lately? Make a claim and he or she will pull out a cell phone and fact-check you on the spot!
They don’t need the church for social networking.
Their secular educations have shielded them from a sense of inadequacy and guilt.
Books on any topic, including self-help books, can be streamed into the palms of their hands with one click. They can figure out how to accomplish complex goals very quickly.
They recognize that the Church has lost influence in the modern world. They won’t spend time wishing it weren’t so. They will live with reality.
There is less need for access to power-makers or power-holders or power-brokers because the new generations know deep in their bones that they have power. Every pimple-faced kid carries as much power in his or her jeans pocket as Napoleon.
One newscaster noted that an individual today has at his or her fingertips as many resources as an entire television network twenty years ago.
The Church tends to read the new sense of power as lack of respect. Some of this may be true. In many cases Church abuses have justified a fall from grace. But generally, the lack of respect is an illusion.
What they are sensing is not lack of passive respect. It’s a growing sense of power in the pews.
What does this say to the church?
Older people may go to church out of habit or for personal satisfaction or devotion.
Young people, if they are to connect with the church, want to use their power. They know they have it. There is no point in pretending it does not exist. They want to make a difference.
As power shifts, the sense of entitlement grows among those in the Church who are accustomed to being viewed as powerful.
They are destined to lose their grip.
This realization may come hard.
The people the Church needs to reach (for its own sake if not for the sake of others) want to be part of activities that make a real difference. Not patchwork, feel-good social fixes. Their absence from church is impatience.
For the first time, perhaps, in the history of the world they really have power and they know it.
The Church must harness the “can do” spirit. Let go of the ecclesiastic reins. Trust in a new plan.
Let the Holy Spirit into the mix and stand back! Be prepared to say, WOW!
Baptism was not unique to John the Baptist or to Jesus. Ritual cleansing was part of other beliefs in ancient Mesopotamia. John’s following were engaging in a familiar custom — just by different and rather unusual leader.
Then came Jesus. When John baptized Jesus, God added something new to an old custom. He sent his Spirit. Adding Spirit made an old custom new to the point that today baptism is associated with Christians.
Christians are baptized with both the water and the spirit.
Here’s one idea for how you might illustrate this to your congregation.
You might set a kettle to boil while you talk to your congregation this week. You could do this with a whistling kettle right in front of people or you could have a hot plate off to the side with a the kettle rigged to go off just about the time you are making a point about water.
Water is so common. There is no life without it. We drink it, wash with it, cook with, and even have fun with it.
Water at rest is still and peaceful.
Water at rest can also become stagnant and foul.
Water in motion cleanses itself. Its power can grind grain and feed a village. It can turn turbines and generate still more power. It can destroy what man cleverly builds and admires.
Water combined with spirit is unstoppable. And that’s what makes baptism in Christ so different.
Water and the Spirit grab our attention. (And that’s about when the whistle should go off!)
2×2 is nearing its second anniversary from the date of launch (February 2, 2011).
Can a small church blog make an impact?
Church blogs are a bit different from other forms of social media where the aim is often engagement. People don’t tend to engage in public forums in matters of faith. If we measured our impact by comments and likes, we’d be tempted to say no. Very little impact. Just over 100 comments in two years.
2×2 has learned that people don’t tend to respond ONLINE. We get many emails from readers that are not part of the public discussion. And that’s OK. We have not followed the engagement star.
Our first year was spent learning. 2012 was the year that the launch actually took hold. We started posting daily in mid-summer of 2011. It wasn’t until the end of 2011 that we saw any encouraging statistics. 2012, however, was a year of steady growth that is beginning to display exponential potential.
Redeemer, through 2×2, now reaches more people each week with the message of Christ than do the largest congregations in the Southeastern Pennsylvania Synod (who claims we are too small to fulfill our missional purpose).
What Draws Readers to a Church Blog?
It is not pictures of your sanctuary and activities or messages from your pastor—all the standard stuff on most church websites.
Readers (seekers) are drawn by helpful content.
Our goal for 2012 is to develop more helpful content.
Last Easter we posted a play that Redeemer had created and performed in 2008, when we still had a sanctuary in which to practice our faith. Beginning on Christmas Day 2012, this play, offered for free to our readers, has drawn about 50 readers and downloads per day.
Our series on object lessons, designed for adult listeners but applicable to children as well, also draws regular weekly readers. One reader wrote a note of thanks last week. They mentioned that they work with Bhutanese refugees.
Our third and fourth biggest draws are commentary on any number of church-related issues and our series on using social media in the church (this was our biggest draw early last year but that is shifting).
We now have more than 2000 new readers each month and about 150 who subscribe through Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. Our followers tend to be young people (20s and 30s—the very demographic the organized church has trouble reaching). They represent many ethnic backgrounds. In any given hour, an average of 20 people read our site. Most visit more than the home page.
We’ve written before about the network of small mission churches that correspond with us regularly. This continues to grow.
There are many people of faith working in isolation and under hostile conditions in the world. Finding support for their efforts within the organized church is expensive and time-consuming. It can take years to be recognized as legitimate mission within denominational standards. Meanwhile, orphans, widows and needy cope, meeting in houses and open-air pavilions and along the banks of rivers, caring little about denominational structure—relying on faith and the bonds they forge on their own.
Their needs are simple. They want Bibles and friendship. They don’t want to walk their faith journeys alone. They really don’t care about denominational labels.
Our little church blog is making a difference in these places. Yours could, too.
Join Bishop Ruby Kinisa as she visits small churches "under cover" to learn what people would never share if they knew they were talking to their bishop.
Undercover Bishop will always be available in PDF form on 2x2virtualchurch.com for FREE.
Print or Kindle copies are available on Amazon.com.
For bulk copies, please contact 2x2: creation@dca.net.
Contact Info
You can reach
Judy Gotwald,
the moderator of 2x2,
at
creation@dca.net
or 215 605 8774
Redeemer’s Prayer
We were all once strangers, the weakest, the outcasts, until someone came to our defense, included us, empowered us, reconciled us (1 Cor. 2; Eph. 2).
2×2 Sections
Where in the World is 2×2?
On Isaiah 30:15b
Be calm. Wait. Wait. Commit your cause to God. He will make it succeed. Look for Him a little at a time. Wait. Wait. But since this waiting seems long to the flesh and appears like death, the flesh always wavers. But keep faith. Patience will overcome wickedness.
—Martin Luther
