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Ethics and Morals in the Emerging Church

New Rules for Winning in the New Church

TV’s top shrink has written a new book.

I don’t want to hype it. He does a pretty good job of that himself.

It’s the subtitle that interests me. New Rules for Winning in the Real World

When talking about his book Dr. Phillip McGraw says (repeatedly) that the world has changed. We can’t approach people or situations with the same level of trust we might have had 30 years ago.

Watch out for people who take advantage of your trust.

We are told we can no longer give people the benefit of the doubt. The advice: Observe. Ask questions. Follow your instincts. Be ever alert to motives and behaviors.

Sad to say, but this is good advice for trusting Christians, too.

Today’s Church is not like the Church many of us grew up in.

We now know that we cannot automatically trust church leaders to behave in godly ways. Headlines for the last decade have shown us that the people we trust, the people we ask our children to trust, are often unworthy. Problems are no longer rare and isolated. We know that criminal behavior has been widespread and enduring, existing under the protected status of “church.” The guilt goes beyond the parish. It reaches into the highest offices.

It is a new world!

Two factors make his advice particularly applicable to religion.

  1. The Church today exists in a state of distress. Mainline membership and attendance are plummeting along with offerings. At the current rate of decline, some denominations will disappear within 40 years. The church is not attracting the best and brightest to careers of service. Seminaries are struggling to find students. Candidates are often second career or interested in part-time ministry only—at their convenience more than at God’s call. The sense of sacrifice and dedication that once characterized candidates for ministry is increasingly rare. The future of church leadership is shaky.
  2. The Church is largely immune from the law. Clergy can operate knowing that there is low likelihood of question or challenge. Many, many people will give clergy the benefit of the doubt and look with suspicion on anyone who makes any challenge.

In the free world, the church is as close as you get to absolute power. We know the saying about absolute power. It corrupts absolutely.

As the mainline church faces continued economic challenges there are greater temptations. Church leaders crave power. The power that wealth gave them is disappearing along with status as our culture grows more and more secular. They are lording power over fewer and fewer people. 

Rules start to be broken. Polity is ignored.

Constitutions are tweaked to increase power.

These actions are begging for challenge, but the Church bets that in most cases they will achieve their objectives without question.

When at last leaders are challenged, they MUST win.

All the tenets of faith are quickly forgotten. 

Let’s look at what is happening today in the Anglican Church in Canada. It begins with a familiar story—a land and asset grab. In this case the bishop takes the dispute further.

Five years have passed since this 2008 land grab. Bishop Michael Bird of the Niagara region is resurrecting the conflict by suing a lay person who wrote about church leaders on a satirical blog. The stories we’ve read are just silly, obvious farces.

Bishops expect adulation. They can’t take criticism. They have lost the ability to laugh at themselves.

And so in Canada, the bishop uses his protected status to attack a 66-year-old man, a loyal church member who undoubtedly donated a great deal to his church over the years. The bishop claims that the blog cost him $400,000 in damages. We can only wonder what kind of deficit his regional body might be carrying. We know here in Philadelphia that SEPA’s interest in Redeemer’s assets always came when SEPA faced severe budget problems.

When bishops have tantrums, they tend to be costly, and the Church or its members pay the bill.

The Canadian news has many similarities to Redeemer’s and other land grabs in ELCA synods. The common threads:

  • No attempt to work with the congregation or lay leaders.
  • No dialog, just the strong arm of the Church, wielding what is left of waning power. 
  • Legal actions against lay members with clergy running for the hills.
  • Public presentations that talk about “discernment,” “dialog,” and ridiculous but righteous-sounding allusions to “death and resurrection.” They represent that taking what does not belong to them is God’s work! That’s what they are doing, and the ELCA’s tagline is “God’s Work. Our hands.”

elca mock logo

The Church today is desperate.

New rules are needed. 

  • Don’t trust that church leaders are wise just because they are elected to office. 
  • Don’t assume that church leaders are immune from temptation.
  • Don’t assume that church leaders will practice what they preach.
  • Don’t assume that somebody else will speak up before you, if there is really something wrong going on. Years went by before the Roman Catholic Church took action against 27 priests for misconduct.
  • Do assume that things will get very bad indeed before the whole church recognizes there is any problem at all.

As it is, it’s open season on lay people. The more knowledgable, dedicated and invested in church, the more vulnerable we are.

The only safe Christians are those who sit quietly in the pews (or in the chancel).

And we wonder why churches are empty on Sunday morning. 

31 May 2013

Memorial Day Message: It all began with a land grab!

Anglican Bishop Sues Vocal Lay Member

Today is Memorial Day. We honor the many who have fought for the freedoms we have today. It’s a good day to revisit what we in the Church are doing with our freedoms.

A significant story involving the Church comes to our attention this month from Canada.

It all began with a land grab.

Now it’s a court battle pitting a bishop and a denomination’s best legal minds against a vocal layman.

Should we, residents of the Land of the Free, be concerned?

There are significant similarities that ELCA Lutherans should note. Here’s an excerpt from the Canadian story.

The ultra-liberal Anglican Bishop of Niagara, the Rt. Rev. Michael Bird has sued an orthodox Anglican blogger, a layman, alleging that he was libeled 31 times on Anglican Samizdat, a blog by David Jenkins that presents facts and pokes satirical fun at liberal Anglican leaders who depart from “the faith once for all delivered to the saints.”

The Bishop of Niagara was one of his targets.

The claim seeks:

  • $400,000 in damages plus court and legal costs.
  • An interim and permanent injunction to shut down Anglican Samizdat.
  • An interim and permanent injunction prohibiting Jenkins from publishing further comments about Michael Bird.

Link to full story.

Isn’t it a bit funny that someone labeled as an “ultra-liberal” would attack free speech—even if delivered with a Canadian accent. 

Canada has its own Bill of Rights, a Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

On this side of the Niagara, the same Amendment to the U.S. Constitution that protects freedom of religion also protects freedom of speech.

The root problem is church leaders thinking so much of themselves that they shield themselves with the first amendment as they take actions that in a secular venue could be challenged in the courts—if not considered criminal.

The ruling in the SEPA-Redeemer case was made without ever hearing the case — even after five years of courtroom drama. The court determined that the issues were not within the jurisdiction of the courts under separation of church and state. However, a minority opinion concludes that if the law were to be applied, Redeemer’s arguments have significant merit. Two judges since have indicated that they, too, consider the dissenting opinion to have value.

Church leaders count on loyal obedience of followers who also benefit from their dubious actions. The same Synod Assembly that gave the bishop permission to take Redeemer’s property—defying their own governing documents—approved a healthy six-figure deficit. The Church can do anything they want. They are the Church.

Dissent is part of Lutheran heritage. How have Lutherans become so weak?

Church leaders work hard on their presentation. They hold the future of the clergy in their hands and can rely on their support. They also control all venues for discussion and media.

At least they did until the term “blog” became known.

Even now, Church leaders tell people how hard they work with congregations—how they use a rigorous process of dialog and discernment. They are very sure that everyone will believe them because they are Church leaders—even when there is no mutual discernment, dialog or any effort whatsoever to work together. No one asks for facts or evidence. Lay people who cite statistics and facts must be wrong because they are lay people. Church leaders can just repeat the same unsupported rhetoric and they are applauded. Bishops make pronouncements. Loyal followers stand back, out of the line of fire, and offer support—or more likely, say nothing whatsoever. This type of behavior prompted the Reformation 500 years ago. And here we are again.

Christians are not obligated to follow leaders simply because they are elected. Rank and file Christians are obligated to speak out when they see abuses and wrong actions and teachings. This is part of the supreme document of our faith—The Bible, sometimes called The Word of God.

In a free society that protects religion, it is imperative that religious followers monitor the actions of leaders. If they don’t they are at risk of being a cult.

Sadly, courts are not equipped to see beyond the rhetoric of religious leaders and probe the causes of their actions. Consequently any layperson who follows duty and conscience risks considerable loss, including:

  • heritage.
  • status within the faith community.
  • their property and assets (personal as well as communal).
  • their faith.
  • friends and family.
  • the fruits of years of volunteer service.
  • the benefits of years of monetary support.
  • and now, at least in Canada, all possessions, including the life savings intended to support you in old age. Mr. Jenkins is 65 years old. 

We could simply say “shame on the Canadian church leaders,” but we know how close this scenario is to what has been happening in East Falls with attacks on the individual members of Redeemer going on long after the objective of grabbing our property was decided. (Yes, right here, where George Washington camped with his freedom fighters on the same stretch of land where the LCA once had its headquarters.)

None of this costly and public conflict is necessary. Church leaders need only treat lay leaders with respect (love one another) and follow the teachings of their faith (do not sue one another, do unto others…). They need to stop coveting the property of member churches. Breaking the covet Commandments leads to breaking several other Commandments and the slow and steady deterioration of the Church’s mission.

Church leaders who encounter criticism or resistance, whether merited or not, have a less costly choice. They can write their own blog and respond to criticism. They can actually have the dialog they tell everyone they are having. Why not try peacemaking?

Using the courts against their members while they cry “separation of church and state” has the potential for a dual payoff. They might be awarded a lot of money while humiliating and intimidating lay people and thereby exerting control over anyone who might follow suit. In the Church today, pursuit of the Almighty Dollar is second only to the pursuit of power.

Mr. Jenkins already took down the offending blog posts.

I’m betting that won’t be enough to satisfy his enemies. Once bishops take an issue public, they have to win. Pride and power take control. Humility, forgiveness, reconciliation — just words for preaching.

Happy Memorial Day! Hurrah for the Bill of Rights and the people who lived and died protecting them!

27 May 2013

Networking and the Modern Church

Will the Church Use the Power of Networking?

One of the joys of being excommunicated from the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America is the freedom to not only think outside the Lutheran box but to explore religion and the concept of church beyond what is expected of the traditional congregation.

Here’s an interesting quote from a prominent blogger in the Jewish community, Rabbi Hayim Herring. He addresses many of the problems the Christian church faces but from a Jewish point of view. Do they have different solutions?

It seems one of the Jewish initiatives is building network-based communities. Here’s a quote from a recent discussion.:

Established organizations are structured as hierarchies. They still have a command and control model, complete with organizational charts that visually portray a chain of command. But networks rest on platforms and platforms abhor hierarchies. They are self-directed and not directed ex machina. They rely on influence and not control, connections and not command.

This observation will benefit Christian community in the new information era.

The Church that will survive in the 21st century will master network-building. Social Media is the turbine for network building.

Network building means reaching out beyond who we already are.

Why think “networks”? Why now?

Because now we can. Now we have the tools to reach people like never before. Now we can think beyond our traditional membership base (which is waning). We can easily look beyond family, friends, and immediate neighbors. Now we can go directly to the people in society who can help us or whom we feel we can help without the gatekeeping of hierarchy or the institutionalizing of our efforts.

 Go into all the world and preach the gospel to all people.

Hierarchical thinking may have once facilitated the goals of Christianity. (It is debatable.) It may now be a handicap—an expensive handicap. Networks are not created by command but by nurture. We will not build networks effectively if we are looking over our shoulders for hierarchical approval.

Hierarchical thinking in today’s world will hinder the spread of the Gospel. As the self-proclaimed “Greatest Generation” fades, the new and as yet unlabeled generations will see no reason to submit to hierarchical thinking in most realms of life and certainly not in religion.

We, as Church, can spend the next decade trying to preserve the past, or we can start to build the platforms and networks that will keep our religion viable in a spiritually competitive world.

Every dollar spent preserving the past is a mission dollar squandered.

This should not be alarming. It is really what we have all been waiting for—a chance to open dialog with people who are not necessarily like-minded. (Don’t most churches look for people who will fit in and contribute in traditional ways?)

The new evangelist will listen and respond. Hyping the Church’s agenda will not build the networks and platforms. The new evangelical approach will return us to our mission of love.

Are we ready for the new world?

11 May 2013

Has the Culture of Church Changed?

Today, Seth Godin, renowned marketing blogger, quotes an organization he supports. In doing so he is exploring the impact of the mission statement.

Churches, these days, are heavily “into” mission statements.

There is more to mission than writing statements. Seth likes the term “manifesto.” It’s a stronger, more action-oriented term. Your manifesto defines your culture, while your mission statement collects dust. (Click to tweet).

Here’s the manifesto he quotes from an organization called Acumen:

Acumen: It starts by standing with the poor, listening to voices unheard, and recognizing potential where others see despair.

It demands investing as a means, not an end, daring to go where markets have failed and aid has fallen short. It makes capital work for us, not control us.

It thrives on moral imagination: the humility to see the world as it is and the audacity to imagine the world as it could be. It’s having the ambition to learn at the edge, the wisdom to admit failure, and the courage to start again.

It requires patience and kindness, resilience and grit: a hard-edged hope. It’s leadership that rejects complacency, breaks through bureaucracy, and challenges corruption. Doing what’s right, not what’s easy.

Acumen: it’s the radical idea of creating hope in a cynical world. Changing the way the world tackles poverty and building a world based on dignity.

Love the phrase “hard-edged hope.” It describes Redeemer.

The problems Redeemer has faced in the ELCA is that the ELCA has become a complacent church. Congregations seem to be increasingly self-focused. As long as things are fine for them, what problems can there be?

The problem is that this complacency quickly defines our culture.

Our culture is worshiping together in a fairly defined way. It is friendly chatter around coffee before or after worship. It is choosing from a fairly short list of acceptable public charities to support (Habitat for Humanity seems to be the most popular). Some congregations support or operate food pantries and nursery schools. Ladies Groups knit prayer blankets and fix meals. Toys are donated at Christmas. Cookie cutter ministries.

The church that grew from the biblical teachings of Martin Luther was anything but complacent. 

Lutheranism grew from the ability of Christians to question authority and to fashion ministry with scripture as a guide — not pronouncements from hierarchy. The whole structure of the Lutheran Church, which focuses on the congregation is designed so that congregations can look at local possibilities for mission and respond independently, without carrying the weight of bureaucracy.

The ELCA uses the word “interdependent” to define this structure. The intent is that each level of church might draw strength from one another. Our regional body has reinterpreted this to mean that they are authorities unto themselves. No one can question them. There is no structure above them to check their power. The churches below them are supposed to do that — but that has proven to be ineffective at best and risky at worst.

The result in our region is SEPA Synod—a collection of 160 congregations that instead of drawing strength from one another, tends to exist with each member church living in its own little world. The way to avoid challenge is to never stray from conventional ministry. Just keep doing the same thing as the world around us slips into history.

Redeemer, on the other hand, had fashioned a ministry around new challenges. This was made all the easier by SEPA’s refusal to provide pastoral leadership. Our priority was not in maintaining good relations with leadership. It was in exploring ministry possibilities. We continue to do so.

Redeemer’s manifesto addressed many of the same points as those quoted above. It was the mission plan we created in 2007.

We were fashioning multi-cultural ministry in a new way. Diverse cultures were joining together in ministry, worshiping  and serving together. We weren’t just sharing a building.

We were investing our resources in this ministry. Our resources. Not SEPA’s resources.

We were recognizing something that the rest of the Church does not want to admit. We cannot serve needy populations when the expectation for every congregation is to support a building and professional staff at a minimum budget of $130,000 before a dime is spent on mission or outreach. This model is creating a church where only the rich and middle class can expect to participate fully. This worked in a culture where everyone attended church and knew what was expected of them. It doesn’t work when you are trying to reach the vast and growing population of unchurched people.

Redeemer was responding to this economic challenge, not by pleading for stewardship. We taught stewardship, but we recognized that it would take decades to develop personal giving. (This was made much more difficult by SEPA raiding our bank account in 1998.)

The only way toward fiscal viability was to develop our own funding streams.

We were unafraid of failure. We learned from it. Our early attempts to reach the diversity of our neighborhood were not particularly successful. Our pastors were not comfortable with multicultural ministry, so evangelism was difficult. Our success came when we were free to find professional leadership who could actually further our mission beyond status quo Sunday worship. It came into full flower when we put outreach leadership into the hands of our immigrant members.

SEPA was so intent on seizing our resources that they never really looked at what was going on in our community. They ignored our success and dwelt on ancient failures.

The past five years have proven that they really don’t care about their congregations and their missions. They certainly don’t care about the people.

Our suggestion for congregations:

Spend more time writing your manifesto and less time on your mission statements. Let’s regain our Lutheran culture!

 

24 Apr 2013

Leading Jewish Temple Consultant Agrees

The Emerging Entrepreneurial Church

Today’s blog post of Rabbi Hayim Herring validates what 2×2 has been writing for a while.

Churches that survive into the coming decades will not rely solely on offerings for income.

The rabbi writes:

Organizations that thrive in the 21st Century will be distinguished by two attributes: entrepreneurship and organizational foresight.

He suggests that the word innovation be replaced with the word “entrepreneurship.”

He notes these subtle but significant differences (the bullets are quotes):

  • Innovation requires creativity but, unlike entrepreneurship, does not address issues like tolerance for risk, organizational agility, improvisational ability and speed.
  • Innovation often comes in bursts after focusing on discrete ideas and issues, while entrepreneurship requires cultivating a certain kind of culture, defined by a set of practices and attitudes that are infused throughout an organization.
  • Innovation implies the creation of something new, while entrepreneurship can mean dramatically improving what is already working with new vision and processes.

This sounds impossible. It is not. Even small churches can follow it.

The problem is that church hierarchies don’t recognize the potential. Armed with an impenetrable sense of entitlement and a tradition that supports it, they measure their congregations by ancient standards. These standards are failing almost everywhere!

The entrepreneurial church is not about making money for money’s sake, but is more about creating revenue streams with ministry projects. More lucrative ministries will provide funds for ministries that will never be self-supporting.

People today hesitate to give offerings, especially when they can’t see their offerings at work. More and more, congregations are begging for offerings just to help them survive — not to help them serve. It’s a losing proposition.

Less committed people of faith are not going to see this as a good investment of their time or tithe. They are more likely to contribute both money and energy to projects when they see them making a difference. They are not seeing this in churches that have budgets that are top-heavy in overhead.

There are many opportunities that are entirely in keeping with the mission of the Church.

One of Redeemer’s strengths is the ability to recognize opportunity.

There would be no conflict between Redeemer, East Falls, and the Southeastern Pennsylvania Synod of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, if Redeemer had been nurtured and granted the freedom their constitution gives them to shape and fund their ministry in less traditional ways. Are we not regularly implored to “transform”?

  • Our Christian Day School, which was ready to open as a Christian School for the first time in 25 years, would be providing upwards of $6000 per month for ministry—and creating a Christian witness in a neighborhood which is losing its Christian schools.
  • Our aid to immigrant families would be producing $100,000 per year. Redeemer had a plan in place that would help immigrant first-time home buyers. The expertise of our members would ease the path to home ownership and the congregation would gain some money in the real estate transaction, which would then go to help another immigrant family.
  • Our website would generate another few thousand per month for ministry. The website reaches out to small churches all over the world.

More than enough resources for a neighborhood ministry.

This is no different from religious publishing houses making their living publishing books or religious social service agencies tapping into government revenue streams. And it doesn’t camouflage mission to meet government requirements.

Unfortunately, our regional body has no vision for its small churches. They are waiting for them to die. 

11 Apr 2013

The Resilience of Small Congregations

shepherdlrSmall Church Resilience: A Squandered Asset

Today’s Alban Institute blog post addresses church resilience. It includes the thoughts of Judith Jordan who describes resilience as not so much an “intrinsic toughness” but more as an ongoing process of nurturing and fostering of relationships. 

All churches can be resilient. We notice resilience more when the stakes are higher—but both large and small churches can rebound. They can redefine their missions. They can survive.

Resilience grows from love.

That’s what the Church is supposed to be good at. Wealth gets in the way.

The Church at every level is challenged today. Almost all church activity is funded by the contributions of individuals. That quarter that clinks in the offering tray must fund the local church, a regional body, the national church and all church agencies.

It is getting harder for church entities more distant from the members’ pockets to survive. Power is their only tool.

In the Lutheran Church with its interdependent structure, there is very little power assigned to church hierarchy. They are supposed to exist as servants of the congregations. But the economy has hit them hard. They crave more direct access to the wealth of congregations.

They start to stretch their powers, tweaking their constitutions a little here, a little there, until they are wielding powers that were never bestowed upon them in their founding documents.

The sense of mission begins to fade. It becomes replaced with pageantry. Pageantry makes things look better—for a while.

The mission of most churches today is funding their budget.

In this atmosphere it is harder to see resilience. The message of love is lost.

Love breaks down barriers. It opens hearts.

Resilience is hindered in a culture of criticism and judgment. That’s what many congregations experience within the structured church. The list of judgments against small congregations can be long and fabricated. The claims are difficult to prove, but few care as long as they are not personally affected.

  • Lay leaders are too strong.
  • People are resistant to change.
  • People are living in the past.
  • People are unwelcoming.
  • People can’t support clergy.
  • People can’t accept new ideas.

Says who? The people who want to claim church assets.

Funny, the faulty lay people who are “destroying their churches” with their backward thinking are thriving in the secular world which changes more frequently and at a faster rate.

Much of the criticism of congregations reflects denominational needs.

Running a denomination is expensive.  Offices are expensive. Staffing an office is expensive. Keeping up illusions is expensive. The ONLY source of income for denominations is congregational members.

The poor, the needy, the sick, the young and old dependents, the infirm or visionaries need not apply.

Constitutionally, in the ELCA, no congregation is required to give to the denomination. Withholding support for a denomination may be the only voice a congregation has.

But denominations can ignore the voice and interpret the lack of support as the congregation’s failure—never its own.

It should be a huge red flag within a denomination when criticism focuses on lay people to the point of naming them and suing them. Any denomination that puts limitations on the laity’s ability to serve denies the example of Christ, who nurtured a ragtag group of peasants and spent most of his time with the needy.

You don’t hear limiting words from lips of Christ. All that comes later. It echoes through the centuries and may be the undoing of the mainline church.

Both clergy and lay leaders are all capable of leading congregations in renewal. But if their view of a congregation is only a measure of dollar signs for the denomination, then there is real trouble.

Any denomination that seeks to limit any individual’s talents is doing a disservice to their message.

God is love.

01 Apr 2013

A Lesson in Transparency in Church Unfolds in Rome

Behind the Vatican’s Locked Doors  

Is God Working in Secret?

What is going on in Rome right now might be of interest only to our Roman Catholic neighbors. But when one denomination boldly claims to be the one and only true church, they invite the attention of the rest of us neo-Gentiles.

Protestant leaders tend to emulate the Roman Catholics, often forgetting the reasons we separated 500 years ago. Some of the reasons have disappeared. Other have not. It’s probably envy for the attention the media gives to the pope.

Truth be told, Protestants have their own messes to clean up today—lots of them, in fact. We don’t really need to be watching so closely.

Nevertheless, beginning this week, all eyes will be on Rome. The process promises to take us close to Holy Week. Guess how much attention Protestant churches will get from the media this Easter season.

We don’t know how things will turn out. One learned church authority described the process and closed his statement saying, “In the end, it’s God’s choice.”

Really? God needs the help of 115 old men, each with considerable self-interest, to name his new Saul or Peter?

Why is the process so secret? Tradition is not a good enough reason anymore. Tradition has led to horrific abuses. Furthermore, tradition has condoned the abuses and made a habit of victimizing any voice of dissent. Again, Protestants share in these atrocities. For once, they can be glad the media concentrates on the Roman church.

Can we, perhaps, learn and adapt traditions so they make sense?

Secrecy in choosing leaders reveals distrust in any human ability beyond the chosen elite. It leads the Church down the road of management not leadership. Managers tend to preserve what they have as they seek to maintain and expand the same power structure. The privileged will remain privileged. Outsiders will fight for a voice.

Leaders, on the other hand, assess the existing resources and add dreams—their own and those of others. This is what the Church today — Roman and Protestant — needs badly.

Leadership has been with us always. In recent years, sparked by the Renaissance, the Reformation and the rise of Democracy, the concepts of leadership have been studied. Much of this research and analysis emerged during the last century but it continues as the world is redefined by digital communication. Old principles will be applied in new ways.

  • We know now that heredity does not ensure good leadership.
  • We know that occasionally the best leaders come from outside a given structure.
  • We know that genitalia is not a predictor of effective leadership.
  • We know that there is no chosen race that excels in leading.
  • We know that the most effective leaders are often unarmed.
  • We know that input from all leads to better decisions.
  • We know that any voting process is not foolproof.
  • We know that any power, however and once bestowed, needs to be watched.
  • We know that future power might be sitting today in a jail cell.
  • We know that power need not be a life-long mandate. Power can be passed on to successors peacefully and former leaders can return to “civilian” life.
  • And with all this new knowledge about leadership, we know mistakes can still be made and power can be abused.

Yes, we know more than we did some 2000 years ago, when someone had to figure out what to do upon the demise of Christ’s hand-picked favorite — the mercurial and passionate Simon Peter. They got it wrong a few times, terribly wrong for a while, which brings to question the conclusion that this is God’s process.

We have ample experience these days with dictators and despots—some benevolent, some ruthless.

We have learned that secrecy and exclusion is a predictor of problems.

Good leaders operate in open ways, building trust with honesty and accountability.

The Church has been very bad at this.

Protestants fall into the same trap. In our denomination there seems to be a behind closed doors vetting process. You have to play to have a say.

The archaic processes are designed to evoke mystery and keep the sheep at the far end of the fold with a few barking dogs between them and the emerging leaders.

Just look at the customs that are revealed on the evening news.

  • The papal apartment is sealed. Against what?
  • The stoves and chimneys are installed so that smoke can signal the cardinals’ progress. Come on! Even Pope Benedict used Twitter.

The mind games, always part of the process, become tiresome in the media. They would have us believe none of the cardinals aspire to stand on the balcony with the world watching. They are all so engaging as they describe their reluctance. One candidate is out of socks. Another just wants us to know he bought a roundtrip ticket. Coach or first class?

But again. This is all the business of the Roman Catholic church. It doesn’t involve the various branches of Christianity, including the Orthodox who were the first to leave the self-proclaimed one true Church. (Or did the Roman Church leave the Eastern Church?)

Orthodox and Protestant Christians are not involved in choosing the leadership of the one, true Church. Neither are most Roman Catholics. (Click to Tweet)

The difficult thing to understand is why Protestant leaders, excluded from the club, travel to Rome for photo ops with the pope. There is zero benefit to their denominations, which are surely footing the bill.

The reality is this: the papacy and all church leadership face a new age in which hierarchies as we know them will topple.

It could come hard. It could come easily. It’s going to come. Whomever God or the conclave chooses will be managing or leading God’s people into a new religious era.

11 Mar 2013

Transparency in the Church—That’s a Toughy

Tough, but not impossible.

People in today’s world expect transparency. We are emerging from a world where business was conducted in back rooms, managed by a few bosses with self-interest as a core motivation.

That’s not working so well anymore. It’s truly a new business environment. Management must listen to employees and employees must listen to customers. Failure to operate openly and honestly in a considerate manner (transparency) can quickly spell disaster.

Recovery from a gaffe in this new business model is all the harder if  shortcomings are not readily admitted and corrected publicly and promptly.

The Church lives in the same world, but it has a tougher time adapting. Church leaders sense that things aren’t going well, but they are reluctant to make any changes that might right our course.

Churches teach trust. Sometimes the trust that we intend for God and His Son, is projected onto church leaders—who are often quite willing to accept the surrogacy.

Recent events in the Church have proven this trust to be ill-placed. There is little evidence that we are learning from the exposed mistakes.

The reason? The Church just doesn’t know how to change. The existing structure is perceived as right, proper and necessary. So what if it is no longer effective!

If the Church is to continue as a viable influence in society, it must provide transparency. People expect this—especially the young who are unfamiliar with old ways of operating. They are looking at their parents across a dinner table discussion about church and thinking, “And we are expected to tithe to support this?”

They are not going to trust that their offerings and other tangible sacrifices for their church are put to good use. They will want proof—real proof. They will no longer trust the Church — just because. There simply have been too many abuses of their trust.

We are referencing an article written by Brian Honigman and published at this link.

This article posts a short bulleted list of the qualities of transparency.

  • Transparency means that you are not afraid of feedback.
  • Transparency means that you have nothing to hide.
  • Transparency means your employees’ personal and work persona blur.
  • Transparency means you like to have conversations with your customers.

The Church fails at each of these.

  • The Church discourages feedback.
  • The Church operates in secrecy.
  • Clergy and hierarchical leaders remain distant in maintaining relationships with congregations and with individual lay members.
  • The Church likes to give orders. Dialog is controlled, when it exists at all.

Illustrations follow.

The Church is facing the same new demands for transparency. But the old ways of doing church are hard to break. Progress is slow.

  • In our region, we have a synod council that constitutionally represents the congregations in leadership within the synod. The names of the representatives are listed on the regional body’s web site. There is NO contact information.
  • The dates of synod council meetings are not publicized to the congregations that have the right to attend them.
  • Synod council’s published minutes include fairly frequent “executive” sessions that are not reported.
  • Synod deans, who lead regional clusters of congregations, were once volunteers, representing the group of congregations to the regional body. Today they are paid — an extension of the bishop’s office.
  • It is almost impossible for a congregation to initiate conversation with the regional body.

The national church, too, has transparency problems.

  • They respond to correspondence from congregations (who fund their budget) when they feel like it. One of our members, after months of attempting to contact the national church, received a letter from its legal department stating that they felt no obligation to respond. Ten monthly letters to our regional body and the national church went totally ignored. We gave up.
  • The denominational magazine, The Lutheran, plays at social media. It allows comments on its website only if you pay. A lot of Lutherans read the denominational magazine via subscriptions paid for by their congregations. Others share a subscription within the family. The result: the forum in the Church is controlled.
  • Most people in the congregation have no clue what might be discussed (in the limited time allowed for discussion) at the tightly controlled Synod Assemblies.

The article we are referencing goes on to list ten suggestions for achieving transparency. We’ll adapt them to church life.

  1. Treat members right. Genuinely interact with them. One devoted Lutheran once shared that he was eager to attend an evening with the bishop. He expected to be part of a dialog. He sat through an hour-long monologue, got discouraged, and walked out.
  2. Don’t come on too strong. Show respect. Bringing legal counsel and a locksmith with you to a meeting with a congregation might be seen as coming on too strong. Dismissing all the elected leaders of a congregation with no discussion is disrespectful.
  3. Always listen to church members. Our synod failed to return phone calls or respond to correspondence for more than a year.
  4. Continue to satisfy. Offer support. Our regional body failed to provide even minimal services for nearly a decade.
  5. Treat congregations and lay leaders as valued partners—even when you disagree. You might be able to learn from one another, but only if communication is two-way.
  6. Build trust. Trust is a process. Start by keeping little promises and staying in dialog. One-way email broadcasts are not dialog.
  7. Admit mistakes. This is impossible if you never make mistakes. But that’s unlikely, isn’t it?
  8. Follow through on your word. Keep promises.  We have a long list of promises broken by our regional body.
  9. Recognize responsibility. The congregations may not always be right — but they probably are more often than not. Certainly regional bodies are not necessarily right just because they are regional bodies.
  10. Always say Thank You. Our regional body seized our property and financial assets. No please. No thank you. Just five years of litigation.

The modern Church will find its strength not in bolstering the clergy and hierarchy but by enabling lay members (upon whom they rely for support).

Failing to answer the modern expectations from rank and file church members will result in the failure of the Church. Transparency must be addressed. The sooner the better. 

The good news. It’s not too late.

07 Mar 2013

Ten Reasons Churches Die

Why do churches fail?Churches Get Lots of Help Along the Road to Failure

I am adapting 10 observations drawn from David DiSalvo’s post published in Forbes Magazine.

He describes ten reasons businesses die. They apply to churches, too.

1. As Yoda said, you just don’t believe it.

Luke Skywalker says, “I just don’t believe it.” Yoda answers, “That is why you fail.”

For all the talk about faith and belief, the Church often acts as if we do not believe our own message. We don’t believe small churches can survive, so we do nothing to help. Our leaders see no economic incentive in helping small churches. Regional bodies see themselves as better managers of money. They often are not. When the assets of one closed church dry up, they look for another small church to loot. The altruistic promises made to justify the seizures, are quickly forgotten. No one really analyzes where the money goes.

Bishop Almquist told us our assets were being put into a Mission Fund. It was later revealed that the Mission Fund fills the synod’s own spending deficits (which were frequently in the healthy six-figures). A few weeks ago we learned that Holy Spirit’s assets would go to The Bishop’s Emergency Fund. Does anyone know what that means?

Belief in the purposes of church—as in life—is foundational to success. More, when we believe in an all-powerful, merciful and gracious God. If we in the pew don’t believe and the regional body has self-interest in our failure — we have a problem.

2. Other people have convinced you of your “station.”

This brings to mind the school principal who fired a teacher when she learned that the teacher had told students from poor urban neighborhoods that they would never amount to anything.

We need this principal’s kind of leadership in the Church.

Any church leader who goes to a small congregation, accepting a salary, with the message that the congregation will never amount to much should be history.

Redeemer was lucky. Bishop Almquist had left us to die. “You’ll die a natural death in ten years,” he told us. He refused to provide even a caretaker pastor. But we found a part-time pastor who served us for three years. He told us we could be a flagship church. We believed. While SEPA was waiting out the ten years, we began to grow.

DiSalvo quotes Tennessee Williams. “A high station in life is earned by the gallantry with which appalling experiences are survived with grace.”

3. You don’t want to be a disruptor.

DiSalvo writes:

Disruption means that consistency, stability and certainty might get jettisoned for a time, and that puts our hard-wired internal defense system on high alert. Sometimes, though, you have to override the alarms and move ahead anyway.  If you never do, you’ll never know what could happen.

Disruptive innovation is discouraged in the Church. We talk about innovation and change, but are ill-prepared for it.

Redeemer had put aside old expectations as we forged new ministry and began to experience success. SEPA allowed alarms to go off without ever sharing our successes.

 4. You think “what if I die tomorrow?”

We stop trying because we foresee our own demise. The Church feeds into this with its “caretaker ministries” concepts.  They use language like palliative care and putting the congregation on hospice. They use these terms and act appalled when people suggest they orchestrating the closing of churches. Meanwhile, we may be transforming into something the experts don’t yet recognize.

5. You wonder how you will be remembered.

We all want to leave a legacy. The Church feeds into this idea, too.

Our pastor in 2008 met with the bishop and never returned to our church. He sent word that rumors were being spread that he was leading a rebellion and he feared his reputation being ruined. A rebellion? A church defends its ministry and it is seen as rebellion! Bishop Burkat shamelessly used the fear of tarnished legacy to fuel her cause. She wrote in a letter to all pastors.

In the case of Redeemer, leaders did not cooperate with us and instead resisted tenaciously in an adversarial manner that publicly tarnishes the wonderful memory of ministry that has taken place in the East Falls community since 1891.

Small churches must learn to live in today’s world and guard against any appearance that protecting the past is mission.

6. You think there must be a pre-established role for your life.

This is part of the church model. We are who others tell us we are.  Don’t dare step beyond your role — even if the role you played historically no longer has a need in today’s world. Instead of using our assets to explore new ways of meeting needs, the Church attempts to find new places where the old ways might still work. They call this mission and celebrate it as innovative. It is not; it is replication. Chances are such replicated ministries will fail soon after the publicity value wears off.

SEPA’s vision of Redeemer was that of a small family church. Redeemer started to transform from a small white congregation in a working class neighborhood to an international church in a growing collegiate neighborhood. SEPA was unprepared to serve us. They had been counting on our failure for 10 years!

DiSalvo writes that these pre-defined roles (agency) “is a figment our brains rely on to manage difficulty with as little trauma as possible. The first thing to do is recognize that….”

7. Your career appears to be well-established and that’s good, right?

We all know the role of the small church. Serve the immediate neighborhood with the message of God’s love. Support a pastor to the best of our ability. Maintain the property. (Not necessarily in that order.) But what if you stepped out of that role and began to serve in new and innovative ways? How would the church react? (It isn’t always pretty.)

8. You are afraid of losing what you have built.

DiSalvo ponts out that this is beyond our control. There is always a danger of losing what we have built. It should not determine your ministry. Unfortunately, in the Church, there are people ready to help us lose what we have built. This fear of being a victim of hierarchical greed is actually crippling the potential of the church. Lutheran congregations used to be fairly independent. It’s written into our founding documents as “interdependent.” But lately, congregations are looking to the bishop’s office for approval of decisions that are constitutionally theirs to make independently. This is what happens when you start forcing church closures. Congregations start to live in fear.

9. You think “maybe I’ve hit my ceiling.”

Many small churches stop trying. Pastors often stop trying. Synods encourage this when they use terms like caretaker and hospice ministries. Small churches must fight this mindset. But that, we learned, can be dangerous!

Why do churches fail?10. Confusion about where to go.

This is a huge problem in the church because the Church really has no vision for where it is going. Frequently, the people we look to in the Church as visionaries are people who have found a way to preserve the concept of Church as we understood it in the past. They are few. These pastors write books about their successes, hoping they will help others. Some of them are pretty good books! These successes are, however, often the result of a serendipitous combination of personalities and circumstances that is hard to replicate.

The Church, I suspect, is headed someplace very different than what we have known. At 2×2, we are excited to be part of it—even as we have been made to feel so very unwelcome in it.

photo credit: komehachi888 via photopin cc
photo credit: Krissy.Venosdale via photopin cc
03 Mar 2013

Art for Luke 13:31-35 — Jesus Is Disillusioned

O_Jerusalem-1The Fox and the Hens

Next Sunday’s gospel features a moving image that has never quite caught the imagination of artists. He starts his discourse sniping at Herod, calling him a fox. But he quickly moves on. Jesus compares his feelings for Jerusalem to a hen protecting her brood — but the brood is unwilling.

The headline art simply depicts Jesus contemplating the city which housed God’s earthly temple.

dominus-flevit-henToday, in modern Jerusalem, in the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, there is a mosaic with the words of scripture surrounding the image. “But you are unwilling” drips in red at the feet of little chicks.

Artists seem to be much more comfortable with other biblical metaphors. There are numerous images of rushing streams, stars, bread, the lion and the lamb—even the rooster crowing, but this poignant image of a mother hen never grabs us.

Perhaps this is because the metaphor was first delivered by a disillusioned Jesus. Do we feel guilty?

Perhaps it is because it is a feminine image in a religion long-dominated by men

It is less likely to be taken on by today’s artists. There was a day when most homes had a few chickens pecking the ground in the back yard — a living refrigerator. But the sight is uncommon today.

???????????????????????????????Nevertheless, one young contemporary sculptor rose to the challenge, entering a biblical art contest.

Jesus’ imagery grabs at our hearts and our consciences. We are his little chicks — like it or not.

20 Feb 2013