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Commentary on Other Web Posts

Christians and Jews Face Similar Challenges

Monday’s Alban Institute Roundtable featured the thoughts of Rabbi Hayim Herring presented in his book, Tomorrow’s Synagogue Today: Creating Vibrant Centers of Jewish Life.

The conditions he cites are faced by all religious groups today.

  1. organizations cannot exclusively control their messages
  2. information is more accessible and less private than in the past
  3. people energized by a vision will collaborate freely
  4. mistakes made by any one member of a group can be corrected by others
  5. success is tied to the ability to distribute knowledge and leadership
  6. synagogues can become a “platform for organizing people with similar interests” rather than remain a “top-down” operation
  7. synagogues are challenged to see “communities that do not yet exist”
  8. synagogues “should recognize the importance of niche communities and foster linkages among them”
  9. ongoing feedback mechanisms are vital
  10. organizations need to focus on what they do best

2×2 has already discussed many of these points. We think every one creates a positive, new strength with truly exciting potential.

We also predict that the upper echelons of church leadership are going to resist embracing new societal realities. They will continue to think like hierarchical leaders. Some may stubbornly oppose the inevitable, using their last vestiges of power to create real harm and chaos.

Ironically, the American Church may have the most difficulty adjusting to new ways. Separation of Church and State, a precious American right, gives the Church powers other organizations cannot claim. Parishioners, equally protected by the Bill of Rights, will find their denominations lording their protected status over them. Courts will not be able to sort out the resulting feuds.

Parishioners providing ideas and leadership that are welcomed in the secular arena, will be challenged by church leaders who are desperately hanging on to control mechanisms they enjoyed since the Reformation.

The emerging Digital Church Age with all its promise will spark a great power struggle. Much of what the Church teaches will be forgotten along the way, beginning with the Ten Commandments. Servant leaders were never more needed. If they prove to be in short supply, as we suspect they will, innocent lay people will be hurt, rank and file pastors will be silenced, and church leaders will meet in increasing seclusion as they come to distrust the people they lead. It could return us to the Middle Ages and the Inquisition.

We hope the coming revolution in the Church will be a short transition as young leaders, coming of age sometime since 1985 reach leadership positions. But meanwhile, it could be very ugly.

The sooner Rabbi Herring’s observations are embraced, the sooner the Church will enter the wonderful new world of the 21st century. It could take a decade or two . . . or three! Plenty of time to build a bunker!

photo credit: marsmet543 via photopin cc

01 Mar 2012

The Unmeasured Strength of the Weakest Link

That weak link — the one you wish you didn’t have to worry about — well, it turns out it could be your most valuable asset. Sociologists are learning that it is the weakest links which drive innovation.

Scientists have done studies to identify how new ideas take root and where the sources of great success stories lie. People think it is in fostering alliances and friendships with the like-minded or the movers and shakers — the powerful, the well-connected, the jet set.

The big churches — not the small churches.

Turns out they are wrong. In story after story the sparks of great ideas prove to come from the serendipitous—the people you barely know, from small groups of people struggling with ideas in a very hands-on way.

Read this for an interesting take on how this affects social media.

This is an interesting analysis of the value of networks. Let’s focus on one quote:

“The way networks have their effect is not by getting information from people, but rather by finding people who are interesting and who think differently from you,” —Ronald S. Burt, Neighbor Networks

What does this mean to the Church?

Most congregations are fairly homogenous in membership. Redeemer’s Ambassadors visited 40 in the last 18 months. Only about four had significant diversity — at least visually. We tend to gravitate toward people who are like us, dress like us, and act like us. The minute things start to change, we become defensive. Liturgical dance . . . no way! Tambourines . . . never! The barriers we put up are designed to protect our sense of identity and comfort.

We want to recognize ourselves in the person sitting beside us in church. It is proof to us that we are accepted.

The whole structure of Church is designed for sameness. We rally around one leader and conform our ministries to that leader’s interests and skills. When encouraged to invite others, we invite people like us.

When congregations attempt innovation it is likely to be the same sort of dabbling taking place 10 miles from us. Properly sanctioned innovation.

Redeemer struggled to grow until we began reaching out to people who were different from us.

Then new ideas began to spread. Of course, we were wary of change, but we quickly learned that we didn’t have to change all that much. Change did not have to mean abandoning who we are. We added to our heritage.

With this web site, we continue to find new spins on evangelism. Churches across the country and around the world are sharing with us and we respond. We have learned that Jesus’ commission for us to go out into the world is not so much to make the rest of the world transform to our ways but for US to learn NEW ways from them.

If the Church as a whole wants to change, it must foster relationships with our weakest acquaintances.

Redeemer, through our 2×2 site, has become pen pals with a church in Pakistan and another in Kenya. We’ve helped individuals with projects across our own continent. We’ve learned more in the last four years than in our congregation’s previous 120 years.

This sense of mission may not be for every church, but we encourage you to look at your own “weak links.” Who in your congregation is borderline involved, a bit uncomfortable? Engage them. You may find they have insights and skills to offer that you didn’t know you needed.

Use the power of the web to reach the neglected. One church close to us has studied the needs of families with autistic family members. Because we knew of their interest we were able to introduce them to another ministry designing worship opportunities for the autistic.

This is a golden age for the church. It was never more possible to fulfill the Great Commission. Will we meet the challenge? Or will we continue to reward and encourage the efforts of homogenous ministry?

UPDATE: June 2013. 2×2 now has a network of six churches internationally. They’ve gone out of their way to get to know each other. Our members are in contact with them regularly—often weekly. Locally we’ve visited 62 of our sister churches. They tend to avoid communicating with us but then they all found our property to be of more value to their leaders than our ministry was in our community or the world.

photo credit: HikingArtist.com via photopin cc

29 Feb 2012

The Future Belongs to the Underdogs and Innovators

This headline is a quote from a post in the Marketing Agency Insider. The post discusses how traditional marketing firms are doomed if they don’t learn to adapt to the new world and offer a hybrid approach to helping companies reach new people with their products and services.

The article’s advice and analysis may be applied to the emerging church and its outreach efforts.

Things happen slowly in the church. Church structure is designed that way. Stability and normalcy are rewarded. Innovation is something to applaud and forget. It seems like every promising innovation is derailed by reverting to the old ways — the structure. Successful churches are those that are still doing things the same way with membership that can still support the old way, even if both membership and offerings are in steady, long-term decline.

Applauding survival has created a crisis among mainline religions that has been growing unchecked for decades. Still, church leaders talk about change but implement very little.

The article we quoted talks about five things that will cause a major shift in the way things are being done in the marketing world. Each can be applied to church and mission.

  1. The emerging church will find alternative funding streams. They will no longer rely on the offering plate as the sole support for mission.
  2. The emerging church must integrate its services and use every technology available.
  3. The emerging church must concentrate on efficiency in delivering services and that includes creating new, cost-effective leadership structures.
  4. The emerging church must find ways to lower operating costs. We cannot continue to support budgets that are top-heavy in management and real estate with very little money left for mission, education and service.
  5. The emerging church will find new ways to measure its successes and be accountable for its mission dollars.

The article concludes that it is the risk takers who are going to emerge from current turmoil. It concludes (slightly paraphrased to apply to “church”) that a new prominence will be afforded to the risk takers who fight to remain nimble, always thinking like startups and acting like underdogs. Their presence will be a disruptive force for years to come, shifting the balance of power and raising the bar for what’s possible when seeking new partnerships in mission.

2×2 has been saying all of this for a while!

Denominations should be concentrating on helping every congregation tool up for change that bears these five points in mind. Instead, congregations hear about “drafting mission statements” and “stewardship” and preparing to “call a pastor” and maintaining existing church budgets — which have the status quo as their foundation.

18 Jan 2012

Churches Must Be Open to Be Accessible

This post is in response to a post on Alban Institute Roundtable about churches welcoming disabled or others representing a challenging status in society.

The Alban post begins by referencing a 2004 commercial created by the United Church of Christ that used stunning imagery of churches barring or ejecting the disabled, elderly, homosexual couples or people who visibly represent a racial or ethnic minority.

What follows is a very good review of the challenges facing congregations living up to Jesus’ mandate of inclusion.

The article states that the imagery was meant to be provocative.

It may be more than that. It may be true.

The fact is denominational leaders are entering sanctuaries and evicting the faithful, sometimes using stealth and chicanery. They are locking doors and barring access to members who rely on their neighborhood churches to support their faith, to know their problems without having to ask for help or special consideration, to strengthen their families, and let’s not forget, to worship.

The discussion of the church and inclusion should be broadened to include the endangered neighborhood church. If churches are closed and sold for their assets, it doesn’t matter if they have handicapped ramps, listening aids or large-type bulletins. They are not there to help anyone.

Denominations are taking from the people they label as frail to strengthen their own needs which are growing as mainline denominations decline and the economy fails. The attitude: It is too much trouble to serve them. We might as well take what they have and relieve our own problems.

Denominations are relying on “separation of church and state” to leave their authority unquestioned, even when their governing statutes forbid their actions. Intimidating tactics ensure that their own rank and file will not intervene. They assume absolute power — and we all know the saying that goes with that!

Bystanders, which include staff, clergy and congregations, assume that the victims are somehow being put out of their misery . . . that it’s all for the good of the Kingdom. They justify inaction and settle their consciences with . . . . “Well, the denomination knows better how to use resources than the smaller churches.” A study of church history does not bear this out, and that’s why the Lutheran Church and some other denominations foster congregational polity.

The people they are hurting include the very people the Christian mission seeks to help. The disabled and the disenfranchised play important roles in small churches in a very natural way. They are not “allowed” to serve as acolytes and ushers or readers. They just do these things as does everyone else. They don’t have to ask for help; their neighbors and families know their needs and their strengths. They — or should we say “we”– go to church where we have found this acceptance.

It is often the small churches with 100 members and valuable properties that denominations eye as easy pickings. In doing so, they threaten their entire denominational mission.

When you lock the doors of a neighborhood church, you are locking out the crippled, who can’t get to the large suburban churches that have elevators and ramps but no public transportation. You are locking out ethnic groups trying to make lives in the neighborhood where they have chosen to live. You are locking out disadvantaged children who walk to church by themselves when their single moms or dads work on Sunday morning. You are evicting the elderly who gave their best years to the neighborhood church and now need their support. You are putting the disadvantaged in a position where they have to beg to be included or noticed.

The imagery of that commercial is real. This is happening.

Accessibility begins with proximity.

‘Truly I say to you, to the extent that you did not do it to one of the least of these, you did not do it to Me.’ 

03 Jan 2012

Our Once and Future Church

Today’s Alban Institute Weekly Forum builds on the re-release of the books written in the 1990s by its founder and president emeritus, Dr. Loren Mead. The Once and Future Church (1991), Transforming Congregations for the Future (1994), and Five Challenges for the Once and Future Church (1996) tackle the very issues our sponsoring congregation, Redeemer Lutheran Church, has been facing since 1998.

None of our members was a scholar of his work at this time. We were just lay members working at what we believed was our mission. As we review the five challenges Mead poses for the church, we find remarkable similarities to the direction our congregation took — without leadership pointing the way but with dedicated lay people grappling, uncompensated and unrecognized, with issues as big as worldwide church.

Our discipleship has not been without cost. We have suffered both as community and as individuals. Most of the time we found ourselves very much alone. The church as a whole was struggling, its denominational leadership was struggling, its individual congregations — large and small — were counting every penny. Our small church was deemed insignificant.

Mead writes:

For now, here are the five challenges I see we have ahead of us: 

  • To transfer the ownership of the church. 
  • To discover new structures for the church. 
  • To discover a passionate spirituality. 
  • To make the church a new community and source of community. 
  • To become an apostolic people. 

Redeemer deals with each of these issues:

  • We insist that the ownership of our community rests in the congregation. Our constitution and church polity agree with our position. But this has been of no protection. When assets are coveted, governing documents are quickly rewritten in the minds of church leadership. Clergy serving us disappeared with little or no notice or explanation. We were eventually evicted from our property. This was intended to be a final blow. Our denomination even predicted publicly that within six months, our congregational identity would die. 26 months later our congregation still meets weekly and has found new ways to serve which do not rely on property or professional leaders. 
  • Left without a building to support, we began creating a new congregational structure which reached out to other congregations, denominations and the spiritually minded with no church affiliation. How fortunate that the world was never more prepared for this type of outreach!
  • We discovered within ourselves a spirituality we didn’t know we had when we were passive pew-sitters, receptors of our clergy’s sense of spirituality. A foundation was quickly laid for the development of dormant leadership skills.
  • We embraced outreach tools that the church as a whole has been very slow to use to anywhere near full potential. Within months we found that our community potential was worldwide.
  • We work now to create an apostolic presence using modern tools.

Mead goes on to write:

“We need to recognize that a classic conflict of interest is at work here. Clergy-dominated institutions make many decisions in which clergy have a direct stake: salaries and job security, for example—sometimes involving prestige and preference. In our society we generally feel that institutions that nurture “conflict of interest” frequently make bad policy—policy that supports the welfare of those with the conflict of interest not the welfare of the entire institution.”

Mead calls for more dialog between clergy and laity. He cautions that dialog must be entered into with equal respect among participants. This, Redeemer has found, has been impossible. The conflict we have faced has been fought for four years with virtually no dialog and no foundation for mutual respect. Power, not mission, was central to the conflict from the outset.

Mead’s books were rightfully acclaimed when they were published. As they are re-released in a single volume for a new generation of church leaders, we can only ponder why his respected advice has been so strongly resisted by the readers who once found his thinking so ground-breaking.

We hope for a new generation who can not only applaud his wisdom but also apply it!

14 Nov 2011

Are SEPA Congregational Statistics “Cooked”?

We recently came across the Southeastern Pennsylvania Synod’s statistical reports as presented to the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America — the national church — on the ELCA web site. The report was dated August 17, 2010. We were surprised to see Redeemer listed at all, since elsewhere on the internet SEPA Synod reports our congregation as closed as of June 10, 2010. Redeemer seems to be open when Synod wants to count us and closed when they want us to be closed.

Where did these statistics come from?

The statistics in this report begin in 2004 when we are listed as having 28 members. Redeemer was listed in the same sort of report in 2005 as the only congregation in the SMALL category that was GROWING. Now Redeemer is categorized in the same year as DECLINING! The most recent report rewrites history and shows Redeemer having only THIRTEEN members in 2005 and every year thereafter, including 2010. We have been locked out of our church since September 2009.

UPDATE : In February 2012, SEPA Secretary Rev. Ray Miller and Redeemer “trustee” testified in court that Synod records had Redeemer’s membership at 26 or 28 (ignoring the list of some 70 names we had provided to them). Yet the report issued to SEPA Synod Assembly stated 13. Synod’s lawyer went on in the same proceeding to attempt to prove that Redeemer acted without authorization because the congregational vote of 17 did not constitute a two thirds quorum. It is now clear that SEPA was lying to its member churches to solicit the vote they craved. 

Redeemer has very few members. Honest!

Redeemer has very few members. Honest!

For the record, REDEEMER was a growing congregation with slow but steady growth throughout most of this time period. Part of this growth was among East African immigrants. We experienced a significant growth spurt in 2006-2007 when we began a concentrated outreach to the friends and extended families of members who had been part of Redeemer for as many as 10 years.

This favorite number, 13, keeps cropping up. It was the statistic included in the Trustees Report to Synod Assembly which was first read to the entire assembly in 2008 (along with other inaccurate information) without ever having been shared with Redeemer. We asked in writing for Synod Leadership to correct this report, but it was dragged out again before the entire Assembly in 2009. Redeemer was denied voice or vote at this Assembly.

FACT: Our church council met with Bishop Claire Burkat on November 1, 2007, and presented our membership list along with a detailed ministry plan and a resolution to call a pastor who had agreed to our payment terms and was willing to commit to five years of service. Our membership list had been carefully compiled for this report and was part of a 16-page ministry plan (see page 11). The congregation had worked on this plan months. It included the names of approximately 75 members (full members, associate members and children). We accepted a few more into membership after that meeting. We had many more who had expressed interest in joining our ministry.

The list we presented to the bishop was a conservative count. Had we included a few “drifters” (young people of college age who hadn’t attended in a year or so, for example) we could have claimed another dozen members, but we wanted to be accurate in representing our changing congregation. We had nothing to be ashamed of . . . we were growing quickly!

At this meeting Bishop Burkat reviewed our membership list and commented that many of the names “looked African.” She then added, “White Redeemer must be allowed to die. Black Redeemer . . . .we can put them anywhere.”

SEPA statistics make no sense.In about 2007 or early 2008, the synod demanded a monitored congregational vote on a resolution we had presented to the bishop. We complied with their request and a Synod Council representative attended the meeting, reporting 14 present for the vote. Synod challenged the quorum, so they believed at that time that Redeemer had 42 voting members and even more non-voting members. Redeemer has few members when Synod wants us to have few members and many members when Synod wants us to have many members.

Who came up with these statistics? We had no pastor during much of this time, so we know the forms were not filled out by anyone at Redeemer. The secretary of Synod, Rev. Ray Miller, also served as a trustee for Redeemer. Does he have the answer to this question? Were these statistics presented to the court to justify their takeover? Since Synod has defined “two” Redeemers, dividing our church along racial lines, are the 13 members they are counting our white members?

All churches should check the accuracy of these documents in reference to their congregations. Otherwise these statistics could be used against you some day. Here’s a link:

http://www.elca.org/Who-We-Are/Our-Three-Expressions/Churchwide-Organization/Research-and-Evaluation/Synod-Statistics.aspx#7F

10 Sep 2011