WANTED: Artists in the Church

Churches need artists. Lots of them.

We need good people in all the standard artistic slots — music directors, choir members, wordsmiths. But there are so many more artistic skills needed.

Visual artists are underused and under-appreciated in today’s church. Painters and artisans used to be so important that their roles in the church were subsidized. That is why even small churches across Europe are filled with beautiful windows, murals and sculptures. This was also the age of great church musicians — the Bachs and Handels. But the love of art extended to things we consider mundane. The doors, furniture and fixtures of small churches built hundreds of years ago were created by artists. Art mattered!

This has been less true in the New World church. Where once we might have commissioned a great tapestry, we now buy from the catalog or fall back on homemade banners, etc. which are nice but would fail to qualify as artistically belonging to the ages.

And then there are the property artists, financial artists, leadership artists.

Many small churches are able to continue ministry because somewhere in their history, some member was an artist in caring for property, making investments or inspiring and rallying people.

In the days before the Church recognized the talents of half the population, small churches often prospered because of the people skills of a pastor’s wife or deaconess. They worked largely unrecognized and poorly compensated (if at all). They used their social gifts to see the potential within the community and instinctively knew how to nurture it. They never had any “power,” so protecting their power was never at issue. They are rarely mentioned in church histories.

Regardless, of the area of expertise, artists thrive on something the Church doesn’t really have much time for — chaos.

Artists are happiest when life is not predictable — when the rules don’t stand in the way of initiative and experimentation.

Many Church leaders have stifled creativity. It was probably not intentional. They may have had the congregation’s best interest (from their point of view) at heart. But church leaders tend to like structure, order, predictability, and comfort. They want their jobs to be easier. They surround themselves with people who complement these goals. They are rarely artists.

This sends creative people already in the Church packing. And those who are not in the Church will sense that they will never be of any use — so why bother.

While we say we are working for change and growth, we are actually judging members by their obedience. Choices will be made based on order, ease and comfort.

In reality, artists and non-artists need to exist together in amiable friction. That’s the spark of life. That’s what’s needed if congregations are ever going to live up to their lofty mission statements.

That’s why in spite of decades of talk about growth, the momentum in the Church is decidedly in the other direction.

This is not going to change without artists.

What can we do about it?

19 Nov 2012

The Stewardship of Promises

A promise kept creates a bond.

A promise broken — even a small promise — creates disappointment and distrust at best. Anger and rage at worst.

The Church is all about promises. There are big promises. Forgiveness and salvation. There are little promises. Love and attention.

It is very difficult to reach people with the big promise of salvation, if the Church is not keeping the little promises.

When Church politics rely on the “spin.”
When little white lies, always self-serving in nature, replace transparency.
When we say “All welcome” but have no clue how to make people welcome.
When church leaders cannot demonstrate compassion and forgiveness.
When we say we care, but have trouble listening, much less acting.

It’s hard to preach of a Savior who commands love when we have such a hard time demonstrating it.

It’s hard for people to set their goals on salvation when they don’t feel safe.

Today’s Church needs to concentrate on keeping the little promises.

photo credit: Flооd via photopin cc

15 Nov 2012

Stewardship of Possibilities: Part 2

Seth Godin’s blog is worth repeating today. (It’s short).

When you don’t know what to do…

That’s when we find out how well you make decisions.

When you don’t have the resources to do it the usual way, that’s when you show us how resourceful you are.

And when you don’t know if it’s going to work, that’s how we find out whether or not we need you on our team.

Every small church is in this position. Many are finding out that they don’t need to structure their “team” quite the way they have in the past.

The “dead wood” (a term one pastor used in a comment on this site in reference to small churches that the synod wanted to close) may not be the congregations. If you are going to assess interdependent ministries, look for dead wood in all the interdependent branches.

We suspect you’ll find some withering main branches.

Small churches are finding that not only do they not need them on their team but they have been playing without their support for years.

photo credit: Moochy via photopin cc

12 Nov 2012

The Stewardship of Possibilities

The Church, more than any other organization, save perhaps environmentalist groups, dwells on the concept of stewardship.

Sometimes we use the word interchangeably with offerings and donations, but we know it is more than that.

Stewardship is the conscious and wise use of resources. Too often we view only the property and financial assets in our thinking.

Measuring stewardship is a problem, especially when you don’t know what to measure.

Measuring stewardship leads to harsh judgments — often by people who are, themselves, stewardship-challenged. We are tempted to assume that we somehow have a right to judge who is the best determiner of when, where, and how resources are put to best use.

This can be tricky even for Christians without a horse in the race! Is the same $50,000 better used by a small congregation with 100 members or would it be better used to the Glory of God if a corporate church managed that money—or take the resources entirely out of the hands of the people who donated the resources. Let your regional body make the decisions.

Any organization of any size can use resources wisely or foolishly. Perhaps this is why the founders of the ELCA placed the determination of the use of resources in the hands of the congregations from whom the gifts were collected.

But let’s shift gears.

What if we stopped thinking of stewardship as the use of tangible resources?

What if we started thinking in terms of the intellectual property of the Church?

Let’s call it the Stewardship of Possibilities.

The concept is biblical. Jesus turned the attention of the disciples away from the pursuit of riches or status at every turn. Time after time, he directed them to possibilities. Unheard of possibilities. Away from “safe” investments. There is even a parable about it!

With the Stewardship of Possibilities, lame people could walk again. The blind could see. The hungry could be fed. Tax collectors could be honest. Fishermen could lead. People living in sin could turn their lives around. Children, women, foreigners mattered!

Instead of looking at our small churches with a message of impossibility, help them determine what is possible with the resources they have — all the resources—not just the endowment and offering plate.

Other things to consider:

The location of the property
The talents of the members
The creativity and ingenuity present in the congregation
Special skills in the congregation
The congregation’s spiritual life
The reputation of the congregation in the community. (Business calls it good will and puts a price on it!)
The relationships with civic and service organizations fostered over time
The stamina of the congregation (Can they weather a storm and work together?)
The potential
The faith and belief that all things are possible

These are things you can’t put in the bank. But you can bank on them.

photo credit: SweetOnVeg via photopin cc

11 Nov 2012

What is the goal of forced church closings?

Every now and then a group of people, calling themselves a church, decides that they don’t want to be a church any more. They take a vote and decide to close. It’s sad, but they followed a prescribed procedure. Everyone can move on.

In the Lutheran church, a congregation gets to decide among themselves how to use their remaining assets to the glory of God. Standing on the sideline is the regional body or synod, desperately trying to find ways around their polity to guarantee that the wealth of the congregations goes their way.

To assure this, they have developed a new process. You won’t find it outlined in quite the way it is being implemented in any ELCA governing documents. (But that’s why we hire lawyers.)

It begins with a target painted figuratively in red on the church. This is followed by years of neglect, and knowing nods and glances among clergy when the name of the congregation comes up in Lutheran forums.

The next step is the lock out. They’ll be talk (with no specifics) of the heroic “efforts” that came between these two steps—as if God was at work and failed. Truth be told, the prescribed neglect is just that — neglect, and no effective help was ever intended or offered. This is the written advice of noted church leaders.

By this time, clergy have ceded their influence in the Church to lawyers. The Gospel is out the stained glass window with the law following. Separation of Church and State replaces the laws other people have to live by.

What is likely to follow is a legal battle pitting clergy with their loyalties to the bishop against laity whose loyalties are to their congregation and faith. It’s not supposed to be this way. We are supposed to be interdependent, working together as equals. This is the traditional Lutheran way.

2×2 grew from just such a debacle at Redeemer in East Falls, Philadelphia. We have 15 years of experience on our side.

We’ve heard of similar heavy-handed treatments from bishops in New England, Metropolitan New York and Slovak Zion Synods and there may be more. There are examples in other denominations, including an Episcopal Church in East Falls. (East Falls is a favorite target. It’s a nice, working class neighborhood with soaring property values. The value of our property has outgrown the value of our people.)

So what are the reasons behind these actions.

Some possibilities

The congregation cannot pay its bills.
The congregation cannot afford to pay clergy.
The congregation is heretical in its teachings.

(If the first two are a reality, the congregation is likely to know it and work together to solve the problem or close.)

Here are some other possibilities.

The regional body cannot pay its bills.
The regional body cannot afford its current staff.
The regional body is heretical in its teachings.

In this case, there is the need for a cover story to gain acceptance among church people who might find what is about to take place distasteful — if not sinful. In East Falls, the cover story was that SEPA Synod intended to close the congregation for six months and reopen it with new and improved Lutherans that wouldn’t ask questions.

Well, SEPA has owned the property by court order for going on four years and done nothing with it.

This was not the real plan. The people of East Falls knew it all along!

The primary question that needs to be asked and answered is “What is the goal of forcing churches to close?”

The goal is usually stated as “better stewardship of church resources” or as a synod representative told Redeemer members, “ministry in East Falls is not good use of the Lord’s money.”

If this is the goal, the results point to high-stakes failure.

The results of this mismanagement, from which clergy and congregations shield their eyes, are ungodly. They include:

broken relationships — within the church, among friends, within families—and with God (the definition of sin)
children wrenched from the first support system they encounter outside their families
elderly living their later years under legal attack from the church they served all their lives
disabled or non-drivers, who relied on the local church, totally disenfranchised
an economic pit that gets harder to crawl out of every day for both the regional body, haughtily asserting its power, and the remnants of the congregation they set out to destroy
a Gospel message, preached weekly, but acted upon rarely

The stated goal—better use of church resources—is no longer even mentioned. The goal has failed.

The evidence is that if stewardship of resources is the goal, it is a far better to work with congregations interdependently — as our constitutions state.

Where do we start? What are your ideas?

09 Nov 2012

Mission Work: Old Ways vs New Possibilities

Several times in the last few years, I have listened to reports from various bishops and high-end church leaders concerning their visits to Africa. Some have visited Ethiopia, some Kenya, and some Tanzania.

They travel at their denomination’s expense. They return with inspiring reports of baptizing hundreds of babies and meeting church leaders.

They give these reports because they want us, here in the United States, to give offerings to these “approved” mission efforts in other parts of the world. They want us to sense that their denomination is actively engaged in the universal Christian mission to go into all the world and preach the Gospel to every nation.

This approach to mission work has decades of experience behind it. It also has decades of pre-social media traditions dimly lighting the way.

Is continuing this style of mission work effective for today’s world?

We serve an interconnected world. Sending official denominational representatives for on-site visits may once have been the only way for congregations to interact with mission efforts overseas.

Today, each individual has the power to connect. If the Church does not harness the power of the individual using social media tools for world mission, we are failing in our stewardship of possibilities.

Each congregation and its members have the power to communicate daily with Christians around the world. No intermediary is needed.

We can share ideas and first-hand accounts of our faith journeys. The exchange can be very personal — they with us and we with them.

A forward-thinking denomination would be working to create their own online mission communities. That would be providing a service many direct benefits. They don’t have to reinvent the wheel. They can simply harness the social media platform that suits them best.

The money spent on junkets might be better spent in building these social network circles.

It would bring new life into mission work.

2×2 is experimenting with this concept now. We correspond with several such mission ventures. We identify ourselves as Lutheran, but we’ve found no need to dwell on denominational distinctions.

As a result of our online outreach, we have first-hand reports of their work, almost daily — not just on mission Sunday. We get firsthand news! Our friends in Pakistan shared that a Lutheran Church in their city had burned as a result of recent violence. We prayed for them during the unrest. Two weeks ago they sent word that they were holding a prayer meeting for us as we faced Hurricane Sandy.

We know many in these fellowships by name. We exchange photos. We pray for one another and offer ideas and strategies. The exchange is truly two-way.

In case you are wondering, we have never sent money.

What will grow from this initiative remains to be seen, but we know this. There’s no holding us back.

God is doing something new in East Falls — and the world.

08 Nov 2012

Branding: Don’t Forget to Be Yourself

How Branding Can Quickly Go Wrong

The Mission Statement is written. The Vision Statement is being drafted.

The process of writing the Mission Statement helped you define your congregation.

The Vision Statement is a congregation’s crystal ball overview. Where do you see yourself as a congregation in five to ten years?

The Vision Statement is an invitation to dream.

You will be tempted to write a beautiful Vision Statement, wrapped up in all your hopes for your beloved congregation. You will stumble over one thing.

You are who you are.

Unless you are a brand new congregation, people already have expectations when they walk through your door.

This is nothing new. It’s how denominations came to be and how they continue to be defined. We expect a bit of pageantry when we enter a Roman Catholic or Episcopal Church. We expect a different focus in a Baptist or Methodist Church.

Example of Branding Challenges

The Lutheran Church (ELCA) is a good example of branding gone awry.

Lutherans are a congregation-based denomination that spans the liturgical tradition. The broad definition provides a wide door for participation, but no one quite knows what they will encounter when they enter a Lutheran Church.

The local congregation, therefore, must be diligent in defining its image.

Without definition, there is a subtle competition to be more of whatever the current trend might be. This changes over the years and varies culturally and geographically.

Currently, Lutherans are trying to emulate the Episcopalian traditions. Leaders worked hard to reach agreement at being in Full Communion, a concept that benefits only top leaders. A document was drafted accordingly. And then a disclaimer was added. The disclaimer is rarely read. It negates most of the agreements made in the document! We are in full communion — just kidding.

The result is a classic “branding” problem. Compare this to the business world.

You expect a certain type of movie from Disney. You expect a certain type of thinking to come from Apple. You don’t expect lullabies from Mick Jagger.

If a company strays from its mission, confusion and disappointment results.

What do we expect from our Lutheran congregations, especially when there is a difference between the leadership of our denomination and the congregations?

Local congregations must find a balance between sudden change and its established image.

It’s not as easy as it sounds. Denominational pressure encourages change. Demographics are examined with a marketer’s eye. The real, unstated mission is to find members willing to support the denomination.

Congregations may decide that they will attract young professionals if they offer a praise band. But that offering may go against who you actually are as a congregation and the community may read this as desperate marketing. Result: no one is comfortable. Pretty soon, your congregation doesn’t recognize itself.

On to the next marketing “hook.”

Like it or not, the Church is involved in marketing.

Know Thyself

A congregation’s “branding” must grow organically from who we actually are. Any changes on the road to transformation must first enhance the life of the existing congregation so that our members are confident in their evangelism efforts. Presumably, the drafting of a Mission Statement helps this process. Know thyself and don’t try to be all things to all people.

Otherwise you may as well lock out the faithful members of the congregation. With this unwelcoming behavior on display to the community, you can then try to build a new membership more to your liking.

This may sound absurd, but it is the actual strategy of some synods in the ELCA!

07 Nov 2012

Going Green: Revamping the Church Bulletin

Rethinking the Weekly Church Bulletin

Redeemer Ambassadors have now visited 50 churches. We’ve seen 50 versions of the weekly bulletin.

They are all pretty much the same and most are a mountain of paper to be left in the hymnal rack or tossed at the first opportunity.

The primary purpose of a worship bulletin is to direct people through the service. This is also the primary purpose of the expensive Worship Books/Hymnals sitting in the pew racks.

A secondary purpose is advertising — which these days is better done by email or Facebook. (It’s not the people who are in church that need all the reminders!)

Bulletins can be a creative outlet that provides enriching content—much more than those black and white line drawings that every church uses—the ones with short, big-eyed characters in flowing robes, acting out the Gospel for the day.

If a church is to go to the trouble of reprinting the worship book each week, it should add something to the worship experience.

We have yet to encounter bulletins as helpful as Redeemer’s—one piece of paper (11 x 17) with the entire service printed inside, including words to all hymns and prayers. Full color art from many different genres and religious poetry graced the covers. News, contact info, credits, calendar and even a Bible study or puzzle for the children appeared on the back.

There was no need to reference hymnals, which freed us to use worship elements from many sources.

Since we printed only words, we could easily substitute parts of the liturgy with an appropriate praise song or hymn.

But what about the music? The congregation developed a pretty good ear. The organist played hymns through in their entirety once. Hymnals were in each pew. Hymnal references were provided for those who wanted the music—and that was rarely more than one person.

A Redeemer bulletin was easy to follow for the presiding minister, visitors and even the children. Most important—there was a reason to take a Redeemer bulletin home to enjoy and share during the week.

Recently, a former member who now lives out of state wrote to one of our members and asked for a copy of our bulletins. She wanted to share them with her new pastor. A current member spoke up and said, “I’ll send her a few, I have them all on file.”

Others had often shared that they clipped a poem or image from the bulletin and stuck it to the refrigerator. That anyone kept them on file was a surprise!

It’s been more than three years since our last worship service in our own sanctuary, but when I cleaned my son’s room last week (who is now of age to be moving out). There, neatly folded on his dresser was the bulletin from the last Redeemer worship service —September 20, 2009.

Redeemer bulletins had mileage—even three years after we published our last one!

In this age of “going green,” it is peculiar that we publish hymnals with liturgies printed in them and place them in every pew. We brag that we have the latest and greatest worship book. Then the worship books sit unused in the racks. We reprint the liturgy in bulletins that eat up a ream or two of paper each week, a ton of toner, and wear and tear on office equipment. Preparing these bulletins takes a half day of a pastor’s time and probably a full day of office time.

Church bulletins are a huge investment with little return.

The reason we do this is probably that the hymnals are heavy and require flipping from the liturgy section to the hymn section frequently. They are awkward.

It’s also the way every church seems to do it.

But bulletins with 16-24 pages and fliers spilling out are equally awkward. Some of them were daunting to us as visitors — even with our strong church backgrounds.

Here’s an idea. Fill the hymnals with hymns—nothing else. You may end up needing to invest in fewer copies.

Print each liturgy in a small booklet that is easy to manage and won’t cost more than a dollar or two per copy. Let congregations choose which liturgy booklets they want. They can even create them themselves if they pay the licensing fee. Most churches don’t use more than one or two versions of a liturgy, regardless of how many choices are offered in the heavy worship books. An advantage of this is that new liturgies can be added at any time without waiting 20 years for the next hymnal to be published.

Now your bulletin can be one sheet of paper. Or maybe you won’t need one at all!

Save a forest. Save the church budget.

The bulletin will be easier to follow and allow for the inclusion of more art, poetry and teaching in your worship experience.

PS: We were able to forge the way in developing this because we didn’t have a pastor controlling the process.

05 Nov 2012

Worship As Entry into Church Life

The sign hangs close to the door of almost every church. ALL WELCOME.

A similar message of welcome will be on the church’s opening web page, usually accompanied by a photo of Christmas Eve worship—as if Christmas worship is representative of the whole church year.

We still expect our worship experience to be the entry point into community life within the Church. There may have been a day when this was true.

That day would have been when most people had some familiarity with religion and sought a new church community only when they relocated.

Today, however, a first-time visitor is often entering our doors totally unprepared for what they are about to experience.

Their first impression will be as if they were watching a foreign film with subtitles in a different foreign language.

Liturgies and hymns are laced with words from Latin and Greek and tunes from ancient choral traditions.
They will be asked to stand, sit and kneel with little explanation as to why. Obvious perhaps to church goers, but not to today’s visitors.
They will juggle bulletins with papers flying out and hymnals that have two numbering systems.

And then comes Communion, where they won’t be sure if they are among those welcome or not. They may be unsure of the local customs and have no clue what this eating and drinking of the body and blood of Christ is all about. (Many of those participating don’t know either.)

There is nothing wrong with any of this. Just realize that it doesn’t necessarily communicate to visitors. Although meant to be welcoming, it may be alienating or worse.

If a visitor is not welcome at communion, their first visit to church has been an experience of exclusion.

If communion is a weekly event, they will feel excluded weekly until they are made welcome through some form of initiation. If the Eucharist is a third of the worship service, the visitor has been excluded from a third of the worship service.

This is just something for the Church in a new age to think about as we practice our rituals.

photo credit: 12th St David (taking a breather) via photopin cc

04 Nov 2012

Here Comes Advent — Again!

The First in a Series of Posts
about the Least Understood
Season of the Church Year

Come December, we will once again anticipate the joyous birth of our Savior by rolling out the traditions so well-known to Christians.

We’ll get our Advent devotionals and four-session Bible studies in place, we’ll buy the kiddies paper calendars, and our choirs will start practicing Christmas anthems. For worship, we’ll roll out the pre-Civil War classic Advent hymns.

We have to know we are paddling upstream. Just as the rest of the world is anticipating Christmas with happy songs, we feel the need to look ahead to the passion‚ as if we won’t be celebrating this in its own right in just a few weeks.

Those of us raised in the traditions of the Church will protest the critics of these traditions.

The chronic complainers aren’t particularly loud or noticeable. But they are many.

Mostly, they just stay home until Christmas Eve. Now that they understand!

As for us Christians, we’ll stick to our traditions, thank you very much.

Truth be told, the traditions of Advent are beautiful and deeply meaningful to the few of us who understand them. The problem we have is in communicating them to the vast majority of the world that doesn’t understand them or feel a need to bother.

The church is left with three choices.

Keep on keeping on. Proudly defend the heritage of Advent and hope someone is listening while the rest of us are still standing.
Abandon the past and cater to the modern mindset.
Find a way to communicate what is so important to us.

Choices one and two require less work and are the most popular — with predictable results.

Choice three might actually make a difference. But how?

We’ll explore possibilities during this pre-Advent season.

If you have ideas . . . please share them.

photo credit: samu.zamu via photopin cc

01 Nov 2012

« Previous

Commentary

WANTED: Artists in the Church