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Rethinking Small Church Ministry

The Strategy and Tactics of Love in the Modern Church

The strategy and tactics of love are the backbone of most storytelling.

Here is the standard scenario.

Boy sees girl or girl sees boy. They want to get together. (Strategy)  They plot to be together, surmounting one obstacle after another until they are happily and forever in each other’s arms. (Tactics)

Is this not like the longed-for scenario of church work?

In the Church, achieving togetherness (oneness with God) is the strategy. Tactics are the methods used to reach this goal.

Too often in church work, we employ tactic after tactic with no clear strategy. Strategy starts to stray — usually in the direction of making a traditional budget.

We write mission statements to remind us that the strategy of the Church is to reach God’s people with the message of love.

What follows should be an examination of tactics. Too often it is simply putting into place the tactics of the past.

Typical tactics include:

  • Membership drives
  • Pot luck dinners and seasonal festivals
  • Visitation
  • Worship innovations
  • Educational and social opportunities
  • Newsletters
  • Sermons
  • Service projects

There are new tactics that the Church has not yet conquered.

  • Social media

This contains a host of sub-tactics — blogging, Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram, YouTube, podcasting, video, etc.

But what is the strategy?

The message of the church is love. The strategy never changes.

The strategy is engagement.

Jesus engaged people.

He approached them as individuals.

  • The woman at the well
  • The midnight lesson with Nicodemus
  • The paralytic by the pool of Bethesda

He engaged them in groups.

  • The wedding guests
  • The disciples
  • The multitudes on the mountainside
  • The people in the temple
  • The family of Lazarus at the graveside

Once engaged, Jesus employed tactics.

  • Miracles
  • Rituals and observances
  • Personal conversations that often had a supernatural nature
  • Teaching
  • Storytelling
  • Protesting (clearing the temple)
  • Service (blessing the children, feeding the hungry, curing the ill)

We must emulate these tactics. We must teach and serve, pray and worship. We must do some things in a traditional way and we must do many things in more modern ways. To some extent we must do them simultaneously because we live in transitional age.

A common tactic employed by regional bodies is to close churches on older memberships — expecting elderly members to assimilate into other congregations that might also be forced to close within a few years. This is a cruel and dead-end tactic because it has lost view of the overall strategy of the church. The strategy of engagement has been overtaken by the strategy of economics.

The rut which is engulfing the Church is that we have become accustomed to people coming to us. We expect this and even demand it—without success, but we keep doing it anyway! This expectation is becoming less realistic with every passing day. The problems we face today are because the tactic of neglect has been employed for decades.

And so we must adjust our engagement tactics.

If people are not going to come to us, how are we going to reach them? How do we engage God’s people today?

09 Mar 2013

3 Programming Ideas for Small Churches (Holy Week-Pentecost)

Worship Resources for Post-Easter

The Easter play we published last year has been downloaded about 3000 times this year. We are grateful for your interests in the content we are providing aimed to enrich the worship experience of even the smallest churches.

As Holy Week approaches, we point you to three other ideas that we tested in our small congregation. Two of them work best in small churches with as few as a dozen in attendance.

Maundy Thursday

This Maundy Thursday service combines the Passover Tradition with the Christian tradition drawn from the Pennsylvania Dutch observance of Green Thursday — a term drawn from the English pronunciation of the German word for grief. It involves the serving of a ceremonial and symbolic meal (like the Seder) but with the symbolism pointing to the Resurrection. It can be used with larger groups, but it is quite easy to do with small groups.

Palm Sunday

Florists supply dried out palm fronds but small churches must purchase far more than they need of these token palms. Actual palm plants are usually available at this time of year for about $10. Have your congregation cut their own fully branched palm to wave during your Palm Sunday celebration. One large palm plant will easily provide for a congregation of 20 or 30. (We often had a nice palm plant left over even after we “pruned” it pretty well.

After Easter (Pentecost or Ascension Sunday)

The Roman Catholic tradition celebrates the Stations of the Cross. The stations chronicle the scenes of Jesus as he heads toward Calvary.

The same idea can apply to the interactions of Jesus post-Resurrection. This service (easily adapted to your liking) celebrates the 14 Stations of the Risen Christ. It follows the  sightings of Jesus between the Resurrection and the Ascension with scripture, prayer, commentary (supplied by your worship leader) and hymns.

This service can be used in one setting. It fills an hour easily. It can also be broken up over the long Pentecost season with each scene acted out.

08 Mar 2013

Blogging Your Sermon—Go Live with the Gospel Online

In general, the sermon is a dead medium. Quite possibly, a sermon is well-reasoned and based in sound theology. It may impart important information about understanding the text. It may be delivered from the heart even when read.

This is accepted in the world of church. Preachers preach. Congregations listen.

Yet frequently the medium of sermon, central to the church experience, lacks the power that live interaction can give—even though they ARE live! Ironic!  Live may not be the most lively!

The temptation, which makes sense, is to preach to the people who are there—to meet the expectations of the people who give their offerings—until the offerings run out.

Today there are far fewer people in church listening. Most of the listeners are over 50 and presumably still have an attention span that lasts longer than 20 minutes (even if our short-term memories are just a memory). There are practically no children in church.

The offerings are going to run out.

Yet the delivery of the 20-minute sermon is still the norm. Preachers preach. Congregations listen. Seminaries are still working hard to teach preachers to do this well.

Some of them do!

Many of them don’t.

One of the faults of the preaching world is that no one reviews or critiques pastors once they complete seminary training. Preachers rarely hear other preachers speak. They are isolated in those pulpits! They are what they are.

There is no place more status quo in the Church than the pulpit.

We listeners at Redeemer have heard a lot of sermons from a lot of pastors. Our versatility in listening to preachers is a by-product of having no pastor most of the time for a decade or so. We had supply pastors. This has continued in our rejected status within the church as we attend other churches and listen to an unending string of “supply” pastors.

In our experience, we have heard some supply pastors give the same sermon unaltered a half-dozen times. We’ve heard a few others ramble about the morning news — preaching the newspaper was the theory. Failure to prepare was often more evident.

We’ve had sermons read to us. We’ve had sermons rambled at us. We have become familiar with formula sermons that build to a climax and drop us right into the post-sermon hymn.

We have heard some good sermons. Good as they were, they aren’t remembered long.

Preaching in a sanctuary is an opportunity to shine—to inspire and reach each set of ears in a personal way. But there is something about the format that no longer resonates with today’s world. It may be too late to recover.

The missing element may be immediacy. Three examples.

We live in a world where news is instantaneous. We are likely to hear it from a stranger nearby—like the guy on a cell phone in the theater lobby during intermission who loudly reports the score of the playoff game to every disgruntled mate who was forced to choose between the theater and the TV screen.

I was in an airplane when the news broke that ObamaCare had passed. Each passenger was busy about their own business, until a young-20-something announced the news. A lively debate was struck crossing the aisles and over the backs of seats. It continued as we filed out the aisle and into the terminal.

I attended a boychoir concert one Sunday afternoon. The choir was very professional and poised. Suddenly, and fortunately in between numbers, the back row of teen boys erupted with inexplicable joy. One of the tenors was wired and had passed the news that the local football favorite had scored a winning touchdown.

News is fresh. Vital. Interesting, Relevant. Necessary to our lives. Catalytic at is finest.

We seem to have lost these qualities in the telling of the Good News.

Delivering the Good News once a week may have fit the slower-paced life of yesteryear. It may still have an important place in today’s world, but it is not the most effective way to reach the most people.

Yet we listeners are locked in. Congregations still pay a hefty fee, often a mission-crippling fee, to make sure there is a preacher present in the sanctuary each week, preaching to a dwindling audience. It is live, but it is not lively.

Blogging, on the other hand, is live in a different sense. It is interactive. It reaches beyond sanctuary walls. It creates a following who are motivated to share. It allows you to address local problems in real time — not waiting until Sunday to muster the energy of the faithful to act. (By then they will probably do little more than pray.) Blogging is THE medium made for modern preachers.

Very, very few have been able to switch gears.

Change comes hard. But it does come. For the art of preaching to survive, it must adapt to the modern audience.

The church audience today is not in church.

We are online.  (Click to Tweet)

25 Feb 2013

February 24 — A Day of Infamy

Today Bishop Claire Burkat of the Southeastern Pennsylvania Synod of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America will gather her little chicks under her wing at Holy Spirit Lutheran Church in NE Philadelphia and celebrate its closure. They’ve been moving toward this date for the last year, since they sold the property to the United Church of Christ—and probably still longer.

This is also the fifth anniversary of Bishop Claire Burkat’s attempt to stealthily seize Redeemer’s property in East Falls. It was on February 24, 2008, that Bishop Burkat invited herself to our church supposedly to plan a closing service for a congregation that had never even discussed closing much less been given an opportunity to vote on it as is constitutionally necessary. She brought about nine or ten people with her with no notice, despite the fact that the congregation had warned her that the date she had chosen with no consultation with church leaders was already booked and that the congregation did not wish to meet at that time. The two members of Redeemer who met her that day were soon to discover that her plans had nothing to do with planning a worship service. Among her posse was SEPA’s lawyer who was waiting behind the building and out of sight in a locksmith’s van. When their strategy called for the lawyer and locksmith to make their presence known we don’t know. We had been forewarned by someone in Chicago that she was intending such a move and so when we saw the locksmith van go by, we were prepared.

The bishop’s embarrassment that day, which sparked five years of vindictive law suits, has cost mission and ministry in our neighborhood dearly.

There was never an attempt to work with us — we were not valued enough to be part of the discussion of our future. The names of our lay leaders were dragged through the mud—an attempt to validate Synod’s actions. The work of the laity was treated with total disregard. The people of Redeemer deserved the opportunity to work with and be in discussion with SEPA just as the people of Holy Spirit have been.

SEPA’s Articles of Incorporation forbid the Synod from confiscating congregational property without the consent of the congregation.

The more SEPA congregations allow this very important foundation of Lutheran polity to be ignored, the more endangered each congregation is.

Redeemer’s Ambassadors have now visited 56 SEPA congregations. We know that many of them are no stronger and more than a few are weaker than Redeemer. If Redeemer’s statistics were the reason for closing, about ten to twenty percent of the remaining 160 congregations should also be closed with more suffering the same fate within a decade or two if innovative steps aren’t taken.

We have always known that Redeemer’s property and endowment were the real attractions. In April of 2008, we discovered that Bishop Burkat had offered our property for sale to a Lutheran Agency without a word to our congregation. We learned this from a letter from the agency, dated in early April (only about 40 days after the February 24 showdown), informing us that they had done an extensive site evaluation and were denying the offer of sale. The timing suggests that the property, owned by the congregation, had been offered for sale even before Bishop Burkat came to the congregation—all without the knowledge of the congregation. Clearly NOT Luthean polity.

SEPA needed our money—quick and easy. This devious situation fueled the character assassination, personal attacks and refusal to work with Redeemer that has characterized the court battles. But SEPA seems to be unable to check and balance their leadership — as their constitutions call for.

In September 2009, Bishop Burkat at last achieved her goal. She locked out the members of Redeemer.

Undaunted, Redeemer continues its mission, achieving its greatest success with our online ministry. We have broken new ground in mission which is being recognized by other denominations if not our own!

While some members of SEPA Synod are celebrating the closure of a church, others are meeting on this date in Lansdale and on Monday in Burholme to talk about communications. Redeemer and its website, 2x2virtualchurch.com, could contribute a great deal to a discussion with church communicators. We have a ton of experience!

But we’ve been banished—ex“communicated.”

23 Feb 2013

Settled Pastors in an Unsettling World

“There are no pastors for you.”

Bishop Roy Almquist told Redeemer this at the turn of this century as a prelude for doing nothing to serve our congregation in his second six-year term.

He may have been very right.

It is no accident that small churches vastly outnumber large congregations. People are attracted to small congregations. Sociologically, an ideal congregation has about 150 members.

The model congregation must have 300 members to support the financial expectations of clergy and the regional body—and that’s before they do a lick of ministry or mission. When a congregation gets that big, it loses some of the qualities that attract many people to church.

A broader geographic area is needed to support this model which makes it more difficult for the congregation to stay in touch with the local needs.

The model is presented as economically desirable — fewer churches serving more people. But statistics show that fewer churches are serving fewer people. Statistics overall are down.

This model relies on the concept of a “settled pastor”— a pastor who serves a congregation for some seven years or ideally for decades. This is unrealistic today and is not likely to lead to church growth.

The epidemic of church closures is a result of a failure to adapt—hanging on to a dying model until it is too much work to turn things around—although it is probably still possible.

To survive in a diverse, quickly changing community culture, congregations need flexibility. They need to draw on professional skills that one person is unlikely to have. They may need these services for only six months, but they can’t get them because their money and fealty is tied up in one “settled pastor.”

Perhaps the growing number of clergy taking interim pastor training is a sign that they recognize that the “settled pastor” model will no longer advance the church from either the clergy or lay point of view.

The interim approach — a short-term plug for a hole which will eventually be filled more permanently — may need adjusting. It puts the management of congregations in the hands of the regional bodies—with which the congregations don’t have any day-to-day knowledge or relations. Similarly, regional bodies know only what they are told about the congregations by people with a vested interest. The odds for misinterpretation are good.

Congregational control of their own ministry — the Lutheran way — is slipping away. Attitudes are changing as the regional bodies rely more and more on their power and less on their sense of service. Congregations begin to defer decisions and rights that are constitutionally theirs. It doesn’t take long for this to become “the norm.” Congregations that insist on their rights are ridiculed and shunned—the Redeemer experience.

We will talk about this more in a later post, but this abandonment put us in an ideal position to experiment. And we were experiencing success.

The only answer many congregations hear is that they should continue to pour money down a non-producing hole until they are drained both financially and spiritually. Then, unable to meet the future, there is a grand celebration of the past as the regional body shutters the church and walks off with the spoils. Such a celebration is scheduled this week at Holy Spirit in NE Philadelphia.

We can’t help but wonder what might have been.

21 Feb 2013

A Small Congregation’s Mission Reach

Four Small Churches—One in Mission

Pakistan Palm SundayRedeemer’s 2×2 web site has made friends in ministry with several mission churches. The first to write to us was a house church in Pakistan. Pastor Sarwar wrote to us last year about this time. He sent photos of their worship — their members marching the streets of a Muslim city, celebrating Palm Sunday. We prayed for them while they were in hiding during the unrest sparked by a thoughtless movie about Islam We learned from them that a Lutheran Church in their city had burned. We tried to explain to them that the movie did not represent America and that most Americans had never seen the film. My beautiful picture My beautiful pictureSince then they have undertaken a challenge to open 1000 house churches in Pakistan in 2013.

The second was a husband and wife in western Kenya who are taking in orphans to raise with their own children. The husband was attending Bible classes to learn more about leading a church. The mother was busy with the children and making necklaces to raise some money. She sent us a selection. They sent us pictures as they worked to build a house for the children. I promised them some art for the walls. I’d love to send them the painting of Jesus with the children which was on the wall of our educational building — now locked by SEPA Synod.

The third was an energetic pastor with a passion for the many orphaned children in Nairobi. He holds weekend worship events for the children. We sent them greetings and the children wrote back to us. We correspond with each weekly — sometimes daily. They pray for us and ask about our members by name. We help one another as best we can from such a distance and with limited resources. Mostly, we write notes of encouragement.

Glory of Pentecost, KenyaA few months ago, with the permission of each, we put each church in touch with the others so they could share and feel a bit less lonely in their work.

Yesterday, we heard from each church—one after the other in a span of a couple of hours. The notes were short, but the message was astonishing. These three churches, in two countries, and in two very different cultures were visiting one another. First, we heard from Simion, from western Kenya. He told us he was with Silas from Nairobi, about 300 miles away. Then we heard from Silas, who shared that he was traveling with Simion and was going to visit their home. Then we heard from Sarwar in Pakistan, he had sent a missionary to visit with them.

oldacademylrThree churches, each with tremendous challenges, each with the barest of resources to work with, were visiting and sharing the bonds of Christianity. Each had met through 2×2, little Redeemer’s outreach.

We are amazed—jealous that we can’t join them—and thankful that in Christ we are one.

Do not underestimate the worth of a small church in today’s world. Even a small church can do big things in mission. We didn’t need a national church or regional body to coordinate our mission. We just made friends with our blog.

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

Join us!

16 Feb 2013

Overcoming the fear of Social Media

horseGet ready for the Horseless Carriage

Get ready for Social Media

Many congregations are interested in adding Social Media to their ministries. And so they dabble. They find someone to start a Facebook page. They lean back and relax. That’s done. Innovation isn’t so hard, after all!

Here’s the thing about Social Media.

Social Media is more than Facebook. Much more!

If your congregation embraces Social Media it will mean everything changes.

Social Media, fully embraced, is not a simple add-on — like adding an extra worship service.

It is transforming.

Transforming? Isn’t that what our church leaders have been demanding of congregations for the last decade with little definition of exactly what they mean?

Social Media—fully embraced—will affect every aspect of your ministry in positive and profound ways.

People need to be prepared. The only way to prepare people is to involve them and encourage flexibility. It helps to actually get started!

My family had lunch today in a historic inn along the famous Lincoln Highway. We got to talking about the history of the highway. It seems the opening of this newfangled cross-continental roadway that followed the introduction of the automobile came with no small amount of angst.

The big fear was that the horses of the early 20th century would not be happy.

Unhappy horses meant unhappy drivers.

A plan was developed.

Step 1: Prepare the horses. Warn them. Something new is coming.

Early drivers of horseless carriages were encouraged to carry flares with them. Upon approaching a horse-drawn carriage, they were to shoot up a warning flare. (Bet that went over big!)

Step 2: Protect the horses’ sense of security.

If horses were not reassured by flares (and why would they be?), then drivers were encouraged to carry camouflage. At the sight of a distressed horse, they should be prepared to pull to the side of the road and drape their automobile with a sheet designed to make the car disappear into the surroundings. What the horse doesn’t see will not be scary.

Step 3: Dismantle the horseless carriage.

If a horse is still disturbed by its new competition, drivers should be prepared to dismantle their automobile and hide the pieces along the side of the road until the horse passes as if nothing has changed.

All of this is, of course, absurd — especially to us Pennsylvanians who share the roads with our Amish neighbors. The horses seem to have adapted!

But this is a typical agenda for those who fear change.

  • Warn people of innovation.
  • Protect them from innovation.
  • Be prepared to dismantle all the progress and benefits possible from innovation at the first sign of distress (real or imaginary).

Churches intent on incorporating social media must be prepared to meet the same sorts of resistance.

It will mean doing things very differently — across the board. The very structure of church will change.

Expect something like this:

  • Social Media is clearly too much work for one pastor. But pastors are used to controlling communication in the church. Lay people cannot be expected to handle so much responsibility. Best to wait. And wait. And wait.
  • What do we do if Social Media actually works and lots of new people join a church? (This was a problem Redeemer was dealing with as 49 people joined in one year.) What if those 49 people become a voting block with the potential to ruin any plans made before they joined. Our congregation was dealing with this issue head-on and making progress. But our denomination, intent on Redeemer failing so they could claim our property, couldn’t deal with change they hadn’t orchestrated. They skipped right to Step 3: Dismantle everything! They kicked out the 49 new members along with the 25 or so older members and locked the church doors. 

These are real problems but they are good problems that need solutions. Dismantling everything because things aren’t like they used to be is just plain silly—and it is counter to Christian mission.

Fortunately, there are real solutions waiting to be discovered.

The automobile is now the norm.

The new church that arises from the use of Social Media will soon be the norm, too — and it all may happen just in time to save the mainline church.

photo credit: NCReedplayer via photopin cc
09 Feb 2013

To Dream the Impossible Dream

Today’s Alban Weekly Newsletter promotes a book, The Small Church, by Steve Willis.

Willis points out that large churches are historically a new phenomenon—only 100 years old!

2×2 has made this point for a while. Most churches set out to serve their own communities with little thought of growth.

When churches grow, it is usually because of societal change, not a dedication to mission, fueled by a carefully drafted mission statement.

Willis points to the rise of mega church as a result of mobility in society made possible by mass transit and a reliable highway system.

The article quotes Tony Pappas, an American Baptist minister:

So for the first time in human history, thousands of people could get to a one- or two-hour event and get home for lunch! So large churches, big steeples, big pulpits, Old Firsts came into being. As we think of them today, large churches have only been around for a little over a century–only 5% of the history of our faith.

Before the concept of mega church, most congregations were pretty much the same in their needs and mission. Pastors were expected to do the same things and there was little mobility. There was no need. Pastors served the same church for decades.

Today, a pastor may, in following a call, carefully calculate how accepting the call will position him or her for a “better” or more lucrative call in three years.

Meanwhile, the congregations still think they are calling a pastor for the long haul.

The article makes a case for the mega church as an attractive business venture. Business entrepreneurs supported large congregations as an investment.

The early mega churches included congregations of just 1000 or 2000 members. Today, the mega church aims for five times that number. (Churches with 1000 or more members are called corporate churches. There aren’t many of them either.)

A model church budget today relies on the support of 1000 members. Most churches with 1000 members have only 10% worshiping on a typical Sunday morning.

In our 55 Ambassador visits, we have encountered only a handful of churches with worship attendance of more than 100. Most of those were on holiday Sundays. The average attendance of all the churches we have visited has been under 50. One congregation listed its average attendance as 400 in its Trend Report. Attendance at the 11 am service the day we visited was 27 (including us, the pastor and the organist).

In the last 100 years, we have created a model that the Church and its volunteer memberships never set out to support. And can’t.

So here we are in 2013, looking at the ruins of our church. And we are still thinking — if everyone can just change and be like the one or two percent of churches that manage to reach “mega” status, all would be wonderful.

Pastors are still trained to serve congregations as if they are neighborhood congregations. When expectations don’t match reality, the laity are blamed.

Most lay people just want to join a church to worship. They never set out to reinvent it.

But then there is 2×2.

04 Feb 2013

The Death of the Offering-based Church

The church has always relied on offerings from followers for survival. That reliance has meant different things in different ages. In Jesus’ time we know that there were followers, many of them women, bank-rolling the disciples and later the apostles.

As the Early Christian Church grew, the contributions became expected. Failure to contribute whole-heartedly was even a death sentence in one Bible passage.

As the church grew across different cultures, contributions took on different forms. Some contributed by going off to war to fight the infidels. (If successful, they might be rewarded with land and title!) Farmers and tradesmen contributed to feeding the large number of clergy and maintaining property. (If successful, their standing in the community would grow.) Artisans donated their talents. (If successful, they might find a patron and their art would preserve their names forever.) 

Monetary tithes were never enough to keep church leaders comfortable and hence by the fifteenth and sixteenth century, church leaders had instituted a turnkey financial model. Pay to play or pay to pray. Indulgences. That incensed one young monk and the Reformation was on!

This was happening at about the same time as a bountiful mass of new land was discovered across the ocean. For the first time, there was someplace to go to escape the oppression of the church. Protestants began leaving in droves. Fresh start.

For years, many American churches copied the same model and congregations contributed their skills and work product to the maintenance of a parsonage and clergy. Monetary offerings were only part of the typical church budget.

Today’s clergy often laugh at these days, although there are few alive who actually remember them! They seem to forget that the contributions were made with love and sacrifice. A chicken given to the pastor was a chicken not available to feed the family.

In the most recent decades, clergy have been less likely to accept parsonage-based or non-monetary pay. Small congregations which thrived on non-monetary model through economically lean times were fairly suddenly priced out of existence. We are still experiencing the fallout from this shift in economic model of the modern church.

This doesn’t mean that things cannot change again.

2×2 believes that any church that relies solely on monetary offerings is scheduling failure. It may not happen for ten or twenty years but the path is fairly certain.

We have studied the statistics of congregations in our own denomination and regional body. Failure is the norm. It is almost universal. Large churches are in decline. Medium-sized churches are in decline. Small churches are the first to feel the pain. The others will follow. Survival is so tenuous that it outranks mission in budget priorities.

Redeemer—the congregation Bishop Burkat decided to close to make up for declining contributions to the regional body—was one of the very few congregations with positive numbers. The numbers presented to the Synod Assembly in 2008 and 2009 were fudged. And no one questioned them. No one.

In our next post, we will tell you how Redeemer had positioned itself to meet the economic challenges of this new ecclesiastic age.

24 Jan 2013

Mission by the Book: A Sure and Steady Path to the Past

Following the Mission Manual 

There are such things, you know. Mission Manuals. They tell us exactly how to start a church or revive a faltering ministry.

Frequently, mission is all about replication. We try to do the same thing that worked so well, perhaps just a few years ago, but in a different place.

We follow flagship ministries that succeed because of unique vision and herculean passion and try to pull off the same success with no unique vision and the part-time commitment of clergy.

At times we go so far as to attempt to import people into neighborhoods. That early “manufactured” success can be measured. It might attract the regional body’s interest and their investment (coin, time, or talent). Perhaps the statistics will attract some unsuspecting part-time pastor!

Why do we try to replicate—and call it innovation?

  • There is comfort in routine.
  • We know how to measure routines.
  • We know what to measure in our routines.
  • We already have the training to do things the old way and the training to do things in new ways might not exist.
  • Who doesn’t like a roadmap?

Neighborhoods are not the same. In decades past, there may have been more similarity and more stability within a geographic era. Church mission concepts are geared to such commonalities.

But neighborhoods vary greatly these days. Change used to be generational. Now it can be expected, especially in urban neighborhoods, within five years.

Look at Philadelphia. There are whole neighborhoods where virtually everyone is in their mid-twenties to mid-thirties with just a few toddlers in tow (Fairmount). There are ethnic neighborhoods that are shifting ethnicity (South Philadelphia, once heavily Italian, is now the home of Southeast Asian immigrants). There are collegiate neighborhoods (West Philadelphia). There are neighborhoods that are very mixed racially, economically, and socially (East Falls).

No amount of forcing will make neighborhoods stay the same. Congregations must learn this. So must professional leaders. We must also learn that a successful replication may have a life of only five years — if ongoing changes are not recognized as part of the mission model.

The act of replicating means that a great deal of energy and resources are devoted to recreating the same model. By the time all of the pieces are in place and showing the first signs of stability (if not progress) there are few resources or energy for initiative. Congregations may be locked into the leadership that brought them thus far but will not be able to take them into the Promised Land.

So how can the church foster innovation when so much thinking and resources are designed to protect the status quo or the initial investment?

If we want innovative ministries. we must stop measuring old statistics. New ministries can’t live up to them. But they CAN forge new ground and show impressive advances.

The day will come when you can apply the old measuring tools. But, if you wait for the old measurements to be in place before you innovate, nothing new will happen.

We can illustrate many of these points by looking at the recent history (15 years and counting) of the Southeastern Pennsylvania Synod (SEPA) of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA)’s attempts to do ministry with the people of East Falls. We’ll publish these separately. They are worth looking at if not for Redeemer’s sake (which would be welcome) but to learn what doesn’t work in the single-minded quest for transformation. There are many lessons to be learned from this one, largely misunderstood, ministry.

20 Dec 2012