You Cannot Build A Church on Conditional Welcoming

Church Replanting as defined in this post on Christianity Today relies on a Church Replanter or pastor having unconditional control of membership—something that may violate a congregation’s constitution.

The first step is to exclude the most faithful—the people who have invested the most in prayer, time and offering and the people who have the most knowledge of church procedure. It is a way of excluding anyone who might say “Wait a minute. Is this who we are?”

What does it say about Church, if you start with exclusion?

Conditional welcoming adds a new caveat to the typical sign in the church yard.

All welcome

(unless you’ve been here before)

Church Replanters assign themselves the right to toy with the faithful in ways that can be horrifically hurtful. The strategy is cruel. Church Replanters can live with this because they have dismissed the people as undesirables. They don’t visit with them, serve them, or care about them. They are the “old wine skins.” The people have served their usefulness. In many cases that his been to supply the property and endowment funds to support the Church Replanter!

What does this say about Church?

Here are some of results we experienced.

• Divided families. Confused children put in the middle.
• Unnecessary testing of faith—usually with a loss of trust in God.
• Finger-pointing.
• Gossip.
• Name-calling.
• Guilt.
• Eroded confidence.
• It can even lead to life and death issues.

What Happens to Excluded People?

Church Replanters will report without evidence, that the displaced people happily “move on.” They state this and move ahead with their plans.

We recommend this actually be researched. It is difficult to poll people you have excluded.

Church Replanters tend to consider existing members as baggage. They are all for getting rid of “baggage”—not caring for it.

The Church Replanter is dead focused on more important things—finding new people to warm the pews and line the offering plates.

Ed Stetzer writes: 

A new church will need a new identity so the community will know it’s a new church. You see, they’ve already decided the old church was not for them. They may decide the same thing about the new church. However, a new identity is a new opportunity for engagement.

This statement is filled with presumption. The foundational presumption is that it is the people in the Church that are “not for them.”

There may be many other factors. Some of them may have had to do with how church leaders treated the people over the last few decades. People already may feel excluded and unworthy—judged. People may determine that contributions of time, talent and wealth are better used elsewhere.

There are so many ways pastoral leadership could engage that are less cruel and more promising.

• Visiting every member.
• Listening.
• Talking and praying with individuals and groups and working to regain trust.
• Attending community events and practicing intentional inviting and welcoming.
• Showing pride in your people and your message.

Excluding the most faithful confirms the feelings of the disillusioned. “I’m glad I stopped going when I did—before they locked the door on me.”

The Real Reason Church Replanters Start by Excluding Members

Ed Stetzer admits in passing that the Church Replanting might fail. But this strategy has taken care of the true interest of the replanter—gaining the control of the congregation’s property and endowment funds. If it fails, the denomination has the property and monetary assets, which if the church failed with the people in control, might have been directed elsewhere.

Denominations want control of the property. They have to get rid of the property owners to do that. This entire strategy is about gaining control of property.

Church Replanting is a euphemism for theft.

Most Protestant denominations have congregational polity. The congregation owns the property and controls the funds and directly oversees church operations through some form of governing board. Church Replanters need to get rid of previous members so that they can claim property and change the rules so that they have control. Rules and bylaws can be suspended or changed without resistance if you just lock doors. The new management they suggest you advertise is no longer local. Congregational polity has artfully been shifted to hierarchical polity.

Church Replanters’ lofty ambitions cannot work without this measure of control.

This is so important that denominations who send the Church Replanters are prepared for court (where they might lose if the law is applied, but the law cannot be applied because of separation of church and state).

Denominations often have lawyers on staff. They are likely to have helped draft the strategies. They are prepared for the coming conflict, while congregations scramble to get their footing with no denominational support.

Congregations, made up of volunteers who come to church to worship and nurture Christian values in their families, are unprepared for what will come — heavy-handed arrogance and self-righteousness which activates the ugliest characteristics of the human condition. Greed, pride, arrogance will soon justify coveting, bearing false witness, and theft.  All for the greater good. Any resistance to the Church Replanters agenda is suddenly the work of enemies—not members. Lines will be drawn and allegiances sought to bolster claims. Denominations, who have access to the decision-makers in the Church will make sure their interests are protected. The Church will be at war with itself—self-destructing.

Don’t think it won’t! We’ve already seen this happen! Our congregation questioned the denomination’s actions under the existing constitutions and found ourselves in court for the next six years—sued as individuals.

Denominations can claim they are Replanting Churches when they are really trying to acquire endowment funds and properties to sell, making sure they receive the congregations’ wealth. That’s about the only thing that makes this strategy, which ignores most of Christ’s teachings, attractive.

All evidence in the Bible points in a different direction.

Churches grow with acceptance, love, and service.

This is how Jesus grew a following. This is how the disciples grew a following.

It takes time and patience. It takes sacrifice. Humility helps.

And it has far better odds of working for more than 10 years.

Who holds the keys to the Church?

I read Seth Godin’s blog—I and many, many others. One of his recurring themes is how we are emerging from an industrial society that views the populace as cogs in an industrial wheel. Our schools have approached education as preparation for being a cog in the system. He recognizes that this won’t work much longer. It is time to think differently not only about how we educate but how we view the people who share our times.

It is time to think differently about Church, too. Are we treating our people like cogs in the Church Wheel?

When the idea of Sunday School developed back in the 1800s it was directed at educating the children of industrial neighborhoods. Hmm!

The people we hope to reach today are living in a fast-changing world. As a group, we are better educated than any time in history. College degrees are the norm in many communities. I watched my son graduate from high school having covered most of the material presented to me in college! The best and brightest are not likely to accept being cogs in the Church or anywhere else!

Returning to the comfort of medieval thinking is not going to work. Changing the way people have thought for centuries is a daunting proposition.

How did we get where we are today?

Often the early attempts at order became church law and were enveloped by doctrine but were actually born of convenience and self-interest. Early church leaders, seeking authority or some justification for systemizing Christianity, looked at the Bible and read how Jesus identified Peter as the outstanding leader among his first disciples. In earthbound thinking, and as history made such thinking convenient, all kinds of rules were attached to the “Feed my sheep” passage.

Oddly, male church leaders read this passage and focused on gender. Peter was male, therefore all church leaders forevermore must be male. Jesus does not mention gender as his reason for choosing Peter. Peter was also married, but married clergy were problematic in a society all too familiar with abuses of ungoing power and wealth by virtue of birth. Let’s ignore that!

The same logic applies to the Church’s view of Mary. Mary was a woman. Mary gave birth to Jesus. Therefore, the role of women in the Church is to bear children—something men can’t do, as a respected, high-ranking cardinal recently pointed out in a 60 Minutes interview.

Mary probably did a lot more than give birth to Jesus, both before and after the Resurrection. But she did not write the Gospels, and she wasn’t a man at a time when men made most decisions. So church leaders focus on Mary as woman, while they assign themselves every other position because they cannot bear children. It doesn’t make sense today. It never made sense.

The Church is no longer the political power it once was. That has been good. The Church should focus on creating Godly community. But the Church must do a timely and unselfish job if it is to keep the attention of people who don’t have to participate by law or custom.

Lacking societal pressure, people are choosing to opt out of something that just isn’t making sense in the world we know. Younger generations, baby boomers and down, are not necessarily forsaking spirituality or Christ, we just have a sense that we don’t fit the mold that was so comfortable for our parents and grandparents.

Here’s a question:

If the earliest Christians had lived today, what kind of structure would they have chosen?

Would they have noticed Peter’s gender as the determining qualification for leadership? Would they have focused on other qualities that are equally “Peter”—his passion and loyalty, his pragmatism, his humility and repentance, his ability to recognize his short-comings, his ability to change? Would they see Mary as a dedicated and brave witness to the Crucifixion, as a leader among the many women following her son?

The Church might recognize that the laity are not  “cogs” in the Church Wheel, requiring nothing more than a weekly oiling. They might find that many laity hold the keys to the future Church. There are countless Peters and Marys with plenty of work to go around.

This was always recognized to some extent with the auxiliaries of the church, nuns and deaconesses often provided the healing, social, and teaching functions that were foundational to church growth. Our small church owes as much to diaconate leadership as we do to clergy!

Modern young people do not want to be “cogs.” Today’s faithful want to use their skills to the fullest without feeling secondary, under the control of people who have power but lack their expertise.

It’s not that this generation is anti-church. We are frustrated with the obstacles that are holding us back but over which we have little control.

Here’s another set of questions:

What if in the full spectrum of time WE are the earliest Christians? What if two, three, four thousand years from now, there are Christian faithful looking to us for saintly example? What examples are we setting to help them?

Opting out is a modern choice.

The Church that doesn’t recognize this and respond to the loss of the faithful will wither.

What 2×2’s Ministry Is and Isn’t

It’s a new year. 2×2 spent the last few months posting less and preparing for the new year more.

We were surprised to find that our online ministry, sponsored by the smallest of small churches, is once again the victim of Christians who fear our influence.

Someone who sends support to selected ministries read our posts about small churches in far away places like Kenya and Pakistan and decided that we use our site to collect money and suggested that we are keeping contributions for ourselves.

THIS IS UNTRUE!

This person did not look very closely or direct any questions about our ministry to us. There is no DONATE button on our website. 2×2 is not set up for Paypal or Credit Card contributions. If we were interested in collecting money, we would have set these up years ago!

This troubled reader decided to cut support to one of these ministries because of our posts! Gossip started! We got a few emails: Where’s the money you are collecting for our orphans?

Pope Francis speaks about the tyranny of gossip in the Church. It spreads like wildfire and does more damage.

And so we start this year by telling you a bit more about 2x2virtualchurch with the hope of nipping the gossip before it buds!

A Correspondence Ministry

Paul’s ministry lasts because he wrote to churches.

We write to ministries of widows and orphans and struggling people, because we are widows and orphans and struggling people. Our correspondence is always initiated by them—when they find our website. We look for no more than Christian fellowship and mutual support, sharing our struggles and praying for one another. We find strength in recognizing that all small churches face challenges and they are often very alone in their work. We try to help—not by establishing a support system and raising money in any ongoing way and not by demanding doctrinal agreement. We don’t have the skills or manpower to get into that kind of control. We use a worldwide platform (which everyone has access to these days) to tell ministry stories—to help them.

Some of the people who contact us are looking for money. One sent us a detailed proposal! We are clear from the get-go that we have no money to give. Some of them disappear. A few of them continue to share. When we write about their ministries we do so with their permission. Some amazing things have happened as a result of just communicating!

We publicize small church ministries because they are rarely written about from a positive point of view. In our country, they are often the targets for church closures, orchestrated for the benefit of richer church bodies. Many have been neglected for years. Pastors, if they have one, are sent with instructions—just take care of them until they die a natural death.

Small churches play a very important role in the church. We are in a position to directly reach the marginalized and the hurting—the people most in need—the people who can’t pay comfortable salaries and send support money to regional bodies they never see. They are in the best position to serve daily—not in token outreaches at holiday time, not as badges for those who can afford charity. It doesn’t matter if they are in rural America, urban America, the African bush or the dangerous streets of the Muslim world. Small churches serve where mission is most difficult.

2×2 works to create voice for small church ministry.

Our Response to the Muslim Attack on Christians in Pakistan

In 2013, 2×2 responded to an extraordinary situation that was getting very little attention by bigger and richer church entities. In this one case, we offered to help people contribute to an extraordinary situation that affects all Christians but which we found no easy way within the established church to help.

2×2 was appalled at the church bombings in Pakistan in September 2013. A church with 250 worshipers was bombed by Muslim terrorists as the congregation was moving from worship to fellowship. Scores were killed. More injured.

We were close to this ministry partly because a pastor in Pakistan already had been corresponding with us for two years. When we heard about the bombings, we wrote to our contact: Are you all right?

He told us in detail what the national news was missing—that there had been multiple explosions and that the survivors were suffering from serious wounds and many children had been orphaned. The injured feared going to Muslim-operated hospitals. Christians had gone into hiding, fearing more attacks. Horrific!

How can we help? we asked. They needed clothing, food and medicine. They didn’t ask for money!

In the congregations we visited following the bombing, the Pakistan situation went unmentioned. When we talked with people about it, we got blank stares. We agreed with a Jewish columnist in the Philadelphia Inquirer newspaper: Where is the Christian outrage!

But how could we help from so far away. That’s what national church entities are supposed to be good at!

2×2 has Lutheran roots despite being excluded from the ELCA. We looked for a way to help within the Church. We found no “companion synod” for Pakistan. Lutheran World Relief’s website did not list Pakistan as a service area and an email to the ELCA person listed as in charge of this sort of thing went unanswered.

So we offered to be a conduit for anyone who might want to help. There was no fund-raising “drive.” Just a mention and promise to help if anyone was interested. A few local readers, people we know, contributed. Their contributions were handed to us—not sent through the website.

About $265 was received. Every penny was sent to Pakistan. This was a lot of work. It took numerous trips to the bank. Pakistan is one of three countries where wire transfers are difficult, the bank officer explained. Since we all work as volunteers, this is not something we want to do every day! 2×2 paid the wire costs.

2×2 Sparked Reader Response

A 2×2 reader in Michigan, an eight-hour drive from Philadelphia, shared our post with her daughter’s book club. The children (middle school age and representing several churches) made a project of collecting clothing to send to Pakistan. The young people sent three huge boxes of winter clothing. 2×2 paid for the shipping. 2×2 pocketed nothing.

The children found the project so meaningful that they are currently repeating their clothing drive. We will support it by publicizing it. We will not benefit from it. Any donations that might be received will be forwarded. Every penny.

We made this effort to help Pakistan because we saw no one else doing this.

We still wonder why there was not more outrage. We wonder why it does not occur to Christians that strengthening their witness might be the most cost-effective strategy in stopping the hate. We are not big enough to do much more than we did.

We are proud that we were able to help, even in these small ways. It is disturbing that any reader would interpret our mission as self-serving.

Just for the Record—What 2×2 Isn’t

2×2 operates with no property and with no paid leadership. The ELCA confiscated our property and endowment funds in 2009. There is significant prejudice and ongoing gossip about our congregation because we resisted their efforts.

We are determined to continue our ministry. If we fail it will be incentive for church leaders to replicate these actions in other small churches. This is a very real threat to small churches as it is remains a tempting strategy in clergy circles.

We have members with skills in communications and education. We launched 2x2virtualchurch website four years ago.

We are entirely volunteer. We don’t even take offerings at our worship services. We talked a local bank into holding what little cash we have without a monthly fee, or even that would be gone.

So, please, if you care about any ministry you read about on 2×2, feel free to give directly to them. We can put you in touch with the leaders of these ministries (with their permission). We consider them friends in ministry but we make no attempt to oversee their work.

We are just a little church that reached 50,000 new readers last year. We have no hidden agenda. We are pretty upfront about our ministry!

Future Direction—What 2×2 Will Be in 2015

We are dedicated to helping small church ministries. For the last four years, we have visited dozens of small churches and talked to countless lay leaders. We’ve come to know their special challenges. We know the frustration of finding resources for lay leaders. We know that small churches often can’t afford salaried help with specialized expertise in music, education and youth leadership—but we have the same needs!

Most church resources are produced by people familiar with larger churches. Most church publishers aim their sales at larger churches and their leaders. Their advertising efforts are aimed at professional leaders. Most church leaders who rise to influential positions spend very little time serving small churches. Therefore, many church resources assume ministry conditions that are increasingly rare! 

We believe that the laity are very important to the future of the Church.

We started developing resources that can be implemented by lay leaders—not to the exclusion of clergy but recognizing the realities. For example, we know small churches have difficulty maintaining traditional Sunday Schools, but still have a need to foster faith. That’s why we outline object lessons that draw in an entire congregation–not just children and that can be used in worship.

In 2015, 2×2 will launch resources that are useful and affordable to small congregations and that can be implemented by any dedicated leader, lay or clergy. We will continue to offer free resources. We don’t want money to stop people from using them. We intend to republish them in more convenient ways. Yes, we hope that this will help us continue our ministry long into the future. For now, it is all volunteer. We’ll find our way as we go!

One of the incentives that we hope will be of interest to our readers is the creation of community around the resources and the availability of “coaching” for things like website development—something we’ve pioneered! We hope to create online forums to unite the leaders of small congregations, especially lay leaders, in sharing. Our experience should be able to save other congregations time in creating and maintaining their own web ministries.

This is in keeping with our mission to help small church ministry. It may be a direction that doesn’t occur to church leaders who have distanced themselves from small congregations. This is the void—the niche— 2×2 tries to fill!

Will the Grinch run out of fingers?

The year-end statistics are in. 2x2virtualchurch, the blog of Redeemer Lutheran Church in the East Falls neighborhood of Philadelphia, grew again. This year we averaged 1000 readers each week. Often twice that! Although we were deemed to be too small to exist, these statistics prove we are among the largest congregations in the Southeastern Pennsylvania Synod of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America that attempted to close down our ministry.

2×2 could have racked up bigger numbers, but that was not the goal. The site was growing fast. The blog format was becoming cumbersome. There were about 1500 posts—many of them buried by time. Although people were finding posts through search engines, we wanted the site to be more helpful. We posted less frequently while we laid a new foundation.

In the summer, we started reorganize the material already on the site. This is a bit behind our projected schedule, but will soon launch. We learned something from this—daily posting is helpful to growing community.

2×2 started as a simple blog in February of 2011. The goal was to keep our congregation active while under fire. During a six-year challenge, we were locked out of our property, a move that was supposed to drive the last nail in our congregation’s coffin. We had confidence in our mission and wanted to continue. We wanted to do more than just get together for worship. We wanted to be a serving church.

With no property or money and no professional leadership, we just kept going. We used the resources we had—the skills of our members. We learned a lot!

• We discovered that size doesn’t matter.
• Money doesn’t matter as much as we think it does.
• Property is important to local ministry but insignificant to world ministry.
• Concentration on size, property and wealth inhibits mission.
• The measures of ministry are not limited to size and wealth.
• Lay members have skills that the modern Church needs and that many clergy do not have.

While 2×2 doesn’t have all the answers, we do have significant and unique experience.

• We know what the Church looks like from the outside.
• We visited more than half of the congregations in our synod and have seen what published statistics don’t tell you.

Here’s our plan for 2015.

• A revamped website will organize the object lessons posts and the slideshow posts so that they are searchable by text and theme. We hope this accomplished by the end of February.
• With that accomplished, we will return to more frequent posting.
• New resources for congregational use will be available. We are working on offering trainings geared to small congregational ministry. The first, Welcome Is A Verb, will be ready to pilot at the end of January. This three-part, online training is a new look at creating a welcoming church environment in an increasingly diverse society. If your congregation would be interested, please contact us by commenting below or by emailing creation@dca.net. We will send an outline of the material and a link to a sample part of the presentation.
• We know that we will learn a great deal from this pilot project. More courses will follow. These will begin with a series on using Social Media for ministry—something we have helped pioneer at the congregational level.
• When the dust settles on these large projects, 2×2 will resume offering weekly resources, and add a new feature—monthly and weekly tips for social media posting.
• Last, but most exciting . . . We will revive our presence in our own community this year.

Pope Francis had harsh words for the Roman Catholic Church’s top leaders.  He named five deadly sins afflicting today’s leaders like a plague.

• Spiritual Alzheimer’s
• Feeling immortal or immune
• Existential schizophrenia
• Spiritual and mental hardness
• Terrorism of gossip

People in power are often the last to recognize these symptoms. The symptoms are comforting to those with a sense of entitlement. That’s the devil’s way. He does his best work with a pat on the back. This diagnosis is coming from someone elected to the job of shepherding. The message just might get through—to Roman Catholic leaders and maybe, just maybe, to their Protestant counterparts.

Redeemer ran into every one of these symptoms in the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America. We encountered church leaders so confident in their pursuit of our land and money that walked into our church and forgot why they were supposed to be there—to help. Spiritual Alzheimer’s.

They pursued us in court with the sure and certain knowledge that they are immune to laws—and the laity aren’t.

For five years Lutheran leaders went from the altar to the courtroom with a total disconnect with their mission. There would be no discussion with us. There would be no attempt to work things out in any biblical prescribed way or even with common sense. Lutheran leaders displayed hearts of granite. The basic message of the Church—God is love—is lost.

Bad as these symptoms were and are, the most pervasive—the hardest to fend off is the terrorism of gossip.

The gossip against our congregation grew unchecked for years. Clergy says to clergy — did you hear . . . . ? By the time the gossip gets to lay ears, it is unshakable even if there is nothing to it.  We continue to hear ridiculous untruths about our congregation bandied about the church circles with no one daring to ask for supporting information. (This will be the topic of a separate post.) The last eight years of ugliness would not have happened had leaders in the church not felt so secure in starting and spreading rumors that had only one purpose—to justify theft.

Lutherans are at heart good people. Lutherans want to care about one another. All Christians fight an uphill battle when we are asked to subscribe to a culture that follows without question. That, after all, is very un-Lutheran. And it will always lead to St. Francis’s Five Deadly Sins of Church Leadership.

Do we have leaders who can right our course as Pope Francis is determined to do in the Roman Catholic Church? If so, now might be good time to speak up! Pope Francis has opened the door for some real soul-searching.

Today is the day that we remember the brave Americans who put aside personal lives for a few years to defend our country.

They have a special day named in their honor. They deserve it. They stood up, guns in hand, for what they believe.

There are people in America who don’t have a special day in their honor. They are the people who stand up for what they believe without donning a uniform or carrying a gun. They are plain old American citizens who take a stand.

Some get recognition. Rosa Parks comes to mind. But there are thousands or millions more.

• The mothers and fathers who fight for the rights of their children.
• Students protesters—there’s always something to protest!
• The detectives who toil for years to bring justice to crime victims.
• The whistle blowers holding positions (at least for the time being) in corporate America or in government.
• Nurses and police—two professions that work every day with people facing the most desperate times in their lives.
• The people working for any number of causes—from  manning the election polls to raising awareness for AIDS, MS, cancer, domestic violence, etc.
• Teachers who take on the challenge of reaching children who are still left behind despite many a political pledge otherwise.
• The advocates for not yet popular causes.

All these people have something in common. They are working at low-paying jobs, often volunteering.

But then there are people who not only volunteer but are expected to pay the freight for all the people who are paid in their field.

The church volunteer. All we get is a special word. We are the laity.

As we at Redeemer found, laity stand up for what we believe without even the Bill of Rights to protect us. The Bill of Rights, it ends up, protects only the hierarchy. Otherwise, you are on your own.

What about the Bible? Well, it’s a little dusty in a lot of churches.

And so, my post today honors the brave men, women and children, who dared to say NO to a church that has lost its way—that hides the message of Christ in a screwed up corporate structure—that can do as it please with its member churches and people and count on no one in the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America to cry “Wait a minute!”

A glass held high for the veterans of Redeemer—the men, women and children locked out of our church home for five years by land-grabbing clergy—the veterans of six years of court battles during which our case was NEVER heard.

To the ELCA, we have one message.

The sacrifice of the thousands of veterans—those who died and those who returned—means nothing if we haven’t got the gumption to protect the rights they fought for at home and in our churches.

We at Redeemer tried. We are still trying! We remain LUTHERans!