Our Once and Future Church
Today’s Alban Institute Weekly Forum builds on the re-release of the books written in the 1990s by its founder and president emeritus, Dr. Loren Mead. The Once and Future Church (1991), Transforming Congregations for the Future (1994), and Five Challenges for the Once and Future Church (1996) tackle the very issues our sponsoring congregation, Redeemer Lutheran Church, has been facing since 1998.
None of our members was a scholar of his work at this time. We were just lay members working at what we believed was our mission. As we review the five challenges Mead poses for the church, we find remarkable similarities to the direction our congregation took — without leadership pointing the way but with dedicated lay people grappling, uncompensated and unrecognized, with issues as big as worldwide church.
Our discipleship has not been without cost. We have suffered both as community and as individuals. Most of the time we found ourselves very much alone. The church as a whole was struggling, its denominational leadership was struggling, its individual congregations — large and small — were counting every penny. Our small church was deemed insignificant.
Mead writes:
For now, here are the five challenges I see we have ahead of us:
- To transfer the ownership of the church.
- To discover new structures for the church.
- To discover a passionate spirituality.
- To make the church a new community and source of community.
- To become an apostolic people.
Redeemer deals with each of these issues:
- We insist that the ownership of our community rests in the congregation. Our constitution and church polity agree with our position. But this has been of no protection. When assets are coveted, governing documents are quickly rewritten in the minds of church leadership. Clergy serving us disappeared with little or no notice or explanation. We were eventually evicted from our property. This was intended to be a final blow. Our denomination even predicted publicly that within six months, our congregational identity would die. 26 months later our congregation still meets weekly and has found new ways to serve which do not rely on property or professional leaders.
- Left without a building to support, we began creating a new congregational structure which reached out to other congregations, denominations and the spiritually minded with no church affiliation. How fortunate that the world was never more prepared for this type of outreach!
- We discovered within ourselves a spirituality we didn’t know we had when we were passive pew-sitters, receptors of our clergy’s sense of spirituality. A foundation was quickly laid for the development of dormant leadership skills.
- We embraced outreach tools that the church as a whole has been very slow to use to anywhere near full potential. Within months we found that our community potential was worldwide.
- We work now to create an apostolic presence using modern tools.
Mead goes on to write:
“We need to recognize that a classic conflict of interest is at work here. Clergy-dominated institutions make many decisions in which clergy have a direct stake: salaries and job security, for example—sometimes involving prestige and preference. In our society we generally feel that institutions that nurture “conflict of interest” frequently make bad policy—policy that supports the welfare of those with the conflict of interest not the welfare of the entire institution.”
Mead calls for more dialog between clergy and laity. He cautions that dialog must be entered into with equal respect among participants. This, Redeemer has found, has been impossible. The conflict we have faced has been fought for four years with virtually no dialog and no foundation for mutual respect. Power, not mission, was central to the conflict from the outset.
Mead’s books were rightfully acclaimed when they were published. As they are re-released in a single volume for a new generation of church leaders, we can only ponder why his respected advice has been so strongly resisted by the readers who once found his thinking so ground-breaking.
We hope for a new generation who can not only applaud his wisdom but also apply it!