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Alban Institute

Alban Institute Announces Closure

The respected Alban Institute, founded in 1974 with a mission of helping congregations build their future, has announced that they are closing as of the end of this March—ten days from now!

Their consultants will now work independently. Their educational programs scheduled for April are canceled. Their publishing operation has been acquired by Rowman & Littlefield. They are working with Duke Divinity School to create an endowment with the remaining assets. The endowment would further their work in providing assets to assist congregations.

WOW! 

The experts in leading faith communities in their discernment processes for the future are calling it quits.

I sensed trouble when they discontinued their Weekly Forum. It just disappeared a year or so ago. They used to invite comments at the end of their posts and suddenly they provided no such options.

No problem. People have their own platforms for comments these days. And we used ours!

The Alban Institute was never good at social media. Their forum was moderated and comments were subject to approval. That often took days—which of course doesn’t encourage engagement.

Very recently I read that they intended to improve this and make forums available to program participants. More vetting. Now they are giving up on that approach!

In general, the Church doesn’t understand social media. Had Alban Institute mastered modern communication skills, they might not be closing!

In short, the trend makers had trouble keeping up.

This is a sign that traditional church structure is going to have similar problems.

I enjoyed reading Alban Institute articles, which were mostly posted to help sell books. Even so, I felt like an outsider. The forum was top-heavy with clergy as can be expected.

But that’s just it. Today’s church needs to empower laity — not as servants of clergy or church structure and not just to fund professional endeavors.

The church needs to empower laity to use their skills. All of their skills—without vetting every effort. Adult lay workers do not need to have their homework signed every night.

Lay people have many of the same skill sets that clergy are expected to have. They also have valuable complementary skills. Some lay people are great motivators and leaders. Some are great speakers and communicators. Some are financial wizards. Some are gifted teachers. Some have an eye for injustice. Some are passionate and compassionate caretakers.

But the structure of the church still insists that all of these skills be exercised under the control of an unwieldy structure and approved by people who have no expertise in the skills they are judging.  Sometimes this process is congenial and welcoming. Sometimes it is judgmental and exclusive. It has existed this way for a very long time.

But now people in the church have options.

Alban Institute’s announcement said that their stable of consultants and advisors would continue to be available, working independently. That’s the wave of the future!

Congregations will soon discover that they can serve out their missions better without all the structure, too.

21 Mar 2014

Avoiding Self-Destruction in the Church

According to today’s Alban Institute’s Roundtable discussion, the Christian Church is not the only religious body to be experiencing economic challenges. Jewish communities of faith are having a tough time, too.

Rabbi Hayim Herring discusses the paid rabbinate as an endangered institutional cornerstone. His discussion may bear well upon Christians.

He points out that up until sometime in the 14th century, the position of rabbi was not compensated. All rabbis were, as Christians say, “tentmakers” — people who earned their living in traditional trades. Tentmaker rabbis produced some of the most cherished teachings of the Jewish faith, he writes.

The Christian church has a similar tradition. Paul was a tentmaker.

In the Christian Church, centuries of power and accumulated wealth, wrenched from the people by feudal fear, became a model for the up and coming religious. Self-sustaining religious communities operated with the funds of their own labors. Various orders and monasteries/convents had their own little hierarchies. But the central, self-focused power, centered much Church teaching on sustaining hierarchy — a legacy which may be behind today’s mission failures.

In early America, born of the Reformation and Enlightenment, the Church also centered on minimally paid clergy, often shared by many worshipping communities. It’s been a long-time since pastors were paid with bounty from parishioners’ farms (which was the same way farmers fed their families), but pastors still talk as if they had personally experienced this long tradition, which in their modern minds is degrading. Their numbers are few.

Paid positions came along with prosperity. It wasn’t until the post-world war economic boom that churches began to fund clergy positions with competitive salaries. They enjoyed a few short halcyon decades under this system and then all the work of the founding church members began to unravel.

As it unravels mission priorities have shifted. We created a model for ministry that we cannot sustain.

The Church began in America with an emphasis on building and supporting community. The emphasis today is on supporting clergy. A congregation that cannot support a clergy position, often compensated at a higher level than the any household in the congregation earns, is endangered.

The Church would like to ignore this reality and blame demographics or find fault with lay commitments. The fact is that the model of a congregation sustaining one professional salary as pastor and several others in compensated auxiliary roles is endangered.

When congregations are endangered, so are the hierarchies they created when times were better.

The Church has become ravenous. Closing churches and keeping the assets “in house” (never a Lutheran requirement—something we thought we had learned from the Reformation) has become a priority. Justifying it legally and morally is problematic but not impossible. It’s been done before in the Church. If we are to learn from our past, we will find that the harsh light of history is not kind to these eras.

It may be time to reprioritize our mission. Focussed on mission, we may be able to find ways to revive community churches—still your best chance of reaching and involving the most people.

This doesn’t mean Churches must die — which by the way affects the economy of the community beyond just the pastor’s salary as we at Redeemer can well attest.

Rabbi Herring asks some good questions about the costs of educating rabbis, the time spent in rabbinical training, continuing education (more important in today’s world) and the actual role and services provided by rabbis. Surely, our seminaries and leaders are having the same discussions.

Time to join the conversation.

Let’s start by thinking of mission first — not salary first.

  • What help does your church actually need to fulfill mission? Will one full-time pastor meet that need?
  • How can your congregation provide mission muscle with the abilities of the congregation?
  • What do we expect of pastoral help?
  • What can Christian community accomplish independently of pastoral leadership?
  • Are we preparing future pastors for the needs of the Church or to fill existing positions?
  • How can we restructure the Church so that the faithful can actually afford it?
16 Apr 2012