4/7InkzHVUEQeEdU9vpc1tikzEhChrKmPfvXI-FSDBrBQ

almquist

Ambassadors Visit Spirit and Truth, Yeadon

Spirit and Truth Lutheran ChurchA New Experience for the Ambassadors

Today, was our 73rd visit to a congregation of the Southeastern Pennsylvania Synod (SEPA) of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA).

Redeemer’s Ambassadors never know what to expect when we set out on our Sunday morning adventures.

We visited Worship in Spirit and Truth Lutheran Church or Worship Center (we’ve seen it listed both ways) in Yeadon (just outside of West Philadelphia). We found the doors were open, but the sanctuary was empty.

We had checked the web site before setting out. The service was listed for 10 am. We had run into a detour and were afraid that we were a little late. In fact, we were only two minutes late.

We could hear a praise band practicing and one of our ambassadors caught a glimpse of three musicians, but otherwise there was not a soul in sight.

We looked around the narthex for a few minutes. The sign on the narthex wall said WORSHIP 10 am. The Ambassadors took a quick vote and decided not to hang around waiting for the unknown. We were concerned that another ambassador was planning to come independently, but since he is never late, we soon set out. This morning would be a Fellowship Sunday.

On our way to the parking lot, we passed the pastor and his wife (at least they seemed to match photos from the web site). They were just arriving. We said hello. But there was no turning the Ambassadors around at this point. It was clear that worship was not going to begin anywhere near on time, and we are a restless bunch.

Last week, when we visited Redemption in NE Philadelphia, there had been an announced change in worship time that wasn’t on the web. We waited an hour for the service to begin, but we waited with other people. The pastor talked with us for a while and explained why there was a mix-up. This morning we had no idea what was going on.

We retired to our favorite local diner and discussed the gospel lesson of the lost sheep.

We were disappointed.

Spirit and Truth’s ministry interested us because their story was told to us when SEPA was trying to find a less messy way to acquire our property five or six years ago. We wanted to see their ministry for ourselves.

This is what we did in Yeadon, they said. The existing church (Trinity) had only a few old ladies left as members, they explained. The old ladies voted to close. We had a grand closing service to provide them closure. Then we reopened the church under a new name a few weeks later with new management—synod. They called the church a mission development church. Rev. Patricia Davenport (who was part of the Redeemer fiasco) canvassed the neighborhood for four or five years. SEPA rechartered the church in 2005 with 179 charter members. But the new charter would forever list the church as a church with mission roots (which we are guessing Trinity didn’t have). This is a bigger deal than it may seem. Read on.

For this strategy to work, it was explained, all memory and ties to the past must be severed. They make it sound likes this is to aid mission. It’s not. It’s about legally acquiring certain congregational property rights.

Spirit and Truth’s web site history begins: In 2000, the Trinity Lutheran Church of Yeadon, PA closed. That’s all folks. Trinity is history. Spirit and Truth rose from its ashes. The saints of Trinity would soon be forgotten.

This was the new flagship strategy of Bishop Burkat when she took office in 2006. Redeemer was to be the first of six churches to benefit from her innovative leadership—or so their lawyer stated in court.

This is why Spirit and Truth is sometimes called a Church and sometimes called a Worship Center.. Worship Centers are synod-controlled. Churches have rights. Unfortunately, those rights have been watered down (with muddy water) in recent years.

SEPA presented their sanitized intentions to the courts in 2009. They left out the part where they tipped their hand by trying to sell our property behind our backs in 2008.

Their plan included a stipulation that was not acceptable to Redeemer. None of the existing members could play a leadership role in the Church of the New Name. We could do no more than attend. We found no constitutional basis for disempowering local leadership and no reason to go this route as we had plenty of existing and developing lay leadership. The proposal was, in our view, a way of gaining control of our property by getting influential church members out of the way and scaring marginal members and pastors into submission.

There are three problems with this strategy.

Problem 1

There is no evidence that the strategy works. While Spirit and Truth grew for a few years under Rev. Patricia Davenport’s leadership, it has been in significant decline since she left in November 2007. Within three years of her departure their average attendance was less than half what it was in 2008 (and statistics were not reported in two of those years). Their statistics had dropped below their charter membership just a few years before. It was during these years that the great Yeadon experiment was starting to fail that Pastor Davenport and Bishop Burkat were trying to take Redeemer down the same road.

If leadership is dependent on clergy, then consistent leadership seems to be pivotal to success. There are no guarantees in today’s church that mission-capable pastors are going to be available long-term. Therefore, relying on clergy to be the sole provider of mission leadership is foolish.

Spirit and Truth’s ELCA Trend Report has current membership at 136 with average attendance of 35, but if you add up the itemized membership column, the membership comes out to only 70—about 12% smaller than Redeemer. Redeemer’s cash and property assets were more than four times theirs. Yet they got to vote on our property. We didn’t.

Thirteen years have passed since SEPA tested this new strategy.

Looks like Redeemer was smart to be wary.

Problem 2

Redeemer was not anything like Trinity in Yeadon, the predecessor of Spirit and Truth. Their members agreed to the arrangement. We were given no choice.

Our membership was statistically young. Only three or four of our 82 members were over 70 (just over). While Bishop Almquist waited six years (2000-2006) for our older members to die, we had actually become a young church. In 2007 the new members led a membership drive which resulted in 49 new members. Most of our newer members were young families and with a good percentage of young unmarried people and young couples from a wide variety of backgrounds joining. We were growing quickly. No reason to act like we were failing when we weren’t.

We didn’t need a new entity with a new name and Synod-approved leaders. Synod did.

Problem 3

Many churches don’t realize this:

If you allow your congregation to be listed as a mission development church, you lose important constitutional rights.

  • The Synod gains rights to the property and disbursement of assets if you vote to close.
  • The congregation loses the right to withdraw from the Synod to join another Lutheran body with their property. EVER—even 100 years from now.

The Synod wants churches to have mission status—even for a short length of time—to constitutionally secure the property for their future enrichment.

This strategy puts the control of assets in their hands. It also puts success or failure in their hands—since they now control all aspects of ministry. That’s why SEPA needs knowledgeable lay people out of the way. That’s why Trinity, Yeadon, was encouraged to close and deed the property to Synod before new outreach began. SEPA needs old churches to close to gain rights to property. It has nothing to do with mission effectiveness being hindered by previous ministry or history. It’s about creating new entities to secure property ownership under mission status. All those new church members in Yeadon may not know that they no longer have the rights the old members in Yeadon had.

Very sneaky, indeed.

We can only wonder why the current residents of Yeadon are considered less able to run their own church than the previous demographic of Yeadon. Redeemer was dealing with a new demographic too. Our members, mostly from well-educated professionals from East Africa, were viewed as unable to manage their own affairs without synod’s help.

And all of this is why SEPA’s dealings with Redeemer have been secretive, underhanded, vindictive beyond reason and litigious. They don’t want people to really know what’s behind their “mission” strategies.

Redeemer has members well-versed in the church constitutions. We knew it was not in our ministry’s interest to give up our rights as Lutherans. SEPA was the only beneficiary of the plan.

SEPA would have to find another way to take possession of our property—and they did. But it has been an ugly unChristlike LOSE-LOSE situation. It is an embarrassment to our denomination.

The Ambassadors didn’t attend a worship service today. We don’t know what went awry.

One thing we know:

Redeemer leaders were always ready for worship at the appointed time.

We had visitors almost every week.

First impressions count.

15 Sep 2013

Ambassadors Celebrate

Homecoming and Coming of Age

Today was the end of our third year of Ambassador visits. We stayed home and had worship, followed by a party. (68 church visits, BTW)

It was an especially joyous day as one of members was home from nine months overseas. It was good to be reunited.

We actually saw each other several times this week, bumping into each other just like the old days. It was especially good to see our young people trying to reconnect.

SEPA Synod’s view of Redeemer was that we were a bunch of old ladies who would be dead soon enough. We wouldn’t have the energy to resist. Need money? Easy pickings in East Falls.

But Redeemer’s demographics were actually the youngest of any Lutheran church our Ambassadors have visited. It was not unusual for children to outnumber adults on Sunday morning. We had very few people who could be considered old.

A lot had changed in the eight years since Bishop Almquist nurtured that indelible impression and during which SEPA Synod ignored us.

And then another six years passed while Bishop Burkat tried to destroy Redeemer one way or another.

A funny thing happens in eight years, followed by six years (two thirds of the history of SEPA Synod). Our children grew up.

Since 2007. Redeemer’s cradle role members are now in first and second grade. Redeemer’s grade school kids are now entering high school. Redeemer’s high school youth are now entering graduate school or the work force.

Synod has been so focused on destroying the adults that they never stopped to think about how their actions in East Falls affect the children. Land and money remains their only consideration.

I’ll never forget the Sunday after Bishop Burkat followed four months of silence with a letter announcing she was closing Redeemer. Our last meeting with her had been all about working with Synod. She broke every promise made to us without a word.

Of course, when all this ugliness was going on, we did our best to protect our children. On this Sunday, following the edict (don’t believe the “mutual discernment” nonsense), two synod representatives appeared at worship. Rev. Patricia Davenport and the Rev. Lee Miller were sitting right beside the children as they gathered for the children’s sermon.

The children came forward wanting to talk. We usually let them talk during the children’s sermon. We typically asked them what was going on in their lives before we settled in for a message. This week they were upset. You see they had seen their parents crying.  “Daddy got a letter and was crying,” one six-year-old said.

They were probably surprised and confused that on this morning, when they needed to talk more than usual, their concerns were deflected.

The sight of a parent crying, especially a father, is troubling to a child. We should have talked it through with the children right then and there. But then the people responsible for the family’s pain were sitting within arms’ reach. The word “smugly” comes to mind. They seemed clueless to what they were witnessing.

Awkward moments in worship.

But today the children are older. As we talk now, we make no attempt to hide anything from the young adults. At one point, I invited them to go off and enjoy kid talk.

“Nothing doing,” one boy said. “I’ve heard bits and pieces of this over the years, but this is the first time I’ve heard all this. This is really interesting.” And so we shared our story with a new generation — now old enough to vote in the church.

As the father told the son, I always thought that if our story were told, any reasonable person would side with Redeemer.

Lack of dialog has characterized this entire conflict. Reason has held little sway.

Redeemer is not closed. We are locked out of God’s House by SEPA Synod.

Our children still care about Redeemer. They will always know what it feels like to be shunned by their church leaders, excluded from the church that had once welcomed them in baptism, and how their parents were attacked in court for five long years.

We learned what they are doing. The young man who often helped lead Redeemer’s children’s sermons now holds a home Bible study. (Redeemer had no shortage of leaders and was grooming a new generation.) Another boy attends church with a school friend. Most remain unchurched as is typical of the membership of closed churches. Another falls back on his Quaker school upbringing. (A good number of Redeemer kids attended Quaker schools.)

Several families that were united at Redeemer are divided in exile.

Bishop Burkat was quite up front with her insistence that the memory of Redeemer be allowed to die. The church’s version of scorched earth policy. If the church was to reopen it had to have a new trendy name. The members of Redeemer could not play a leadership role in any “resurrection.” They would remain dead while SEPA searched for more compliant East Fallsers (good luck!) or shipped in outsiders.

She thought the death process would take six months. That was five years ago.

And now we know.

Redeemer’s spirit will live for another generation.

Let’s hope a resolution is reached that will restore our children’s faith in Christian community—for everyone’s sake. It’s high time.

Praise God for this special day.

28 Jul 2013

What Makes Ministry Viable?

This is a question that is answered differently by clergy than lay people.

Denominations want to measure assets to determine if they can comfortably place a minister there.

Congregations are more interested in ministry results. They look for ideas, passion and action.

Both have a place in the viability equation and both sides should be involved in any viability determination. Money without ideas, and vice versa, is useless.

What is rarely measured is potential and that has a lot to do with the work of the Spirit.  

Redeemer has great experience with the folly of measuring viability without allowance for the Spirit.

Redeemer was declared not viable in 1998. Our elderly but spunky members were viable enough to change Bishop Almquist’s mind — even if they failed to prompt him to work with the congregation.

For eight years we were ignored by synod leadership.

Synod, under new management in 2006, decided to play the viability card again. They assumed those old ladies from 1998 were dead, gone or rasping for breath. Redeemer, under synod’s philosophy of allowing congregations to die, should have been ripe for picking.

The old ladies of 1998 were gone. But they hadn’t gone to their eternal reward without laying the foundation for new mission. In the eight years Redeemer was left to die, Redeemer grew, slowly and steadily at first, and quickly in 2006 and 2007. Most members were now under 40. Children were abundant. Redeemer was five times the size it had been in 1998.

Ample evidence of this was presented to SEPA to no avail.

  • We were debt-free.
  • We had a 25-year day care program renting our educational building.
  • We had an endowment fund — that suffered from Synod’s attempts to take our assets in 1998 but was still more than Synod had!
  • We had ministry initiatives which were reaping good rewards.
  • We had talented lay leadership and good relationships with several pastors.
  • We had worked for several months with clergy, real estate experts, an accountant and lawyer to create a detailed plan for new ministry initiatives.

But Bishop Burkat had made a hasty declaration about Redeemer and wasn’t about to let facts get in the way. SEPA’s recurring six-figure deficit budget was motivation enough. Money had to be found. Redeemer, we learned, was to be the first of six congregations targeted to solve the problem.

If the viability measure were scientific, it should have been easy. Swoop in, act like you care, say a prayer, hold a “celebratory” service, grab everything in sight, and post the “for sale” sign. If members resist, sue; that’ll get ’em.

But Synod’s measure of viability seems to be faulty. Money created a conflict of interest.

Six years later, the oppressed victims of Redeemer have an active and viable ministry even without the property and assets that were found inadequate back in 2006. Legal action, personal attacks, even excommunication failed to dampen its potential.  The Spirit found a crack. Potential.

Synod– the entire body, not just the leadership — turned their responsibility over to the courts, who, as it ends up, don’t want it. The courts never heard the case Synod brought against the congregation. They decided to let the church work out its own problems, citing separation of church and state.

The ball is back in the court of SEPA member churches.

Synod could be proud of Redeemer. They could boast of Redeemer’s pioneering efforts in multi-cultural ministry, social media ministry, and children’s ministries. They might learn from our ministry initiatives.

If you approve of the actions of your synod, beware that your approval means many of you will face the Redeemer treatment. From our visits it looks like about 10% of SEPA congregations are no stronger than Redeemer. A few more years of unchecked decline will add to that number.

If you do not approve, you are obligated under the constitution to speak up and say so. The secular courts are not going to do your work for you.

That’s about the only decision to come out of four years of legal maneuvering. Doing the right thing is up to you! Spend the next four months thinking about it.

10 Jan 2012