Congregations are often criticized by others in the Church as being “unwilling to change.”
The need for change is universal. It applies to small congregations, medium congregations, large congregations, clergy and hierarchy. It applies to groups and individuals.
It is a criticism that is hard to refute. After all, it applies to EVERYONE. Change of some sort is always desirable, so it becomes a card to play to achieve ulterior motives.
The ability to embrace change is going to become the saving quality of every congregation–even those that seem to be ministering comfortably. Unrelenting change is going to be the norm.
When confronted with the need to change, congregations must take steps to make sure that their interests and ministries are respected.
Ask for change to be defined.
What are the desired goals? (It is easy to say you need more members and more income. It is always true.) Demand clear goals.
Ask what help is available? Change is not likely to happen without something added to the ministry mix.
Do the congregation and pastor need training? Is a necessary skill missing? If your neighborhood is changing, you may need help with culture and language differences. If you want to serve youth, you may need to find help with youth ministry skills.
Does the demand for change have a timetable that is realistic?
Is there a plan? Was the plan created by the congregation or mandated?
Is the congregation on board with the plan?
Creating an environment for change is a group effort. It will not happen by edict, nor will it happen in an atmosphere characterized by superiority expressed in criticism.
Change takes time, patience, tolerance and most of all love.
The foundational message from God is simple. God loves us!
With this message, Christians are sent out into the world (2×2) to spread the Good News of God’s Love.
Congregations dedicated to outreach take this message seriously and revolve activity around it. All are welcome. Come as you are. Embrace God. Embrace us.
But from the moment the hook touches our eager lips, the message begins to change. You didn’t expect all this love to be free, did you?
More is expected of the new Christian. This is biblical to some degree. We love because God first loved us.
Some of it is pure greed. Newcomers to church will sense it. Some will dive in and become part of church culture. Some will lurk, testing the water no deeper than than their knees. Some will run to shore and keep running, the dollar sign on their foreheads no longer visible.
It is a balancing act for any congregation. What exactly is expected of lay church members? How do we grow involvement without crumbling the foundation of new faith?
It helps to understand lay thinking.
People join church because of family tradition.
People join church to feel part of community.
People join church to know God.
People join church to feel loved and to grow in their expression of love.
People join church to feel better about themselves and their personal failings.
No one joins a church to take on enormous existing debt.
No one joins a church looking to be subject to authority they barely know.
To welcome people openly with love, waiting to begin demands until they are settled in the pew, is a bait and switch. It is what keeps people away from worship and Christian community.
It is something for congregations to think about as they plan outreach, stewardship and new member programs. Are we ministering to them or hitching our lifeline to them?
On this day, all mothers are elevated to sainthood.
The sacrifices they make are recalled in detail. Mothers tend to put family before self and career. It took most of recorded history to notice.
How did mothers attain this revered status?
Most people don’t give the theology of Mother’s Day worship much thought. A recognition of the role of a mother’s love in our faith formation makes sense to most. Mothers are a key part of God’s gift of family.
Love is the central message of Christianity. Mothers are the universal representation of love.
On Sunday morning, we can contemplate the love of Jesus, his sacrificial caring for all of God’s creation, his heart open and his arms outstretched to every child of God regardless of race, age, gender, status, intellect or infirmity.
What we know about love comes to us through that first bond with others in God’s creation — our mothers.
A mother’s love is tangible. It isn’t embedded in our stained glass windows or abstractly retold in scripture. For some of us our mother is still sitting next to us in the church pew. For others she is a cherished memory.
Some Christians reference frequently Christ’s mother, Mary. But the references to a mother’s love is obscure in much of Christianity. In centuries of hymnody, mentions of motherlove are rare outside of the Christmas carols.
It is indeed odd that in just the last century or so, the status of mothers became so elevated that, on this one day of the year, it is an unofficial part of the American religious calendar.
We are reposting some information which has a permanent home on the 2×2 web site on our Proverbs Page.
SEPA Synod Assembly convenes one week from tomorrow. We always hope that as a body, Lutherans can improve their policies and services to the many small congregations which make up their membership. As long as small churches are seen as prey to fund Synod’s budget shortfalls — limiting services (for which all contribute) to the clergy and larger churches — there will be inequity and injustice within SEPA.
The cannibalism of the church must stop for the good of all. 2×2 has visited 44 SEPA congregations. We’ve seen many of them facing challenges with little hope for help from the denomination they joined in the 1980s. Many feel alienated and wary of involvement with SEPA.
This is a weakness that can be fixed!
The Lutheran Church was founded by a man who called out to the Church of his era to end policies that took advantage of weakest members. Any Lutheran who claims today that leadership cannot be challenged is denying this proud heritage.
We hope that someday the many members of SEPA Synod will muster the fortitude to right the wrongs against Redeemer and other small congregations that have been victimized by intentional neglect (which Bishop Burkat terms “triage”).
The prevailing “wisdom” must be challenged.
We collected some wisdom from the heritage of our members—all of whom have been locked out of the Lutheran church and denied representation at Synod Assemblies for four years. The first section is a collection of proverbs from Africa—the majority membership of Redeemer. The last entry is a very old tale from the tradition of our European heritage. Enjoy!
A shepherd does not strike his sheep. For lack of criticism, the trunk of the elephant grew very long. When a king has good counselors, his reign is peaceful. The powerful should mind their own power. A clever king is the brother of peace. The house of a leader who negotiates survives. To lead is not to run roughshod over people. A quarrelsome chief does not hold a village together. Threats and insults never rule. He who dictates separates himself from others. A leader does not listen to rumors. If the leader limps, all the others start limping, too. Good behavior must come from the top. An elder is a healer. One head does not contain all the wisdom. A leader who does not take advice is not a leader. Whether a chief is good or bad, people unify around someone. The cow that bellows does so for all cows. A powerful leader adorns his followers. True power comes through cooperation. The chief’s true wealth is his people. Where trust breaks down, peace breaks down. If you show off your strength, you will start a battle. A leader should not create a new law when he is angry. What has defeated the elders’ court, take to the public. It is better to be a lion for a day than a sheep all your life. If your only tool is a hammer, you will see every problem as a nail. Do not call a dog with a whip in your hand. Leaders who use force fear reason. To agree to dialogue is the beginning of peaceful resolution. If two wise men always agree, then there is no need for one of them. If you feast on pride, you will have no room for wisdom. When the village chief himself goes around inviting people to a meeting, know there is something very wrong going on. Other people’s wisdom prevents the king from being called a fool. Force is not profitable. Do not light a fire under a fruit-bearing tree. In times of crisis, the wise build bridges. It is easy to stand in a crowd; it takes courage to stand alone. Be sure you stand on solid ground before you stretch out to grab something. Be a neighbor to the human being, not to the fence. Calling a leader wise does not make him wise. A leader who understands proverbs reconciles differences.
Of course, there are a host of proverbs in the Bible!
We have one remaining proverb/parable from the tradition of our European members. Some little child should speak up and say, “This is sheer foolishness.”
______________________________
And so the Emperor set out at the head of the great procession. It was a great success. All the people standing by cheered and cried, “Oh, how splendid are the Emperor’s new clothes. What a magnificent train! How well the clothes fit!” No one dared to admit that he couldn’t see anything, for who would want it to be known that he was either stupid or unfit for his post? None of the Emperor’s clothes had ever met with such grand approval!
But among the crowd a little child suddenly gasped, “But he hasn’t got anything on.” And the people began to whisper to one another what the child had said till everyone was saying, “But he hasn’t got anything on.” The Emperor himself had the uncomfortable feeling that what they were whispering was only too true. “But I will have to go through with the procession,” he said to himself.
So he drew himself up and walked boldly on holding his head higher than before, and the courtiers held on to the train that wasn’t there at all. — Hans Christian Andersen
During a recent panel discussion, a reporter explained the process of ferreting out the news. She described the many story pitches that come to her every week from enthusiastic, community-minded groups that are doing “worthy” things — but not “newsworthy” things.
Your walk for charity is not “news.” Lots of people are doing this — every weekend.
She went on to say that when an interested party calls, she begins to engage the caller in conversation about the upcoming event. The caller, with great passion begins to talk about the people, and suddenly, the reporter senses there is something newsworthy in telling the story about the people involved — not the event itself.
Church communicators can learn from this. Our story is often best told through our people. When we tell our church story we should focus on our people and their faith stories. If church makes a difference in their lives, it may make a difference in someone else’s life. You don’t have to use names (although it’s nice when you can). Tell the story of your people on their faith journey and you will be teaching the Gospel.
Facebook is a good place to tell the people side of your story.
One Maryland church applauded a 12-year-old member who made and served the congregation lunch after church one Sunday. It’s Facebook page encourages the readers to press the “Like” button on the story to show the young man how much his work is appreciated. (It’s in the scroll bar on the left of the linked page.) Just that one short note on their web page tells any reader that their church values and encourages the contributions of their young people. It is likely to be far more effective than any newsletter or bulletin kudo.
You can use the same technique in focusing on your members’ faith stories.
Tell your story . . and make it personal!
“I love to tell the story, for those who know it best, seem hungering and thirsting to hear it like the rest.”
The Church has fallen on hard times. This is widely documented — no need to go into detail.
It’s hard to blame the world. The world was here long before the Church. Reaching the world has always been the challenge, yet we remain surprised that the world is not lining up at our doors, wallets in hand.
Today, however, after some mid-century prosperity, we’ve forgotten that the Church’s mission is to reach out. It is not the world’s job to embrace the Church. It’s our job to embrace the world.
We typically greet the challenge with a number of tactics. Some show initial success and then fade. Some are the foundations of long-term ministry. Some are a mixture of frequently used bad ideas. All the ideas below represent actual ministry tactics — for better or worse.
We can pretend to be someone else.
We can figure what the community wants and pretend to be the answer. You might gain some currency in your community but it is most likely temporary. Community interests change and will probably change just as you are getting the hang of yesterday’s priority. In chasing public demand, we often forget who we are and what we are about. We start to look for best ways to meet demands and that often means abandoning our mission. Religious social services, which routinely deny their connections to the Church so as not to jeopardize government subsidies are a prime example. Services are provided. The Church is buried.
You can scale down ministry.
This is a frequent road traveled by struggling congregations. It never works. When a congregation decides to go “part time” in its ministry, it projects failure. Any part-time solutions should from the beginning be approached as temporary measures. Clergy chosen for part-time ministries must be missionaries. They rarely are.
You can hire more help.
You want to reach families so you hire a youth minister. You want to tend to the elderly and sick so you hire a visitation pastor. Soon you have a budget that is out of control and threatening the congregation’s ability to conduct any ministry at all. This avenue is taken by individual congregations, regional bodies and even national denominations. Hiring someone and creating an additional monetary challenge may make us feel like we are addressing needs. By the time results are measured, the newly created positions are secured by custom whether or not they proved effective.
You can copy the equally challenged.
Churches are great at copying one another’s ministry ideas. However, they often copy before the results are tested. Result: failure is replicated. Individuality and creativity are lost. The church becomes less meaningful.
We can form alliances to pool resources and diversify our talent pool.
This idea needs more testing in the church. It is somewhat foreign to church structure which traditionally focuses all energy and resources on one leader and many followers. This worked well for the church when small, homogenous communities were the norm. The world is changing faster than the Church seems to be able to adapt. We need each other now more than ever.
We can employ teamwork.
This sounds like something churches would embrace but it actually hasn’t worked very well. We are all protective of our own territory in the church. The structure for alliances is fostered in theory but rarely used. Church bodies have congregations, social service agencies, missionary outreach, seminaries, schools and church camps. All are looking to the same membership to provide support, but often the major sources of support — individual congregants or congregations — have very little interaction with arms of the church. Congregations hope that members will remember them in their wills, but you can bet the regional offices, seminaries and social service agencies with funded development offices want a big piece of the same pie. Interaction in the church suffers. Congregations are the financial losers. The others, recipients of occasional windfalls, slowly erode their long-term foundation of support.
We can become predators.
This is a very real dynamic in today’s church. We don’t help struggling congregations when help is first needed, we wait for years as downward trends continue — and almost all congregation’s are experiencing downward statistics. Our inability to support one another in ministry forces congregations to close. The dice are rolled to divide assets. We need to find ways to help the weakest among us so that we can all be stronger. Survival of the fittest may work in nature, but it is not the foundation of the Gospel.
We can live beyond our means.
This tendency in the church has created predatory ministries. The terrible lessons are being learned slowly and at significant loss. When those with hierarchical power operate on deficit budgets, they jeopardize the ministries of their supporting congregations. It becomes easy to find fault with them and force them to close in ways that guarantee assets are turned over to them.
We can return to our roots.
We can study the evangelism techniques used by Christ and the apostles. There are good lessons in the scriptures. Why is it that this is often the last place we turn for help?
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?
This week a Founders Day celebration was held at a nearby institution that is friendly with Redeemer. One of our members attended the pricy event.
The emphasis of the night was “honoring heroes.” A slate of a dozen or so people influential in the institution’s difficult past was called forward. Friends and supporters applauded enthusiastically as each name was read and each honoree accepted a plaque and a handshake. It was a love fest with words of encouragement:
“Without you . . . . (followed by a long list of potential disasters that would surely have occurred if someone hadn’t done something).”
More striking was the behind the scenes banter. Among themselves, the celebrated heroes talked about the lack of the support, the drain on their energy and personal funds, and just how difficult their work on behalf of the institution they loved had been. There was a sense that any one of them would have traded the honor for a few more willing hands when the going had been tough. But still, they emerged before the assembly, proudly accepting the accolades of the less committed.
Hero worship is an interesting ritual. It’s a way of passing the buck. Let someone else take the risks; award them if they happen to succeed and if they fail we can say with our clean hands comfortably tucked in our pockets, “We told you so!”
And it’s also a chance to raise some money!
It’s easy for us in the Church to rely on the sacrifices of others. It’s the foundation of our whole religion! We expect sacrifices from the most faithful.
With plentiful biblical example of widows giving their last and martyrs standing up as stones are hurled—and let’s not forget—crucifixion, we encourage the faithful to give and sacrifice for their churches. Like the rest of society, we assuage potential guilt for our own lack of perseverence by bestowing honors on those foolish enough to really lay things on the line. We justify our own inaction with a few Bible verses about trust.
How much healthier would the Church be if there were no heroes (sometimes we call them saints)—if everyone got his or her hands a little dirty!
The next time we attend a ceremony to honor local “heroes,” we should think about what we might have done to have made their lives less trying.
Join Bishop Ruby Kinisa as she visits small churches "under cover" to learn what people would never share if they knew they were talking to their bishop.
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Redeemer’s Prayer
We were all once strangers, the weakest, the outcasts, until someone came to our defense, included us, empowered us, reconciled us (1 Cor. 2; Eph. 2).
2×2 Sections
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On Isaiah 30:15b
Be calm. Wait. Wait. Commit your cause to God. He will make it succeed. Look for Him a little at a time. Wait. Wait. But since this waiting seems long to the flesh and appears like death, the flesh always wavers. But keep faith. Patience will overcome wickedness.
—Martin Luther
