Redeemer and 2×2 takes SEPA’s recent request for congregations to make multimedia presentations about their ministry seriously. It is a goal of 2×2 to conquer video for use on its website, so it was a welcome challenge.
We learned basic recording techniques and syncing sound tracks to slides. We added transitions. We’ve got a lot to learn, but we are happy with our start and will soon share our experiences with others.
2x2virtualchurch is the web project of Redeemer Lutheran Church in East Falls, Philadelphia, shunned by the Southeastern Pennsylvania Synod of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America. They view us as too small to fulfill any mission purpose and seized our property and locked out our members.
2x2virtualchurch is now two years old. We started knowing very little about the web but it seemed to be a logical and viable mission opportunity for a congregation raped of its heritage.
It’s been a voyage of discovery.
We’ve documented our growth statistics before but in the last month we began to add new dimension to our ministry.
About a month ago, businessesgrow.com (Mark Shaefer’s marketing website) featured a 2×2 guest blog.
That blog was picked up by five other major blogs including a couple of business web sites and two Christian Social Media web sites. (These are the ones we know about!)
Yesterday, we received a request to participate in a podcast for a Christian Social Media site. At the same time we are about to launch our first multimedia video.
This is all within a few weeks!
So the progression has been:
2011: Readership grows from 1 reader per month in February to a few hundred per month
2012: Readership grows from an average of 20 readers per day to 50 readers per day
2013 to date: Readership grows from 50 readers per day to an average of 90 per day and more than 4000 per month
This makes Redeemer and its 2×2 ministry the congregation with the widest reach in SEPA Synod—which declared us to be closed and unfit to manage our own ministry in 2010. (They wanted our property.)
The lessons to be learned from our ministry:
Prepare to give a solid year of dedicated work before making any value assessments. 2×2 started to gain momentum when we started posting daily in the summer of 2011.
Post frequently at least three times a week.
Look for interests that aren’t being addressed. We discovered a demand for object lessons for adults that draws daily traffic to our site. Churches are also looking for easy dramas—plays that don’t require a lot of costumes and rehearsals. We are trying to figure out how to offer music!
Your audience is the world once you begin using the web. You can write for just the people who live near you but don’t close the doors on interesting opportunities. We have many stories to tell of how our ministry is impacting the lives of Christians thousands of miles away in surprising and exciting ways.
Be helpful to your readers. Our free resources geared to small congregations drives our traffic.
Cast a wider net when fishing for men. Most church web sites are all about them. They may succeed locally with this approach, but they will be missing mission opportunity.
Don’t look to professional leadership to have the skills needed to forge the way in this type of ministry. They have been busy learning other things. Turn it over to lay people.
Don’t rely on hierarchical support. They are not likely to understand the potential of the web. They were born of an era when church structure was locally focused with distant oversight. This is not likely to change without a major reformation.
Don’t expect accolades for your success from the greater church. Again, they frequently don’t understand the web and are still assessing congregational viability by 1950 standards. It will be five years at least before they realize what they are missing. By then things are likely to have changed still more.
Don’t expect regional bodies to admit their weaknesses.
Where to from here?
2×2 has gained credible blogging skills. We will now look to be adding more video and podcasting and more helpful resources for small church ministry and world mission.
We hope to cooperate with other local ministry efforts, offering our expertise to their causes.
We’ve grown a bit “like Topsy” but we will now become more intentional in creating our ministry plan—something Redeemer was always good at!
We have achieved this success on a $0 budget as our hierarchy claimed all our offerings at the same time it challenged us with legal expenses. We now have a readership base that can monetize our ministry. The economics of scale will allow us to do this at prices far lower than traditional publishing and we will remain dedicated to providing most resources for free as part of our mission.
There is a lot of hard work in learning all these new mission skills. We will be glad to share our experiences with any church interested in diving in!
Organizations that thrive in the 21st Century will be distinguished by two attributes: entrepreneurship and organizational foresight.
He suggests that the word innovation be replaced with the word “entrepreneurship.”
He notes these subtle but significant differences (the bullets are quotes):
Innovation requires creativity but, unlike entrepreneurship, does not address issues like tolerance for risk, organizational agility, improvisational ability and speed.
Innovation often comes in bursts after focusing on discrete ideas and issues, while entrepreneurship requires cultivating a certain kind of culture, defined by a set of practices and attitudes that are infused throughout an organization.
Innovation implies the creation of something new, while entrepreneurship can mean dramatically improving what is already working with new vision and processes.
This sounds impossible. It is not. Even small churches can follow it.
The problem is that church hierarchies don’t recognize the potential. Armed with an impenetrable sense of entitlement and a tradition that supports it, they measure their congregations by ancient standards. These standards are failing almost everywhere!
The entrepreneurial church is not about making money for money’s sake, but is more about creating revenue streams with ministry projects. More lucrative ministries will provide funds for ministries that will never be self-supporting.
People today hesitate to give offerings, especially when they can’t see their offerings at work. More and more, congregations are begging for offerings just to help them survive — not to help them serve. It’s a losing proposition.
Less committed people of faith are not going to see this as a good investment of their time or tithe. They are more likely to contribute both money and energy to projects when they see them making a difference. They are not seeing this in churches that have budgets that are top-heavy in overhead.
There are many opportunities that are entirely in keeping with the mission of the Church.
One of Redeemer’s strengths is the ability to recognize opportunity.
There would be no conflict between Redeemer, East Falls, and the Southeastern Pennsylvania Synod of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, if Redeemer had been nurtured and granted the freedom their constitution gives them to shape and fund their ministry in less traditional ways. Are we not regularly implored to “transform”?
Our Christian Day School, which was ready to open as a Christian School for the first time in 25 years, would be providing upwards of $6000 per month for ministry—and creating a Christian witness in a neighborhood which is losing its Christian schools.
Our aid to immigrant families would be producing $100,000 per year. Redeemer had a plan in place that would help immigrant first-time home buyers. The expertise of our members would ease the path to home ownership and the congregation would gain some money in the real estate transaction, which would then go to help another immigrant family.
Our website would generate another few thousand per month for ministry. The website reaches out to small churches all over the world.
More than enough resources for a neighborhood ministry.
This is no different from religious publishing houses making their living publishing books or religious social service agencies tapping into government revenue streams. And it doesn’t camouflage mission to meet government requirements.
Unfortunately, our regional body has no vision for its small churches. They are waiting for them to die.
It will take a while for the Church to recognize that they can no longer control the voice of the faithful. The reason for this delay is that congregations and individual Christians do not yet realize that we have more power than ever before in history.
We are accustomed to abiding in silence, accepting what we are told and assuming that the powerful within the church have godly interests.
This is not always true.
Martin Luther took a huge risk when he hammered his list of 95 complaints onto the cathedral door. The response was predictable. Luther was forced into hiding for fear of his life. Fortunately, he made a few well-positioned friends who helped him over this rough spot. He emerged to become a respected preacher and teacher of the Word.
Martin Luther wasn’t the first to raise many of the issues he cited. He was the first to survive. He was the first with the power of a printing press to amplify his voice.
The old tools of intimidation still work. Clergy who are beholding to hierarchy are easily silenced.
During the extended conflict between Redeemer Lutheran Church and the Southeastern Pennsylvania Synod has anyone wondered why it is the lay people who have been dragged through courts? The clergy who were working with the congregation, voted with the congregation, and encouraged the congregation headed for the hills after private meetings in the synod office.
Today, each individual within the Church has far more power than Martin Luther.
We have a voice that will be more difficult to control.
Eventually, our voices will have influence.
Redeemer, excluded from participation within the church, started a blog. We are one of very few churches who have taken this step and use this tool for weekly outreach. It has both changed and shaped our ministry in ways we never expected.
Blogging builds community. We have encountered dozens of individual bloggers who write from a spiritual point of view. They are poets, photographers, parents, writers, artists, and adventurers. They are all over the world—Thailand, Armenia, Scandinavia, Africa, the Mideast. Some of them have church connections. Others do not. They tend to represent the age demographic that is missing in the church on Sunday morning—20-40.
They have discovered that within the Church, they have little voice, but outside the Church, they can grow.
The ability to grow as individuals is a key factor that is missing in many church communities.
Modern youth have been reared in a world where they must constantly reeducate themselves. They are involved in an ongoing process of self-discovery. In the past this discovery period ended at about age 30, when we settled down. This will no longer be true for any of us, regardless of age.
Self-rediscovery tends to be discouraged within the Church. We are likely to be assigned a task that Church needs to have accomplished. We will be told how to do it—how to teach, how to sing, how to fix the altar, and how to distribute the offering plates. Once we accept one of these jobs, it may be ours for life!
It is no wonder that people turn away from the Church. They seek community where their voices can be heard—their ideas and talents recognized.
If the Church does not find a way to welcome the voice of the people and adapt to modern expectations, they will find their churches to be empty on Sunday mornings.
Church leaders who face this change in society with tenacious resistance will enjoy fleeting successes.
A storm is coming. A wise church would nurture voice if they want transforming change.
Today’s Alban Institute blog post addresses church resilience. It includes the thoughts of Judith Jordan who describes resilience as not so much an “intrinsic toughness” but more as an ongoing process of nurturing and fostering of relationships.
All churches can be resilient. We notice resilience more when the stakes are higher—but both large and small churches can rebound. They can redefine their missions. They can survive.
Resilience grows from love.
That’s what the Church is supposed to be good at. Wealth gets in the way.
The Church at every level is challenged today. Almost all church activity is funded by the contributions of individuals. That quarter that clinks in the offering tray must fund the local church, a regional body, the national church and all church agencies.
It is getting harder for church entities more distant from the members’ pockets to survive. Power is their only tool.
In the Lutheran Church with its interdependent structure, there is very little power assigned to church hierarchy. They are supposed to exist as servants of the congregations. But the economy has hit them hard. They crave more direct access to the wealth of congregations.
They start to stretch their powers, tweaking their constitutions a little here, a little there, until they are wielding powers that were never bestowed upon them in their founding documents.
The sense of mission begins to fade. It becomes replaced with pageantry. Pageantry makes things look better—for a while.
The mission of most churches today is funding their budget.
In this atmosphere it is harder to see resilience. The message of love is lost.
Love breaks down barriers. It opens hearts.
Resilience is hindered in a culture of criticism and judgment. That’s what many congregations experience within the structured church. The list of judgments against small congregations can be long and fabricated. The claims are difficult to prove, but few care as long as they are not personally affected.
Lay leaders are too strong.
People are resistant to change.
People are living in the past.
People are unwelcoming.
People can’t support clergy.
People can’t accept new ideas.
Says who? The people who want to claim church assets.
Funny, the faulty lay people who are “destroying their churches” with their backward thinking are thriving in the secular world which changes more frequently and at a faster rate.
Much of the criticism of congregations reflects denominational needs.
Running a denomination is expensive. Offices are expensive. Staffing an office is expensive. Keeping up illusions is expensive. The ONLY source of income for denominations is congregational members.
The poor, the needy, the sick, the young and old dependents, the infirm or visionaries need not apply.
Constitutionally, in the ELCA, no congregation is required to give to the denomination. Withholding support for a denomination may be the only voice a congregation has.
But denominations can ignore the voice and interpret the lack of support as the congregation’s failure—never its own.
It should be a huge red flag within a denomination when criticism focuses on lay people to the point of naming them and suing them. Any denomination that puts limitations on the laity’s ability to serve denies the example of Christ, who nurtured a ragtag group of peasants and spent most of his time with the needy.
You don’t hear limiting words from lips of Christ. All that comes later. It echoes through the centuries and may be the undoing of the mainline church.
Both clergy and lay leaders are all capable of leading congregations in renewal. But if their view of a congregation is only a measure of dollar signs for the denomination, then there is real trouble.
Any denomination that seeks to limit any individual’s talents is doing a disservice to their message.
The Southeastern Pennsylvania Synod of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (SEPA / ELCA) has become a disciple of Seth Godin, the leading authority on marketing and societal change with a voice on the web. They have quoted him to their congregations.
Some organizations demand total fealty, and often that means never questioning those in authority.
Those organizations are ultimately doomed.
Respectfully challenging the status quo, combined with relentlessly iterating new ideas is the hallmark of the vibrant tribe.
SEPA begs its congregations to innovate and change. When they don’t change the way the synod has predetermined that they SHOULD change, they close them down and claim their property.
Redeemer is a case in point. Redeemer was growing quickly when SEPA saw their longed-for chance at claiming our property slipping away. Bishop Almquist had made an attempt to close us and seize our assets in 1998 and backed off after two years. But he refused to work with us in ministry if we didn’t accept the part-time pastor he had chosen for us. His call or no call.
We continued to grow without his help.
SEPA has a mission plan for small churches. They call it triage — shoving the smallest churches to the side and waiting for them to die, while attention is spent on larger churches with more promising prospects for supporting the hierarchy. Property values and assets DO enter the equation. A small congregation is better off if it has no assets than if it has an endowment! Compare Redeemer’s story with Faith/Immanuel in East Lansdowne.
Bishop Burkat loves to call Redeemer “former Redeemer.” We are not sure if she means Redeemer of the 1960s, Redeemer of the 1980s, or the Redeemer she visited with a locksmith in 2008 and spent the last five years suing. We exist if only so we can be sued!
Or maybe she thinks because Synod Council voted to close Redeemer in 2010, never bothering to inform the congregation, that Redeemer is closed. We notice in the latest ELCA yearbook that we are still contributing to the national church! Sounds like we are open!
Synod Council does not have the power to vote congregations out of existence. They’d know that if they read their founding documents. We reserve our constitutional right to challenge synod council’s actions when SEPA can provide a fair forum for hearing a challenge.
We recall very well our appeal in 2009 — which the Synod Assembly never voted on, substituting a vote about our property (not within their authority) when we were appealing Synodical Administration. Check the Synod Minutes and read the question that was voted on. It had nothing to do with our appeal!
Bait and switch. Then claim immunity from the law to pull it off in court.
Redeemer still exists in every way. Redeemer meets weekly — sometimes more often. Redeemer worships weekly —sometimes more often. Redeemer’s efforts to continue ministry— even as SEPA locked us out of the church we built and excluded us from all rights and fellowship within its fold—have grown our congregation in reach and influence despite persecution.
SEPA congregations are not powerless. They can still turn this around for the good of mission. But they have to respectfully challenge the status quo and demand peaceful reconciliation.
But what we’ve heard for the last five years is silence.
Redeemer is not closed. Redeemer is locked out of the Church by SEPA Synod.
It may be Groundhog’s Day in Punxatawny but February 2, 2013, is 2×2’s second anniversary. Our experimental web site has been quite an adventure. Our ministry has gained influence and reach we never imagined and is poised to be an income asset for our host congregation, Redeemer.
In February of 2011, 2×2 had just one visitor for the whole month (and it may have been one of us). Last month we had more than 2100 first time visitors and that doesn’t include a growing number of subscribers and those who receive our posts via Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn.
Our cyber statistics make us one of the largest congregations in the ELCA. And we’re just getting started!
Our primary mission is to help small congregations with ministry challenges. We hope to do this even more in 2013. The Easter Play we posted last year has had 1000 downloads this year. Our weekly Adult Object Lessons has a regular following. And several church organizations have contacted us for help with web sites.
Our secondary mission is to be the voice of Redeemer. The Southeastern Pennsylvania Synod of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America has done everything it can to try to silence us — even suggesting that one of our members, an ordained ELCA pastor, be censored for speaking out on issues everyone else veils in silence.
2×2 has been an effective voice.
A surprise along the way has been the number of international friendships we have made and the youthful readership who make up the majority of our followers. 2013 will also be a year for building/nurturing these relationships.
Through 2×2, Redeemer is poised to take ministry to new places. We’ve earned our place in the ELCA which refuses to recognize our ministry, preferring our physical assets to our membership. Where is St. Lawrence when we need him!? (Turn us over. We are done on this side.)
It is time for those who decided in 2009 that Redeemer couldn’t survive and therefore they should have the benefit of our assets to reconsider their actions.
The resulting law suits have depleted what reserves there were for them to enjoy. The building has been locked to all for three and a half year — serving no mission purpose whatsoever. Yet good can still be salvaged.
The church is not a building. It is the people. The people of Redeemer have continued our ministry despite every obstacle thrown our way.
Under Lutheran governance, any synodical administration is temporary in nature. It’s constitutional purpose is to help congregations. The Articles of Incorporation make it clear that property belongs to the congregation and cannot be taken without a congregation’s consent. Most of the people who voted to do this had never read the Articles of Incorporation.
There is no reason why Redeemer with its physical and cyber assets cannot fund a full ministry. With a little nurturing it could be quite lucrative.
It is time to for SEPA to reconsider its actions in East Falls, return our property as they should under their constitution and restore mission to this neighborhood.
If this was about money, problem solved. We can afford our own ministry. We always could.
…we rejoice in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not put us to shame, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us.—Romans 5:3-5
Today two Ambassadors revisited Trinity, Havertown. One of the Ambassadors had missed the last visit and had a special interest in visiting. In 1949, he had completed his seminary internship training in this parish. He didn’t expect to find anyone who remembered him from 64 years ago, although they have one congregational pillar who is about 101 who might recall him.
We found little had changed since our first visit. They still have a great choir which was about one third of the congregation, which numbered about 45. We were impressed with their dedication to their youth during our last visit. Today they were having a fund-raising spaghetti dinner to fund a mission trip for their youth to South Dakota.
So that’s why there is a picture of buffalo on their website!
Their web site has been upgraded in the last year and they are venturing into social media. Since December they posted about five blog entries. They seem to be posting them on their neighborhood patch.com, which we recommended to congregations some time ago.
We know social media ministry is work because we have done it. Web sites become effective evangelism tools when you post as close to daily as possible. (2×2 now has about 150 readers each day with 2000 new visitors per month. We’ve been posting daily for about 18 months now.)
The Book of Nehemiah Tells Our Story
The Rev. Dr. Dolores Littleton is Trinity’s pastor. For her sermon, she retold the story of Nehemiah and the rebuilding of the temple in Jerusalem. She did a faithful retelling, but we noted that she left out the intrigue, which is what makes the book of Nehemiah so interesting to us at Redeemer.
The people of Redeemer were (are) intent on rebuilding the church in our community after decades of neglect. You might think our denomination might support the work of its members but over the years our only meetings with SEPA were intent on wearing down the people of Redeemer, while SEPA carefully calculated how our failure might benefit them.
There is a chapter in Nehemiah where those in opposition to restoring the temple try to trick Nehemiah. Understand that 140 years had passed with no one lifting a finger to restore the temple. They hadn’t cared a fig that the temple lay in ruins.
Nehemiah shows up and sets out to do the impossible. He enlists the support of people who are willing to sacrifice to see ministry restored. Many of them have no Jewish roots! Only now do we find people, including religious leaders, interested in cleaning up after 140 years of neglect. They intend to take advantage once and for all. Failing that, they want to stop Nehemiah at any cost.
Frustrated that their early attempts to discredit the temple rebuilders are unsuccessful, they at last try to arrange meetings to “talk.” Nehemiah sees through the ruse and refuses to meet with them.
This is precisely SEPA’s strategy in trying to destroy the ministry in East Falls.
The ensuing five years has been little more than attempt of Bishop Burkat to save face and punish the people of Redeemer for making her attempts to take our property and cash assets more difficult than she projected.
The people who supported Redeemer’s rebuilding have been taken advantage of — just like Nehemiah’s workforce. Nehemiah put a stop to this, demanding that the people toiling and sacrificing for the temple be treated fairly. Sadly, there has been no such voice in SEPA Synod.
It is OK with the Lutherans of SEPA Synod if the people of Redeemer are left homeless (a real possibility, folks!) as SEPA claims all the congregation’s assets and pursues them in punitive court cases, which they undertake as they plead immunity from the law for themselves.
Like the Book of Nehemiah, the opposition has no real plan for Redeemer’s property now unused for worship or any other good purpose for nearly four years. They simply don’t want someone else to succeed where they never bothered to try.
We only hope that the story of Redeemer ends with ministry restored and the people revalidated— just as the book of Nehemiah ends.
The hard-hearted SEPA Synod shows no sign of returning to the word of God. There is no passion and voice to defend the workers.
Here’s the difference between Nehemiah and SEPA leadership. Much of the Book of Nehemiah is a list of names that would otherwise be forgotten today. This difference is probably the reason most people don’t read this book very thoroughly.
Nehemiah valued the people. He carefully recorded the names of the workers who risked their lives to complete the restoration of the temple. Their ancestry and affiliations are recorded for all time. Nehemiah cared about the people and their relationship with God. They were worth his attention, his work, and if necessary, the sacrifice of his life. He did all he could to protect them as they served the Lord.
The value of Nehemiah is in its detail. A lowly servant in the court of a foreign king had the wherewithal to restore Jerusalem.
The Book of Nehemiah — all of it — it should be required reading for Lutherans!
A friend wrote a note of encouragement this week to Redeemer, a congregation that continues to be abused by the Southeastern Pennsylvania Synod of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (SEPA / ELCA).
He wrote that our situation reminds him of a song by Alice Cooper of the 70s. He quoted a song:
“I went to church, incognito, when everybody rose. The Reverend Smith, he … he recognized me, and punched me in the nose. I said, ‘No more Mr. Nice Guy.'”
That doesn’t begin to describe how the Lutherans of East Falls feel about the way their denomination has treated them. But it’s as close as anyone in the church has tried to get.
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.
Undercover Bishop will always be available in PDF form on 2x2virtualchurch.com for FREE.
Print or Kindle copies are available on Amazon.com.
For bulk copies, please contact 2x2: creation@dca.net.
Contact Info
You can reach
Judy Gotwald,
the moderator of 2x2,
at
creation@dca.net
or 215 605 8774
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
Where in the World is 2×2?
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
