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transforming the church

Hey, Church! Put on Your Listening Ears

A first rule in business is “Listen to Your Customer.” Good businesses are good listeners . . . and amazing responders.

The Church can learn from this.

Every time we are tempted to think we know what’s best for the people we hope will support our churches we should stop dead in our tracks and ask, “Is our ministry driven by their needs or by our needs.”

Are we listening?

Listening is humbling. It is admitting we don’t have all the answers.

We want people to accept us just as we are. That’s natural.

Strangers to church are looking for the same acceptance. We are equally needy.

And so we are on a treadmill. The Church keeps on churning out variations on the same themes, done pretty much the same way, by the same people . . . with the same results.

What we have is cinema’s iconic “failure to communicate.”

When people care enough to tell us exactly why the church has turned them off, we owe it to them to listen — not in a patronizing way. “Poor souls! They just don’t know how wrong they are.”

When we don’t listen, we don’t know what we are missing.

The modern church needs to listen to modern people.  If people are talking to us at all, that’s a sign that they care. If all we do is nod our heads and then criticize them as soon as their backs are turned, we will never be able to reach them.

And they will have proved their point.

An argument is always that we are not of the world. We are here to transform others—to follow the way. However, we are hoping to reach people who are of this world. God sent his Son from heaven to come to earth to be like us, to suffer and die. The only reason He had was that He cared about us. That’s how He approached transformation. The least we can do is listen.

Listen to objections. Find ways to overcome objections. Look for ways to help the entire congregation overcome objections.

Of course, some of the objections are nothing more than excuses. Keep listening until you find the real reason people prefer separation from God’s people.

You’ll be demonstrating that you care.

photo credit: The Pack via photo pin cc
26 Apr 2012

Getting Over the Fear of Facebook

If you want to drive the message of the Church, hop in. But you won't be the only car on the road.

Facebook remains an enigma to the Church.

The few churches using it seem to use it as nothing but a digital bulletin board.

There is power in Facebook. The power is twofold.

  1. Facebook can build relationships.
  2. Facebook has reach.

Building Relationships with Facebook

Jason Stambaugh of heartyourchurch.com talks about Facebook as the Weekday Bridge of the Church. It can be used to foster relationships that happen Monday through Saturday. Face-to-face encounters are invaluable, he recognizes. But the little midweek interchanges help to build the connections that make face-to-face interactions more possible, more frequent, and foster more tightly knit community.

The discussion will not be led or moderated as is the custom in the world of religion. That may be why the Church doesn’t understand it. There’s nothing stopping anyone from adding their two cents.

Part of the hesitance of the church to embrace Facebook is fear of losing control.

The fact is the Church lost control of its message a long time ago.

Yesterday, you could control your message with cumbersome qualifying hoops and censorship. Hard habits to break.

Today, the only way to control the message is to be part of the dialogue.

If you want to drive, hop in. But you won’t be the only car on the road!

The Incredible Reach of Facebook

Looking at rough and round numbers, the average Facebook user has nearly 200 friends (a number which continues to grow). Allowing for overlap, each of those friends adds another 100 or so to the network. So if your congregation has 50 people using Facebook during the week, your community has the potential to reach 10,000 people at the first tier of the network and 1,000,000 at the second tier of the network.

  • What is your Sunday attendance?
  • What is the circulation or readership of your parish newsletter?
  • What’s the circulation of your denominational magazine (which probably reaches only those already involved in Church)?

Just do the math and stop spinning your wheels.

photo credit: Stuck in Customs via photo pin cc

25 Apr 2012

9 Common Tactics for Church Growth — Good, Bad and Ugly

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.

  1. 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.
  2. 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.
  3. 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.
  4. 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.
  5. 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.
  6. 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.
  7. 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.
  8. 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.
  9. 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?
20 Apr 2012

What SEPA Synod Can Learn from Redeemer

Today, SEPA (Southeastern Pennsylvania Synod of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America) Communications Director Bob Fisher sent a plea to SEPA congregations for interaction on a web site the synod created for congregations to share ministry ideas. The site was launched in November and had an initial outpouring of about 100 submissions. Then it fizzled. Involvment on the web site has been flat ever since.

There is little reason to post a time deadline on a web site like this. But Fisher’s request for submissions asks for responses by April 26 — one week before Synod Assembly. You want good statistics for Synod Assembly!

Meanwhile, during the same period, 2x2virtualchurch.com, sponsored by the SEPA-excommunicated members of Redeemer, has grown to more than 200 visits per week, with more than 80 followers and 30 new visitors daily. We’ve pioneered social media in church work and have been gaining respect around the world for our work — interdenominationally and among churches of every size. Look at  2×2’s statistics for roughly the same period (screen shot taken in midday/midweek for last bar):

The concept of SEPA’s web site is flawed. No one needs to submit ideas for review and verification by a central office any longer. There is nothing stopping any church from posting their successes and ideas on their own website. Synod should be encouraging community between congregations without a middle man. Don’t worry . . there’s plenty of work for communications middle managers.

This site is not likely to create dialog. It is rigid in a medium that operates best with freedom. It allows three categories of questions. It limits responses to 50 words. (Most of the questions had close to 50 words.) The message conveyed to a visitor to this site is that their ideas will be monitored, judged and verified — controlled. This thinking is foreign to internet users who are accustomed to the free flow of ideas on Facebook, Twitter and blogging platforms—all of which are community-building platforms.

Why invest time posting to a site that might reject you?

There are other ways to achieve sharing. Start developing content that is helpful to congregations so there is a reason to come to the site in the first place. Begin linking and commenting and taking part in the dialog. Recognize that there are no boundaries to good ideas. Why limit the submission of ideas to just 160 congregations when there is a world of mission out there? It’s the social media way. And it works.

Redeemer would submit its ministry ideas to www.godisdoingsomethingnew.com, but we doubt our ministry would be recognized. It hasn’t been for a long time!

No problem. We post our ideas daily on 2×2. Welcome!

(2×2 be glad to help any church get started in social media. Just contact us! We can have a web site up and running for you in a week, train members to use it and even help you develop content.)

19 Apr 2012

The Power of Negative Thinking

Label a problem “impossible” and you have an excuse for failure.

This temptation faces today’s Church. In many cases, Church leaders have given up on the Church!

“Neighborhood ministry can’t be supported.” Just declare it! That makes it true.

What happens then?

We stop trying. After all, we have given ourselves permission to fail.

The first to be defeated are the clergy. They throw up their hands and devise ways to make it look like they tried. Assign a caretaker pastor here, an interim pastor there, and pray. Christians support one another in failing ministries. Just look at the statistics.

The laity can only wonder what is discussed at ministerium gatherings of “caretaker” pastors whose assignments are to slowly and quietly bring ministry to a close. It must be deflating. Any pastor who walks in with a new idea is likely to have the conversation quickly changed. The idea is to fail as gracefully as possible.

How can you rebuild self-esteem in a Church where these conditions prevail? Hold grand worship services celebrating Church closures (failures).

Lay people who have more invested in their neighborhood ministries keep working, often under the leadership of defeated pastors, who are called with the tacit understanding that they are to keep things going as long as the money can flow.

Lay leadership is puzzled at the attitudes they encounter, but they soldier on, trying to avoid the conflict brewing from exasperation and a conflict in mission that is never defined — so it can’t be handled.

A  defeated attitude spreads like a bad rash. It chafes at the message that is preached from our pulpits. We worship a God of the possible. The Bible is filled cover to cover with accounts of insurmountable obstacles overcome. Some problems are fought with patience, some with trust, and a few with power. The deeper you go in the New Testament, the more faith is relied upon, and thank God for the Book of James, who reminds us that it might take some work.

The Church faces problems today that can be overcome but not if we must first meet all the standards of yesterday’s church. It is time to clear the slate and approach our congregations openly and with the knowledge that with God, all things are possible. If we do not believe that, why bother?

Walk in the shoes of the laity. Would you support a church with no momentum? Would you join a Church that doesn’t believe in its ability to succeed? Would you subscribe to a faith that doesn’t believe its own message?

photo credit: morberg via photopin cc
12 Apr 2012

The Underestimated Value of Small Churches

There isn’t much difference between small churches and large churches and their mission potential. Redeemer’s Ambassadors have visited nearly 50 neighboring churches. We’ve seen small churches with impressive worship. We’ve seen large churches with ordinary worship. We’ve seen volunteer choirs in small congregations perform as well as larger church choirs with paid section leaders. We’ve seen small churches with amazing track records for supporting neighborhood mission. We’ve seen large churches doing similar things. We’ve seen innovative, scalable mission projects in several very small congregations.

Yet large churches have preferential ranking in the minds of denominational hierarchy. That’s because there is one thing larger churches can do better than small churches. They can better support hierarchy.

Hierarchies are expensive and self-perpetuating.

There is rarely talk about reducing hierarchy. This may be precisely what is needed.

Hierarchies are responsible for keeping church professionals employed. They are also supposed to provide services to congregations. Most congregations have little contact with their regional office unless they are calling a pastor.

Clergy rely on the denomination for access to and approval of a call. The regional body becomes their employment agency.

In the corporate world, employment agencies work for either the employer or the job-seeker. In the church, a regional body, acting as employment agency, holds some power over both the job-seekers and the limited pool of employer congregations within their region. They serve two earthly masters and tend to favor the clergy.

When pastors are vying for the most lucrative or beneficial assignments, the regional body as employment agency begins to judge congregations by their ability to meet clergy needs. If a congregation insists on finding a candidate that fits ministry needs, they can be judged as uncooperative—a judgement that could follow them for decades.

Mandated initiatives that make no sense to congregations can result. The regional body might recommend merger or acceptance of an interim pastor for an undesignated time—or they may recommend closure.

Denominational leaders are acting as managers. Looking at the map, it may make perfect management sense to merge two or three congregations within a two-mile radius. The thinking is that if you merge two 150-member churches, you will have one church with 300-members and that’s a magic number for supporting clergy.

It doesn’t work that way. In the church . . .

1 + 1 = One half

Churches are little communities, something like families. They come with their own traditions and social structure. Merging them to save management costs makes about as much sense as merging three or four unrelated families to make utility and grocery bills more reasonable.

You cannot mandate community. Attempts to merge congregations often end up with one even smaller congregation.

There is another side effect. In the corporate world, mergers and management decisions often result in similar products and services replicated in similar ways. The beauty of small congregations is their individuality. Without small churches we will end up with cookie cutter large churches, worshiping in similar ways and providing similar services and mission opportunities.

The loss of neighborhood ministries will be felt far more deeply than any temporary gains of church closures and mergers.

We must make small congregations a priority. We must find ways to help them get over decades of neglect.

10 Apr 2012

Can the Church Be Fixed?

Are our church doors truly open?

Are our church doors truly open?

The Alban Institute’s Roundtable is unusually active this week. The weekly topic laid out all the failings of the mainline church. The resulting dialog was a mild outrage.

“Why are we going over what’s wrong? We know what’s wrong? How can we fix it?” Among the most desperate and honest questions is, “Can it be fixed?”

There is still a disconnect between church leadership and church members which may be at the heart of a general disillusionment with the Church.

Why do people become involved in church?

  • Some are born into church-respecting families.
  • Some seek answers to life’s problems.
  • Some are looking for peace and comfort
  • Some are seeking validation or acceptance.
  • Some are seeking God.

One way or another, many people find something in the church worth making it part of their lives. Something attracted them. It was probably someone humbly modeling the teachings of Christ.

That opens the door. Then what?

Church always asks more of us. It asks us to learn and to grow. It encourages us to take stands on issues. We are asked to influence others.

And then the rules begin. Rules are prompted by leaders who want order and power. This lessens the potential of the Church.

The laity hit a glass ceiling. Take a stand—but follow us.

Laity have a choice. We choose to become involved when our initial needs are met and we can make a difference. We don’t join churches to take on more financial woes. We don’t join to have more authority figures. We want to feel loved. We want to know God.

Part of the gift of the Reformation — a cause for which many gave their lives — was the empowerment of the laity. Grace is freely given. No middle man is needed. That message is clouded today in a Church where any “stand” is accepted only if it is politically correct.

The Church is at its strongest when it fosters courage by example.

There is an old Sunday School hymn, probably long forgotten by most:

Dare to be brave. Dare to be true.
Fight for the right for the Lord is with you.
He knows your trials, when your heart quails.
Call Him to rescue His grace never fails.

The Church often speaks out of both sides of its mouth. Be brave. Do as we say.

One commenter in the Roundtable discussion wrote an impassioned essay on his frustrations on spreading the Gospel. He concluded with his own battle cry—that he would remain faithful in knowing God.

He is correct. That is the foundation of all that is good and can be better in the Church. It is fundamental. Work at knowing God and the message we send will ring loud and clear. Then we will know when to follow and when to lead. We will be empowered to do both.

photo credit: Autumnsonata via photopin cc
05 Apr 2012

Stop Blaming Congregations for Failure

Let Social Media Save the Day

We lay people have been taking it on the chin for years.

  • We’ve been ridiculed. We don’t tithe. We don’t evangelize. We aren’t welcoming. We don’t volunteer.
  • We’ve been labeled. If we aren’t strong, we are backward and resistant to change, and dying. If we are strong, insisting on answers, we are adversarial and resistant to authority.
  • We are made to feel inferior and inadequate, unable to find our way in the world without hanging onto the robes of the clergy.

—all because mainline churches are failing.

IT’S NOT OUR FAULT.

  • It’s not our fault that the church is structured to nurture homogenous cultures of yesteryear that  naturally replenish and grow in numbers from generation to generation.
  • It’s not our fault that, in the New World, community demographics shift every decade
  • It’s not our fault that even the least dysfunctional families experience their own diasporas every generation or so.
  • It’s not our fault that fewer people enter the ministry as a life call and see the only road to advancement as moving to suburban settings, making neighborhood ministries less desirable.
  • It’s not our fault that leadership has been just as unprepared for changes in society as we were.
  • It’s not our fault that the Church, despite a strong start in the Reformation, managed to sit out the Renaissance and stayed mired in the Middle Ages for the last 500 years.

Now that we are in a new age yet to be named (the Information Age?, the Digital Age? the Age of Globalization?) we’re all playing catch up.

In the hierarchical past, this meant creating a position headed by a well-paid think tank leader with an alphabet of credentials after his name. It meant funding an office with a staff, providing an adequate budget for developing resources, allowing three to five years for development, and the creation of a network to implement resulting initiatives. Implementation would be easy because all churches would be alike, waiting for answers to their problems to be delivered to them. After all, there would be nowhere else for them to turn.

Today, we are standing at the door of the future. The answers will come by inspiring community. There will be much less need for a centralized office of any sort.

The church of the future will be led by a conductor who stands at the podium, signals the opening downbeat and walks away, allowing the musicians to get their cues from one another, to take off in an imaginative riff, to return to the group to enjoy another artist’s take.

Welcome to the Information Age, the Age of Social Media, the Age of Globalization. It’s all coming together just in time to save the mainline church . . . if the mainline church is paying attention.

There is a lot of rethinking that needs to be done. Lay people might be best equipped to lead the way!

photo credit: DeusXFlorida via photopin cc
02 Apr 2012

Church Competition (It’s not who you think!)

Did watch manufacturers ever predict that their major competitors would be cell phones? That’s what has happened. Cell phones display the time prominently. No need for a watch. Bulova, Timex, and Seiko were watching each other while T-mobile and the Iphone began to make them obsolete.

Understanding your competition is important to successful honing and implementation of mission.

Many churches have no clue that there is competition. There is.

We often address symptoms of the competition and miss the diagnosis. The competition is not:

  • the neighboring church of a different denomination
  • the church with the charismatic pastor or hefty endowment
  • the bigger church of your same denomination
  • Saturday morning sports
  • demands of the schools on family time
  • dysfunctional families
  • televangelism

These are symptoms.

The competition is the force that separates people from God and wanting to be in communion with the people of God. There was a time when the religious were bold enough to give it a name . . . Satan.

Most churches act as if their mission were to attract the biggest piece of the existing religious pie.

That’s what happens when you rely on demographers to direct mission efforts. Demographers can measure the known. Careful studies count the number of existing “Lutherans” in a geographic area. They compare it to how many “Lutherans” were in that area a decade ago. They measure the household income of the people in the neighborhood.

That’s where the train jumps the track.

Mission is about reaching those who are not measured by demographers and will not have the inclination to support ministry with a piece of their household income for some time.

The biggest problem (and there are many) in this approach to mission is that it keeps churches from working together.

Denominational church structures are designed to facilitate mission, but in tough economic times they can become self-focused, making decisions that protect their own status quo.

Denominations and congregations cannot serve our neighbors while we are coveting their people, their money, their staff, and their property.

When each visitor is seen as a potential “sell,” we fail to reach the soul of a seeker longing to know God. When each congregation is measured by its ability to support the denomination, not its community or mission, we fail the Church as a whole.

There is a trickle down effect. Unaddressed problems spread over the years. Failure to help one struggling church becomes ten neglected churches within a decade or so.

Our Ambassadors have visited many congregations. We have seen separate communities facing the same challenges—most of them in isolation. Some of them are within a three-mile radius (in well-populated areas). Some of them face closure—one at a time—over the next decade or two. Since the ability to support an expensive structure is put before mission, they fight an uphill battle even within their denomination.

There is untapped power in working together. Yet the Church that talks about unity is crippled as they seek success and solutions that help their bottom lines today.

When the church understands that their mission is to reach the world outside their demographics, progress will be made.

We offer a quote prominently displayed on another website.

People shouldn’t have to find a church.

The church should find them.

photo credit: mbgrigby via photopin cc

31 Mar 2012

Women Are Key Influencers in the Church (always have been!)

A business blogger recently posted statistics claiming that women are the most powerful “brand ambassadors” in the world. The business world sometimes uses a church term, evangelist, for this job description. Once again, the church can learn from the world of business.

Steve Olenski, in socialmediatoday, cited a study that showed that:

  • Women are 80% more likely than men to try new products/services based on advice of a friend.
  • Women are 74% more likely than men to encourage friends to try new products and services.
  • Women tend to stay more engaged (74%) with products and services they like.
  • Women are 42% less likely to share negative experiences with products or services.
  • Women are only 32% less likely to avoid products or services based on a friend’s negative experience.

These interesting statistics remind us of something we encountered in our own experience and on our Ambassador visits. Redeemer’s greatest period of growth was nurtured less by pastors but by the presence of a deaconess, who ran the educational and social programs in the church. Older Redeemer members could tell us the names of pastors but they talked about the work of the deaconess. In our visits we encountered several churches that referred lovingly to a long-departed deaconess.

And then we remembered the power of the women’s group at Redeemer, which operated independently with their own budget and bank account. Unhampered by church council they chose their own social pursuits — all of which reflected well on Redeemer as a whole. We thought back to the days of the Women’s Auxiliaries and Ladies Aid Societies.

Many of the churches that struggle today to afford pastors have their roots in the less recognized and less compensated devotion of women.

In a television program that follows well-known entertainers as they research geneology, Actress Helen Hunt appeared to be mortified by the revelation that her great grandmother had been a powerful force in the women’s temperance movement of the 19th century and early 20th century. She sat with an historian who pointed out to her that this movement was actually revolutionary, fighting serious societal problems that were affecting their communities in a world that gave women no vote or voice.

Women have always had a voice — just not a publicly recognized one. Their voice was easily overlooked because men controlled publishing as well as the board room. The powerful women’s groups of the era grew from passion, commitment and perseverance to make a difference in a world that refused to recognize their abilities.

No more!

The church would be considerably stronger today if it recognized and unleashed women’s powerful inclination to nurture — which is what the statistics quoted above reveal.

Consider this as you make plans for church growth. The challenge is to find modern, equitable ways to do this.

30 Mar 2012