Recently, I have been serving on a small advisory committee relating to a remote branch of the United Methodist Church’s largest agency (The General Board of Global Missions). It’s like being on the tip of the tail of a very large dog. My experience had led me to believe that the dog is heading in the wrong way. When once our priority was to bring the love of God to the most marginalized people on the planet, our new direction is to preserve the institution of Methodism at all costs. Unfortunately the dog (GBGM) reflects the way our church is going in general.

Today, every hound in United Methodism is on the hunt for ways to make congregations grow and stop the shrinkage of budgets and denominational membership. I think that it is more important that congregations become healthy and engage in meaningful discipleship formation in their context. These are diametrically opposed concerns. We can either teach for the test, that is do the things that add paying United Methodist members to the books, or we can give ourselves fully to the task of loving people. If we say, with Wesley, “the world is our parish,” then we will form partnerships with non-Methodists for the purpose of making disciples for Christ. We will throw ourselves fully into meaningful mission work, such as, No More Malaria, Circles our of Poverty, and our local food bank. If we do this right, there will be less Methodists but more Christians in the years to come.

A key value of the postmodern culture is simplicity. If we simply help every day people to live as Jesus’ disciples, we will be doing the right thing. We should be asking, what will help every agency and local church in United Methodism form new relationships and transform their communities? How can we be more transparent? How can we get back to that singleness of focus  that birthed American Methodism, “nothing to do but to save souls?”

A particular bone in our denomination’s mouth today is the planting of new congregations. What the world needs, however, is not more large box churches in the suburbs. That should be someone else’s concern. We should do what we do best, utilize trained and supervised lay leadership (CLM, Community Workers, VIM) to form small fellowships in the poorest contexts, both urban and rural.

I own a dog. I know how stubborn she can be when she sees a squirrel she shouldn’t chase or wants food that’s not hers. Love and discipline can turn the most spoiled dog around. Today we are seeing in Pope Francis a turn around story happening in the Catholic church. Perhaps there is still hope for the UMC.

A while back we had expensive stone work done on our church building. Water was getting into the decorative block and causing the face of each stone to flake off. The word for that is ‘spalling’ and I’ve applied it to the church ever since. Over the last century, the United Methodist Church institutional structure (conference boards, general agencies, and general conference actions) has aligned itself with other mainline churches, specifically the Lutherans, Presbyterians, and Episcopalians. If we were to time traveled back to the 1900’s, we would note that those denominations tended to be have better educated clergy, be more socially progressive in politics, and more liberal theology, than the mainstream of the Methodist Church. In spite of the educational emphasis of the church, the Social Creed adopted at General Conference and progressive nature of our Book of Resolutions, and the recent shift of popular culture away from conservative theology, the majority of United Methodist pastors, congregations, and parishioners consider themselves more evangelical than our mainline colleagues. This has led to a continuous spalling off of clergy and lay people who claim that the UMC has become too liberal. 

This spalling is often sited as the reason for our membership loss since 1968. I don’t find any evidence that our denomination as a whole is more liberal now than the either of our predecessors were at merger. Further, our church is doing only slightly statistically better than other mainline churches, even though we remain significantly more theologically conservative. The real cause of our membership loss is the swing of popular culture in the postmodern era away from church attendance. Recent statistics show fewer than 18% of Americans in church on any given Sunday. It’s raining and everyone, liberal and conservative, is getting wet. 

The bigger concern for our church structure is the loss of whole congregations to splits over social issues, such as, gay marriage. Unlike the other mainline denominations, the UMC has a strict trustee clause and a connectional culture which prevents the congregations who spall off from taking their buildings. Pastors and people who feel that the UMC has become too liberal, leave in small chunks. So local churches, especially in rural areas, are left weakened. Conference trustees inherit a half dozen abandoned church buildings a year. Over the last decade, I watched the Episcopalian and Presbyterian denominational leaders in Western Pennsylvania sell off church buildings, often at a reasonable discount, to the congregations that no longer feel comfortable with their social stance. This has allowed many of their congregational splits to progress without unnecessary grief. I’ve come to the conclusion that our reluctance to allow congregations to vote to leave the UMC has become part of our current mess. What was a good policy 40 years ago, has become an albatross preventing our institution from progressing in the direction that it needs to go.

There is another lesson, however, that we need to learn from the other mainline denominations. The Presbyterians, Lutherans, and Episcopalians, have kept pace with popular culture in acceptance of gay marriage and the ordination of openly practicing homosexuals. The United Methodist Church remains stuck with its current retro-policy until at least 2016. This means that in the 15 states expected to permit gay marriage, pastors and congregations will be be forced to deny rituals to their own people. However one feels about this issue, one has to admit that the United Methodist Church has not developed clear and compelling theological reasons to exclude people from full participation in the church because of their sexual orientation. The capriciousness of our current stance has become a social embarrassment. Until recently, I thought it was a good thing that we were taking our time on this issue. I watched the other mainline denominations take their lumps as conservative members and congregations spalled off. As with most social change, however, this is an issue in which it would have been better to pay early rather than to muddle aimlessly.

The danger now, is that we will spall, not just little conservative chunks off the outside of our institution, but that that we will spall a whole generation, as well as substantial congregations, off of the inside of our foundation. The Wesleyan movement began as an inclusive reformation of the church to meet the challenges of the modern era. Our passion and process allowed us to expand with the American frontier and incorporate rural people into the church. No other denomination had our willingness to accept people where they were. Our love of mission and social action pushed us to form congregations in marginalized communities. Now at the beginning of the postmodern era, the young adults who remain in the church are calling upon us to rethink church in more inclusive ways. Popular culture is already shifting towards full acceptance of the LGBT community. This in itself would not concern me, if I thought there was a theological argument to be made for our current position. 

Unlike the fundamentalists who slowly left over the course of the last century, the pastors and congregations who wish to display full acceptance of LGBT community will spall off in increasingly dramatic ways. There isn’t a middle ground that will allow us to make everybody happy. We can, however, abandon our law for the sake of our spirit. If we permit reconciling congregations to follow their heart, and clergy who marry gay couples to be unpunished, then we have a chance to keep in our fold the younger clergy and early adopters of postmodern culture that the United Methodist Church needs to be vital in the future.

I find myself thinking of Jesus’ story of the man who finds a pearl of great price (Matthew 13:47).  The pearl that is in our grasp, is to develop a witness to the emerging culture of America. We can only do this by being willing to sell off the structures and organizational idols that keep us locked in last century’s way of thinking. We can’t help spalling and becoming a smaller church. We can, however, choose who we will invite inside.

I watched a parade of squirrels passing through the the 30foot trees at the edge of my property today. Each squirrel scampered to the thin end of a branch, then launched themselves like Rocky across the eight feet of emptiness to the dainty branches of the next tree. I saw five of them do this in a row, gracefully, without hesitation, even though both their launching tree and their target branch were swaying in the wind. Then a squirrel came who hesitated. I found myself identifying with that fellow as he turned and backed down a yard or so of the tree. Was this leap really necessary?

I’m reading Brian McLaren’s book, “Everything Must Change” (Nelson, 2007). He speaks of how the church has lost its social relevance and missional message. We preach the same sermon every Sunday; “we are sinners, we should get saved, then we can live as nice people.” We don’t address the social needs of our community. For most of us, Jesus has not left the building or entered into the daily lives of the people near us. Most leaders have become tree huggers, unwilling to leap to into the future. “I’ll just stick with what I know,” has become our epitaph.

The squirrel I was watching, did in time, make the leap. He landed safely. He rejoined the others on their mission to scavenge the last of the acorns before winter. When critters, people, and churches make a big leap, there are usually the same factors in play:

The danger of doing nothing. Congregations who continue to care only for their buildings and current membership will decline and die. Squirrels who travel the safe pedestrian route of the lawn will get caught by roving cats and die. People who fail to change will die, though not soon enough for the rest of us.

Transition always involves letting go of the old, trusting a spiritual process, and leaping into new territory. Congregations who are unwilling to lose the support of their faithful pillars will not have the courage to leap into empty air. Squirrels, however, are designed to fly between trees. The church is designed by God to change.

Community matters. The last squirrel was probably motivated by the fear of being alone. Congregations can’t be legislated or preached into social action. They transition into being missional churches by a process that involves making person to person relationships with those in need. Jesus’ methodology was to teach people how to love. That love of neighbor gives Christians the courage to do new things.  Read Acts 6 and note that the new organizational structure was in response to the new relationships that the early church was having with the Hellenized Jews. They did new things because they had a new sense of community.

I talked with a well-trained, dependable, and highly fruitful youth pastor yesterday. Such creatures do exist. He was even the product of my own denomination (United Methodist), though now, is serving on the staff of a non-denominational church. His story speaks volumes about what needs fixed in the church and provides insight about what needs to be done to reach the next generation with the gospel.

    One of the great sins of the church today is to maintain a class system in which children and youth ministry is relegated to the basement. The youth pastor I interviewed had graduated from a well respected four year college and received advanced training specifically to do youth ministry. His vocational calling seems very clear. Yet, he is frequently asked about when he plans to go to seminary and become a ‘real pastor.’ When I was in my teens, the life-changing youth pastor of my home church was in her sixties. I have another colleague who has proven gifts for children’s ministry and curriculum development, yet because he is middle aged and seminary trained, his denomination has forced him to return to parish ministry. Check Youtube, today’s popular youth evangelists are rarely young.

    Currently, church economics seems be driving most ministry professionals who specialize in teaching children and youth into serving large, non-denominational, box-churches.  The Methodists, Presbyterians, Lutherans, etc., have a habit of paying their ordained pastor first, and then scrambling to see if there is anything left over for other teaching professionals. I use the word ‘teaching’ intentionally, because no such class prejudice exists in the secular world of education. Those who graduate with teaching degrees do not have to worry about whether their specialization in elementary ed, or desire to work with the disabled, will relegate them to a dead-end career. What I observe in most main-line churches, is a downward spiral of expectations. We pay our youth workers to be young and inexperienced. Then lower our standards to keep the pace with the decline in what we offer to the next generation. Further, we have bought into a dangerous myth, that youth relate best with those who are immature. Actually, people of all ages desire authenticity, stability, and integrity in their program leaders, pastors, and teachers.  A great senior pastor can’t fix the damage done to a person who misses hearing the gospel in developmentally appropriate ways as a child or youth.

    It is clear to me that we have a systemic problem. The values that people express do not correlate with the church’s current institutional structure.  The missional outcomes that we propose, do not match the budgets and priorities that we live by. Further, we have a biblical mandate to share our faith with the next generation (Deuteronomy 6:7, Matthew 18:1-5, 10). Our repentance may have to begin by confessing the idolatry that we have surrounding the word ‘ordination.’ All trained workers in a field deserve respect. Those who share the gospel with youth and children need to be both compensated and held to higher standards.

    For congregations with less than 200 in average worship this will mean forming cooperative relationships with other congregations so that additional full-time staff persons can be supported. In today’s world, people move and young adults are unlikely to attend the denomination, let alone the church, of their childhood. It doesn’t hurt a local church to share the teaching of their children with other trusted congregations of the region. Rather than muddling along with ineffective children and youth leadership, churches should work together and fund a full-time missionary to the next generation. A professional person, who has had both psychological and theological training, can oversee many volunteers and develop programs in various locations. Here is a place where we urgently need to break down our old parish and denominational fences.

Recently, I went to a burger joint that used the new Coke Freestyle vending machine to dispense my beverage. Instead of giving my drink order to the guys behind the counter or filling it up my cup at the fountain nozzles, the Freestyle vending machine presented me with a touch screen. After stabbing away few menus, and I had a drink made exactly to my individual tastes. It hit me that Freestyle had a few things to teach the church about our new postmodern world:

1) The machine offered many options – tailoring the experience to each person.  Not only could I choose to add cherry, orange, or lemon to my drink, the machine also gave me control over carbonation and sweetness. Each drink is customized.

Apply this to your church and outreach:

Congregations need to offer more options to their participants for hands-on mission work and individually designed spiritual formation experiences. Churches are no longer free to offer the same religious experience to every member. People are demanding more freedom in designating where the mission part of their offering goes. It may even be time to offer more than one form of membership, that is, providing a way to recognize and affirm the people who participate in more than one congregation (snow birds, college students, mixed marriages, etc) and people who are in different places on their spiritual journey. 

2) The machine calls home every night to tell Coke what people are buying.  Not only is Coke able to keep the machine well stocked, their marketing department is given real-time information on the tastes of their customers. With this information, Coke knows to bottle sweeter  products in one region for its stores or whether a new flavor will be popular. Note that knowledge has become a two way street in the postmodern world. Gone are the days when Coke had a secret recipe that it developed in its labs. Now, people tell Coke what to bottle. 

Apply this to your church and outreach:

Today, knowledge flows uphill. Don’t look to your denominational office to teach you how to be in mission. Use the web. Form personal networks with people who are making a difference in your community. Build your own, local, partnerships. Become agile, fluid, and ready to change to meet new opportunities.  

3) The machine uses its LCD panel to teach the local burger joint employees how to maintain and repair it. 

Apply this to your church and outreach:

The church needs to stop being in the institution building business and renew its commitment to making disciples. Instead putting all of our resources into equipping a few ordained leaders (who are like the specialized vending machine repairmen of old) we need to teach all Christians how to pray, witness, and do the mission work of the church. The postmodern world is decentralized. Knowledge is available to whoever wants it. 

4) The Freestyle Coke Machine comes global ready. Because all of the text on the machine is displayed on the LCD panel, the machine’s software can easily translate its information into any language and currency. 

Apply this to your church and outreach:

Don’t be afraid to be Global. Find ways to overcome boundaries. Don’t be constrained by the language and policy structure of your denomination. Music is a form of language. Instead of arguing about whether you like country western or contemporary or Bach, seek for new ways to translate the gospel into the musical language of those people you wish to reach.

Sometimes when I’m away from the house all day, I’ll come through the door and think, “Boy, does that cat stink.” The problem isn’t with the cat. The problem is with me needing to change the litter box. Yet if I’m home all day, I don’t notice it. What is it about going away that makes the cat’s box stink more. No matter how bad something is, we get used to it if we live with it. Things can be pretty bad in a local church, and often are, and the regular attenders won’t notice. 

In the church, people who can look at a familiar situation with new eyes are a God-sent gift.  Any committee that is involved with bringing about change in the church, needs to have a few people put on it just because they are new to the congregation. This rule applies to the church council -- nothing new ever happens in churches that don’t have at least one person on the board who has recently become a member. This also applies to the committee that oversees pastor and staff relationships. Things can stink pretty badly in the church office, but nobody will change the proverbial cat’s litter unless they come in from the outside. This is especially true of the groups that are charged with setting vision or goal-setting for the church.

Twenty percent of any visioning group needs to be composed of people who have just started coming to the church in last eighteen months. If we don’t take intentional steps to listen to those with a different perspective, we will find ourselves reinforcing our misconceptions. 

Good church leadership involves stepping back from time to time and asking, “If I was an outsider here, what would I see?” We may assume that what we experienced week after week is normal, when in fact it is dangerously unhealthy. 

When we set goal or strategic plans, our first objective is not to fill a sheet of paper with good ideas. Instead, we should quietly discern God’s grace and purpose. God often uses those whom we have not listened to in the past to provide us with new understandings about our current reality and future objectives.

As I write this I am getting ready to change planes in the Atlanta Airport. I am prepared for certain changes; the next plane I get on should be larger, it will head north rather than southwest, and it will be in the air longer (I hope). As major as these changes are, they are not a transition. I think its important in our churches and in our individual lives to distinguish change from transition. Change is a constant part of life. We may initiate changes or they may happen to us, but they do not fundamentally alter our identity, or the way we go about our lives. Transition, however, radically shifts who we are and the procedures we use to accomplish our dreams.

In short:

• Transition involves a major shift in expectations and values that leads to new operating procedures
• Transition occurs over a period of time and has a middle ground place (the wilderness) which is not like what is before or what comes after. Having a process helps us travel through this middle ground. 
• The journey of transition forces us to acknowledge what is lost and affirm our ownership over what will be gained
• Transitions can be healthy or disastrous. The chances of success are greatly improved when trained experts (Intentional Interims for churches and therapists for individuals) are involved.

Being willing to label a season of transition in the church as a designated special time is the healthy way to respond to leadership failure or misconduct, major conflicts, or fundamental shifts in the congregation’s neighborhood or missional vision. When you are in transition, look for help, and remember the motto:

“The process is always more important than any one result or decision.”

Reality Check begins with these three questions, each with an application intended to encourage abstract thought and open conversations among church leaders. The three questions are:

1) What is the real nature of the Church?

2) Where is society taking us?

3) How can we do God’s will?

There are many other questions that could be asked, but I am convinced that these are the right three. They point us towards the fundamentals. They avoid the contextual dead ends which sidetrack so much of our creativity. Questions like; ‘how long should the sermon be,’ and, ‘why don’t we do more contemporary music?’ imply that sermons and music are givens in God’s design for the Church. We need to ask first what the nature of Church is. 

    You may want to ask, ‘how do we bring more people into our church?’ But that question assumes that your form of Church is still appropriate for your neighbors to attend. Understanding your neighbor and how society is shaping both their needs and your own, seems to be a more basic place to begin. Church can only meet our need for community and a right relationship with God if it is remains relevant. Often the comments and questions that church leaders raise reveal a deep distrust of the world outside. Many local churches are like swimmers caught in a tide they haven’t the strength to overcome. But if the Church moves with the currents, it can be a rescue vessel for those who would otherwise perish.

    Many people want to jump right to questions like, ‘how can we increase our giving,’ or ‘what do we have to pay our preacher?’ Yet these questions assume that the money we receive and the clergy that we support are essential for us to do God’s will as a congregation. When was the last time you sensed a deep partnership with God as you went about your church work? Today, as so many congregations struggle to set priorities and divide fairly diminishing resources, there is a need to ask, ‘if we are to do one thing in the coming years, what would it be?’ For some the answer is to leave a legacy, for others the answer involves adaptation to the postmodern religious environment, for still others it is found in sacrificially giving to some mission, and for a few, it involves continuing to develop the bright, shining qualities of this church.

    These three question are based upon the business book, Confronting Reality by Larry Bossidy and Ram Charan. They say that long range planning and having effective change in any organization depends upon asking three questions:

1. What is the nature of the business we are in?
2. Where are the external factors and market changes that are influencing our business?
3. How can we continue to make money?

    As you can see, it was easy for me to substitute Church for business, society for external factors, and doing God’s will for making money. Bossidy and Charan’s book, however, is worth reading by church leaders for the startling tales they tell of talented and highly paid executives who drove their companies into ruin because they were afraid to ask these fundamental questions. On the other hand, these business writers provide also provide detailed accounts of how these questions brought understanding and preceded successful change in the midst of an adverse economic environment for companies like Home Depot and 3M

In Reality Check 101, I make a point of stating that churches have souls. By this I mean that each congregation has an intrinsic worth. There is a value to the local church that far exceeds its statistical strength or the value it may have for the denomination that holds the title to its building. Pastors come and go, but a church’s soul remains constant. Like the soul of a human being, the congregation’s soul represents more than the current state of the body.

Where is this soul located? Philosophers speak about the human soul being located at the intersection of the will of the mind and the reality of the flesh. The Bible says that when God breathed the inspiring breath of life into Adam, he became a living soul (Genesis 2:7 KJV). This implies that the soul is a crossroad, where physical context (the mud of the ground) limited by time and mortality intersects spiritual vocation and God’s promise of a continuing existence.

Your church’s soul is located at a similar intersection. It lies where the world of human affairs and aspirations (red circle) intersects with your congregation’s daily life (blue circle). These both intersect with the kingdom of God (green circle). A small triangle represents the common ground of God, Church, and Human Society. No congregation is entirely at one with God’s Kingdom -- I think we do well to overlap the will of God by 30%. The world is never so secular to be without an overlap with God and the church. Where we take the Kingdom of God into the world, there is our soul. Three often used words overlap into this one concept; witness, mission, and vocation.

If a church moves down and away from God, its spiritual passion becomes weakened and its soul impoverished. It is impossible to increase our overlap with God’s kingdom without pushing further out into the world’s territory. Jesus calls us to be in the world, but not of it (John 17). Soul is not in the safe part of the circle with the majority of the church’s programs and concerns. It is out in the dangerous intersection of our holy God and the chaotic world.

The theological concepts expressed in previous blog lead to three substantial changes in how churches will be organized in the future.

1) There will ceased to be a distinct separation between laity and clergy.  There’s nothing in the postmodern definition of ‘Church’ which requires a designated priesthood. It may be  helpful to continue to ordain some church leaders as ‘clergy’ and entrust them with supervision of  “word, sacrament, and order” – which in postmodern language is: the faithful application of biblical text to current context, the holy practice of the sacraments, and the fair and democratic ordering of congregational life. The terms clergy and lay will become more and more a matter of how a person functions within the local church, and not a status that travels with a person in other contexts.

2) In the Internet age, seminary training will not be a prerequisite for ‘religious authority.’ Today all people have equal access to information. Religious leaders fulfill their calling, however, by helping people of a particular time and place interpret Christian Word or Text for their situation. Trained leaders also perform teaching roles and act as guides for organizing healthy, compassionate, and spiritually aware congregations.

3) Congregations can be of any size. The goal of the institutional Church is not to accumulate more members nor is it to make individual congregations grow. Denominations, if they continue at all in the postmodern world, will need to serve the kingdom of God. This means helping each community develop the form of religion that  enables its people to live better and more meaningful lives. We are driven by compassion to make the world our parish, not to grow our institution so that it encompasses our world. We must learn to offer Christ and his simplicity, instead of the burdensome rules of our order.

The church exists to help people in every place live better and more meaningful lives. God has given us a rich and transcendently ‘true’ text (scripture + church practice) or ‘Word,’ whose focal narrative is the acts and teachings of Jesus. The church invites all people to experience the Word as preaching, music, art, and ritual (including the sacraments). We value this Word because within it we have found personal healing, salvation, and eternal life. We also believe that Christian revelation joins with the texts of other great faiths to offer healing for social ills and to speak truth against the sinful powers that exert themselves in oppression, materialism, and the neglect of those who are weakest in our world. Like the other great world religions, Christianity allows each individual to participate in a larger human memory, thereby overcoming the limitations of our brief earthly life. 

    The church acts in the world by forming worshiping congregations. These communal gatherings reflect on the Word and join in the praise of God. Repeated in our Word is the understanding that God deserves to be praised both by individuals and in public gatherings. Also, fellowship seems to be central to an authentic Christian life. Each communal gathering or congregation develops its own culture to mediate interpersonal relationships and share the Christian Word. Congregations without physical space, such those that meet in cyberspace or in transient locations like coffee shops, must develop new cultural forms for insuring the continuity of fellowship. 

    When we speak of Christian Word, we are aware that it is at its core a revelation from God that we dialogue with and mold to fit our current context. When we lift up any part of the Word and claim it to be essential or fundamental, we diminish our relationship with the ongoing work of God’s spirit. The Word can be expressed in scripture, art, music, and ritual (including the sacraments). We can think of our revelation this way: The Word of God became flesh and lived among us as Jesus. The early church preserved this experience for us by translating it into scripture, ritual, and creed. Primarily in the context of a congregation, but also occasionally as individuals, we translate the Word back into an experience of God in Jesus Christ. In every place and time the church must add to the text (and so inadvertently edit it) that which makes it more appropriate to its context. The church does this with fear and trembling knowing that what it neglects may be more holy than what it adds.

    The church also exists to ease suffering and to be the ‘Word of God made visible’ in loving ways in the midst of their secular community. To be compassionate is to offer help to others without strings or expectations of gain for the church institution.  To be evangelical is to believe that the Christian Word is ‘good news’ and of benefit to all. To be ecumenical is to recognize that the outward form of our texts may vary but the experience of God in Jesus Christ unites us. In order to participate in the world’s religious dialogue we must be respectful of other texts even though the integrity of our personal relationship with God depends upon being exclusive and faithful to our Christian text. 

    Religious institutions become evil when they neglect their call to help people live better and more meaningful lives. Christian individuals must grow in compassion and service to others in order to grow in faith. Congregational leaders must devote equal attention to the problem of helping the church do good and the challenge of making their worship relevant and true.

People who design things or engineer processes often have a hard time grasping the importance of spiritual passion for their local church. Recently, a pastor complained to me that his church leaders loved to do projects and fix things, but lacked the heart for mission or any enthusiasm for faith sharing. Evangelism is often a foreign concept for engineers. 

    There are key engineering concepts, however, that relate to spiritual passion. Framing our theology around these concepts will light a fire under our more process oriented members. Appropriately, there are three steps to this. First, is to speak about passionate spirituality as a measurable quantity in the life of the church. Just like the gasoline in your car or the altitude beneath an airliner, spiritual passion can be talked about as a needed component, which when lacking, can be disastrous. 

    Consider what happens in Mark 9:14-29. A man brings his demon possessed son to Jesus’ disciples, and even though they have watched Jesus for several years and participated in many healing demonstrations, they are unable to help the boy. Jesus takes over and does the same things that the disciples had been doing, but he has no problem driving the demon out. Was it a matter of his technique? No. We read:

 After Jesus had gone indoors, his disciples asked him privately, “Why couldn’t we drive it out?” He replied, “This kind can come out only by prayer.”

    Here, and many other places, Jesus seems to be saying that there is some quality or quantity built up in us by prayer. Jesus had sufficient spiritual passion, his disciples did not. Prayer is one of four processes (note, engineers like to talk about process) that raise spiritual passion in both individuals and in the church. Jesus also teaches us that prayer shouldn’t be just repetitive words or the rote performance of ritual (Matthew 6:5-13). That form of prayer is like eating celery, it burns more calories than it provides. 

    The prayer process that Jesus is talking about involves expectation. Thy kingdom come, thy will be done. Jesus formed the habit of praying with complete confidence that God both heard and would answer his prayers. Each time a prayer was successful, it reinforced this confidence. This is what engineers like to call, a feedback loop.

    In the local church we build feedback loops around prayer by asking people to report the answers they have received to their prayers. “Has God answered the prayer request you made two weeks ago?” Teachers, small group leaders, and committee chairs, should be taught to use high a expectation process with their group. They must both pray for individual concerns and allow time for reporting back on how God has acted in each of their meetings. Imagine your trustee or church council spending the first ten minutes of their meetings this way.

    There are three other processes that lift spiritual passion in individuals and in the church. They each have a critical quality, similar to expectation in prayer. Local church leaders, and particularly engineers, will appreciate the need to build appropriate feed back loops to support each spiritual passion lift point.

In summary, they are:

The first step in reaching engineers is to speak about Spiritual Passion as a quantifiable substance (see Hebrews 11:1 KJV, note the rest of the chapter supports the use of the word ‘substance’).  The second is to enlist engineers in the discovery of feedback loops within the local church. The third step involves appealing to the engineers basic understanding of beauty and duty. Engineers feel that a design is beautiful when it perfectly fulfills the specifications of the customer. God is the church’s only customer and your leadership are commissioned to design a church that optimizes the making of disciples in your neighborhood (see Matthew 28:19). If we can get our engineers to embrace God’s written specifications, then we may not have to explain a fuzzy idea like love to them.

Rule # 4  The process is always more important than any one result.

Church issues rarely have the urgency we assign to them. We may feel that it is vitally important that the church does such and such, but is it really worth destroying the trust that the people have in the congregation’s decision making process? Each decision we make, should be done in a way that is consistent with the patience and love that Jesus showed when he shepherded his Church into existence.

The exceptions involve violations of the three previously stated rules (see Church Rules and Exceptions):

• When a congregation has gotten into a rut of inward thinking, radical action (or trauma) may be required to force it into seeing the unchurched outside its walls.
• When the financial process of a congregation makes money into an idol, spiritual concerns need to be emphasized over exactitude in financial matters.
• When there is an emergency threatening the safety of the church’s programs, the integrity of the church building, or the future of the congregation, then immediate action by authorized individuals is required.

    If one needs an example to make the above rule clear, consider this week’s developments in the Syrian crisis. We tend to talk as if making a decision, to go engage in a military action or not, is the primary issue. I have seen a multitude of Facebook posts and news articles stating pros and cons of intervention, but very few deal with the process of making that decision. Has the president done the right thing in sharing this decision with congress? What will be the long term effect on the reputation of the United States as a world power? What actions have the greatest chance of helping the other nations of the Middle East develop healthy democracies? 

    In other words, politicians and church leaders need to be aware that the process is always more important than any one result.

In each of the following, the validity of the rule is proved by its exceptions:

1) The group is always smarter than the lone leader or expert.

This rule applies to every church committee meeting. Pastors must learn to give laity more say in setting the mission and worship style of their congregation. Church vitality doesn’t spring magically from a book, nor can it be bought by attending the seminar offered by a visiting guru. It grows out of a healthy, spiritually connected, congregational discernment process.  This rule comes from James Surowiecki’s The Wisdom of Crowds.

Exceptions:

• When the decision making group doesn’t represent the cultural diversity of the church’s context. An aging group of church leaders will have a hard time discovering how to be in mission to a neighborhood of young adults. Churches in transitional communities always need trained transitional leadership.
• When a dominant voice controls the group process.

2) Vital congregations spend more of their budget on mission and program. Administration, clergy compensation, and church maintenance are to be treated as necessary evils.

This rule encourages congregations to do their budgeting process in two columns. The left column should show all the money that the church spends on its own institutional needs. The right column shows what the church is spending for the first-time visitor and the people outside its doors. Most budget items, such as conference apportionments, will need to be split, based upon how much of the item is really missional.

Exceptions:

• When the pastor, or staff person, is the church’s primary form of mission to the community. Small rural churches and urban mission churches tend to do their ministry through the giving of their paid staff to the neighborhood.
• Church renovation and additional maintenance dollars need to be spent to keep the church building accessible. Poor parking and dark hallways reinforce the church’s exclusive tendencies.

3) Over time, congregations either grow upward and outward or decline downward and inward.

This is what is known as the Spiral Rule, written about in Reality Check 101, chapter 6.

It has no real exceptions, but the words upward and downward need to be defined by the local church as they discern the particular calling God has for their congregation. Any congregation who refuses to look outward in mission, will in time become a selfish singularity.

Exceptions:

• Many churches become effective in caring for the needs of others and transforming their community, even though they may be statistically plateaued. Their upward growth may not be visible to those who only consider a church’s metrics.
• Having a popular pastor may give a congregation a momentary upward bump. Unless a congregation develops a sense of its own vision, apart from its current clergy leadership, it will not continue to grow. 

In last week’s blog I stated that the repeal of DOMA (DOMA and the UMC) is a game changer for clergy who are being asked to officiate at gay ceremonies. While individual clergy may still wish to set higher standards and restrict who they will unite in marriage, the denomination can’t exclude a whole class of people without good reason. It would be like the United Methodist Church saying to me that I couldn’t perform marriages for people over 70 years old because they were unlikely to procreate. Unless the denomination can prove to me that there are biblical principles that I am violating, I don’t see why I couldn’t perform any marriage that is legal in my state. This would certainly be less theoretical if I were actively serving in California.

As I write this, I am aware that my authority to perform “pastoral acts,” such as funerals and weddings, is tied to my ordination and appointment to a local church. This undercarriage remains, even when I am performing my duties outside the local church and for non-Christians. There are several caveats; because congregations are notorious for being narrow-minded and prejudiced, the local church is not allowed to restrict my ministry or curtail my works of compassion towards any person or group. They certainly are not allowed to vote on who I marry or burry. The United Methodist Church, as a denomination, is equally famous for bending to political pressure and failing to do serious theological work in matters relating to social justice. To counterbalance this known fault, however, United Methodists have historically given the benefit of the doubt to individual clergy who acted according to their conscience. 

We are still three years away from the next General Conference and any opportunity to adjust our church law. As gay marriage becomes common in perhaps a half dozen states over the next year, the UM Annual Conferences of those states are unlikely to continue to defrock the clergy who perform these unions. The question that occurs to me is, what right would either the local church or the General church have to interfere if a clergy person has the support of his or her colleagues? I have always said that my calling is to advance the Gospel in my region. The local church is often to self absorbed to support the ministry that I do for the world outside their walls. The denomination as a whole is such a nebulous political beast that it is hard to believe that it always knows what is right for my region. So, I think the United Methodist clergy of each state need to decide together what is best for the advancement of the Gospel in their context.

In last week’s blog I speculated on how productivity varies over the thirty odd year career of the average clergy person. Let us be blunt; the United Methodist church, and other mainline denominations, are moving towards a system that reduces professional productivity down to one factor, the capacity to add members or grow a church (sometimes called ‘metrics’). Elsewhere I have cautioned that we need to read this as an institutional concern, which may have little correlation to God’s calling on a particular pastor’s life or the God-given vocation of the church that they are serving.

Like the Church Lifecycle that I drew last week, the Pastoral Lifecycle that I have drawn here is without statistical support. Considering the fact that the average United Methodist clergy person has been providing a negative membership gain for the denomination for the last thirty years, what curve would you draw? Take an incoming class of probationary members, say the class of 1979 (mine). Which part of their careers are they most likely to have been in negative territory?

I only draw this out to say that any policy which seeks to replace aging workers with young ones will have these difficulties:

1. Most clergy become workaholics and our attitude about the above curve may be accentuating this psychological problem. The seminary graduate enters the field expecting to rack up double digit membership gains. Each time they have to submit a negative statistical report or confess that their church is falling behind on apportionments, they feel the denomination’s lash upon their back. Soon they realize that certain intractable problems and location issues prevent this particular church from growing. The only way to get a better appointment is to work harder. What they rarely do is settle in and accept the bottom half of their learning curve. They don’t seek for the core understandings and deeper insights which will help their current congregation become healthier and their total career be more fruitful.
2. As workaholics, many clergy become depressed in midlife when their statistical values drop again. What made them productive in their thirties, no longer works. Depressed people tend to be risk adverse. They reject social media as a ‘time waster,’ failing to realize that we are in the community building business. More significantly, the denominational system with its mythical career ladder doesn’t encourage older clergy to do the work where they may be most fruitful. Mature, wise, leaders are needed to help legacy (or hospice) congregations transition into an appropriate state of closure. Other transitional leaders are needed to provide healing for congregations in conflict or some other form of collective trauma. 
3. Given the current climate, healthy clergy with thirty years of experience, will exit gracefully and transition into productive midlife in another field. Unhealthy ones will stay and demand continued increases in salary. The denomination may lack the resources to transition through the period when the newly recruited young pastors are in training and the unhealthy clergy are failing to exit. We may be digging both negative valleys of the productivity curve deeper.

The unintended consequence of policies that focus on clergy age is that adaptive and well rounded pastors will consider their church work to be a short term career. Sports teams that focus on having young players lose their talented ones when they become free agents. There is a reason why the fifth command is the only one with a blessing (Deuteronomy 5:16). Those who intend to live long in the field of church service, choose a denomination that isn’t abandoning their elders on an ice floe.

The life cycle of a congregation is often described a bell curve, mapping out membership growth over time. Martin F. Saarinen (The Life Cycle of a Congregation -Alban.org), and others, chart how a congregation is born with enthusiasm, has significant yearly growth for a decade or so, enters into a long period of stability, then falls into decline, leading in time to death. My first response to seeing this curve was to ask, what about Canterbury Cathedral? Obviously there are outliers, that is churches whose lifespan is so unexpected that it skews the chart. Best, perhaps, to disregard both those new congregations that die in less than 5 years and those historic churches that grace the centuries. The lifecycle itself is a hypothetical construct, blessed by the fact that most aggregated statistics form bell curves. At any rate, you can’t look at a chart of average church lifespans and predict where your church will be ten years from now. Every regional cluster of congregations, like a synod or district, forms a messy scatter plot, with older congregations unexpectedly growing and solidly stable mid-life churches crashing. The more individual narratives you know, the less you believe in statistics.

What if we draw a similar life cycle curve for the productivity of a clergy person as they age? This curve might be more sinusoidal; a drop at the beginning, a rise in the middle passing through neutral (doing more good than harm), then a drop off to grey near age 65. A young pastor enters his or her first church full of enthusiasm and the capacity to fail large. Because they both lack wisdom and are likely to be serving in a situation with limited resources, most clergy will find their first decade to be unproductive. Eventually, they move on to serve a church with more resources that matches their now tested leadership skills. Suddenly, they are highly productive. When rewarded with a more substantial church or an administrative post, an average pastor becomes less productive but more dependable. In time, physical aging and the accumulated reluctance we all develop towards risk and needed change, causes a decline in productivity. The life cycle curve plunges downward as the clergy person dreams of retirement.

Of course, this pastoral productivity curve is also a hypothetical construct. Real pastors are so diverse that even a sinusoidal curve constructed from a large sampling would have limited value.   We can’t put our finger on a chart and predict how many members a clergy person will join this year. Nor does knowing a person’s age qualify us to guess whether they are productive or ready to be put out to pasture. Life cycle curves, however, may be helpful starting points for individual congregations and mature pastors as they begin a prayerful self-discernment process. 

Churches and pastors need to begin by charting their own statistics and reflecting upon the context of their good and bad times. Every congregation and every individual is on their own path. At times they will follow the general life cycle curve. Where they, as an individual or as a distinct congregation, leave the pack is important. All and all, the life cycle curve is deflating to our ego. Some situations require working to beat the odds and choosing to be an exception. Others require faithfully accepting God’s grace for this present time and making the appropriate adaptations. 

Churches will note that a period of enthusiasm and a period of stability is something that they share with all other congregations. Their experience of these times may have been enhanced by the leadership of a former pastor, but he or she did not cause the good times. In a sail boat, the captain sets the sails and marks the course, but the wind and the currents are beyond ones control and tied to that particular time and place. Further, churches that recover from decline, do so by discovering a specific calling or vocation from God. This requires spiritual discernment and is the subject of my new Reality Check 101 book.

Pastors also need to think of productivity as more than just metrics. Who they are will always be more than what they do. Integrity is everything. Leadership cannot be exercised without transparency. If they are in the front end of the learning curve, they need to admit that to the lay leadership of the congregation. Throughout their stable years, the process that pastors use to discern the specifics of their calling will parallel the process their congregation needs to follow to discover their vocation and prevent decline. Mature pastors need to search for ways to overcome the natural effects of aging, particularly; risk aversion, work addiction, and the reluctance to embrace new technology. When a pastor discerns the approach of retirement, they owe it to the church to announce it two years in advance and intentionally prepare their congregation for the transition.

Finally, denominational leadership should consider the implications of the congregational and pastoral productivity curves, but only after running the numbers for the last thirty years of their own judicatory. Do the math carefully, recognizing that denominational entities are dynamic systems with many interrelated parts. False assumptions and their resulting prescriptions can do more harm than good. Be aware that the clergy and congregational life cycle curves will interact:

• Many church leaders are advocating the rapid retirement of aging clergy and the active recruitment and placement of young pastors. If we don’t know the shape of the pastoral productivity curve, we may be causing a double whammy. Wise leaders may be exiting too soon and not providing needed transitional support for declining congregations. Young pastors may be working through their decade of inexperience and low productivity at the very time the denomination doesn’t have the resources or flexibility to support the low end of their learning curve.
• On the whole, congregations of a certain age are likely to be in decline. You need to do the math to see what contextual factors support the outliers of your district. Do rural churches live longer than suburban ones? How does the size of congregation relate to its overall percentage of gain or loss for the last twenty years? Other than a change of pastors, what factors support congregational rebirth in your area?
• Perhaps it is time to burry the myth that a clergy person’s career should move up a ladder, serving bigger churches and deserving a higher salaries as they approach retirement. The post modern age and the rise of mega-churches has broken that system. Denominations invested in it will die. How can we encourage people to not be risk adverse and to keep current on the use of technology in the church, no matter what their age or leadership post?
• How can we discover and support those clergy and congregations that do better than average? Does our current use of metrics get in the way? How can we relate pastoral productivity to real disciple making skills and leading congregations towards greater health? How can we prevent the negative predictions inherent in these curves from becoming self-fulfilling prophesies?
• Other ideas?

Jesus said, “Consider the lilies...” (Matthew 6:28) Why?  Please note that these flowers have three strikes against them:

• They are cheap; especially if you translate lilly as wildflower
• They are apolitical; they seek to influence the world or force others to march to their drum.
• They are independent and self directed, that is, they don’t wait for someone to tell them when to bloom.

Small congregations are a lot like lilies. They have limited assets. They rarely have aspirations beyond caring for the people of their immediate community and the one or two missionaries they may support. They are often resistant to being told what to do. This is both the beauty and the frustration of the small membership church. I think Jesus invites us to appreciate the beauty and reconsider the source of our complaints. 

Like wildflowers, small congregations are plentiful. Two-thirds of the churches in the US average less than 100 in worship. Denominational leaders and seminaries should take note that most clergy will spend their entire careers serving small and mid-sized churches. Worse still the average congregation today can no longer afford an ordained, full-time pastor to serve them alone. Perhaps, we should consider better ways to train and supervise laity to provide pastoral  leadership for the average congregation. Perhaps we should also appreciate the role God has intended the small church to play in the economy of His kingdom.  

Healthy small churches provide social capital and a real witness to Christ in rural, inner city, and marginalized contexts. Like wild flowers, they are also resilient. They survive economic crisis and leadership failures that bankrupt larger congregations. Further, they have a tendency to develop and train disciples of faith that go on to serve larger congregations. A disproportionate number of ordained clergy and effective lay leaders in my own denomination (United Methodist) grew up in small churches. 

Consider then, the small church. In our materially focused world, their efforts are often under valued. In our bottom-line, business obsessed culture, fails to comprehend what Jesus is pointing to. There is beauty in places we often fail to look for it.

Most things that fail in the church, do not fail for lack of trying. They fail because the groundwork was not done to prove the project worthy of the required effort.  Here is how it goes; one or two leaders become excited about a new program for their church. They work hard to get the votes needed to initiate it. There are stories told about how well this program worked elsewhere. It sounds like fun, and perhaps a little mysterious. The vote passes through council and money is set aside for it. The innovators wipe their brows, thinking the hard part is over. The new program now requires broader support. The various church leaders who ‘liked the idea’ before, back away. They didn’t think this thing would require anything from them. Who understands the next step? When it gets put in the bulletin or an announcement is made, how many church leaders will connect this item with what was talked about last month at council? Who in the pew will think the item is directed at them? The pastor and other spiritual teachers might suddenly realize that they haven’t checked off on the program’s underlying theology. It may also be that not enough people have given the idea the room it needs in their calendars. Like the seed that was planted on a busy footpath; the program will die for lack of depth (Matthew 13:5).

When this happens, those who initiated the effort will become discouraged. They will say, “This was such a great idea. It’s too bad that our folk lacked the commitment to get it done!” This is unfair. The people of your church know enough not to eat a cake that is half baked. Why should anyone sacrifice for a mission that is poorly interpreted?

Months before entering Jerusalem and offering his sacrifice, Jesus tested his disciples to see if they had sufficient understanding to fulfill their mission.  Inventing church would require a great deal of focus and sacrificial effort from each of them. He took them aside and asked, “Who do you say I am?” (Matthew 16:13-24) Jesus knew that understanding his divine nature and the importance of the cross, were key to starting his church. Peter got the quiz right. Jesus responded, “…Upon this rock I will build my church.” It was only after affirming the bedrock of key understandings, that Jesus went on to talk about commitment to this new thing we called ‘church.’ 

The rule is clear:  Understanding precedes action. 

Building sufficient digestion time into church planning is important. Wise leaders know how to nurture their ideas until the appropriate groundwork has been done.

An important promise in the Bible reads, "Take delight in the LORD, and he will give you the desires of your heart." - Psalm 37:4  But, where do the desires of my heart come from? I suspect the significant ones come from God. When He promises to give me my desires, He is not agreeing to buy me a Porsche. He is instead agreeing to fulfill the very impulses that He has already wired into my being. Something has to change in me so that I delight in God, however, before I discover the deeper desires of my heart. I have found in my own life that there is a circularity to what is being promised here. God is glad to give me the things he already wants me to want. If my deepest desire is to communicate, God helps me to learn how to write. Other people have discovered a desire to see beauty and become artists, or to care for the sick and entered into medicine, or to teach, etc. Very tricky, isn’t it? 

In the same way, if your congregation delights in the Lord, the deepest desires of the collective body which is your church will be fulfilled. Is it the desire of your congregation’s heart to have a beautiful building and happy members? Or is your congregation more interested in insuring that the next generation finds a church where they can experience authentic worship and Christian fellowship? Or does your congregation’s heart lean towards mission, that is, working with the poor, befriending the oppressed, and being a transformative force in the community? Or, finally, is your church wired by God to be a key player in the region, capturing religious market share while it provides quality programs and worship?

Careful, before you answer: Each of us as church leaders has a personal preference for one the four suits or pathways to success. Chances are good that your personal desire is not the same as your congregation’s group desire. This doesn’t mean that you should part company. Every person’s individual passion is needed by a congregation as it moves down its path. One of the things that has to happen before we can help lead the church on its path is we have to set aside our own desires, and prayerfully ask to hear the Holy Spirit speak through the small groups of our church.

Reality Check 101 book provides two tools (Suits of Cards, Roundabout) to discern the desires of a congregation's heart.

This week my new Reality Check 101 book became available. The back cover reads:

As a tightrope walker alone on her path, so each church must discern a way forward. Reality Check 101 provides a process for congregational dialogue and a dozen exercises for implementing change. Five years in the making, this workbook follows Bill Kemp’s Ezekiel’s Bones and The Church Transition Workbook as a practical guide for lay and clergy leaders.

For your church to survive in today's postmodern world, you must leave the beaten path. This will mean breaking from the herd. It will mean doing things differently from the other churches in your denomination or town.

To be practical, new programs have to connect congregation’s current resources with their unique vocation from God. We can’t write checks on money that is not in the bank. Church can’t do programs that aren’t supported by their current reality.

check it out at amazon.com

You may have noticed that problems in the church have a tendency to cascade. An idea that someone has seen working elsewhere is tried here. It falls flat. The initiator(s) is then criticized for wasting church resources. The initiator(s) comes away from this experience wounded and more hesitant about sticking their neck out in the future. The council and/or clergy leadership also wants to prevent future failures and protect church resources. So, they renew their commitment to micromanaging and the rigid enforcement of standing policies. Without realizing it, they stifle creativity. This leads to less enthusiasm in the church. Young people depart. Stewardship falls and budgets go unmet. Single point answers, such as, doing a program to bring in more youth, only create fresh places for the cascade to erupt.

For your church to survive in today's postmodern world, you must leave the beaten path. This will mean breaking from the herd. It will mean doing things differently from the other churches in your denomination or town. It will also involve traveling slower and becoming more observant of your context. You need to learn which plants have blackberries on them and which ones are poison ivy. It will mean setting aside time for discerning this congregation’s unique calling from God.     

To change images, learning to do visionary leadership in today’s church is like walking a tightrope. You step out alone on your path. You put one foot in front of another. You concentrate on what lies at your feet. What can this church do, given its particular location, people, and resources, that other churches cannot do? How can we faithfully walk the line that lies before us?

Reality Check 101 -- a new resource for doing congregational discernment -- is off to the printer. Look for it to be out May 2013!

Paul warns Timothy about the dangers of loving money: 

“If we have food and clothing we should be content with that” 

                            - I Timothy 6:8 

The ‘should’ can be read as an imperative, “Be happy with the bare necessities!” Or, Paul could be making a more syndical comment, “We should be happy but were not.” Either way, the point is that some financial resources are necessary, but our quest for more easily leads us away from our spiritual path. Jesus stated a similar thing about bread and the word of God (Matthew 4:4). This is a great spiritual truth that needs to be considered as we plan our individual lives and as we do church planning.

How hard is it to draw a line between the essentials and luxury items? Food belongs on one side, sports cars on the other. But where does a food item like steak belong or a fuel efficient car that happens also to be eye candy? Things quickly get muddled and we must conclude that Paul was wrong. Having more money is always a good thing. Going with the higher priced item can always be justified, and usually without too much thinking on our part. The thing is, luxury is not the desire of our spiritual heart. Thinking about how to get more money often leads us away from our Christian vocation. Optimizing our budget so that we can buy what we want is not the same thing as following Jesus as the Lord of all things.

Jesus says that people are incapable of serving both their financial interests and God at the same time (Matthew 6:24). Indeed, we have all found that dealing with money and remaining spiritual is difficult to do. Money can  mean so many things in our personal lives. For one person, saving money makes them feel secure. For another, spending it expresses the fact that they are successful. Still others, use money or the withholding of it as a way to exert power in their relationships. Not only do people bring differing attitudes about money into church meetings, the congregation as a whole develops a cultural habit regarding its finances. There are policies and unwritten agreements that lock churches into  a narrow way of thinking about their material assets. Thinking outside the box is hard when it comes to money.

Any plan for congregational change will encounter its greatest resistance at the point where it involves rethinking our relationship with money.

The one fact that no one can dispute is that fewer people today are interested in organized religion. Most Americans don't want to pay for some religious monstrosity or attend a Crystal Cathedral. To put it in biblical terms, they have forsaken the Temple that Herod is building in the city, and gone looking for  the burning bush. They are a generation like the one that met John the Baptist on the border of the wilderness and accepted his casual dress. They long to gather on the hillside and hear Jesus tell them about the Kingdom of God and how it is relevant to daily life. 

    Adults today, even those approaching retirement age, have become disillusioned with the religious answers that lie along the beaten path. They have noticed that their problems at work, in their family life, and in the political realm, are exacerbated by hierarchal structures and adversarial (I win, you lose) relationships. They have found that fruitful actions in each of these areas of life arise from:

• Utilizing small groups or teams
• Having horizontal relationships in a permission giving environment 
• Consulting networks and seeking ideas from people outside their assigned group 

My question this week, is your church tall or flat? Does it seek to be postmodern friendly by utilizing small groups, horizontal structures, and creative networks. When today’s adults are invited to work in the church, they want their experience to incorporate these things. This is why it is often hard to get people to fill the higher offices or to chair a committee. Traditionally defined church work doesn’t feel horizontal or egalitarian. It feels compartmentalized. It’s like being indoors on a warm spring day. Go for a hike. Leave the hierarchy behind. 

Zig Ziglar says that every sale [of a product] overcomes five basic obstacles: no need, no money, no hurry, no desire, no trust. This list deserves our attention; witnessing involves selling the church and our Lord. The five barriers translate easily into five problems that every congregation has to solve. For the average congregation trying to sell the Gospel of Jesus Christ to their unchurched neighbors, Ziglar’s list is in a rising order of importance. 

#5 Need: Even Plato was clear that an unexamined life [without philosophy] wasn’t worth living, and Buddhism, which opposes proselytizing, still holds that every sentient being needs enlightenment, but most Christians no longer believe that people need the Lord. Church leaders also have to consider what people need, as opposed to what we have always given them, in designing church programs.

#4 Money: To outsiders, churches look expensive and demanding. They fear that becoming involved will suck their time and money away. What has your church done to counter this misconception? What would Jesus did do to overcome this barrier?

#3 Urgency: Church people have forgotten how painful and confusing a secular lifestyle is. We lack a sense of urgency as we invite people to today trade in their slavery to sin for something far better. 

#2 Desire: A close second, is our failure to make our faith look desirable.  Jesus and the early church did not have this problem. They were infectious with their joy, loving in their actions, and confident with their hope of heaven.

#1 Trust: The number one reason most people do not buy the Gospel today is because they no longer trust religious institutions. Trust is earned through sincere contact, persistent communication, and being there when needed. It is lost when Christian fellowships look too much like businesses or institutions.

In his book “Leading Change,” John Kotter makes the point that nothing changes in an organization until a sufficient sense of urgency has been established. You can have the right people in leadership and a clearly communicated vision, but if a “plenty of time for us to consider this later” attitude prevails, needed change will never occur. This is the missing step in most church goal setting processes.

I believe that a healthy sense of urgency can arise from church leaders doing the math and looking at their church statistics, but it rarely does. When church statistics are favorable, they are usually lies and half truths, tailored to suit the pastor's ego. The right numbers are rarely tracked. The numbers I want to see relate to the church's witness in the community. We need to keep on top of social trends. Leaders need take a step back and get a broader perspective on the church's current situation. Each new era brings new opportunities. Social change also brings real penalties for those who fail to adapt. The trick is to name these change points without becoming defensive or falling into the blame game. We also need to spend time in prayer, discerning how the numbers relate to our congregation's God given vocation.

Consider the following example:

Ten years ago, 10^th Street Church received most of its new members from its confirmation class and transfers from other churches in its denomination. This year its three new members came from a nearby group home. Even though the Nurture Committee had to consolidate three Sunday School classes into one, they were excited by reports from the their newest small group located at the Federal Prison. The average age of a Tenth Street member continues to rise, as deaths out number baptisms. The church council has learned not to be discouraged by these statistics. They instead have a healthy sense of  urgency as they contemplate new ways to minister to the marginalized of their community. The church’s declining finances may mean that they’ll soon have to move to part-time pastoral support. They have made a commitment, however, to insist that their next minister continue to help them expand their outreach.  

When a local church experiences flat or declining income over a several year period, it is reason for concern. This doesn’t mean that the church is headed in the wrong direction, though. Holy urgency comes from vision and Spiritual Passion, not the fear generated by bad statistics.

There’s an old story about a Maine Lobsterman who was caught in a bad storm at sea when the engine on his boat suddenly quit. Anxiously he fiddled trying to restart it. All the while, he heard the waves crash upon the rocky shore. Soon, he’d be dashed to bits. He prayed, “Lord, I have never asked you for anything in the past. If you rescue me this one time, I promise not to be bothering you again in the future.” 

    The passionate thing about Spiritual Passion is that we expect a lot of things out of our relationship with God. People with low Spiritual Passion expect God to bail them out of some of their jams. People with high Spiritual Passion expect every crisis to intensify their relationship with God. They pray in good times and bad, as if they expect God to hear and do the thing that raises the spiritual stakes. It is an easy and safe thing to pray for good luck. It is a passionately risky thing to pray for God to manifest himself in real world events.

    When a young person enlists to be a soldier, he or she expects the army to provide room, board, transportation, and the appropriate weaponry for their combat duties. Expectations flow in both directions between soldiers and their commanders. The closer a unit is to the front, the more intense the level of expectation. The general expects the troops to be courageous, utilize their training, respond intelligently to a changing battlefield, and if need be, sacrifice their lives. The soldiers ask that their lives not be wasted, that their training be sufficient for their duties, and that rations will arrive when needed. Soldiers with passion, do not pray to be neglected or left aside while others fight.

    Being a disciple of Christ involves a similar exchange of expectations. Passionate disciples pray that their lives will have meaning. Whether they are laity or clergy, they pray to understand God’s calling on their lives and to be spiritually equipped for that vocation. They do not pray to be spared trouble, but for the courage to live for God in all circumstances. The spiritual formation of disciples is the primary task of every congregation. This cannot be done without teaching people to pray with expectation.

    Praying with expectation is not about expecting God to magically give us what we ask for; its about believing that God wants to build a more intense relationship with us through prayer and His response. Congregations with high Spiritual Passion see a relationship between their prayers and real world outcomes. 

About fifteen years ago, at a church I was serving, a group of forward thinking people came to the church council seeking to start a contemporary worship service on Saturday night. They needed funding for equipment and music. They knew that there was money in the Ford Endowment fund, which was designated for music and worship related expenses. Several in the church council objected, saying, “We knew the Fords. They would be dead set against this kind of thing.” I spoke up and said, “If we are going to resurrect the Fords for the sake of this meeting, couldn’t we at least resurrect them as young people?” The point was taken and the vote went in favor using the funds to support the new worship service.

I have been thinking a lot about age lately. For the last ten years I’ve had an outline for a book about mid-life that I have been meaning to write. This week it occurred to me that I might be getting too old to write about mid-life. Talk about a scary thought! Especially since when I began to think about the project, I put it off because I feared I was too young to be an authority on it. Now it hits me now that the best gauge of old age is how risk adverse we are. The Fords died old, or so I was told, and were known to be sufficiently cautious to be dead.

It doesn’t seem to make much sense that when we are young we try many foolish and risky things. Yet when we get down to the point were we have only a few years to put at risk, we become overly cautious. Churches are the same way. When they are new church starts, they experiment a lot. They shift worship times around and hold study groups to discuss relevant (controversial) social issues. As congregations age, they get cautious. Suddenly, they have long time members that they don’t want to offend. Some are down to a hand full of people in worship. They could easily meet each week in a home or in the local restaurant. Yet, the thought of having something happen to their ark of a church building fills them with dread. What if they were to risk it all in one new mission or program? What if they were to offer the rooms that they don’t need to another nonprofit? 

What is it about old age and creeping cautiousness that seem so inevitable?  Yet, everyday we encounter counter examples. From the story of Abraham and Sarah in the Bible to Neil Clark Warren who founded the internet dating service, E-harmony, when he was 66 years old. Occasionally, I even see something in the church that makes me think that risk aversion isn’t inevitable. Usually it’s something small. But, when it happens, we should note it. Accentuate the positive, and remain vigilant against the faint of heart.

If you’re not busy being born, you’re busy dying.
- Bob Dylan 

Any local church whose leaders and congregational culture is seeking first, to cater to its current members, and second, to preserve its assets, is already digging its own grave. These two priorities are the hall marks of organizations that are preparing to die. It doesn’t matter if the organization is a political party, a social club like the Elks, a trade union, or a local church. Once the governing board reduces their principle interests to membership happy, maintaining physical assets like buildings, and protecting the organization’s savings account, the handwriting is on the wall. From time to time, pastors need to find gentle ways to remind their church council that the same rules that govern other organizations also apply to the church. 

    Consider two book clubs:
In the first, the people who attend the book club, at the end of each meeting, vote as to which book they shall read and discuss at their next gathering. In this club, new members tend to be people who have been personally invited by a friend who is a member. From time to time there may be a straggler who drops in because they have an interest in this month’s book, but when the topic for the next month is discussed they are not likely to feel included and will soon drop out if the next book doesn’t interest them. To make matters worse, no one takes responsibility for contacting infrequent attenders to inform them of the next month’s selection. Many churches are like this. They have exhausted their new member pool, no one is having children and the members canvased all of their unchurched friends. They wait to die by attrition.

In the same town there may be another book club. This club selects its books from the New York Times best seller list and frequently advertises its program choice at the local library. They also choose discussion leaders who are skillful at including the timid newcomers. They email everyone the list of future selections and provide links and reviews for those who miss the program but still want to do the reading. Unlike the dying club above, this book club welcomes those who use e-format book readers. From time to time, this club explores the option of birthing another club, perhaps in a different location or with a different target audience. This club is busy being born, whereas the other one is busy dying.

Which book club is more like your church?