It's past midnight on Sunday night / Monday morning, and I'm in a weird overtired place. Last night I slept fitfully, but slept, for about six hours. I woke up at 6 A.M. and was at church by 7. Normally I don't get up that early on Sunday mornings anymore (though I did for the first few years of my ministry). But today was a special day--Annual Vestry!
Annual Vestry is a meeting of the church membership that receives various reports and votes on various motions. They also elect officers (and receive the appointment of others). We review financial statements and approve a budget and do all that kind of stuff.
Normally as part of Vestry the Rector (me) gives a report on the state of the parish. Like many other priests, however, I give my address to the parish during the Sunday morning service so as to speak to those who won't stick around for the actual Vestry meeting. During my "Charge to Vestry" I spoke about some of the current situation of the church and directions forward. I also outlined what I see as some particular strengths and challenges of the church.
One thing that I stressed in particular is the need for us to shift some focus away achieving excellence on Sunday morning and towards starting up Fresh Expressions of church. This is possible, in part, because of the tremendous amount of work we've put into tweaking Sunday mornings to get them humming along. Sunday mornings at Messiah are great, and that might be sufficient to attract a few families a year (as it did in 2008), but real growth is only going to come with new, missional ministry.
As some have pointed out, supporting mission is like supporting motherhood and apple pie--no one is going to speak against it. But actually the implications are far trickier. For one thing, most of us church professionals immediately want to start with worship. We want to design some new service or do some clever liturgy in an existing one. Learning more about more about church growth and evangelism, however, I become convinced that this strategy of attractional church is fundamentally flawed. No amount of advertising or promotion is likely to make a big difference for a place like COTM. We haven't seen much impact from any of the hundreds of dollars spent last year, and I doubt we'll see much in 2009, either. Even if we do, the numbers are bound to be small.
I'm not saying we abandon doing or promoting Sunday mornings. I'm a big believer in the Back to Church Sunday initiative, for example (in fact, I'm the Area Coordinator on behalf of Bishop Yu for that particular initiative)--but it's simply not enough. The roadside is littered with Pastoral-sized churches that tried and failed to lure people to join our way of doing things. More is needed.
Once in becomes clear that attractional-church isn't likely to succeed, the next place many churches go is programme. The idea here is that you can programme your church into growth. Churches create and run all kinds of fantastic programmes designed to either attract interest or develop new Christians. Some of these, like Alpha, can be quite successful. The problem is that the programmatic approach to church growth tends to be resource intensive. Once a church drops below a certain threshold of size, it fails to have the critical mass necessary to execute programme to the point so as to cause new growth. There is a reason "Programme-sized" Churches are called "Programme-Sized"--being a "Pastoral-Sized" place guess where the impetus for growth lies?
Indeed, my predecessor at COTM discovered precisely this. He has written and spoken about how when churches dissipate below a certain critical mass, growth becomes elusive. I would go a step further and say that's only the case if we are working within the the framework of inherited-church and it's emphasis on programme. No doubt there are many churches that are growing quite well with evangelism programmes--but we simply don't have the resources to sustain that at COTM. We don't have enough volunteers and we don't have enough staff.
So if the attractional model with it's emphasis on superior liturgy and advertising is insufficient and the programme approach is untenable because we lack critical mass, what's left? I would argue, strongly, that we need to develop new expressions of church that will appeal to an entirely new group of people. This is not a new idea, but it is finding a resurgence.
The success of something like The Meeting House is entirely due to the fact that they let mission drive ministry. They decided to pursue mission to people for whom Sunday Morning in a traditional church is no good and let that drive everything else. The result has been phenomenal growth. Now I have some critiques of the Meeting House. Note, for example, that only about 50% of the people that come on Sundays actually belong to the house-church groups where the real work of pastoral care and discipleship are supposed to happen. But the take away point is that if you align your ministry with a carefully-discerned mission you are likely to tap into a work the Holy Spirit is already doing.
The hard part is letting go of stuff to free up the resources to do mission-based ministry. I hesitate to even mention some the things I think we could axe in an effort to move forward in ministry. I think that before long I'm going to have to make some even bolder decisions for the good of my community that are likely to make a few people confused or even unhappy. But I really don't see how I can get COTM back into a thriving place where people's lives are changed without it. We are well beyond a time when simply doing Sunday morning well is enough!
I'm haunted by the fact that virtually every priest I talked to has told me that turning around COTM is going to take something like five to seven years. Yet we are in a better place to make that change than many parishes. My people are fearless! They really are. I love it. They really do understand that what we do is about following Jesus--how cool is that? So this transition is totally possible, but it requires a lot of change from both the congregation and from me. Like most priests, I was trained to maintain a church, not transform it!
Anyway, I'm still pulsing with energy from the Vestry Meeting (as you can tell). I'm both exhausted and fidgety. I'm thinking about all the things I should have said or explained more elegantly. I'm fretting over a few people that I meant to thank and didn't (so many to acknowledge). I'm anxious about the $40k deficit for the '09 budget. I'm thinking about some of the people in the parish that I really need to spend some time with. Having a been a good enough pastor to them? Probably not. And yet I'm desperately trying!
Did Jesus have these moments? Of course he did. Remember when he went back to his hometown and he couldn't even heal anyone? How depressing that must have been! There is a reason that he is often taking time by myself to go up mountain tops and pray either alone or with a few key disciples. Me, I'm planning to go to Holy Cross at the end of March. Pray for me until then!
-t
1 comment:
Useful.
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