By Robin G. Jordan
3. Identify your congregations’ strengths and build on those strengths.
Every congregation has strengths as well as weaknesses. One way to identify its strengths is to ask these questions, “What does this congregation have going for it?” “What does it do well?” “What resources are available to it?” “Who is willing to help the congregation and how?” Congregations are often surprised to discover that they have more strengths than they realized. Identifying a congregation’s strengths may give it a boost in confidence.
The next step is to brainstorm how a congregation’s strengths might be used to the best advantage. Put all the ideas on the table and list the pros and cons for each idea. Then weigh each argument for and against an idea. Determine whether each argument has substance. Be on the lookout for arguments that are based upon false beliefs or premises. Congregation will often create obstacles for themselves where no real obstacles exist. Be leery of a “we’ve never done that before” attitude.
Then rank the ideas by doability and select the top five ideas. Develop an action plan for implementing each idea, outlining the steps that will be taken and who will take them. In the action plan describe the expected outcome and establish a realistic time frame for the completion of each step and a review date for evaluating the progress of the action plan.
This process can be repeated over and over again. The key is to not try to implement too many ideas at once and to not establish unrealistic timeframes.
4. Think out of the box.
I cannot overemphasize the importance of creative thinking that is unhampered by conventional ideas of “church.” How these ideas can hinder the Great Commission is one of the reasons Jeff Christopherson’s article, “Five Churches that Shouldn’t Reproduce” struck a chord with me. Christopherson’s description of “the self-indulgent church—those which values ecclesial praxis over missional engagement”—points to the danger of putting ecclesial preferences first and allowing such preferences to shape our thinking.
One is likely to find a lot of in-the-box thinking in new churches whose core group or nucleus was “hived off” from an existing church or was a breakaway group that split off an existing church. These groups will bring pre-conceived ideas of how a church should do things with them—how the church should worship, what music the church should use in its worship gatherings, what the pastor and other ministers should wear at such gatherings, what ministries that the church should start, and the like.
In-the-box thinking can also be a problem when a new church attracts individuals who have been strongly influenced by traditional ideas of “doing church” or who want to replicate in the new church a church from their past. In the case of new Anglican and Episcopal churches one is likely to hear the mantra, “But this is the way the Anglican Church (or Episcopal Church) has always done things.”
If one is to believe these individuals, “tradition”—their interpretation of a particular tradition or perhaps more accurately their opinions presented as a binding tradition—trumps everything.
They do not like to hear that different churches do things different ways and what they view as “the” traditional way of doing things is just one of a number of ways of doing them. In determining how a church will do things, there are far more important considerations than a particular set of customs and practices to which they subscribe.
For example, when we launched St. Michael’s Episcopal Church, Mandeville, Louisiana as a satellite congregation of Christ Episcopal Church, Covington, we adopted a different approach to preparing the communion table for our worship gatherings. We invited families—parents and children—to take turns setting up the table for these gatherings. As well as preparing the communion table, this plan accomplished several other purposes. It helped to integrate families into the life, worship, and ministry of the new congregation. It encouraged a sense of belonging. In helping their parents, the older children made a contribution. They also learned a practical skill—how to set up the communion table before a worship gathering and to clean and store the communion vessels after the gathering. The plan worked quite well.
My oldest niece and I were one of the families on the roster. My niece was also a server.
We also had a backup plan. In the event a family was unable to prepare the table due to an unforeseen emergency, the worship coordinator or another member of the worship committee filled in for the family.
However, as the congregation grew and attracted more Episcopalians, one group within the congregation began to lobby the vicar to form an Altar Guild. This, the members of the group argued, was the way things had always been done in the Episcopal Church. They kept up the pressure on the vicar until he capitulated.
Anyone who is familiar with the history of the Anglican Church knows that Altar Guilds were a nineteenth century development, an offshoot of the Ritualist movement. In the preceding three centuries the Parish Clerk prepared the communion table for communion services and cleaned and stored the communion vessels after the service.
As frequently happens with Altar Guilds, the guild quickly became a “holy huddle.” It served none of the purposes that the family sacristan plan had served other than preparing the communion table before the service and cleaning and storing the communion vessels after the service.
During the early days of St. Michael’s we used real bread in the form of whole wheat pita loaves for communion. The use of real bread was particularly popular with the new families who had moved to the area and who did not have an Episcopal Church background. These families formed one of our principal ministry target groups. Its use was also popular with a number of new families who had moved to the area and who did have an Episcopal Church background. The new vicar had no objection to the practice and continued it after his arrival.
The same group that had agitated for the Altar Guild began to push for the use of wafers. The new vicar introduced the use of large whole wheat wafers that could be broken into several pieces, retaining the use of whole wheat pita loaves for feast days and church festivals.
By his account he preferred the use of real bread that could be broken into pieces and distributed to the communicants. However, he believed that whether the church used real bread was not such a vital issue that he was willing to become embroiled in a fight over it. He was willing to compromise with the women of the newly-formed Altar Guild to some extent. At the same time he did not want to alienate those members of the congregation who preferred real bread.
Among the factors that accounted for St. Michael’s growth was not a rigid adherence to traditional notions of “church” but an openness to innovative ideas and a willingness to try them. Where in-the-box thinking dominated, it put reaching and engaging the unchurched second if it gave any consideration to the central purpose of a new church at all. Typically its primary focus was satisfying the preferences of a particular group in the congregation.
Sometimes the greatest challenge a new church faces is its congregation. This realization is why I believe that most Canadian Anglicans, Continuing Anglicans, Episcopalians, former Canadian Anglicans, and former Episcopalians are not good candidates for pioneering new churches and otherwise reaching and engaging the unchurched. They are apt to lack flexibility and imagination. They are too wedded to particular way of doing things and not open to new ideas and new approaches. They can end up sabotaging a new church’s efforts to reach and engage the unchurched because they are not comfortable with the diversity that newcomers bring with them—race, ethnicity, culture, social-economic group, musical tastes, and the like.
A conservation that I had with a friend last night, however, suggests this problem is not particular to North American Anglicans. She has been visiting a local United Presbyterian church. In this particular season of her life she appears to be moving in a more progressive direction. A contributing factor is the attitudes of more conservative churches in the area toward women in ordained ministry and toward the LBGTQ community, but in particular toward a much loved uncle who was gay and died from HIV/AIDS. She comes from a fundamentalist Baptist background.
She was telling me about how the church that she has been visiting has a praise and worship time before the service. Older members of the congregation repeatedly interrupt the praise and worship time with their loud conversations. They are apparently accustomed to socializing before the service and while they can carry on their conversations outside the sanctuary, they hold the conversations in the sanctuary during the praise and worship time.
The praise and worship time has been attracting young people to the church but one couple told my friend that they have decided to go elsewhere. Among the reasons that they gave for leaving was that the older members of the congregation held all the positions of leadership in the church, they also dominated the church’s ministries, and they interrupted the praise and worship time.
My friend went on to say that older members of the congregation often complain that the church has so few young people but at the same time they are doing very little to incorporate young people in the life, worship, and ministry of the church. They say that they want more young people but their actions contradict their words. She thought that they ought to stop complaining about the lack of young people and admit that they really did not want young people in the congregation in the first place.
She was also surprised how conservative the congregation was in the area of worship, considering its stance on women and the LBGTQ community. Being progressive in these two areas, she expected it to be more progressive in the area of worship.
I told her that what she was observing is not an unusual phenomenon in progressive churches. When it comes to worship, they are typically conservative. Churches that are progressive in all three areas are a rarity.
Being open to doing things differently is critical on the North American mission field. Many traditional practices do not translate well to non-traditional settings.
One of the churches in the diocese donated a number of used hassocks to St. Michael’s after we moved into our multipurpose building. Since the large room that we used for worship gatherings also served a number of other uses, we purchased stacking chairs for seating. These chairs also enabled us to make more flexible use of that space for our worship gatherings. The other church heard that we did not have kneelers and thought that we could use the hassocks in place of kneelers. We quickly discovered that members of the congregation had difficulty in lowering themselves onto the hassocks. They also slid off the hassocks and landed painfully on their knees. We stored the hassocks in the attic along with the other useless items that well-meaning churches had donated to us.
Most of the congregation was accustomed to sitting with bowed heads at the confession of sin and the absolution. The posture that we assume for the penitential section of the service really does not matter. What matters most is the members of the congregation bend the knee of their hearts.
The rector who had been St. Michael’s longtime vicar would eventually install pews and kneelers in the large room and limit its use to worship gatherings. When I last visited St. Michael’s this room resembled the worship area of a Roman Catholic parish church. St. Michael’s had experienced a church split and the charismatic-evangelical portion of the congregation—over a third of its member households and its most able leaders—had left and he was trying to woo Anglo-Catholic and progressive Episcopalians to replace those who left.
Many of those who left had been involved in the pioneering of St. Michael’s during its first decade and a half. A number of them had served on its launch team. I do not know what happened but St. Michael’s would also experience an exodus of progressive Episcopalians during the period between the church split and the events of 2003. Earlier the rector had alienated some members by clear-cutting the church property and selling the harvested trees for pulpwood.
Also see:
Church Pioneering in the Piney Woods
Photo Credit: Christ Our Light Anglican Church, Big Rock IL/Greenhouse Movement
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