The Sheila Moment.

                  A small church I know cherishes a particular legend about how they began to turn around.  The church had been struggling and hemorrhaging members for several years.  They had attempted many of the usual conventional fixes, to no avail.  With little money left, and membership diving under 30, the future looked bleak.  The session went on a retreat to sort things out.  Part of the agenda for the retreat was to decide whether the church should close.

                  After a thorough and rather depressing review of the declining numbers in every category, an elder named Sheila broke the gloomy silence.  “I’m just going to call it,” she said.  “We’re done.  We are never going to be the conventional church we once were.  What if we just decided to be a small group of people following Jesus?”

                  I call that “the Sheila moment.”  It is a crossroads of promise most distressed and marginal churches never get to.  The majority of churches, if they ever do come to the realization that they are not going to be the institution they once were, proceed forthwith to a decision to close.  They don’t have any vision of what it means to be a church other than the memory of their institutional past.

                  In other words, marginal congregations have to realize that they are never going to be a “church” again, if by “church” we mean the conventional, pretty building full of young, ethnically homogeneous, well-dressed, well-behaved, intact families, with-a-full-time-pastor (with a wife and children), and a bustling Sunday School and lots of programs, where they worship on Sunday mornings for exactly one hour, sing traditional hymns, and hear uplifting sermons that never mention politics or economics.  And too many churches would rather not be anything if they can’t live up to that fantasy/memory.

                  It is the rare church that, when they hit the wall of viability, punch through it to a recognition of what a church really is in the first place: a small group of people following Jesus.  That vision is foreign to many Modern Americans on every level.                 

                  First, we have a problem with anything “small.”  It grates against our cultural prejudice that equates big with successful.

                  Second, we are suspicious of the word “group,” which inherently questions our individualistic bias.  Yet the movement Jesus begins is inherently communal and collective.

                  Thirdly, the idea that we are “followers” militates against our self-perception as independent, self-sufficient leaders. 

                  Finally, even “Jesus” can be a problem.  Too many Christians are ignorant of the Jesus who appears in the New Testament.  Instead, they seem to maintain a fantasy “Jesus” who is mainly a cipher for a particularly disturbed subset American culture.  That “Jesus” is a white, flag-waving, gun-owning, gay-hating, Capitalist.

                  Even if that overstates the case a bit, few churches think of themselves as small groups of Jesus followers.  Few can comprehend that it is possible to be a small group of Jesus-followers without the expensive and weighty institutional superstructure of buildings, clergy, budgets, membership, denominations, etc.  Few understand that this is precisely the kind of movement Jesus initiates.    

                  But I contend that churches have to do just this.  They have to clean out the centuries of clutter, grime, dust, and habits that have accrued to the church, and to the minds of individual disciples.  They have to get down to the bottom, to the essence of the church, which is simply… a small group of people following Jesus.

                  And it is the churches that are hitting the wall of viability that may be most likely to have this realization.  “Successful” churches have no incentive to change.  But it is our “failing” churches, the churches that have nothing to lose, that have amazing potential for actually becoming vibrant gatherings of Jesus-followers.  Because “failing” churches are the ones God cares enough about to bless with a vision of the simple, beautiful truth of the church.  It is these churches God visits and restores to integrity.

                  When I was a kid my parents were cleaning out our house.  Among the things chosen for the trash-heap was a small bookshelf.  It had been painted numerous times.  It was dirty.  The veneer was dried-out and cracked.  And it wobbled.  So my dad placed it at the curb in a pile of other junk for the trash collector to pick up.  The truck went by; the pile disappeared; we completely forgot about the bookshelf.  Until several months later, when our neighbor across the street showed up at the front door, offering us what appeared to be a beautiful new little bookshelf.  It was made of polished maple that glowed a warm brown.  It was sturdy and strong.  My dad recognized it immediately as the piece we had discarded.  He was flabbergasted!  Not just that the piece was salvageable, but at what the neighbor had done.  He rescued it from the trash.  He took it to his basement where he stripped off the layers of old paint, sanded varnished the wood, and reconnected the pieces with new, brass hardware.  Somehow he was able to recognize that, beneath the failed and rejected piece of furniture, was good, solid wood.

                  Then, amazingly, he returned it to us!  He refused to take money for his work!  He just smiled and went back across the street.

                  One of Jesus’ favorite Scripture passages is from Psalm 118.  “The stone rejected by the builders has become the chief cornerstone.”  It is the failing, rejected, marginalized, “unviable,” dying, even “ghost” churches that have the most potential.  But they have the vision and courage to get to a “Sheila moment.”  They have to let go of any expectation or desire to be big or successful by secular standards.  They have to not even want to be important, big, a leader, substantial, popular, influential, or wealthy.  They have to positively flee from even the possibility of becoming any of these things.  They have to let go of all that, and simply listen to Jesus and follow him.

                  I know, “let go” sounds pretty easy.  In reality it is often a matter of having all that old paint and grime soaked, burned, scraped, and sanded off, which is a very painful process.  The point is to get down to the heart of the matter: the pure and strong wood – maple, oak, mahogany, pine, walnut – that we are.  It is to gather around the Word in the power of the Spirit, to learn, to pray, and to share the Body and Blood – the life – of the living God.

+++++++

                         

                     

                    

                                    

Lives Touched.

            How do we evaluate and assess a church?  This is an increasingly urgent question in our time of decline, when many churches are falling into unviability and facing closure.  How do we determine whether a church’s mission is effective and faithful, and hence worth supporting? 

            According to the model we are now thankfully abandoning, churches were evaluated in terms of what some derisively call the “3-B’s”: butts, bucks, and bricks (membership/attendance, money, and buildings).  We have painfully discovered that this is a woefully inadequate and inaccurate set of standards by which to assess a church.  Churches can register high numbers in all three of these areas and still not be doing effective or faithful mission.  At the same time, churches can register quite low on these scales, and yet communicate the good news to people quite effectively.

            We now accept that the 3-B’s are simply imported from the prevailing economic order.  They only tell us how successful a church is in terms of an ideology that holds growth and economic sustainability as primary values.  But these metrics have nothing whatever to do with the mission of the church, which is based on the teaching of Jesus and the New Testament.

            This mission, as variously articulated in the New Testament, always has to do with touching people in some way with the good news of God’s love revealed in Jesus Christ.  I suggest that a more accurate and instructive way of assessing a church’s missional effectiveness is by looking at the “lives touched” by its ministry, both quantitatively and qualitatively.  That is, how are individuals being touched by the grace of God in Jesus Christ by the power of the Holy Spirit, in and through the work of a particular gathering of disciples?

            Once we start thinking in these terms, it becomes apparent that there are different ways and degrees to which people are touched by the good news.  Some are more intense, personal, and intentional than others.  Certainly a person who attends worship regularly is impacted far more strongly by the message of the good news than someone who drives by the church and merely reads the message board.   Although certainly both are “touched” by that church’s mission.

            So I suggest four levels of intensity in the way a church touches people with the good news of Jesus Christ.

1.    Primary.  These are people who participate regularly and consistently in the worship and other ministries of the congregation.  

·      --  They support the church with their time, talents, and money. 

·      --  They serve on church boards and hold offices. 

·      --  They engage in spiritual practices.

·      --  They participate in educational opportunities.

·      --  They may be equipped to teach, lead worship, pray publicly, give pastoral care, and even preach. 

·      --  They understand themselves to have a personal calling from God to do specific mission in the community.

·      --  They are often elected to positions of leadership. 

      2.    Secondary.  These are people who attend and participate in the mission of a particular church more sporadically and situationally.  

        --  They attend worship, but infrequently and irregularly. 

·      --  They may come to some church programs like educational classes, mission and service efforts, and enroll their children in church school/confirmation.

·      --  They may contribute financially, though usually at a lower level.

·      --  They may be family-members of others who participate in the church.

       3.  Indirect.  These are people who are touched by the church’s mission but would not       consider themselves to be a part of the church.

     --  They participate in activities hosted in the church’s building (eg. AA, a daily nursery school, a counseling service).

     --   They may lead or benefit from mission activities funded by the church, whether in the area of social services or evangelism.

     --  They may choose to receive the church’s outreach in social media (Facebook friends and likers, Twitter followers, etc.)

     --  They may be members of other groups served or supported (eg. people visited in nursing homes, hospitals, prisons, or members of other faith communities).

     --  They may attend church events for the public (eg. concerts, art exhibits, lectures).

     --  They may have attended a wedding or a funeral in the church, or performed by the pastor.

     --  They may participate in another congregation with which the church is denominationally or otherwise affiliated.

      4.      Incidental.  These are people who are touched by the mission of the church in very       small ways. 

·      --  They read the sign board as they drive by. 

·      --  They might see the church’s name in newspapers, receive mass mailings, have friends or acquaintances in one of the other 3 categories, etc.

·      --  They may simply be neighbors of the church or the pastor.

·      --  They have been made aware that the church is there, and not much more than that… but they do have that connection.

            It seems to me that these would be more instructive – and yet still quantitative – categories for measuring the effectiveness of a church’s mission in terms of lives touched.  The model clearly needs more development.  Stay tuned. 

            

Ghost Churches.

            A friend of mine once told me his theory about ghosts.  He suggested that ghosts are people who died, but don’t know they are dead.  (I seem to recall something like this hypothesis articulated in the movies, Poltergeist, and especially The Sixth Sense.)

            Setting aside the questionable metaphysics, it seems to me that it describes a lot of churches.  They’re dead but don’t know it.  They’re able to go through the motions of a kind of half-life, only barely and incidentally visible to their wider communities.

            Such churches are recognizable.  They haven’t changed very much over the years since they stopped relating to their actual world.  Notice the pictures on the walls.  Notice the hymnals.  Notice what translation of the Bible they tend to use.  Notice the architecture and the furnishings.  Notice the office and audio technology.  Notice the books in the library.  Notice the age of the worshipers.  If we find many of these indications that the place is caught in some prior decade, then we may be wandering through a ghost church.

            Ghost churches may be frozen in any decade, from the 1940’s (still remembering “the boys” serving in the Pacific and Europe), to the 1950’s (the mainline churches’ perceived “golden age” when the church was wealthy, popular, and influential), to the more recent decades of the Great Decline (where we see on the walls fading posters from old evangelism and stewardship campaigns).  Even if there are conspicuous displays of pictures from mission trips and fellowship events… from 3 or more years ago, we may be dealing with a ghost church.

            Ghost churches can be wedded to the organ, they can feature liturgies and vestments more appropriate to another time, or they are still going through the motions of ecclesial life (think Strawberry Festival and Spaghetti Supper) that haven’t been effective or meaningful to anyone in the wider world for many years.  Ghost churches also feature a lot of clutter and just plain trash lying around, probably because the people are not conscious of what it looks like, and certainly not seeing it from the perspective of a visitor.

            I know this sounds very critical and judgmental.  But my heart goes out to many of these ghost churches.  Often congregations descend into this state because of various kinds of trauma.  I mean, there is the shock of the cataclysmic changes going on in the world and neighborhood around them.  These can be factors like increased traffic, demolition of neighborhoods for highways, deteriorating air quality, a plague of ugly strip-malls, and other indications of a steep drop in the quality of life.  Then there are the effects of the 2008 recession, from which many churches are still reeling.  Or there could have been a debilitating crisis – perhaps a clergy sexual misconduct case, or an incident of financial malfeasance – and the traumatized congregation just got stuck, unable to process and move past it.

            A ghost church has to be confronted with the evidence of its death.  This is difficult because the congregation has constructed an elaborate scaffolding of rationalizations, explanations, and justifications for their condition.   They do not want to hear that they are dead.  Somehow someone has to hold up a mirror to demonstrate that they do not have a reflection.  The world only sees them partially if at all.  They are feeding on memories more than hopes.  They have no energy to change.  They do not grow.

            Facing this reality, a church may choose with dignity and grace to close the doors.  There is no shame in this.  Maybe something new can be seeded with its remaining resources.  It is better to cash it in, than to hold on to the dishonest, disoriented shadow existence of a ghost church.  Most ghost churches don’t even get to this point.  But I suspect that most churches that do finally face their own death choose this path.

            Yet we are people of resurrection.  The apostle Paul talks about how much it frees a person to have already in some sense died.  Anyone coming back from death in this way is certainly not going to be frightened or controlled by the fear of death.  For them, death is in the past and the whole future opens up.  The early church knew this, and instituted Holy Baptism as a sign of resurrection.  Jesus himself seems to have had an experience at his own baptism that was powerful enough to drive him out to the desert to process it.  Baptism is a ceremonial dying and rising, by which death is symbolically placed in a person’s past and the basis of their life relocated to God’s future, which Jesus reveals as resurrection.

            So, upon facing, recognizing, and admitting its own death, a ghost church may rise up with new life in this world, and accept God’s call and mission with energy and freedom.  Ghost churches, then, have to decide to take up that new life with enthusiasm and energy.  New life is not like the old life.  What emerges from this choice will look and act very different from the now former ghost church.  It will be as different from what went on before as an oak tree is from an acorn or a butterfly is from a caterpillar.  It is for all intents and purposes a new gathering of disciples.

            Such a metamorphosis may be demonstrated in such things as a new name, a new worship style and place, a new sense and statement of mission, new leadership, and a new identity.  That is, it will have a new story that lifts up and lives in and for the future.  Only in this way does a gathering of Jesus-followers become visible and real in the world.

+++++++