Reality Check 101: New Paths for a Changing Church

CHAPTER ONE

The Basics

Look for the bare necessities

The simple bare necessities

Forget about your worries and your strife

I mean the bare necessities…

If you act like that bee acts, uh uh

You're working too hard!

— Disney’s The Jungle Book  Lyrics by Phil Harris

and Bruce Reitherman

3 Questions

Reality Check begins with three basic questions

-- each with a specific application:

1) What is the real nature of the Church?

+ Application +

How should we design our life together as a congregation so that we become what Christ has in mind?

2) Where is society taking us?

+ Application +

How is your church changing to remain relevant to the people of this neighborhood?

3) How can we do God’s will?

+ Application+

What specific vocation does God have for your church?

To be valid, any church planning session has to discern new answers to these three questions.

Too often we confuse long range planning with institutional maintenance. The latter has often been described as rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic. To continue the metaphor, effective long range planning must involve: 1)Understanding the nature of our vessel and its task, 2)Understanding where we  are going and the hazards of the sea, and 3)Understanding the sacredness of our vocation, especially as it relates to the lives of our passengers. The Titanic tragedy serves a lesson, when you plan a voyage it pays to look beyond your current popularity, technical improvements, and the things that worked in the past. When church leaders set aside time to plan, they need to return to the fundamentals.

In this postmodern era, every congregation is traveling in dangerous waters. As we plan for the future, we need to do a serious reality check. Are we sure that we understand the nature of this thing that we call church? Have we paid sufficient attention to what is happening outside our church walls? Have we lost touch with the sacredness of our task or vocation? Do we, as leadership, have a group process for checking in with the Holy Spirit to see if there are any updates on our congregation’s position in the grander scheme of God’s kingdom?

Possibly it is assumed that questions like these are so basic that everyone already knows the answers. But, do you? There may be doctrinal statements about the nature of the Church in your denominational records, but are they relevant to your particular congregation? The identity of your church, where  she is going, and how she is called to serve her God, are inherently local questions. Church planning, whether you call it goal setting, visioning, or the annual leadership retreat, involves finding new, localized, and relevant answers to a small number of fundamental questions.

Pick any of the the above three questions and put it into your own words so that it includes your congregation’s name or town. Then go into a children’s Sunday school class and listen to what they think. A popular TV show, today, asks if you are smarter than a fifth grader. The good news is that you don’t need to be that smart to do a Reality Check. You do have to be willing to go back to the basics. Often fifth graders, confirmation classes, college fellowship groups, and gatherings for those new to the congregation, are rich deposits of people gifted with insight into the basics. If any of the these groups exist in your church, mine them for wisdom.

Your mission during the Reality Check process will be to find the place where your congregation, the Kingdom of God, and the outside world, intersect. This is where you will find your congregation’s soul.

Yes, I believe that congregations have souls. Most church workers have lost the child-like vision that is needed to see this. A congregation’s soul is like the grain in a piece of wood. A skilled carpenter will always notes the direction of the grain before making a cut. A master craftsman chooses among various pieces of wood in order find the ones whose grain will align in the finished piece. In the same way, the Holy Spirit understands the congregation’s history and how the spiritual gifts of the current leadership equip the church for particular service. Church leaders, as they gather in small groups for prayer, study, and spiritual discernment, can listen in on the deep conversation between the congregation’s soul and the God’s spirit (see Romans 8:26-27).

Most churches today are in some way, broken. Some are hurting from divisions in their membership relating to hot-button issues, like, gun control, the ordination of homosexuals, or local politics. Answering the three fundamental questions above could help your congregation respond with more integrity to current events. Many churches are still fighting over contemporary worship or if they want to have a projection screen in the sanctuary. It seems incredible that we can have a vote on these things without first finding some consensus about the real nature of Church. Nearly every church, today, is having a hard time making ends meet. It is short sighted, to blame random internal factors, such as the loss of certain members or the rising cost of utilities, and not consider the broader question of where society is taking the church. How can we do God’s Will? should be the driving concern of every church meeting, yet the agenda only asks How can we pay our bills?

✓If you learn nothing else from Reality Check 101, learn how to ask the fundamental questions. Discuss at least one of these questions every time you meet as a church council. Pray. Read one of the questions and its application.Allow five minutes for silent reflection. Spend another ten minutes in open discussion (you may set a timer if needed). Then ask someone else at the table to offer a second prayer. After a few months, ask yourself if these questions are helping you to understand the fundamentals. If so, add more time to this portion of your regular meetings.

Coach Vince Lombardi used to begin his training sessions by holding up a football and saying, Gentlemen, this is a football. He wasn’t just being  cute. His winning philosophy was that every team member had to be clear on the fundamentals. Too often, church meetings focus on agenda and problems rather than the basics of faith and life. Too often, the church doesn’t know how to be  Church.

✓You, the reader of this book, should make a prayer commitment to reflect upon these three questions every week. You may want to pick a specific time, like Sunday evening before you go to bed. Reflect on the application for each question. From what you experienced this week, is the congregation going forward or backward in this area? Write your thoughts in a journal. Alternately, you could rotate through the three questions during your morning devotions. Each day, spend ten minutes reflecting on one of the a questions and its application. Make this a sacred commitment for a season (Lent, Summer, Football season, etc.).

To be practical, new programs have to connect a congregation’s current resources with their unique vocation from God. We can’t write checks on money that is not in the bank. Churches dare not do programs that aren’t supported by their current reality. That current reality consists of physical assets, such as, church location, buildings, and financial resources. It also involves important intangibles, such as, the integrity of its paid staff, the spiritual passion of its laity, the training of its volunteers, and its reputation in the community. Many of these things are the stuff of our meetings. Our conversations rotate from topic to topic as we seek to preserve or modify our assets. We often talk about making improvements, but rarely talk about how each resource relates to the congregation’s vocation. Reality Check’s question, How can we do God’s will? encourages you to do more than just survive.

The above paragraph concerns the things we can change and discerning how to align our efforts with God’s will. External forces, however, also play a part in shaping your church’s current reality. Like the famous AA prayer, Reality Check’s question, Where is society taking us? encourages you to accept the things you cannot change. The fact that a smaller percentage of Americans participate in church today than in 1970, profoundly influences your church, even if you are one of the lucky few that are currently growing. (See: About the 1 ½ percent in Additional Material)

Church leaders need to consider external factors as they look at new programs and evaluate existing ones. When fewer people show up for an event, does that mean that the content of the event was a) advertised in the wrong way, b) not a quality event, or that c) the program itself has become irrelevant?

What about other alternatives?

1.Some things are worth doing even if they impact only a few people.

2.Other programs have had their time and now need to be laid to rest.

3.Still other things are ahead of their time and need to be kept in play until they catch on.

What letter (a,b, c) or number (1, 2, 3) best describes the top program item on this past month’s agenda? If you don’t know, what follow up questions should you be asking? Do any of these questions lead you back to the fundamental questions at the beginning of this chapter?

Lay people often have a better intuitive grasp of where society is taking the church than their clergy leaders. On a snowy Sunday, they note that their car is the only one making tracks on their street. They may have already have discovered why some of their neighbors don’t go to church. A rule of thumb is; each year a clergy or staff person spends in full-time employment for the church, halves the amount of concern they have for the unchurched. A similar rule is, the   more years a lay person has spent on the church council, the more powerless they feel about the problem of declining church attendance. Each Sunday, as we find ourselves a faithful minority in an increasingly secular society, we all move a little bit further away from awareness. We lose some more of our curious, open, and reflective attitude. We become defensive, narrow-minded, and institution-bound in our thinking.

How God will judge our society is a theological question, best left to academics and tele-evangelists. How we will continue to meet the needs of our neighbors and invite new people into our fellowship, however, is our problem. It has always been society’s job to take us someplace. We can’t blame the world for being the world. We can, however, consider the external forces impacting our church work. Once we prayerfully understand them, we can utilize them to improve our ministry.

In what ways is congregational life in post-Christian America similar to the early days of the church as a misunderstood minority? Those of us over fifty can remember a time when social pressure literally swept people into church. Today the church needs to constantly push itself out into the community to keep from becoming a historical oddity. As we pray about the external realities impacting the church, how do we resist the urge to retreat? A plan not only has to be doable, it also has to be the right thing to do at this time. Good ideas and good programs are a dime a dozen. Actions that leads us where we need to go at this moment in the church's journey, are a much rarer commodity.

One thing remains clear even as all else changes, Jesus designed the Church to be a congregational affair. That is, Church exists wherever two or three are gathered in his name (Matthew 18:20). It is in these gatherings of people that worship occurs, the gospel is shared, and the persistence of Christian love for one another is demonstrated. Reality Check’s first question, What is the real nature of Church? only yields answers if we talk about it in peer to peer groups. Don’t ask a fish about water. Don’t consult your denomination’s doctrinal statement. Don't ask the pastor to preach a sermon series on the nature of the Church (though any pastor worth his/her salt wants to). Let the plain words of Jesus and his apostles guide you. Try to discern whatever motive Jesus might have had in wanting us, now twenty odd centuries later, to gather in these fellowships called Church. Listen for the wisdom uttered by children, outsiders, and those considered to be fools. Seek to recover your idealism from the bottom up.

This grass roots process fits with the simplest definition of Church:

Church is a gathering of people for prayer, study, and worship, who relate to each other and to the world as Christ desires.

Both the process for discovering what to do next and the authority to implement new things, flow out of the relational nature of Christ’s ministry and his Church. First we gather people together in small groups, having them prayerfully seek answers. They study. They discuss. They worship. They change how they relate to each other. These groups then lead the church to walk in the path that God is calling the church to walk in. As the church begins to do its divine vocation, it becomes more integrated and confident. Internal bickering subsides. Energy begins to flow towards ministering to those outside the church.   The congregation develops a new reputation in the community. This church, in its own unique way, becomes a vital representative of The Church. It becomes transformative in the midst of a world in need of God’s saving grace. This is the basics, the simple bare necessities.

As we move on from here, remember what the bear said, "If you act like that bee acts, uh uh; You're working too hard!" Congregations that don’t understand the real nature of Church, sacrifice themselves on a hundred crosses and save no one. Church leaders who don’t seek to understand the outside world waste their efforts on failing programs and defensive excuses. Whenever you see people working too hard, its almost always because they lack a clear vision of their congregation’s unique vocation.

Getting off the Beaten Path

"My people have committed two sins:

They have forsaken me, the spring of living water,

and have dug their own cisterns, broken cisterns that cannot hold water.  - The prophet Jeremiah¹

Reality Check 101 is born out of the simple fact that most congregations and their pastors are clueless as to how to work together and grow into the future that God might have for them. There are perhaps as many reasons for this problem as there are churches:

•A clergy-person arrives at a new church assuming that what worked elsewhere will work here

•Denominations constantly ask about 'the numbers' (budget, membership, attendance, mission support, etc), not about the congregation's health

•Micromanagement stifles creativity

•Outdated church policies are written in stone

•Large non-denominational 'box' churches are stealing our young

•Past conflicts remain unhealed

•Not many people go to church in our town

•Good pastors soon leave to go elsewhere, bad ones stay too long

•There isn't much enthusiasm in the church

•Income falls short of expenses

…And so forth

The key feature of the above list is that the obvious solutions have already been tried. Any answer that lays along the path of conformity (doing what other churches are doing) is a dead end. As rural folk will say, this church needs to find a new place to pick its blackberries. Or in the words of a city person, The only way to avoid this traffic jam is to learn the side streets.

You may also notice 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. As you depart the well traveled path, you will need to consider the weather and what season it is. The path you might take to avoid the current cascading waterfall of problems, may only be passible in certain times of the year or when the church is in a particular phase (Tool 4: The Three Phases). 'Living close to the land' is an interesting analogy to describe becoming more sensitive to the flow of the Holy Spirit in your congregation.

Observe the Enviroment

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:

1.Utilizing small groups or teams

2.Having horizontal relationships in a permission giving environment

3.Consulting networks and seeking ideas from people outside their assigned group

Reality Check seeks to be environmentally 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.

Those who get off the beaten path will find creative solutions to their problems.

As they do, they often fail to realize how out of the box and scary their answers seem to those invested in the old ways of doing things. Currently most congregations and denominational offices are staffed by professionals schooled in modernist hierarchy. This means that they know how to form a committee for each aspect of church life. The committees all have designated responsibilities and limited authority. Clergy circulate among the committees, passing messages and regulating creativity. Reports move upward while action plans fall down from above. Every agenda has more old business than new. Every system has a flywheel to keep it within specs. These policies and customs have been the norm since the 1700s. They are geared for the industrial revolution, not for a hike in the postmodern woods.

Safety Checklist

What follows is a checklist of the basic concepts that will be required for a congregation to safely leave the beaten path:

Are we clear about who really owns this church?

Each congregation belongs to God, not to the institutional church (denomination), nor church’s vocal members, nor its current pastor. As a human organization, the local church has a number of significant relationships. One of more of these relationships may contribute heavily to the congregation’s sense of identity, but none of them own the church. Churches have a relationship with