Hidden agendas

I got a call out of the blue the other week from a young woman who I thought must have left town because none of the church's communications with her received any reply. But, she's had a second baby, and, guess what? wants to have the baby baptized.

It was great to see her again after several years and what impressed me in talking to her was her intuitive grasp of some pretty deep theological concepts like grace and providence. Her approach to parenting and family life would benefit so much from being shaped and deepened through Christian community.

She was very wary of any hints about deeper involvement because of family demands and employment uncertainty. But she had this real openness of spirit, and really wanted to talk about the things that matter to her deeply.

I was fighting with myself to resist the temptation to keep on steering the conversation away from her concerns onto the church's needs. I haven't sorted the how-to stuff out in my mind, but I'm becoming more convinced, though, that we have to resist exactly this temptation -- to bring a preset agenda to our interactions with people. Now, she came to the church asking for the church's ministry. But ministry would seem to be establishing a supportive relationship with her and her family, so that they can begin discovering the presence of God in their lives -- and let that be the motivation for church involvement, not vice versa.

We need to help people discern what God is up to in their lives and build on that, rather than starting with the recruitment pitch.

How others see us

A young adult friend tagged a Facebook posting to me the other day. This is a young man raised in a church home, with passionately believing grandparents and parents. And for a time he followed in their footsteps, using his gifts of music to give expression to faith. But then something happened. Disappointment and disillusionment with the church, and the anti-religious writings that seem so daring to the young have combined to cause him to turn away, and to critique the "arrogance and hubris" of many Christians. Now, he says, he's interested in "making the world a better place."

I love him dearly, and I know where his passion comes from. I know in his heart he values his upbringing. And I know he really wants to make the world a better place -- don't we all. His heart is so much in the right place.

I wish he could have come with me last weekend to a conference in Hamilton put on by True City, a network of churches committed to working together 'for the good of the city." What blew me away was that these churches are all evangelical, and several have a long history with fundamentalism and separatism. But they were talking about their mission simply being to witness to the love of God in their neighborhoods, regardless of whether people become Christians. They talked about how important it is to love people, but not treat them as "a project." Their biblical texts were Jeremiah 29-- "Pray for the welfare of the city where God has put you" -- and Abraham's pleading for Sodom and Gomorrah.

The church has a pretty dismal history in many ways, and impressions of that history have stuck in the minds of many outside the church. But I think God is doing some pretty amazing and trasnformative things in many churches, and I pray (patiently) that those like my friend will come to see them.

Patience

One of my favorite writers is Eugene Peterson. He has a chapter in his book The Contemplative Pastor he writes that pastors are called to pray, to be poets (in the sense of awakening imagination through words) and to be patient. If ministry belongs to the whole people of God, then this applies to all those who live the life of faith.

It's the patience part that's really been on my mind lately. Here's why. The church I served amalgamated with another church five years ago. For five years, we've been the proud owners of two massive buildings -- one the building we meet in, the other a beautiful, 150 Gothic structure in the downtown of the city. Several times we have almost had it sold, but then something happened and it all fell through. I was going through my prayer journals today and noting the number of times I had prayed "Lord, please send somebody -- anybody -- to relieve us of the burden of this huge building!" There are long gaps in those prayers -- times when I'd obviously grown tired of praying and wondered if it was doing any good.

Then, completely out of the blue, along came a congregation made up of African and Caribbean immigrants, a charismatic congregation with tons of faith and big plans, who managed to put together the financing and bought it as their new home. It didn't go to some sleazy developer who was going to desecrate it by breaking it up or tearing it down. It went to a vibrant, lively, wonderful congregation of Christians who will bring worship and prayer and service into the heart of the city.

It hit me so powerfully that the reason we had not sold the church, and that all of our prayers seemed to be going unanswered, is that the people whom God intended to have that church had not come along yet. It was a real lesson in spiritual patience -- in "praying and not losing heart" as Jesus put it.

I got a phone call yesterday from a young woman I assumed had moved away from town. I baptized her first child -- also about five years ago -- and all communication had gone unanswered. But, they have had another baby, and she described to me the roller coaster of sickness, crisis and upheaval she and her family have been going through. Then today, reading through my prayer journals, I noted several times where I had prayed for them.

So often we want to play the role of the Messiah -- the can-do guys who "get it done." When God is calling us to engage in the imagining of God's future and to pray, persistently, patiently.

That's such an important aspect of our ministry with and among those whom I have been calling "affiliates."

Will our children have faith?

Back after the crazy season.

If you're my age, you might remember that book from the early 80s by Christian education guru John Westerhoff III, Will Our Children Have Faith? I don't remember the book being all that useful, but the question has stuck with me. I guess what's brought it on is having just returned from a week long visit with my 14 month old grandson. His daddy is in seminary, studying for the ministry -- and I really wonder about the future of the church that they will be a part of.


A few other bits of grist for this mill. A while back, I read a short article by Nancy Ammerman in the Canadian version of Touchstone magazine, in which she wondered if Christians (especially the Protestant variety) have not pretty much given up on passing on their story to their children. The Sunday morning worship service with concurrent Sunday School is the norm and that's pretty much all the contact kids have with the church. Jews, Muslims, and other faith communities expect that children will be instructed in their religion outside the main gathering time of the week.

Robert Louis Wilken wrote in the last issue of First Things a perceptive comparison of Christianity and Islam. Islam has always understood itself to be a public religion in the sense that Islamic practice is lived out visibly. In the ideal of the Islamic state, religious practice becomes the cultural and legal norm. Christianity has evolved in a much different way, but, according to Wilken, it now finds itself at a disadvantage in terms of the future because in Europe and North America (excluding parts of the US) it has pretty much disappeared from the public square. Wilken has a particular Roman Catholic slant on things, but he's a wise guy, very learned, and I think he's got a point.

I alternate between days of optimism and days of discouragement and today I'm sliding towards the discouragement end of the scale. Faith is not just assent to a list of beliefs, but the deep imbibing of a narrative, a story, which becomes one's own story only after long exposure. The vast majority of Canadian children have been completely cut off from the Christian story to the point where even the traditional icons of Christmas have little or no meaning to them. And in our churches, we have capitulated to such an extent to aggressively proselytizing Sunday sports and other voracious activities, and have dumbed down our Christian education to accomodate teachers and parents who will make only the briefest commitment of time and effort, and we have abandoned age-old practices like family devotions -- so I really wonder what's going to become of the story in which faith has always taken root and grown.

Anybody out there want to try to cheer me up -- or just commiserate?

Oh, the mystery of it all

I led an event yesterday based on my affiliates study. There were about 30 clergy and lay leaders in attendance -- which brought home to me how concerned people are to find new ways of connecting with people.

In preparing for the day, I was struck once again by the deep mystery of faith. Over and over again this mystery is expressed in Scripture. Jesus' parables of growth in Mark 4 -- the parable of the Sower (or more accurately, the soils), the parable of the Seed Growing Secretly -- they tell us that the growth of the kingdom is pretty much out of our hands.

The Book of Acts describes this mystery too. The early missionaries go to a city, preach the Gospel, some scoff, many are indifferent, but some believe. And Luke doesn't seem to feel it necessary to account for the differences between them. He certainly doesn't attribute it to the clever strategies of the apostles. "Silver and gold have I none," Peter says to the crippled beggar in Acts 3, "but I'll give you what I do have" -- the name and power of Jesus Christ to make whole.

I'm sitting here looking down a list we made up a couple of years ago of younger folks who were kind of bobbing around the edges of our congregation -- showing up here and there, but not consistently. A handful are back. Quite a few are still bobbing. But a whole bunch have drifted even farther away. It's so easy to get discouraged. What could we be doing differently?

But then I think of the people who have arrived. And the people who have come alive. And there just doesn't seem to be any rhyme or reason to it, except that the Holy Spirit is at work.

Where we are perhaps failing as a church is not in producing the harvest, but in sowing the seed. I sense that we need a quantum shift in priorities, expectations and relationships, so that the bulk of our time and attention is turned to sharing Jesus. Not doing the demographics and the long-range planning as a prelude (or substitute) for sharing Jesus, but doing that first and the other stuff after. It sounds so simple, yet so much outside the familiar ministry boxes that I know I've been in.

Switching metaphors, Tom Bandy in his book The Roadrunner talks about the church's "fishing" mandate. Traditional churches, he says, would rather sit on the dock cutting bait, or set up "fish processing plants" where fish can be frozen or dried, or raise money to pay somebody else to fish -- anything except what Jesus commanded his disciples to do -- get out into the deep water, let down their nets, and fish!

Narrativity

I was motivated to investigate what makes affiliates (people connected to the church but not really involved) tick. The deeper into it I've gone, the more I'm amazed and moved by the mysteriousness of people's stories. It's stuff that just doesn't show up in our social science based analyses of church trends.

A young woman has been attending my church for the last year or so. She's a classic affiliate -- active grandparents, sporadically attending mother, Roman Catholic father. She came back for the most conventional of all reasons -- she had her first baby and wanted her baptized. But as I've gotten to know her, I know there's more than that -- so much more going on in her personal story and struggles -- and I know that God's involved in moving her.

I did a funeral several years ago for a little girl who died suddenly and tragically. Parents were also classic affiliates who came to church once in a while. It's a family who has been through unimaginable suffering and I had the privilege of walking with them for quite a while.

I lost almost complete touch and wondered if they were even in town any more. Then, out of the blue, I receive a Facebook message from him. We share messages occasionally. We've been trying to make plans to go out for coffee. Last Sunday, he shows up to church with the little girl they adopted. He was back yesterday.

This stuff just can't be caught in a bottle, measured or predicted. It`s all part of the richness of individual narratives that I`m realizing more and more are at the heart of ministry -- and the heart of the Gospel.

Alan Roxburgh says that pastors should be like poets -- giving people the language to articulate what God`s doing in their lives, taking people`s questions and helping them to expand so that they can hold a reality infinitely bigger than themselves, relating personal narratives to the Great Narrative of God`s saving acts.

One more thought. I`m beginning to wonder if Christian faith is not something that you need to be older to begin to grasp. I know that goes against all of our desires for a rejuvenated church. And I`m not suggesting for a minute that the faith of younger generations is in any way deficient. But I`m telling you, there are things I`m starting to understand now at 54 that I just couldn`t have comprehended when I was 24 or 34. For one thing, I don`t know if you really begin to see the narrative pattern in your life until you`ve got a bunch of years behind you. And I`m seeing in my church the number of people for whom the Gospel is coming alive for the first time who are in their 40s and 50s. Which is also kind of changing my perspective on effective minsitry.

Too Much Data?

Back again, after an extended summer break. My wife and I went to Boston and while there I picked up a copy of Edwin Friedman's book A Failure of Nerve which he was completing when he died in 1996.

Ed Friedman is one of those people I wish I had met. The rabbi and therapist, famous for applying family systems theory to institutions like churches and synagogues, is one of the most provocative and interesting thinkers of our times. In A Failure of Nerve, he argues that we live in an emotionally regressive culture that systematically undermines self-differentiated leadership and values safety over adventure. He develops his ideas about human communities being interdependent systems that have predictable ways of reacting to anxiety and change. Leaders are most effective when they refuse to become enmeshed in the anxious emotional processes of the system and learn to be self-differentiated.

But the part of the book that caught my eye, and that relates to what I've been trying to do with affiliates, is chapter 3, "Data Junkyards and Data Junkies: The Fallacy of Expertise." One of our culture's ways of dealing (or refusing to deal) with anxiety-provoking change is by multiplying the amount of data at our disposal. But it has gotten to the point where the sheer volume of information has become overwhelming. Data is now a form of "substance abuse" among those who use it as a substitute for wisdom and decisiveness. The multiplication of data in the information age reinforces many "learned superstitions."

I remember when I embarked on my project to understand affiliates better, clearly thinking, "Well, if I knew more about what they were thinking and feeling, I could respond more effectively." Hence, my survey. But I've found that simply gathering and assembling the data doesn't really produce anything. Simply knowing the reasons why affiliates don't attend church more often doesn't lead to change.

Those who have been following this blog know that I'm a terrible second-guesser, and my instinct is to discount the data. But I don't think that's what Friedman is saying. He's not advocating being ill-informed. He's just making the common sense observation that piling up data becomes counter-productive and inhibits action. The quest for more complete data simply postpones effective response indefinitely and actually serves to increase anxiety. Friedman argues that clarity about goals and decisiveness is actually a more important quality for leaders than being fully informed.

(I'm not doing justice to his ideas in these few sentences. You need to read the book!)

But here's what I think I'm learning. It's more important for churches and their leaders to be clear about who they are and what they need to be doing than to endlessly strive to figure out what people are thinking. I learned some helpful things about people who belong but don't attend through my survey. But that's only a preliminary, prepartory step to ministry. We need to be careful that we don't slip into thinking of our mission as mainly a marketing problem.

The data I've collected on affiliates have been really helpful to me in two ways. First, it reminds me that things in the church look different from the outside than they do from the inside. And second, it's shown me that there's no quick fix (another desire of an anxious system, according to Friedman.) There really is no single answer to the question "Why aren't those people coming to church and what can we do to change it?" I did ask those questions explicitly: "What are the main reasons that keep you away from church?" and "What, if anything, would motivate you to attend more often?" And the responses to those questions were among the least clear of the whole survey.

But after reading Friedman's book, I see that that's probably the most important lesson from the whole exercise. And that churches will be far more effective in ministering to their affiliates if they stop worrying about how to attract them and achieve greater clarity about who they are.

A Second Wind

I haven't been keeping up as much with this blog, frankly because I began to wonder about the validity of my approach in dealing with affiliates. Was I just sugar coating what amounts to narcissism and lack of commitment? Is there really anything valid about someone's personal sense of "belonging" -- or is that just wishful thinking to try to gloss over the seriousness of the church's predicament?

I've been reading "The Search To Belong: Rethinking Intimacy, Community and Small Groups" by Joseph Myers which has rekindled my interest in affiliates. Myers challenges the belief that intimacy is the goal of all relationships. THis is the assumption that's behind the small group movement -- that ideally 100% of church members ought to be in a small group that shares on an intimate level.

Myers identifies four "spaces" of belonging -- public, social, personal and intimate -- and argues that people can find real connectedness and community on all four levels. It's wrong to try to force people to move to a space that we think is the "right" space to be in. The fact is, that many people's connection to the church will remain at the "public" level -- attending worship (more or less frequently) and taking part in those activities that they find helpful and valuable. We should not assume that unless someone moves through stages to ever deeper commitment and ever greater intimacy that they don't "belong" -- or that the church has "failed."

What the church does is set up two value-laden categories -- "active" and "inactive" -- or, "committed" and "uncommitted," "insider" and "outsider" -- or however you want to label them. We think that the only really valid way of belonging is to be in the inner-most circle. But Myers argues that that does violence to the varied ways in which different people find true community. We try to put everybody in the same box.

This has got me thinking again about Reg Bibby's observation that people we think of as "inactive" or "drop-outs" often have an incredibly resilient and stubborn sense of being part of "their" church -- and if you mess with that, it can blow up in your face.

I think what it comes down to is recognizing that God works in mysterious ways, differently in different people. Who are we to judge that the person who slips into the back pew on a sporadic basis -- or the people who derive great satisfaction out of working at church suppers but avoid prayer groups like the plague -- or the person who watches Robert Schuller on Sunday morning and sends an annual cheque to the church -- who are we to judge that God is not at work in their lives?

That's not to say that we give up on nurturing people or forming them. It's not to say that we don't encourage deeper levels of practice. But, in the words of Alan Roxburgh, the church tends to ask "church questions" rather than "God questions." Our agenda is what will support and perpetuate the church structures familiar to the inner circle, rather than asking "What is God up to in people's lives?" And we ought not to forget that the religious structures of Jesus' day were what actually impeded the work of God in peoples' lives -- and that much of Jesus' ministry was in breaking through those controlling structures.

What I've decided to do is to start rearranging my schedule so I can devote major portions of my time to having coffee with people. Not as an underhanded way of roping them into church activities, but as a way of posing this question -- "Where's God in your life?"

How are things going?

It's coming up to a year since I wrote my study on church affiliates. It gave me some valuable insights into how people who claim some religious connection but aren't active in church think.

But I'd have to say that there are no major breakthroughs in terms of reactivating many of these people. I acknowledged that in my study. I concluded that there is no magic button you can press that will bring people back to church. The cause-and-effect relationship between church programming and church involvement has broken down.

I have realized how I am what Alan Roxburgh calls a "leader lost in transition" -- someone highly trained to read "maps" that no longer describe the terrain we are trying to traverse. Roxburgh urges that we become aware of the unspoken assumptions behind those maps. And I guess for most of us the assumption is that what we really want to do is to attract (or re-attract) people to our churches. Is that the Gospel imperative, though?

Roxburgh has some interesting things to say about the strategic planning process that many churches still employ to try to generate desired outcomes. It's rooted in modernity's quest to analyze and control

"Strategic planning models are based on an assumption that all reality, including human beings in their social communities, is based upon a simple, or complex, nexus of cause and effect. They assume leaders can predict then control factors in such a way as to achieve intended outcomes."

This model is not completely moribund, but it is less and less effective. What do we put in its place? Not sure yet. But, for me, the key right now is just to keep a) praying and b) talking to people.

Is "Monthly" the new "Weekly"?

Our Worship planning team decided we would track the number of individuals who attended church over the course of a month. How did we do this? Easy. We passed a clipboard during the announcements and requested people simply to write their names and those of any family members who were actually physically present on that Sunday. We were motivated by a pretty well-informed hunch that part of the decline in Sunday attendance is that people are just coming to church less often than they used to.

In May, 387 people came to church at least once. In October, 399 people came to church, but this time, our hard-working secretary Rosemary broke these numbers down according to frequency. Here's what we found.

13.7% of that 399 people came to church all four Sundays.
20.6% came three Sundays.
25.2% came two Sundays.
And 41% came one Sunday.

In other words, of the basically 400 people who attended a service during October, two-thirds came once or twice.

I don't know about you, but I think a church with 400 people coming through the doors in a month is a pretty healthy church. Our challenge is to find ways to a) increase that 400 to, say, 500; and, more importantly, b) to change the once-a-monthers to more regular attenders.

And I know, I know, numbers aren't everything. But they aren't nothing either. One element of maintaining congregational health is to nurture regular worship attendance. We're working on how to do that. Comments and suggestions gratefully received.

Being there when we're needed

We're at a stage in our life when we have contact with a lot of young adults. They're our kids' friends. And, even though our own kids sometimes think we're a little square, their friends think my wife and I are pretty cool.
One of their friends recently asked if she could talk to me. Some things have happened in her life that have made her open to the possibility that God might be trying to get her attention. She wants to come to church.
I know this happens frequently. Young adults have moments of spiritual crisis or awareness and they need someone to help them shape and direct those experiences. But it's not always easy to know where to tell them they should go. If a young person in another city asks me what's a good church to attend, often I don't know.
I'm glad I have enough confidence in my church and its ministry to encourage this young woman to come here. But it's something I think we need to worry a lot more about than we do. We say we want young adults to come back to church, but we're ill-prepared to receive them when they do -- or to give them the spiritual support and help they're looking for.
One of the young adults who responded to my survey commented that the church needs to be ready when people his age find their way back. I don't think that means launching a lot of gimmicky market-driven programs. I think it means making sure there's enough depth in our own faith, worship and community life that it doesn't feel like a waste-land or a closed club when they arrive.

"The Untied Church: Affiliation as a Key to Congregational Renewal

My research report is posted on the First Grantham United Church website. Click on the link to the left and you'll see it clearly marked on the homepage.