general conference – Page 4

a day in the life of a reserve delegate #gc2012

Posted on April 26, 20121 Comment

The morning starts at 6:45 with showers and hotel room coffee and a peanut butter and jelly sandwich made from groceries I picked up yesterday.

As a reserve, I get to observe most of the time, and so when I arrived at the conference at 8am, I made my way to the Superintendency committee. I’m not sure why I picked it, but there I was. Devotions were led by the committee chair and then we got down to business… mostly. The group started with two easier ones – and chose to not support an item to allow for laity to become bishops and an item that would require district superintendents to serve outside of their annual conferences. And then the fun began. 5 proposals all dealing with term limits for bishops had to be dealt with. Which would they chose? How would it affect central conferences? Are term limits a sign of distrust or a tool for effectiveness? Is being a bishop different than being an elder? The process was long, and at one point, the group decided to return to language allowing central conferences to chose their own term limits for bishops (current practice). Which then left the question of what to do with US bishops. As the debate went on, and an amendment was made by a delegate from a central conference, a woman from Germany stood to speak. She gently spoke to the fact that the committee had allowed for contextual local control for the central conferences to make their own decisions and asked that other central conference delegates would refrain from editing the proposal that was before the body so that the US delegates could make decisions about their own context. It was a gracious act of kenosis.

Lunch gave me the opportunity to sit down with other young adults and have a Q&A with Adam Hamilton about the Call to Action and Interim Operations Team proposals. Adam was extraordinarily gracious and did his best to listen and answer what he could. There were still many questions and not enough time and not enough dialogue back and forth (the format and sheer number of YP who turned up – 50+) didn’t allow for it. BUT – you could sense there was a change of feelings… it didn’t hurt that the backdrop for the conversation were the words “HEAL” – our theme scripture for the evening.

After lunch, I tried to catch up on some social media conversations. I sat outside in the sun, recharged my phone (which I used excessively b/c of the poor internet), talked with some other reserves and rested. Then I spent the rest of the afternoon session observing the Faith & Order sub-committee which was discussing qualifications for ordination. One of the most interesting parts of their work was watching the difficult work of the translator and the difficulty of not only multiple languages, but the added language of Robert’s Rules to complicate matters. It was an exercise in patience for all involved and they truly lived out the process graciously and beautifully… in spite of fumbles and human missteps. That happens… keeping the spirit is the hard part and they succeeded.

The hardest part about the process is that you can’t talk. You can’t add information. You can’t help to clear up problems. You can just be there. I tried to be available by offering to move chairs, by shushing folks next door who were being too loud, offering markers, etc. As a reserve you really are support. You can love and care and pray, but you can’t really participate in the same way. For anyone who knows me, that is a difficult thing for me to do. I like to be actively engaged and twitter has been one way for me to communicate and share even though I cannot use my physical voice.

Tonight’s plenary greeted our Pan-Methodist brothers and sisters from across the globe and featured nominations for important general church positions. It also featured a point of personal priveledge that lifted up the failure of the process of holy conferencing (not enough time, guidelines, compassion, importance) the day before – specifically in regards to LGBT issues. It was evident there was pain and hurt felt by many…

but the beautiful thing about a church conference is that God is in our midst. Our theme for the day was healing and plenary led into worship where we sang Balm in Gilead and talked about the healing power of Jesus’ love in our lives and we were challenged to lift up to God the places where we have hurt or been unkind or have sinned… the places we need spiritual healing as well as physical healing. It was powerful. Tears freely poured. I prayed with one of the marshals for her sister who is ill. We sang, we prayed, and God moved in that place.

10:00 – time to head back to the hotel… with stops for conversation, and witness, and sharing. It’s nearly 1am now… the blogging is done, the mind is clear, and I can sleep.

invocation of the spirit #gc2012

Posted on April 24, 20121 Comment

One of the most amazing moments in worship this afternoon was to see bishops of our church gathered around the communion table in the center of the people and to hear them invoke the power of the holy spirit.

I recite those words every week at our communion service.

I say them once a month in Sunday worship and at the nursing home.

They are deeply familiar to me.

And yet, with the arms of all of our body outstretched, the bishops prayed in their native tongues. The voices overlapped and competed with one another. Hard consonants mingled with softer vowels. It was a beautiful chorus of language and culture and background and perspective… it was humanity – reaching up towards the heavens and asking God to come down and make her presence known among us.

The beautiful cacophony of it made my heart sing and tears stream down my face.

We continued to experience this unity in the midst of our diversity when the voices of all 4700 participants in worship joined together to pray the Lord’s Prayer in their first languages. The familiar comfort and cadence of the American way of reciting the prayer was a subtle and not over powering backdrop to the many other voices… I was surprised that I could hear so many and that my own native tongue was not drowning out others.

This is the church. This is the body of Christ.

A global church #gc2012

Posted on April 24, 2012Leave a comment

This Sunday, the African Ministry from St. Mark’s UMC came and joined our congregation for worship. Well, they didn’t just join us… they led us. Pastor Dieudonne preached, the choir sang, the little boys danced, and it was an exciting, uplifting time of worship.

One of the things that really stuck with me was that Pastor Dieudonne kept reminding us that God is doing us a favor in worship… meaning that God is blessing us right now by allowing us to be here in this place. And it truly was a blessing to gather with brothers and sisters from around the globe and to remember what we are about and WHO we are about.

My congregation was full that morning – not only with members of my church and our brothers and sisters from Cedar Rapids, but also from other churches in our community who wanted to come and worship with us. So we were not only global, but ecumenical, and all different ages were a part of our celebration, too!
For three hours, we were a living embodiment of the One, Holy, Catholic, Apostolic church… the body of Christ, itself. It was awesome.

And it got me very excited because this morning, I’m in Tampa. And delegates from every state and countries from all across this globe are gathering. And as we worship we will remember that we truly are a global church. We are a church that has listened to the command of Jesus Christ to make disciples of all nations… at least we are trying to do so.

So far, I’ve visited with folks from Michigan, Ohio, Alabama, Boston, Puerto Rico, Illinois, Korea, and the Phillippeans. (Yes, I know I spelled that wrong… my brain keeps wanting to type Philippians)

But on the plane yesterday, I was also reminded that our global church has some work to do. We do not truly share our standards across the globe. We will make a lot of decisions these next two weeks that will only affect the United Methodist Church in the United States. We will employ practices that are very “American.” Our denomination does not represent the diversity of the very places that we live in, much less the world. There is work to do!!!

For the next two weeks, I hope and pray that we might not only become empowered to truly be a global church, but to listen to our brothers and sisters, to speak out of the fullness of our hearts, and to be willing to change and expand and grow if that means welcoming someone else at the table and into the Body of Christ… or maybe even being willing to get up from our table and go to join someone else in creating the body of Christ where they are!!!

Confessions before General Conference

Posted on April 18, 2012Leave a comment

In the past few weeks, between holy week services and fundraiser dinners and youth group and church meetings and the normal day to day business of pastoring, I’ve been trying to get a handle on the general conference legislation.

It is actually difficult to try to digest it all. There are 1400+ pages in the Advance Daily Christian Advocate. There are different proposals about the same items. There are nuances. There are huge, crazy, dramatic statements.

And my blood pressure has been rising.

I have been focusing much of my effort on the materials related to restructuring and changes to the understanding of ministry. Which means that I put off the section on church and society. In part I was afraid to look. But I did. Monday night, I dug deep in those two sections and realized why I was so afraid to even look.

One of the reasons that I am United Methodist is because we have such a rich heritage of taking progressive stances in areas of war, poverty, work, and relationships. And for the first time, as I read through legislation, I began to worry that we might take huge steps back this year in our areas of social witness. Now, I have very little historical perspective under my belt. This is my first General Conference, my first rodeo, so to speak, and so perhaps these are issues that have come and gone before. Maybe there are always people making waves and trying to take us back to the way things were before.

But I do not have that history. And my shackles started to raise. I found myself wanting to yell at the pages and the proposals. I began to see familiar names repeated… legislation that would roll back some stances on worker’s rights, the death penalty, our positions on war and peace, and they were coming from the same few people.

Confession time: I started to feel bad thoughts towards those people. Until I realized that they were merely the secretaries of the conferences that those pieces of legislation were arising from. And then I really felt bad.

If we are not even at conference yet, and I’m feeling this defensive, territorial, angst filled… God help us all.

I closed my files. I took a deep breath. And I prayed for forgiveness.

In this particular General Conference, I get to travel on behalf of my conference as a reserve delegate. And this means that while I will not be voting on every issue, I will be in the midst of it all. And my prayer is that I can help remind us of the spirit of unity that brings us together as disciples of Jesus Christ. I want to surround my delegates with prayer and support. I want to be a calm, non-anxious presence for them and for all who gather. I want to breathe deeply and remember that this is the Body of Christ in action. I want to see the best in every person, hear their best intentions, and prayerfully discern together. I am going to lay aside my own anxiety, my own agendas, my own desires and truly hope that God will speak through us.

My friend, Anna Blaedel, wrote on facebook today: “holding the pilgrims making their way to Tampa in prayer… for courage… grounding… webs of care… for surprising in-breaking of Justice and Joy”

Amen, Anna.

Instead of expecting the worst, I’m looking for God. I’m looking for where God surprises us, and breaks in to the ordinary time and the ordinary practices of debate and decision to bring holy unity and powerful witness. I’m looking for joy and courage and stories of resurrection and hope.

I repent of my divisiveness of spirit. I repent of my anxiety. And I pray that Christ would help us all remember – Peace.

GC03: Restructuring and the Four Areas of Focus

Posted on April 2, 2012Leave a comment

Over the past few months, conversations, posts, articles, videos, etc. have been flying around about the Call to Action and the Interim Operational Team proposals for restructuring. As a reserve delegate for General Conference, I probably won’t be someone voting on this, but I’m still going to be there. I am meeting with my delegation and we are looking at all of these pieces together. I did the Call to Action Study with my church. I’m reading as much as I can. And I have to say, I’m not sure how I feel about all of it. Tomorrow I want to talk a little bit about the need for distinction between CtA and the IOT proposals (because they are different things), but for now, I just want to think about the idea of restructuring our general boards and agencies.

Most people who know me would say that I’m not someone tied to the past. If something isn’t working – by all means, scrap it and start afresh. I often work by trial and error until we find just the right fit. I like to take risks and push the envelope and be bold. So the fact that I’m a little uneasy with all of the change proposed here means something.

I’ve had a few people ask me pointedly in the past month what I think about all of this restructuring. Here is my first response:

I’m still pretty torn. I think there are some benefits to the ways they want to realign the boards and agencies, but talking with the boards and agencies folks, they have already made significant cuts and some of the ways they benefit the church would be severely restricted by having to cut more. I worry about our continued GBCS presence in the capital. I worry about whether we will have the resources in place to support the local churches if we diminish any more GBHEM and GBOD and the like. I understand the $ benefit to a smaller board, but think the diverse representation in so many places is one of the awesome things about the church and wonder if we couldn’t use technology and more web conferencing to cut back on some of the cost. I worry that with only a 15 member board, we just will not have a diverse representation of the United Methodist Church as a whole. I’m not necessarily worried about power consolidation or anything like that – but I would HATE to be on that board – that is a lot of responsibility and time, for such a small group to be overseeing all of the boards and agencies in that way. On the other hand, our own local church just consolidated all of our committees into one church board and its working just fine.
That probably doesn’t help.. does it? lol.

My friend Gary’s response: Katie, help the Church think beyond either/or options. Thanks

*sigh* Gary… I belatedly, and with great humility and not a small amount of uneasiness accept your challenge.

And as I think more about that restructure our own church just did, what I realized is that when we did so because we didn’t have enough people who could sustain that large of a leadership structure. To have four required committees that needed 6 people + our ministry committees of education, worship, outreach… that would be 6×7= 42 people!!! Not to include the chair of our council and our lay leader. We average 50 in worship on a Sunday. And so our large leadership structure certainly involved people, but people also felt like they were simply filling holes. There was a lack of engagment. Our structure was too big. I’m not sure that with a global membership of 11-12 million has large problem with a leadership board and agency structure that involves around 650 lay and clergy representatives on boards/agencies.

Second, we did consolidate our work around three primary goals for our congregation. Which sounds a lot like consolidating around the four areas of focus. But we did so and have actually funneled MORE money into those three teams in our local church. They have more to work with now than they did in their respective disjointed committees. If we truly want those three things to be the focus of the life of our church, then we have to put our money where our mouth is. It feels like the restructure proposals are in order to save money to be sent somewhere else – to local churches perhaps, to reduce apportionments so resources stay on the local level, who knows – to be honest I haven’t seen anything about WHERE the extra resources will come from or WHERE they will go. That seems like an important piece of the puzzle that is missing.

I completely understand restructuring for missional reasons to help us refocus our attention on the four areas of focus that we as a global church have named as important: global heath, ministry with the poor, new places for new people and revitalizing existing congregations, and developing (young) leaders. But have we actually given these four areas of focus time to settle in with our churches yet? And will a restructure help us to focus on them if we do so at the expense of diverse and abundant representation (when we have so many capable and talented people we can use in our global church) and with cuts to the funding for said ministries. In fact, we might be chopping the legs out from underneath ourselves if we do not provide the resources in people and dollars and institutional weight behind those four areas of focus.

So if I’m thinking both/and, I want to ask the questions:

What would a restructured church look like with larger boards than the proposal entails?
What could it accomplish with the resources to really make a difference?
What kinds of bold risks could our boards and agencies take if they felt like we as the church trusted them and didn’t see them as an excessive growth that needed to be trimmed away?
What would we say to the world if we not only realign our church around these four areas of focus, but back it with our time, energy and resources?

I’m not saying that vital congregations are not important… in fact, the other materials we have been given by IOT and the Council of Bishops and the Connectional Table and Call to Action all seem to point to the idea that we need to develop more young leaders and create new places for new people and that a vital congregation is defined by its fruits – which includes its participation in the redemption of the world (global health and poverty seem to fit here). If we continue to focus on these four areas and put both our larger institutional AND local resources towards this focus, I think we are heading in the right direction.

Where’s Katie?

Posted on March 31, 2012Leave a comment

I know, it has been a little while since I’ve posted. I’ve been busy. And a little stressed out. And I stopped making time for writing. But I’m putting the time back in my schedule starting this next week. New month, new me. In the meantime I’ve been:

GARDENING: This has been the strangest March on record in our area. The soil temps/weather and plants are actually about 3-6 weeks ahead of schedule. So I’ve been taking advantage of the outdoors. My first seeds have been planted and tended and they are growing nicely. But my yard is a mess. There was literally a hillside of creeping charlie that I’ve had to rake out, treat, and then kill because it wouldn’t go away. I’m also trying to kill off some weeds in my grass on the front lawn and I have plans to mulch and transplant some hostas. All the prep work has been done, and one good day of sunshine this week will call for a day off of work to get the last of it accomplished. In the meantime, all of the tulips I planted last fall are doing MARVELOUS!!!!! This first image is the front of the house and directly outside of my office window. SO BEAUTIFUL!!!

YOUTH: I have been working with the youth in our community from a number of different angles. I am on a grant team at the school, we have regular youth group each week, and our church is trying to be more present in the community through attending youth events. I’ve been to plays and music events, and I’m looking forward to the spring sports seasons. On top of that, we have had our first round of fundraisers for the year – including our 2nd Annual Chili Cook Off this past week.

FAMILY: Friday night dinners with my in-laws complete with dancing in the kitchen and wii-playing and cuddling on the couch watching Sponge Bob. Saturdays with my family enjoying the new baby and eating good food and relaxing. I haven’t had a lot of time free to spend with them – but I make it count when I do.

DISC GOLF: the tiny bit of free time I’ve had lately I’ve spent on the disc golf course. I’m doing pretty well for this early in the season – 11, 13, 16 and 11…. no sub 10 rounds yet, but my arm is still warming up 😉 The weather has been beautiful, the company (family and friends) is always good, and the discs are flying straight and true!

GENERAL CONFERENCE PREP: Okay – I haven’t actually done as much of this as I would like. I’m reading here and there and doing a lot of mental digesting, but I have not done as much writing as I want to. Writing helps me think out what I’m actually feeling, so its a necessary step as we get even closer.

GC02: Fruits vs. Roots… or the Call to Action vs. IS3

Posted on March 2, 20123 Comments

An interesting counterpoint to all of my general conference focused discussions on the Call to Action has been my involvement on the local level with the Iowa Safe and Supportive Schools (IS3) grant.

One afternoon as I was pouring over survey data and statistics and numbers and practices for the IS3 grant, I asked myself why these numbers were so important when I was having such a hard time thinking about church numbers in the same way. It has taken me a while, but I think I finally nailed down the difference.

In the Call to Action, we have determined what congregations are vital based upon three criteria: congregational growth over five years, significant engagement of members in ministry and the mission of the church, and an outward focus by making new disciples and giving generously to the needs of others (Call to Action Study Guide, page 8). Now… if our mission as a church is to make disciples of Jesus Christ for the transformation of the world – then we are looking for churches that are growing in the number of disciples and are engaged in transforming the world. Fair enough. The Call to Action then suggest that we need “to redirect the flow of attention, energy, and resources to an intense concentration to foster and sustain an increase in the number of vital congregations making disciples of Jesus Christ for the transformation of the world” (Call to Action Study Guide, page 10).

An assumption was made at some point in the process that we should look at what characteristics those vital churches have and then encourage others to implement those drivers. Throughout the reports and materials, the metrics used to determine effectiveness are: professions of faith, worship attendance, # of small groups, # of people engaged in mission, and money given to mission. Pastors, bishops, annual conferences, general agencies are refocusing on these things. What we have not heard in the process is how those resources get redirected. Does it go to those who are already successful? Does it go towards implementing conference wide strategies for growth like our New People for New Places or Co-Missioned or Path One or Healthy Congregations? Does it go to the churches who are failing in order to help them get back on course?

With that in the background, I want to describe a little bit about my involvement with Iowa Safe and Supportive Schools. There is an awareness that “No Child Left Behind” was in large part a failure in its attempts to reform the educational system. In my work with the School Improvement Advisory Committee, we have talked some about how the goals set out for them in that process in many ways creates impossible demands. There are specific goals and metrics that schools must meet and it is not always possible for this to be done. I cannot remember some of the specifics, but an example would be that we need to have 90% of students testing at grade level in reading. We can work with students, we can prepare them, but if in a small school like ours even one student has a bad day or doesn’t test well, then the goals cannot be met. Schools with high achievement scores are rewarded, those that struggle are punished, and the focus of classrooms has to shift to prepare students for tests, rather than education. The measure of a good school is based on student achievement and so academic results are the measure. Teachers are stressed, students are stressed, and it simply is not working.

Iowa Safe and Supportive Schools takes a different approach to the whole thing. The goal in many ways is the same – we want students to learn and succeed – that is the mission of schools in general. But instead of setting goals for testing, this evaluative process asks the question: what is it that helps students to learn and succeed? What are the conditions that need to be in place for real learning to take place? Through research, studies, etc. they have determined that safety, engagement, and the school enviroment are all background factors in student achievement. If a student does not feel safe, they will not succeed. If they are not engaging with other students and adults, they will not succeed. If they do not have a consistent and welcoming environment at the school, they will not suceed. So using this criteria, schools were evaluated in the spring of 2011.

Based on student surveys and hard data from the school, schools were evaluated as to how safe and supportive they were. Then, schools who scored poorly in these areas were invited to recieve funding in order to improve school conditions of learning. Our school district had low scores specifically around engagement and environment and gratefully accepted the grant in order to work on these areas.

But here is the real kicker. The state department of education, in similar ways to the Call to Action, is putting money where their mouth is. They are providing these grants to help create more safe and supportive schools. And in the process, they have provided each district with trained resource people who are walking with us through our particular data sets so that we can determine a particular plan of action for our district. That is why I am pouring over data and statistics. We are trying to determine what are the next steps in our district, which areas we can really focus on, and which will make the largest difference in the success of our students.

I realized as I compare that process with the Call to Action that our denominational iniative feels a lot more like “No Child Left Behind” than it does “IS3.” I look at the drivers and I look at the indicators of effectiveness and I see a lot of ways to measure fruitfulness and results. I see test scores as a measure of success and nowhere do I see the deeper question of “what are the conditions necessary for discipleship?”

What helps someone to take up their cross and follow Jesus?

What are the background factors that transform someone from a mere member to a disciple?

The Call to Action Study Guide at least lays out some of these things from a Wesleyan perspective – lifting up the importance of the means of grace as a practice of daily surrender and obedience to God… but then we head back to the perils of membership decline, worship attendance decline, decline in offerings and a fear decline in mission engagement.

My take from the Call to Action is that I need to create more programs for young people, train and mentor more people to be leaders, stick around in a congregation for a long time, and have vibrant worship. But do those things really help us to surrender to the will of God in our lives? Do they really help us to participate in the redemption of the world? Some of them are… but many of the things that are layed out are fruits… and I’m not sure that they need to be our focus if we want to see lasting change.

I believe we need to back up and focus on what makes us disciples. I believe we need to get to the root of what we believe a Wesleyan disciple is. I believe we need to work on the things that create the conditions for discipleship and like the IS3, let the fruits naturally follow.

And, a key learning from the IS3 process, I think that as we redirect resources back to local churches, we need to focus on those churches that are not vital and help them to discover what are the ways that they can improve the conditions for discipleship in their local places. Telling a small church they need to add a contemporary service or make a Sunday school class for kids is pointless. Walking beside them as they discover that people are having a hard time believing in God when the factory in town has just shut down and jobs are gone is another. Because in the latter – the solution is contextual, it meets us in our real situtations, and invites the Holy Spirit to imagine with us creative possibilities for community, sharing our resources, prayer, and trust as we depend upon the grace of God to get us through.

GC01: Call to Action Study – Part 2

Posted on March 2, 2012Leave a comment

As I mentioned in Part 1 of this post, I am going through the Call to Action Study put out by the Council of Bishops with my congregation. In our first session we covered sections 1-3 and in the second session we examined 4-6.

The call to grow more vital congregations. My folks noticed that the definition or criteria for being labeled as a “highly vital” congregation was based on the three things mentioned: 1) cong. growth over 5 year period, 2) engagement of members in ministry/mission, 3) outward forcus by making new disciples and generous giving. Many of them said that they absolutely agree with those second and third critera because engagement means that members are taking a role and living out their discipleship, but they are not sure that growth in numbers is a good indicator for vitality in this day and age. In any case, they were confident that growth would not occur if engagement and outward focus were not also happening.

A large chunk of our conversation around this point was asking if growth is possible when the culture at large is working against us. We are fighting sports, working parents, family time, school activities, and on Sunday mornings at least, we are losing the battle. We live in a community that has not experienced any real growth according to census figures at large. The folks who are not currently involved in church seem to have little interest in being involved. We believe we have something important and vital to offer, and can share that, but people do not always respond. Does that mean that we are not being faithful? Is our faithfulness being based on the response/hardheartedness of the culture surrounding us? Tis lead us into questions about how we can help to change the culture around us. What is it that we offer? Fellowship, ways to actively live out our faith, studies, we are the body of Christ and don’t have to be on our own, we share with our brothers and sisters and find value in that kind of community centered around Jesus Christ. I found a tension in their answers that ranged from a firm desire to get more kids in Sunday School to an emphasis on saving souls; from reclaiming/changing culture to being a set-apart entity that might NOT be popular, but still can be faithful.

This section also included five ways that the “adaptive spiritual challenge” is defined – aka, the problem behind the numbers. They sensed that division and mistrust is a problem – not so much on the larger levels, but they experienced how they lost people in their church when there was conflict amongst themselves. They agreed that we are not comfortable with setting goals, because then that means we might have to actually do something about it and follow through. They absolutely feel like they are not always connecting with the nominally and non-religious people in their community, but in many ways struggle to imagine what they might have to do differently. They see the issue as a two-way street. We need to invite and connect with new people, but there are also many who are burnt out from continually asking and inviting and always being told no.

Then, this section layed out the challenge: to grow more vital congregations. We really liked the definition here of a vital congregation as a community of believers under the lordship of Christ – but we weren’t sure how that connected with the other things that were mentioned earlier in the section. It seemed like that piece came out of the blue and it was the first time that was mentioned! We had talked earlier about the need to get back to basics – talking about salvation, following the Holy Spirit, prayer, and that if we did that, everything else would fall in line, so we liked that it was part of the expanded definition in this section. But we also really dove into the idea that we have to live that out in our lives. We have to participate in the redemption of the world. We have to smile more, greet people more, be a Christian every moment of the day. We have to forgive a little more and be people of grace in everything thta we do. Someone told a story about how their son had a bad experience with another church and came back saying – “if those are Christians, I don’t want anything to do with them.” Someone also made note that it was ironic there were pruning shears on the picture – if we are pruning back in order to grow, sometimes that means people who aren’t committed will leave the church, and sometimes that is a good thing for the overall growth and spread of the gospel.

16 Drivers of Vital Congregations I was disappointed there was NOTHING to explain the drivers, how they were arrived at, what they meant in the context of this study. Knowing what I do from our orders event and reading I have done for General Conference, I explained that these 16 drivers were characteristics that those 15% of congregations that were vital had. So compared with other churches they had more of this, and more of that, and these were descriptors that pointed at what made them vital.

We looked at them by sections, starting with children and youth. Someone asked if having a preschool helped a congregation to be more vital and connect with the community. We talked about our youth group at the church and outreach into the community in that area. In a small church, we don’t have the people to have a lot of programs – so will we always struggle with vitality? Does it count when we are doing these things in partnership with other churches?

Lay leadership we found to be very important. Our congregation has not had a history of lay leaders understanding their roles very well and this is something we are working to change. We also have not challenged our lay leadership to really grow in their personal faith journey and are trying to focus on that as well. They were astonished at number 7 which said 20% or more of their worship attendees describe themselves as current or past leaders. I pointed out, however, that since our average worship attendance is only 50, that would mean only 10 people see themselves that way. We currently have 12 on our church council, which is more than that.

We had a lot of discussion in the “pastors” category about how long the pastor stays being an indicator of effectiveness. This is a congregation that has had a lot of short term pastorates and feel like when they finally get something going with a pastor, he/she is pulled away. They feel like longer appointments would help them to have a better cohesiveness. Someone compared it to dating and talked about the importance of chemistry. When you find the right fit, you can’t always replace that right away, if ever. There also is sometimes a lame duck time. They are used to pastors leaving after a few years and expect them to move and give up working and expecting things to change.

In the last category of worship, we talked about the reality of small churches. We do not have multiple services, so is a blended service okay? The drivers only talk about contemporary OR traditional. We do have wonderful multi-media capabilities in our church and celebrated that.

As you can see… we had a lot of conversation! And so with the time constraints, we skipped ahead to what is the Call to Action for laity in the church. I wanted them to see where they specifically were being challenged to grow/act. Their initial perception was that it sounded good and really called them to take action. We felt like a lot of what we are already doing with our “Co-Missioned” process fit into this naturally (we are finishing up a two year church revitalization and missional focus process thingy). Several talked about how they felt like they need to personally take action. They realized that coming to church and sunday school is fine, but that they need to get up and do more in the church. One person said that they would if they knew what they could do, if someone personally asked and invited them to do something. We talked about how we need to encourage and ask people to serve more. This is something that has been a natural outcome of that Co-Missioned process for our church and in fact is the next step on our journey, so it was good for them to hear we are already working on that.

As I process what they have said, one of the realizations I had is that there was a lot of explaining and background work that I needed to do. We do not do a good job of talking about the structure, mission, vision of the church, the four areas of focus, the larger goals of the denomination, new people and new places, etc. When we can make those connections, great, but it is not something that is readily known to every lay person. It can all get very confusing because there are so many different things to focus on. But people were eager to learn, connect, and overall were very supportive of our denominational connections. The level of mistrust we sometimes talk about between local churches and the denomination just wasn’t there. This is a congregation that is on the cusp of “vitality” – they are growing spiritually, they are deepening in their engagement with the church and community and are extraordinarily generous… yet, compared with these drivers and indicators and definitions, they aren’t sure quite where they fit. They know they haven’t arrived and aren’t sure if they will ever grow in the way this is asking them to. They know they will never be a large church, but they are determined to be small but mighty.