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Introduction
In times of size transition, congregations have an opportunity to deepen the connection between faith and context. Vital congregations are passionate about bringing faith to bear powerfully within their context—I believe this right down to my toes.
Faith Meeting Context
If you look carefully at the founding story of your own church, you will almost certainly find that its early life—including prayer, belief, action in the world—was shaped decisively by the history, politics, economics, and wider religious movements of a particular place and time.
At its founding, a congregation may relate faith to context in a variety of ways. In Puritan New England, for example, a minister would travel to an area previously unsettled by Europeans, build a church, and establish a town around it. One might say that faith created context in those places, though we must remember that the Puritan movement had itself emerged from the turbulent English context, and that this “new” land was already an inhabited landscape when those English settlers arrived. In 18th-century Philadelphia, faith opposed context when freed blacks—refusing to be segregated from the rest of the faithful—walked out of their home congregation and founded a church that would mother the whole new African Methodist Episcopal denomination. In the years after World War II, with the rise of the “automobile suburb,” a brand new context engendered a new kind of congregation. Physically separated from the urban worlds of work and politics, the suburban church focused intensively on family and personal concerns. In each of these three examples, a spark of energy ignited the life of the new congregation—a spark struck from the encounter between faith and context.
If faith and context interact to release energy and create something new at the beginning of a congregation’s life, the corollary proposition is not so comforting. As the community changes, congregations may simply keep doing what they did at the energized founding moment. In that case, the lively dance between congregation and context gets steadily slower, more distant, and more awkward until the church abandons the dance altogether. The building may still stand on the corner as a dusty relic, a club for the few who remember the good old days, or a fortress with barbed wire to keep the energy of the context from breaking in. But the central dynamic that gives a congregation its vitality has ceased.
Size transitions are critical because they present the congregation with an opportunity to adjust the connection between faith and context, to realign the inner life of the congregation with external realities brimming with potential for ministry. Numbers are secondary, but important; used well, statistics alert us to changes in the real lives and real relationships that make up congregations and communities. The primary issue in a time of size transition is suppleness—the congregation’s ability to keep dancing with its context, to learn the new steps and rhythms that will carry it from one era of vitality to the next. Like learning a whole new style of dance, this process is often hard work and it is certainly not always pretty.
Anxiety and Energy
Often, congregations begin to explore the issues of size transition when leaders notice that the topic of numerical growth is generating a great deal of apprehension. Whether the congregation is small (up to about 150 in attendance), medium-sized (up to about 400) or large (over 400)1—and whether it is growing or declining—anxiety seems to peak when the church is crossing the boundary from one size category to another.
One of these size transitions poses special difficulties. In congregations where the average weekend attendance has leveled off somewhere between 150 and 250 (all sabbath services, all ages) while the surrounding community continues to gain population, size-related anxieties run especially high. Congregations that remain stuck for years (even decades) at this particular transition point—which I will call the pastoral-to-program size plateau—seem to experience the most intense discomfort of all.
A certain amount of anxiety can energize a congregation to identify a challenge and mobilize for new learning. But when the anxiety level gets too high, we humans engage in what psychiatrist Ronald Heifetz calls “work avoidance.”2 In the face of distress, we deny the facts, we hide, we fight about peripheral matters, we throw our energy into manic activity that doesn’t really address the situation. Most of all, we demand that leaders “fix it” for us.
Wise congregational leaders resist this mandate. Instead, they build a “holding environment” to help members to manage anxiety about size change; then they give the hard work—connecting faith with context in a new way—back to the congregation “at a pace they can stand.”3 This book is intended to help you and others to fulfill both of these leadership tasks: to create a secure enough environment for learning, and to involve members with challenging choices about bringing faith to bear in a changing world.
How to Use This Book
For an individual reader, chapters 1 through 3 of this volume will provide concepts, research, strategies, and practical tools related to the pastoral-to-program size transition. But I hope you won’t stop there. Chapter 4 provides a process designed to engage the congregation’s whole leadership circle (defined broadly) in a shared learning experience and to produce a plan for further learning and action. Of course, that’s an ambitious goal—even assuming that this is the right project for your congregation to undertake at this time. Let’s think together about whether this is an appropriate resource for your church’s situation.
The resources in this book were designed for congregations where:
- Average year-round attendance (all Sunday* services, all ages) has hit a plateau somewhere between 150 and 250 (i.e., between pastoral and program size).
- The congregation is located in a context favorable to numerical growth. Likely indicators might be continuing population growth in the surrounding community and/or steady increases in total church membership while attendance remains stuck at a constant level.
- The congregation regularly attracts first-time visitors to Sunday worship.
- Both the pastor and lay opinion leaders believe that the congregation may be called to “step up” to the next size, and wish to engage in discernment and planning.
- Basic trust exists among pastor, lay leadership, and congregation.
- A small team of leaders can be found with the skills and motivation to guide others through a learning experience.
Other congregations will undoubtedly make use of the concepts and processes presented in this book. Simply bear in mind that I have organized this material for a particular audience—a set of congregations I have gotten to know through my consulting, training, and research.
The Learning Experience
The approach laid out in this book includes elements of education, discernment, and planning designed to occur over a period of about eight months. Though segments can be adapted for shorter time periods, I recommend that you sketch out in advance the entire process you will undertake and set firm dates for the key meetings. A definite plan of learning helps create a sturdy “holding environment”—framing a space in which people have agreed to stick with the subject and to avoid premature decisions.
The content in chapter 2 and the process described in chapter 4 are based on a pilot Alban course called “Raising the Roof,” conducted online in the spring of 2001. I am profoundly grateful to the 12 congregations that participated in this cutting-edge work, and to the Massachusetts Conference of the United Church of Christ for underwriting a substantial portion of the cost.
The findings in chapter 4 resulted from my study of transition issues with seven UCC congregations in southeastern Massachusetts in the spring of 2000. I extend my thanks to them, and to the Massachusetts Conference, for their faithfulness and openness in this work of learning and growth.
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