Finding People for Ministries

I recently asked some leaders what their biggest challenge was in leading their teams. One person wrote:

The biggest challenge I face is finding volunteers to step up and lead or help.

Here’s some reflections I offered:

Recruits for Ministries

Technical fixes

• offer time-limited, clearly defined, small tasks 
• change the story, e.g. from “we need someone to volunteer to help with the Sunday School” to “there is an opportunity here for you to impact a child’s life”
• don’t appeal to people’s sense of duty; invite them to offer their gifts. I use the “Go with the guilt” principle. Sometimes, when people are asked to do something, they say ‘yes’, even though they would like to say ‘no’. They say ‘yes’ because they think that they will feel guilty for not helping out where needed. Then, they get angry and they resent the time and energy the task is taking. I invite them to ‘go with the guilt’ and just say ‘no’. Do what brings you joy and delight. 
• limit the number of ministries that each person can take on (one or two at the most: one major, one minor):  less assertive people often don’t offer their help if someone else is already doing it
• offer ‘apprenticeships’ — pair a less-experienced person with an experienced person so that the less-experienced person can learn and gain confidence in their capacity to do the task. In this way, ‘volunteers’ become ‘leaders’, their creativity is unleashed, commitment strengthened, confidence developed
• celebrate the work people are doing; help them find and articulate the holy significance of what they are doing. Send letters to them reflecting on the holy significance of what they are doing; invite people to share their experiences of God’s presence and work during worship, in newsletters, in special publications.

Adaptive changes

Turn the notion of ‘church’ upside down.

The model of ‘church’ we have inherited delivers projects and programmes that require ‘volunteers’ and committee members. People are recruited to fill positions that 

• may or not be clearly defined 
• may or may not have a clear end-date 
• may or may not fit their gifts, passions, interests or skills.

Missional church focuses on developing relationships — with God, with each other, with the ‘neighbourhood’. People aren’t recruited to fit the needs of the structures as much as the structures are shaped to nurture and develop the Spirit -driven gifts and calls of the people so that they are equipped for mission in the world. 

It assumes:

• the the mission is God’s and God will provide the gifts and people that are needed to fulfill the mission. (Develop your capacity to pray and trust Psalm 23:1 —  “The Lord is my Shepherd; I have everything I need” — not everything I want but everything I need to accomplish the work God has given me to do)
• the work of the church is to be open to what it is that the Spirit is asking of its people; to be open to where the Spirit is leading the people in mission. This means developing the capacities of the people for prayer, for listening and for discernment; developing eyes to see what God is supplying and the ways in which God is already working
• you need to develop the person before you develop the ministry. “Change happens at the pace of relationship”. The process/programme/project are only tools for developing the relationship with the people. This includes allowing people to ‘drop the ball’ and not rushing in to cover for them. If you always pick up the responsibilities that they drop, you infantilize them. The point is not to run a successful programme; the point is to develop people and relationships
• ministry happens through collaborative teams of ‘ministers’ (defined as all the baptized people of God) vs. hierarchical ministry offered by paid professional ministers who look for lay people to help them do the ministry or accomplish an agenda. I have been working with a group of lay people who are engaged in developing their capacity to respond to the Holy Spirit and who have been experimenting with new ways of participating in God’s mission. A member of their congregation said to them, “Why are you doing this? Isn’t that what we pay the minister to do? Why not leave it to her”. I reflected back to them, “You have been experiencing God’s presence and work in all sorts of relationships, both inside and outside the church. You have been struck with awe as you have been part of holy moments of God’s grace in other people’s lives and in your own. You get to be in sacred experiences. Why would you want to leave all of that to be only the experience of the ordered minister?”
• ‘failure’ will be expected. The Church is venturing into uncharted territory. We don’t know how to make ‘church’ work any more. We need to take one step at a time, to discern, to experiment, to reflect on what happens and learn from it. Create a culture in which experimenting and failing are expected as steps to learning what will work.

When you operate out of these assumptions, the focus shifts from accomplishing a task to growing people. Put the work into growing people in their capacity to listen for, discern and respond to the Holy Spirit’s leading. It may be slower than jumping into a new project. One group who spent 3 -6 months learning how to listen and discern (and grumbled about it the whole time) discovered that, when they did launch a project which they believed that the Holy Spirit was leading them to do, things fell into place more quickly and with a far greater effect than they had expected. Many more people showed up to help than they had expected. The project grew more quickly; far more lives were impacted.

Be ready to be surprised — 

by the ways in which God is working in people’s lives; 

by the ways in which God supplies what is needed for the ministry/mission;

by resurrection!

Give God plenty of room to use people in ways you cannot imagine 

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Leaders as Equippers of Ministers

As the church moves into a new paradigm, ordered ministry personnel find themselves confronting questions about their identity and role.

Many different models and metaphors have been used to describe the role and identity of ordered ministers. When the Church existed in Christendom, the ordered minister often operated as a chaplain — tending to the pastoral and spiritual needs of people who lived in a culture that helped the church shape and form Christians and a culture that saw itself as  operating on Christian ethical principles. We live in a very different culture now.

A model or metaphor for ordered ministers that is being reclaimed is that of equipper — one who equips the culture of the congregation such that all the baptized know that they are ministers both in the church gathered (ekklesia) and in the church scattered into the world (diaspora). The ordered minister is a ‘ministry developer’ who mentors, guides and educates the ministers of the congregation for their ministries. S/he is the team leader, the overseer of the joint work of the people.

This model requires different kinds of leadership from the chaplaincy model. Among other things, it requires leadership that is willing to upset the status quo that prevails in the environment of most congregations. Major shifts need to be made in the ways congregations govern themselves and in their delivery of pastoral care, faith formation, worship and proclamation. They must be structured for relationships instead of programmes: relationships of trust, of truth-telling, of forgiveness, of compassion. That work of re-shaping congregations will require ministers who are cultivating a deep identity in Christ rather than in the work that they do or in the acclaim of the congregation.

Leaders need different metrics for measuring what they are doing. Rather than counting bodies, buildings, and budgets, churches could count how many people have had their gifts identified and their vocation made clear. How many people in the congregation are equipped for ministry? How many lives have been transformed? What is the depth of community? Where are there signs of mutual love and support? Those metrics are relationship-based. They are developed through different skills and capacities than most clergy received in their formal theological training. They operate out of a different imagination than functions in most congregations. William Willimon suggests that the test for pastoral ministry is not, “How much have I been able to accomplish at my church?” but rather, “How much have I enabled the laity to accomplish at their church.” (William Willimon, “The Point of Pastoral Ministry: Lay Ministry”  March 26, 2007).

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The Changing Shape of the Church ~ The Way Forward (2)

The Triune God is already at work among us, making a new creation. We know from the scriptures that, if we are to see that work of God, we need to pay attention to what is happening at the margins, at the edges of what is ‘mainstream’. At the margins of the United Church of Canada, new patterns of being ‘church’, new patterns of leadership, and new patterns of ministry are taking shape. Many of them have been ‘flying under the radar’, quietly but courageously finding a way forward into God’s new creation. Sometimes they are at the margins because the realities of these faith communities do not fit the current structures and policies of the United Church. Sometimes not much attention is paid to them because they don’t look successful the way that we often measure success (numbers of people in the pews and dollars in the bank).

These faith communities at the margins are taking many forms: collaborative or regional ministries, house churches, lay-led congregations, base communities, fresh expressions, pub churches, congregations sharing technology and worship, intentional communities. In almost all of them, there is a turn toward reclaiming the ministry of all the baptized, although it may not always be expressed or experienced in such terms.

As new communities of faith emerge with a focus on being missional, there will be a need for other such experiments that are aimed at giving both individuals and local churches a new imagination and capacity to engage their neighbourhoods.

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The Changing Shape of the Church ~ The Way Forward

The report of the United Church’s Comprehensive Review Task Group, “United in God’s Work” recommended that the United Church “make a commitment to supporting new ministries and new forms of ministry through an initiative that tentatively would be called Chasing the Spirit” . It frames the purpose of this initiative in terms that come from the Missional Church conversation: “The task group believes the challenge, risk, and hope for the church lie in joining what God is already bringing to life”(p. 13).

The language of the missional church conversation is being heard in many places in the United Church. There is lots of talk about engaging the neighbourhoods around church buildings. However, the term ‘missional’ is often applied to congregational mission projects rather than connoting a genuine shift in identity: mission is seen as something the church does rather than what the church is.

The Missional Church conversation recognizes that the the Church does not have a mission; rather, it participates in God’s mission in the world. That mission does not just happen in distant places; the Holy Spirit is at work everywhere, including the neighbourhoods in which congregations exist. God works through the everyday, ordinary lives of the people of the church and through the congregation as a local expression of the Body of Christ. Baptism is a person’s ordination into ministry and mission. The church is not a ‘place’ where spiritual consumers come to get their needs met. It is an outpost of the reign of God from which disciples of Jesus are sent into the world. It understands itself to be both gathered and sent for the sake of God’s mission of reconciliation and grace. The conversation is not about, “What can we do to get more people into our church”; it is about, “Where is God already at work and in what ways are we being called to participate in that work?” As congregations make this shift in identity, the role of the ordered ministry personnel shifts from being “the minister” to being a leader who equips disciples of Jesus for their ministries in the world and who cultivates a congregational environment that “nourishes this work of discernment, experimentation, learning and engagement with God at work in their neighbourhoods” (The Missional Network website).

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The Changing Shape of the Church ~ Creative Experiments for New Realities

These posts on the changing shape of the church are the result of a project I began as an attempt to discern what supports would be most helpful for lay people who were providing ongoing worship leadership in congregations that either could not afford or could not attract ordered ministry personnel. What has become apparent is that that question is only one dimension of a much larger and more complex shift that is happening in the United Church of Canada. Across the country, increasing numbers of congregations are moving away from a clergy-centred model of church towards a model that recognizes that all who are baptized are called into ministry.

Communities of faith are seeking training and support for the ministry of the baptized in a number of different forms. There is, indeed, a growing number of congregations that are lay-led. They are looking for help for those people who are providing leadership in worship, in pastoral care, in spiritual formation and in outreach ministries. Other congregations find themselves able to afford to pay ordered ministry personnel for only part-time work and look to lay people to provide leadership in areas that would, in the past, have been done by ordered ministry personnel. They, too, are looking for ongoing training and support for these people. Even congregations that still operate with a more conventional model of church are looking for ways to engage their members more deeply in spiritual growth and practice. In all these situations, the ministries for which support is sought are largely focused on the ekklesia — the church gathered.

In some places, there is also a growing recognition that there is an equally urgent need for training and support for the baptized as they exercise their ministry in the diaspora — the church sent into the world. The United Church has given a lot of attention to the work of the church in the world as it addresses systemic injustice and oppression. However, there is room for richer and deeper support for the ministry of the baptized as they live out their faith — as individuals in the places where they live and work and play and as a community of faith in relationship to the neighbourhood in which it exists. As the Rev. David Shearman wrote in a recent post on his blog, “The local church [has been] generally focussed on making sure that worship happens, the sick are visited, the young are raised in the faith and at the end of the day, there is a good and convivial feeling.” Congregations are re-awakening to their calling to be externally focused and to engage their neighbourhoods. They are looking for resources to do that. This includes figuring out what ‘evangelism’ and ‘witness’ mean in a post-Christendom culture and for people for whom those words carry a lot of negative baggage.

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The Changing Shape of the Church ~ Soul Stretching Conversations (5)

In the posts that follow, I outline some of the core convictions from which I am working and about which I believe  “soul-stretching conversations” (Craig Dykstra and Dorothy Bass) need to happen. I recognize that these convictions will not be shared by many people in the United Church of Canada. I hope that they provide a starting point for the conversations since it is in the conversations that the way forward will be found. I also outline some of the implications of those convictions for the ways in which we train leadership in the church.

Conviction 5:     The Church is intended to be a community of ministers.

Christians know God as Trinity — a relational being who invites us to participate in that relationship.

The basic rhythm of church life is twofold: being gathered and being scattered. Worship gathers the community of disciples into God’s presence, receives their offerings of adoration and praise from the week that is past, nurtures them and sends them out into the world to live their adoration and praise in their daily lives, anticipating God’s new future. Churches that thrive in the future will be communities in which each person makes an active contribution, both in the church gathered and in the church dispersed in service. As much attention will need to be given to the formation of the so-called laity as to the clergy, to the church in diaspora as to the church in ekklesia.

The model of the church will need to shift to recognize the power, giftedness, and calling of all the baptized.

“Baptism and the ministry of the laity is the starting point for the ministry of the church to the wider community. Although ordained ministries have historically received greater attention, the ministry of all the baptized, sometimes called the ministry of the laity, is now the subject of widespread recognition. Importantly, newer occasional rites associated with baptism also include rites of blessing for the vocations of all the baptized, the ever-present and perennially overlooked complement to ordained ministry. Such attention to the ministry of the laity is crucial, for it is in the daily encounter of Christians with non-Christians, in life at the border, that significant missional activity occurs” (Robert D. Hawkins, “Occasional Services: Border Crossings,” in Thomas H. Schattauer, ed. Inside Out: Worship in an Age of Mission , p. 186)
In conversations about elevating the ministry of all the baptized in churches, two kinds of comments often surface. The ordered ministry state that they have a hard time getting the people of the congregation to make commitments to serve on committees and to attend programmes. The people of the church indicate that they do not feel qualified or adequate for the tasks that they are asked to do, that meetings are not a good use of their limited time, and that they are they are weary from taking care of the ‘business’ of being the church. They are tired of expending all their energy on fundraisers and on the administration of the structures. They are yearning to attend to the nurture of their souls. They are often strangers to basic Christian practices but, when they experience them, find that the practices feed their souls. They want their churches to be places of transformation: places where they themselves experience the transforming, liberating power of Jesus Christ and places where they are trained to invite others to experience that same transforming power.

Ed Stetzer has likened the church to a “bear fed by tourists . . . What happens when you feed the bear is eventually it can’t fend for itself.” The models of church and of ministry that are operative in most churches leaves most of the power in the hands of the paid ministers. The rest of the congregation, restricted from exercising real ministry, becomes dependent and weak. Paid ministry personnel need to be given authority to give their authority away to the rest of the congregation’s ministers. The baptized need to be commissioned to expressions of ministry that really matter — the kinds of ministries that will challenge them so deeply that they will be compelled to pray, to search the scriptures, to seek out the companionship of others in order to find the help they need to live into their ministry. “When people are grounded in spiritual practices and are growing in faith, they are more willing to take up the exercise of their spiritual gifts and calling” (from a conversation with Rev. Dr. Richard Bott).

Some Implications for Leadership Training

A) The leaders of a church will need to be trained to equip others for ministry, helping the  church to be the church. Their work will be less about providing chaplaincy services and more about cultivating environment where all the people of God thrive. They will need to be trained in cultivating an environment where each person knows that s/he is indispensable to the Body of Christ. They will need to stop trying to rescue the church by working harder when others do not step up. They will need to trust that a congregation’s mission endeavours will develop organically, i.e. from the callings and passions and commitments of the people.
B) Leaders will need to be actively engaged in apprenticeship in Christian practices. Training for leadership will need to include a strong emphasis on formation in what the scriptures call ‘holiness’, i.e. formation in spirt, character, and virtue. It will include training in faithful use of power and in exercising creative authority.

C) Congregational leadership will need to develop the capacity to nurture structures that help people discern their callings and the gifts that the Spirit has given for those callings. They will need coaching in trusting and empowering people to own their ministries and their identity as God’s ambassadors. Such participatory leadership cultivates a community that comes together to discern their participation in God’s mission. Elizabeth O’Connor describes such a community at Church of the Savior in Washington, D. C.: “Everyone was needed and everyone was aware of the point at which he was needed” (Elizabeth O’Connor, Call to Commitment: The Story of the Church of the Savior, Washington, D. C., p. 43.)

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These days, many people are looking for hands-on-ministry. They are not interested in being passive consumers in a church that operates out of a solo-minister model. They want to participate. More than that, they want to participate in activities that emerge organically, from the grassroots, not in activities that are dreamed up by someone else and managed from the top down. Leadership for such people consists of participatory teams. Most United Church ministers have not been trained in team leadership. They do not know how to do it. There will need to be ongoing training provided for ordered ministry personnel who want to move their congregations toward ‘every-member ministry’.

There seems to be very little attention given to training people for participatory team leadership in the United Church of Canada. One possible exception is the Camino D’Emaus congregation in Quebec. This congregation includes five ‘base communities’ which meet weekly in addition to the Sunday worship services. These base communities are located in their neighbourhoods and each one has a different focus. Each gathering includes a spiritual dimension; for example, a sharing dialogue on biblical passages and life experiences. They are lay-led. The animators, or lay leaders, of these communities are part of the parish council. The church provides very intentional leadership training once a week. The focus is on “popular education” rather than academic. This is not to say that the quality of the training is not high. Rather, it is based in liberation theology’s model of praxis and reflection. Through participation and discussion, the participants develop their faith and leadership skills.

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The Changing Shape of the Church ~ Soul Stretching Conversations (4)

In the posts that follow, I outline some of the core convictions from which I am working and about which I believe  “soul-stretching conversations” (Craig Dykstra and Dorothy Bass) need to happen. I recognize that these convictions will not be shared by many people in the United Church of Canada. I hope that they provide a starting point for the conversations since it is in the conversations that the way forward will be found. I also outline some of the implications of those convictions for the ways in which we train leadership in the church.

Conviction 4:   The Church is missionary in its very essence.

The Church is easily drawn into many good and worthwhile endeavours. However, just as facing death causes a person to examine and re-set priorities, so the church in our time is being drawn back to basics. It is a time for identifying what the essentials are and for stripping away that which is extraneous. In a time of vast changes, what must be preserved and what is it that the church must let go of? In its most elemental form, what makes a church the church?

William Willimon, in Pastor, suggests that, in its most elemental form, what makes the church the church is the presence of the living Christ. Mark Allen Powell, in the introduction to  A New and Right Spirit says that “the mission of the Church is simply to love Jesus Christ. Everything else is just strategy” (p. viii). Tom Bandy pushes congregations further to identify, “What is it about your experience of Jesus Christ that the community around you cannot live without?”

Another way to approach the conversation is to ask, “What are the essential elements that make up the church?” University Hill United Church identifies five marks of the church: worship, service, community, teaching, proclamation.

Old Testament scholar Walter Brueggemann tells the story of an Anglican diocese in British Columbia. Its involvement in Residential Schools and the subsequent settlements of lawsuits for abuse suffered by aboriginal children at those schools led it to declare bankruptcy. At a news conference following the declaration, the bishop of the diocese was asked what the future of the church might be. He said, “We have a book, a towel, a table and a cup. We have what we need.” (http://time.com/110732/sermon-series-getting-smashed-for-jesus/)

Nadia Bolz-Weber, pastor at The House for all Sinners and Saints, identifies the essentials in her sermon, “Stop Saying that the Church is Dying”: You know what the culture around us will NEVER do? Preach the Gospel, administer the sacraments and proclaim forgiveness of sins. You know why? That’s OUR job. That’s our main job and while we are free as the church, to participate in any number of other activities in the world that seem bigger and more impressive let’s remember:  We are those who have been, and continue to be, entrusted with nothing less than the Gospel.”

Roland Allen, in Missionary Methods, looks at the Apostle Paul’s pattern for establishing churches and identifies that only four things were deemed necessary: “a tradition or elementary Creed, the Sacraments of Baptism and the Holy Communion, Orders and the Holy Scriptures.” (chapter 4, e-book)

The Protestant Reformation of the sixteenth century produced a number of definitions of the church. The most famous one is found in “the (Lutheran) Augsburg Confession of 1530. Its Article VII describes the church according to two distinguishing marks, namely as ‘the assembly  of saints in which the gospel is taught purely and the sacraments are administered rightly’”.   David Bosch has pointed out that such a definition deals only with what happens within the assembly of the church, not with its calling in the world. Loren Mead, author of The Once and Future Church, “argues that the ‘crisis’ the church faces has to do with the church’s relationship to its ‘mission’. . . . there is something fundamentally flawed about the way the church does church” (quoted in A New and Right Spirit, p. 6).

The churches that are finding their way through this time of transformation are giving fresh attention to their calling in the world. Congregations that had drifted into being not much more chaplaincies or social clubs for their own members are reconnecting with their neighbourhoods. Some are experimenting with new expression of church that reach out beyond their own comfort zones. Some are engaging in the “missional church” conversation: listening to people outside the church; looking for ways to be active participants in the ‘new thing’ that the Spirit is doing.

The God who creates the Church is a God who is on mission in the world. The Trinitarian God is a sending God — the Father sending the Son; the Son sending the Spirit; God sending God’s people into the world. The Church is missionary in its very essence.

Some Implications for Leadership Training

A) Most ordered ministry personnel are not equipped to lead a church that understands itself as primarily missional — as existing for the sake of people beyond its own membership. Churches are largely shaped by a consumer mindset. Christendom models of church required clergy who were trained to provide good service to their members and to keep those members satisfied. What is needed now are leaders of faith communities who are equipped to cultivate a church environment where the participants are developing the capacity to discern where the Holy Spirit is at work in their neighbourhoods and are learning to ‘give account for the hope that is in them’ (1 Peter 3:15) to other people who do not share their faith commitments.

B)  The Church’s faith is an incarnational faith — lived out in the concrete realities of the neighbourhoods in which the churches exist. Since many communities are increasingly diverse, training for leadership will need to include training in cross-cultural realities and radical hospitality.

C)  Additionally, since the mission for such communities will be informed by the contexts in which they exist, and therefore will be very diverse, training for leadership will probably be mostly localized. Modernism privileged methods that were universal and standardized. In such a context, seminaries and training centres could be far removed from the local churches in which their graduates would served. It was assumed that the training provided in one place would be easily transferrable into any congregation across the country. This was never true: rural churches have known for many years that ‘national’ programmes and standards were much more applicable to city churches than to rural ones. Whatever training for leadership emerges to serve churches of the future will need to be far more localized and organic, growing out of the specific contexts in which churches are serving. Local congregations will need to become sites for leadership training.

D) Communities of faith will need to adopt an identity as learning communities. Leaders will need to be trained in cultivating churches that are discipling communities. The leaders themselves will need to provide a deep grounding in the traditions of the Church so that they can lead people in working with the traditions imaginatively and creatively. The leaders will also need to develop skills and capacities for passing that tradition on to the participants in the church. Frequently, leaders have offered Bible Studies or Study Groups but few people attend; often, those who do sign up stop attending after a session or two. Leaders will need to know: What are the attributes of the kinds of studies that people do want to participate in? What are different methods of delivering the information?

E) Discerning the Spirit’s leading requires a capacity for imagination. As Walter Brueggemann points out, the prophets in the First Testament were mostly poets — helping people break free from the status quo by helping them imagine that things could be different. Many leaders will need guidance in working creatively and imaginatively. Congregations will need to be places that curate the arts as a way of helping people pay attention to what is happening around them.

F)  A return to the essentials, to the basics, of Christian community will mean that new expressions of ‘church’ will have the freedom to emerge without being burdened with extraneous activities and requirements. If the church is essentially missionary in its nature, leadership within the churches will need training in birthing new churches and in equipping the people for evangelism that is authentic to their experience of faith. Doing church the way it has been done will not produce new results. Planting, birthing, new churches requires a different set of skills and capacities. Leaders will also need to learn how to train ‘missionaries’, who engage their neighbourhoods in appropriate ways which reflect the hospitality and humility, love and grace of Jesus Christ.

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The Changing Shape of the Church ~ Soul Stretching Conversations (2)

In the posts that follow, I outline some of the core convictions from which I am working and about which I believe  “soul-stretching conversations” (Craig Dykstra and Dorothy Bass) need to happen. I recognize that these convictions will not be shared by many people in the United Church of Canada. I hope that they provide a starting point for the conversations since it is in the conversations that the way forward will be found. I also outline some of the implications of those convictions for the ways in which we train leadership in the church.

Conviction #2:        The Church is the result of what God did on Easter morning. When God raised Jesus from the dead, God made a new creation (2 Corinthians 5: 17). The Church is a servant, witness, and sign (Lesslie Newbigin)  of the new creation.

God is doing in and through the Church what God did in Jesus’ resurrection: confronting and  overcoming the powers of suffering, death and evil; bringing new life, healing and reconciliation in the midst of brokenness; creating new futures where none seem possible.

This means that the Church is able to face suffering and tragedy with authentic hope. It is this hope that it offers to the world.

The book A New and Right Spirit tells the story of Abiding Hope Lutheran Church in Littleton, Colorado. In April 1999, the congregation found itself dealing with the aftermath of the Columbine High School massacres. Its pastor, Rick Barger, wrote, “On this night we did not have answers that could provide any meaning or explanation for the carnage and evil that had engulfed the high school the day before. We offered no quick fix for the pain and the huge aching holes in all our hearts. All we had to offer was a story — the story of Jesus Christ, the one who himself was victimized and suffered an awful death, and yet is now raised from the dead. . . . the gathered church on this night left the deals, causes and spiritual helps to others and instead looked death in the face, named the reality for what it was, and offered God” (p. 72)

The congregation of Abiding Hope understands itself as stewards of God’s story. “God’s story tells us what God is up to, and God is up to the work of transformation . . . Transformation happens because God is good and is still at work reconciling the world through Christ.” The congregation understands “its calling to be an authentic witness to the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ . . . the congregation [decided it] would stand with the poor, the powerless, and the disenfranchised with the compassion of Christ that has no limits or boundaries” (p. 22)

In the introduction to the book, Mark Powell says that “what happens at Abiding Hope every Sunday of the year seems to be the result of the resurrection. . .[the people]  do not gather to hear inspiring sermons or to experience lively worship or to learn more about the faith or to enjoy fellowship with other believers or to get their spiritual needs met in any number of other ways (though of course any or all of those things might happen). They gather because God raised Jesus from the dead” (p. 41)

The mission of the Church is to “practice resurrection” (Eugene Peterson) . The Church gets to join in the transformation that God is effecting in our midst through the risen Christ and the power of the Holy Spirit. This means that, even as some forms of the church are disappearing, the Church is not disappearing. God is still at work, bringing resurrection in unexpected ways and unexpected places. Resurrection is radical transformation. The Church lives expectantly, alert for signs that God is on the premises. Churches will need to expend less energy on trying to fix the current model of church and more energy on becoming communities that are capable of discerning the life-giving work of the Spirit when it looks very different from what they are used to. They will need to expend more energy on becoming the kinds of communities that are willing to risk death (relinquishment, letting go) so as to be free to embrace the new work of the Spirit with boldness.

Some Implications for Leadership Training

A) In a church that is the result of the world-changing action of God at Easter, the practice of baptism will need to stop being merely a sentimental cultural ritual marking a life passage. Leaders and congregations will need a robust theology of baptism as the gateway to a way of life in which one is dying and being raised with Christ. They will need resources for cultivating a “baptized and baptizing community”. “The movement to this life is adaptive, losing life — losing our schemes, deals, causes, and whatever else the world tells us we must have in order for our lives to be significant and meaningful — and finding it by walking in a new and true story. This movement is not easy. The Jesus who calls us into this movement did not first do so without great peril. It cost him his life” (Barger, pp. 33-34)

B) In a culture where despair is rampant, leaders will need deep grounding in the biblical narratives that tell how the community of faith faces tragedy with hope. They will need to draw richly and deeply from the scriptures and from the Christian tradition to provide resources for dealing with grief, lament, confession, and suffering in a culture that seeks to avoid any suffering — what theologian Douglas John Hall has called an “officially optimistic society”. They will need to engage meaningfully with a theology of the cross and the healing and hope it offers.

C) The transitions caused by the Spirit’s work of resurrection are disruptive. Leaders will need to be trained in navigating those transitions. They will need to be mentored by courageous saints who have led God’s people in similarly conflicted times.

D) The church, like any organization, has tended to favour those who will “work diligently in and for the organization, under the direction of those responsible for the organization” (Roland Allen, The Spontaneous Expansion of the Church and the Causes that Hinder It )

Churches are often filled with people addicted to ‘non-life-change.’ Nevertheless, the resurrection power of God is often breaking out of the rules imposed by churches and breaking through the resistance of anxious people. The training systems of the church will need to encourage creativity in its leaders, instead of trying to rein in the people who do not fit the system or pushing them to the margins. Accountability will be best exercised at the local level, among the people who must live with the decisions and actions of their leaders. Congregations will need training in faithful ways of holding its leadership to accountability while making room for failure.

E) Since what is being asked of congregations is to make a massive shift of the paradigm out of which they operate, leaders will need to be trained in adaptive leadership. For some leaders in our churches, this will require a shift in focus from doing the tasks of congregational leadership to cultivating the eco-system of the congregation. For others, it will mean not only learning new tasks but also cultivating a firmly grounded spirituality that is free to be creative with the tradition.

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The Changing Shape of the Church ~ Soul Stretching Conversations

In the posts that follow, I outline some of the core convictions from which I am working and about which I believe  “soul-stretching conversations” (Craig Dykstra and Dorothy Bass) need to happen. I recognize that these convictions will not be shared by many people in the United Church of Canada. I hope that they provide a starting point for the conversations since it is in the conversations that the way forward will be found. I also outline some of the implications of those convictions for the ways in which we train leadership in the church.

First Conviction:     The Church is first and foremost God’s creation and God’s gift. The Church does not belong to us. We do not create the Church. The Church is a gift of God’s grace into which we enter and in which we participate.

When congregations are struggling to survive and when all their attempts to ‘fix’ what is wrong with them do not produce the expected results, it is liberating to remember that the Church is God’s idea before it is ours. In response to God’s grace, we may offer what we are and what we have for the Church’s life and work but, ultimately, the Church’s life and future are in God’s hands. Many years ago, in another time of crisis in the Church, the Protestant Reformer, Martin Luther, wrote, “We are not the church’s guardians . . . if it were up to us the church would perish before our eyes, and we together with it. But it is another who obviously preserves both the church and us” (Martin Luther’s Basic Theological Writings).

Gordon Cosby was the founding minister of the Church of the Savior in Washington D. C. He was often asked, “What do you think the future of the church is?” He would answer, “I have never had a helpful answer to that question. Have no idea. I do not know what the judgments of God are or what will be the breakthroughs of God’s power. . .  I do not need the church to have a visible or successful future in order for me to feel safe as a person. I’m glad to leave it to God’s sovereignty. It is his church —not mine”  ( Elizabeth O’Connor, Servant Leaders, Servant Structures , p. 31).

The Church exists not because of what we do or don’t do. The Church exists because God has chosen to work in and through ordinary people who have been commandeered by the risen Christ and gifted by the Holy Spirit to participate in the Triune God’s work in the world. This conviction frees congregations from focusing on survival. Trusting in God’s care, they can get on with what they are called to be: witnesses in word and deed to the grace and love of the Triune God who is revealed in Jesus Christ through the power of the Holy Spirit. This means that churches can engage people as people whom God loves and in whose lives the Holy Spirit is already at work. They are set free from treating them as ‘potential new church members’ who will help to fill the pews and balance the budget.

Some Implications for Leadership Training

A) Part of the weariness in our churches is the result of people being uprooted from the source of their life and energy. There is a difference between knowing about God and knowing God; between knowing doctrine and knowing the One to whom the doctrine points; between talking about God and talking to God. “If Jesus is to be anything more than another name, another historical mythic figure for us; if he is to become in any sense “Christ,” “Saviour,” “Lord”; if his name and his story are to arouse in us anything life ‘faith’, then we shall have to encounter him and not merely some ideas about him” (Douglas John Hall, “We Would See Jesus”, The Living Pulpit, Inc., 2005).

In a seminar on preaching, a participant was asked, “Do you know ‘The Lord is my Shepherd’?” He replied, “Yes, I know the psalm. I also know the Shepherd.”

In The Contemplative Pastor, Eugene Peterson writes about three types of language: “Language I is the language of intimacy and relationship . . . Language II is the language of information . . . Language III is the language of motivation. . .  Languages II and III are clearly the ascendant languages in our culture . . . Meanwhile Language I, the language of intimacy, the language that develops relationships of trust and hope and understanding, languishes . . . Prayer is Language I. It is not language about God or the faith; it is not language in the service of God and the faith; it is language to and with God” (pp. 91ff).  Training for leaders will need to include a strong focus on resources and practices that help them attend to God, not just talk about God. It will need to guide them in developing their spiritual lives so that they have spirits that are adequate for receiving God’s truth and life. There is a rich and ancient tradition in the Church of spiritual leaders who were wise in the ways of prayer and in the disciplines of attending to God. Leaders will need to be introduced to these guides and immersed in their practices.
B)  The United Church has largely been focused on the horizontal dimension of Christian life — putting faith into action. Less attention has been paid to the vertical dimension: to who God is. In many congregations, the worship of God has played a secondary role to the action of the participants: “God has no hands but our hands”. If the Church is first and foremost about what God does, then the worship of God is at centre of congregational life. Worship services are the primary corporate events where the community attends to the Triune God who is the source of its life and its destiny. The Holy Spirit gathers the church together to encounter God in the community of Christ’s people and sends the church out to encounter God in the world that God loves. Training for worship leadership will need to attend to the basics of what makes for vital and authentic worship of the Triune God. Worship will need to be something more than ‘what people endure in order to get to the coffee hour’. Worship will need to provide people a way to enter more deeply into the mystery of God and of God’s grace and love.

C) Worship of the triune God at centre of a congregation’s life puts control into God’s hands. This is uncomfortable for churches that are shaped by Modernism with its focus on control and management. Faith in the triune God involves deep trust in the midst of ambiguity. Peterson describes it this way: “All is gift. Grace is everywhere. God in Christ is actively doing for and in us everything involved in the practice of resurrection So what is there left for us to do? Receive. That is our primary response if we are to find ourselves no longer lost in the cosmos but at home in it. For the most part, receptivity is a learned response. Receive the gift” (Eugene Peterson, Practice Resurrection: a conversation on growing up in Christ , p. 68).
Living by the grace of God involves a radical shift of imagination. Vital, robust worship immerses people in Christ’s “grace-sovereign country” (Romans 6:5, The Message) where they are formed to trust in God. Leadership development will focus on curating worship services where people practice receiving the grace of God as well as responding to that grace with lives of suffering love and service.

 

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The Changing Shape of the Church ~ Soul Stretching Conversations

One of the challenges that the United Church of Canada faces in the pioneering task that is before it is that it has no clear consensus as to what the gospel is. Within the denomination, there is a wide range of convictions about the basics of Christian faith and about the authority of the scriptures to guide us. There is great diversity in convictions about what the church is and about what its mission is. In the past, the United Church has prided itself on its capacity to hold differences within its unity. It is already evident that the churches that are emerging in this new context are going to exhibit even greater diversity than in the past. The denomination may find that the current upheavals and uncertainties will lead it to ask if such a lack of consensus is sustainable. Will the pressures on the structures of the denomination reveal deep differences that cannot hold together?

In such a time as this, it may be that a consensus about convictions is not possible. What may be called for are what Craig Dykstra and Dorothy Bass have called “soul-stretching conversations” (“Times of Yearning, Practices of Faith” in Practicing our Faith:  A Way of Life for a Searching People, ed. Dorothy C. Bass, p. 7).

Deep conversations are needed to discern what God’s Spirit is doing in this changed landscape. Those conversations will need to be with God (through God’s story and through prayer), with the new context in which churches live, and with each other.  The church conversations will be rooted in the basics of faith: gospel, church, scripture, mission, discipleship, evangelism, etc. The convictions that shape those basics will, in turn, shape the directions the church takes as it seeks to discern the kind of training that its leadership will need.

In the posts that follow, I outline some of the core convictions from which I am working and about which I believe those “soul-stretching conversations” need to happen. I recognize that these convictions will not be shared by many people in the United Church. I hope that they provide a starting point for the conversations since it is in the conversations that the way forward will be found. I also outline some of the implications of those convictions for the ways in which we train leadership in the church.

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