Tag Archives: Alban Institute

A denomination is dying near you

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The Episcopal Cafe had this headline a couple of weeks back, but it referred to the Presbyterian Church of the USA, from an article that appeared in Christian Century.

One of the comments on the Episcopal Cafe’s post pointed out that there had been many articles about the “dying church” in recent months on the Cafe.

There’s another one today, written by George Clifford. Clifford gives all of the statistics: the high percentage of over-60s in our pews and on our membership lists; the number of churches in small towns or rural areas where population is declining; the overall decline in Average Sunday Attendance.

But he also has some hopeful things to say, including this:

Yet, we in TEC have some cause for hope. The Episcopal congregations most likely to have experienced numerical growth in the past decade are large and very liberal congregations, according to the 2010 Faith Communities Today Survey.

Clifford argues that perhaps the most important key to growth is creating a vision and agenda for change, something we don’t work on very much. Instead, our attention seems focused on organizational and structural issues.

I read his piece shortly after reading the weekly email from the Alban Institute, which has some very similar things to say in an essay entitled Determining Ideal Board Size. The author, Susan Beaumont, begins with the observation that:

Effective boards in every size congregation must tend to three types of work: fiduciary (tending to the stewardship of tangible assets), strategic (working to set the congregation’s priorities and seeing that resources are being deployed in accordance with those priorities) and generative (problem framing and sense making about the shifting environment of the congregation).

The important takeaway from both her article and Clifford’s is the need for strategic and visionary thinking. We, clergy and lay leadership, often get so bogged down in the day-to-day running of the church, that we have no time or energy to think creatively about the future and how we need to change to meet the needs of a changing world.

Congregational Development Oddities

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New Rectors and Vicars in the Diocese of Milwaukee participate in Fresh Start, a nationwide program that seeks to help us make the transition into our new ministries. It’s a wonderful opportunity to develop relationships with other clergy in the diocese, to create camaraderie and to share experiences. But of course there is also programmatic stuff.

I have learned a great deal from congregational development gurus over the years and I’m a big fan of the Alban Institute but occasionally there are things that simply seem misguided or flat-out wrong. Today we did something that seemed very much the latter to me.

We were given two questions on which to plot our responses from 1-10. The first was a choice between “The only way to know God is in a one-on-one, direct relationship” and “The only way to know God is in the midst of God’s people.” So far so good.

The second set of alternatives was between “The end and purpose of life is so to live that I am reunited with God in my death” and “The end and purpose of life is to participate with brothers and sisters in building a human society of shalom, where peace and justice and love reign.”

The problem for me was the latter alternative. No mention of God there at all, and indeed in the graphic we later saw, that end of the axis was described as “secular.”

Now, I have no doubt that many people would have a problem with that second alternative. But the vision of the “Kingdom of God” articulated by Jesus was just that, a kingdom, reign, where God was present, and human community was also a crucial part. It may be that some clergy might be comfortable with a vision of a “human community of shalom” that excluded God, but I’m not sure why they would stay in the business.

The grid is from the work of Loren Mead. No doubt there is something in what he was trying to get at, but even in the examples he used, comparing Billy Graham and Martin Luther King, using MLK as someone who used the “secular style” seems to me misguided. King may have worked in the public  sphere, but his “style” and language were theological and religious.  The copyright date on the material is 1994, and I’m curious whether it reflects an different era.