Tough Questions & Thoughts

            As we turned out for a Saturday morning of power washing, garland hanging, and pageant practicing, I experienced the joy of God’s people working together.  I also found myself once again pondering questions that Cocoa Pres must face.  (I say, “must face,” but I a reminded of Lucy in the Charlie Brown comic strip saying that there is no problem so big that I cannot avoid it!)

            The questions spin out of one – how do we be a viable congregation?  As we covered one end of the campus to the other one had to wonder, how do we keep up this aging facility when we are a congregation getting smaller in numbers and older in years?  Will a pastor hired just part-time turn our decline around?  Will a pastor hired full-time turn our decline around?  If we don’t turn it around, we are in a hospice mode. 

            To maintain the facility, hire staff, and run programs we need cash.  That means revenue streams having to do with members – more $$ out of the members we have, more members and $$ out of them, or a combination of the two.  That means revenue streams having to do with income generation by renting or selling – renting part of the facility to another congregation trying to get started or needing more space, selling more land, running a thrift shop, opening a tea room, putting in a boat and rv storage area, …. 

            We easily say that we need to minister to the neighborhood and that is absolutely true.  However, our ministry needs also to lead to supplying us with sustaining members.  Otherwise we give away and continue to shrink and age as a congregation.  (Now I have more than once travelled to be a part of a church seriously involved in mission in their community.  So the flag that needs to be waved is, “Come join us as we are a group of people making a serious difference in our community.”  To do the ministry without getting sustaining members or to say we are doing the ministry when we are not, won’t cut it.)

            The other part of cash is, of course, cutting expenses.  There are soft and hard expenses.  Hard ones are set, like the insurance we carry on the property.  Soft ones are cut-able, like staff.  We can put services into Flanniken Hall to reduce electricity expenses.  We can go to volunteers for custodial, landscaping, and secretarial services.  
            Again lower expenses, selling property, increasing cash by micro-business enterprises … without growing the congregation just means being able to tread water longer.  Growing the congregation may mean, and this is ok, growing only at a rate that replenishes typical losses (members dying, moving, drifting away, or switching churches).   But if it is less than a replenish rate (typically 10% of the congregation's size), a trendline of decline can be plotted to a congregation’s expiration date. 

            Sounds gloomy? There are other ideas that can go on the table – merging with another church, selling the property and moving someplace where people like us can grow more easily, making the end of our life as Cocoa as we know it a giving ourselves away to become an African American or Hispanic congregation of the Presbyterian flavor or some other denomination all together.