Fun and Thought

                                                  This guy is about to have a bad day!  

Churches measure many things.  One is seating capacity.  Our sanctuary seats 400.  But let's talking about sending capacity.  Not only how many rear ends we can get in a pew but how many people we can get into the world telling and showing the reign of Jesus Christ.  We definitely want people to come to church.  We also want church members to go to people.  Not one or the other but both and.  

I like this very short, very simple, very helpful video that is a part of this topic.  Please watch it.  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=arxfLK_sd68

Holy Spirit & Julie Andrews

Bring up the Holy Spirit and we can get into hocus pocus pretty quickly.  Not that the Holy Spirit doesn't have some of that.  But there's a lot of the Holy Spirit that is supernatural in a mundane sort of way.  For example, three big chapters on the Holy Spirit are in I Corinthians 12-14.  Note that the famous chapter on love, chapter 13, is in the middle of that.  So rather than hocus pocus we have living in self-giving love as being full of the Holy Spirit.  

As Americans we don't realize it, the way fish don't realize they are in water, until we are in other cultures, or they are commenting on ours, that we are highly individual based in our outlook.  When it comes to the Holy Spirit the first way we think of it is how does he fill me?  In the Bible, however, while filling me is legitimate, an equivalent or greater concern is how the Holy Spirit fills us.  Ie, the group, the congregation.  

I got to thinking about how Julie Andrews in the Sound of Music story entered an unruly and stern family.  Let's throw in that the bathrooms were dirty and the children said self-pitying things all the time.  Or the children said uncharitable things about others.  She, of course, would love and discipline and model and sing.  The family members might not like her saying, "No," to them or saying, "No more of that," to them.  They might not like being sent to their rooms because they continued.  But eventually Julie Andrews got the sloppiness out, the encouraging in, and love flowing.  

The Holy Spirit in a congregation is the same way.  He might help the session send someone to their room.  That doesn't sound very spiritual, does it?  But it is.  He might help one member say to another member, "We don't talk that way in this church family."  He might help us prize encouragement.  He might help us hug and smile at everyone in the church family.  He might help us be brave or to sing.  He might be a lot like Julie Andrews in the Von Trapp family.  

Institution's Sake??

I am a servant of Jesus.  I care more about people's relationship with him than with the church.  I've heard people talk about their relationship with the church and never mention Jesus.  As a pastor I have cared about people sitting in the pews and let up on people who aren't following Christ becoming followers.  Too many of us have been a part of churches that transferred sheep amongst themselves rather than making new sheep.  So I am squeamish about simply trying to preserve the institution.  It can be like preserving the body and not caring about health.  If, however, you care about health, you'll preserve the body.  Right?

I will try to overcome my squeamishness and wonder if we shouldn't focus on making members.  Public radio has pledge drives.  Other organizations have member drives.  A base of members makes possible the mission.

I ponder so many of our good outreach and mission projects.  We're not giving away the farm at all.  But we give a lot of efforts to that which will not garner us sustaining members.  A thrift shop, a clothes pantry, a hefty program for helping feed the hungry by gleaning ... all very good.  All take our time and money and energy.  Some may join us because we care about others.  Hurray!  May it be so.  Yet a 100 member congregation spends a lot of itself doing a pantry for the poor, and not that they shouldn't, but those poor are not recruited as members.  If they were, they probably are so different socio-economically that they wouldn't join.  Meanwhile, the 100 member church shrinks to 90 to 80 to ... and then there's no more food pantry period.

Somewhere along the line we have to ask supremely, "Are we making more disciples?"  Too many of us aren't.  Me included.  And more mundanely and more in the sense of (yucky?) institutional preservation we have to ask, "What are we doing to get new members??"

We're doing this committee, that event, this renovation, this teaching series, this pot luck ... and none of them with the ask, "How can we leverage this for getting new members?"  Or none with the ask, "How does spending ourselves on this occupy us so that we don't have to do the perhaps harder task of finding new members?"

Good luck to us all.  Me included.

If Not Me, Who? If Not Now, When?

If not me, who?  If not now, when?  Pretty pointed questions.  Not that you couldn't say, "Not me, that guy Joe looks good."  Or not that you couldn't say, "Yes, me, but not until next year."  What I am thinking about, however, is, for example, inviting others to church.  There are some issues that are, in the old way of putting it, very important but not urgent.  And the urgent by its nature gets taken up while the important gets put off.  If we are not thinking carefully about all this, it isn't hard to say something that you know is important can be done by someone else and can be done tomorrow.  Of course, until there is no one else and there is no tomorrow.

I was thinking the other day about asking elders to say in the next session meeting who they were going to ask to come to church with them on Easter.  Something in me said, "That'd be putting them on the spot and you can't do that."  Then I thought, "Why?"  What makes that out of bounds?  Who created a value that would say sharing about who you are inviting to church would be putting someone on the spot?  If you were in Toastmasters to improve your speaking ability, someone would surely ask about what date you were signing up for to deliver your speech.  If you were in a church to improve your and others' relationship with God, and inviting them to church would improve your and others' relationship with God, someone would surely ask about when you were bringing whom.  Such invitations to share would help us from letting this important thing be done by someone else, some other day.

Hey, and I need someone to ask me, who are you bringing on Easter?  Hey, and I need someone to ask me, "If not you, who?"  "If not now, when?"

Coworking Space?

In my last blog I mentioned the innovation factor that happens when city blocks are diverse and short.  People, different kinds of people, end up walking and mixing.  Then there is through that interaction a combustion of ideas and partnerships.  And that’s why churches as they measure their health ought to consider as one of their factors their “mix” – especially new members and tenured members, young and old.

USA Today featured Atlanta amongst its articles this week.  Atlanta is becoming a high tech center.  One of the signs of that was how a Coworking space dedicated to high tech sold out even before it was finished. 

Coworking?  It is an open office and people bring in their desks plus computers.  There’s a common coffee pot and drinking fountain.  There’s a common kitchenette.  There’s whatever the “tenants” and the developers come up with that they want to have in common.  But it is space where people under a theme (like, in this case, tech) come together to do their own private work.  But they talk on the way in.  They meet each other and catch lunch together.  One ends up resourcing the other.

It could happen in a chat room or through Linked In.  But there’s something in the face-to-face and serendipity that I suspect can’t be duplicated virtually. 

The thought I had pop up as I read about Coworking Space was how churches could be leaner and brighter if they had coworking space.  In any community draw a radius of three miles and you will find five or ten churches most likely.  Imagine one office centrally located with shared copier, curriculum, coffee pot, secretarial pool, coop purchasing power, library, …. The list of cost saving and … here’s the point … cross fertilizing opportunities is big. 

I’m a Presbyterian and that’s somewhere in our idea of connectionalism.  Problem is we’re spread a pretty good distance and we’re all in the same camp.  Coworking in tighter geographical but broader denominational circles could be pretty exciting for Christ and his kingdom. 

Medici

MEDICI

I’m not sure where I read it.  I think it might have been THE MEDICI EFFECT.  The theme was innovation and what I found fascinating was that the most creative centers were city sections where the city blocks were not long and had a mixture of business tenants.  By mixture what they meant was that some were in little, tiny offices and some were in big, giant ones; some were established and had been there for several years and others were new and had been there only several months.  Some did high end business and some did low end.  Some did art.  Some, food.  Some, computers. 

Because of the mix and layout, people walked.  The people who walked were different – wearing suits, wearing t-shirts, business comfortable, business hungry, and so on.  They passed each other’s stores.  They stood at the traffic lights together.  They chatted together at the hot-dog vendor. 

With long blocks people didn’t walk.  When the tenants were all big law firms they just wore suits and nobody went to the hot-dog vendor.  When the tenants were all start-ups in storefronts there wasn’t really much cash floating around.  What the mix and layout did was bring new and old, lean and fat, this outlook and that expertise, this need and that asset all together. 

How could churches get this cross pollination going?  If most of the members have belonged for three years or more, there's not much pollination.  If most of the leadership is what it was five years ago, there's not much pollination.  But diagnosing "not much pollination" or prescribing "pollination" is not as easy as saying how it happens.  How can it happen in churches?  Let's talk.

The Way We Do It Here

I grew up in a military family and one of the features of that life is moving.  We moved every couple of years.  What's behind moving personnel?  Is it just filling vacancies as when someone has retired or been promoted?  Yes, that's some of it.  But some of it has to do with keeping things fresh. 

No doubt there is a lot of positive power associated with people being in place for a long period of time.  They know who's who and what's what.  Call so and so if you want this done.  The thing-a-ma-bob is under the copy machine.  The reason we don't have one of those is that the hurricane twenty years ago knocked it down. 

That same positive can be also restricting.  "We've always done it that way" may have been fine for yesteryear and for all of us.  But what if it isn't for today and the people we need to gain for tomorrow?  What if there is new wine needed and all there are are old wineskins?  It's a pain to move house but it is good for throwing out stuff you don't need anymore that you would have held on to if you weren't moving. 

Sometimes I think the Methodists have it right to move pastors every five or six years.  It keeps a congregation from getting too in a rut.  Upsetting?  Yes.  Helpful?  Perhaps. 

And if you change the pastor but the session and staff stays the same throughout the pastoral changes? 

I don't know where I am going with all this except perhaps to say that we may need an earthquake to rearrange things and sometimes they come in nature or by accident.  How could we get the benefits of restructure by design?