1. The growth of Wesley Seminary, now approaching 500 at the end of our sixth year, is quite remarkable. The average seminary size last year was 155, and most are on a path of significant decline. David Watson of United Theological Seminary and I are actually going to co-present at a seminar this month at the annual CAOS meeting (Chief Academic Officers Society) on enrollment strategies. United has also experienced growth under President Wendy Deichmann.
So what is the secret sauce?
2. First there is what I like to think of as the core.
a. I've mentioned the cohort model as an important key to our success. You don't recruit random students. You recruit groups of students. You plan for a train to leave the station in January and you recruit to it. Once a group of, say, 15 is on the train, they are likely to stay on the train. None of this inefficient block schedule where students may or may not sign up for Professor Boring. It's one train and you know more or less where it's going.
Our core reached equilibrium at the beginning of Year 4. The number we expected in the MDIV at equilibrium was 255. That's two new MDIV cohorts every January and August and one new cohort in May, with attrition factored in. I'm also assuming regular MA starts.
b. A key note here. There's no way we would be in existence if we expected these students to come onsite. Indeed, we have had a wake-up moment in Year 6 in relation to onsite that I'll discuss in a future post. The demand is to take these degrees at a distance, online. IWU does online. IWU is thus positioned for existence and growth.
I can't wag my head enough at those who continue to resist distance education. If you're Duke, Princeton, or Harvard, no problem. You have a stable clientele. But you have to have a market to survive, and the general market of people who will uproot and move somewhere is seriously on the decline, especially for seminary. If we had to be an onsite seminary, we would likely close tomorrow.
c. There are threats to the core. They factor into growth but they are especially threats to decline if they are not in place. A competent and enthusiastic faculty, including adjuncts, is important. Students won't stick around if their overall course experiences are bad. There are too many other options. Things like timely feedback and faculty presence are key. Indeed, I would say that the competent administration of courses is more important in a professor for online students than professor brilliance. After all, the content for the most part is already pre-installed into each course.
In our case, we also have enthusiastic full-time faculty who are brilliant, competent, and are marketing machines in their own right. Bob Whitesel, Brannon Hancock--these guys market Wesley as well as a television ad. They create an enthusiastic environment that not only maintains the core, but brings growth.
d. I also believe that an institution can develop a legalistic, negative environment that dampens student enthusiasm. In my opinion, IWU as a whole was seriously in danger of a trajectory of this sort in 2012. The predisposition of a successful business is a "can-do," "we say yes" attitude. I hear that Todd Voss, President of Southern Wesleyan University, went there with this motto, "We say yes." In that kind of environment, growth is contagious.
I mentioned that the Seminary started with this attitude: "If they come we will build it." People don't want to go to a negative place. People don't want to be told "no" at every turn, especially in the name of rigid policies. Places that grow are places that are flexible and have a propensity to say "yes." To me, that's core.
3. Growth has come by new venues.
a. I once heard Dan Reiland of 12Stone® say that there was a certain gravity churches had toward an inward focus. If they didn't concentrate at least 51% of their energies toward evangelism, toward an outward focus, the inward gravity would take over and they would not likely grow. Discipleship is an important function of the church, but if the focus is not on reaching new people, decline was the likely result.
I suspect this principle applies to seminaries and universities as well. If they are not focused on finding the next thing, the next venue, the next degree, they will likely decline. I suspect that IWU can offer a case study on this one. About ten years ago, IWU paused its focus on growth for a moment to bolster its infrastructure, and we have only recently started to grow again after a couple scary years.
b. Wayne Schmidt, our fearless leader, has that growth orientation in his very DNA. So let's say that Wesley Seminary in 2012 had a stable core of 250 MDIV students and perhaps 120 MA students (4 cohort starts a year). To grow beyond this point would require addition. To do nothing would mean eventual decline. 51% rule.
In the traditional model of seminary education, you grow by adding people to the existing location and courses. Traditional seminaries also tend have high full-time faculty to adjunct ratios. This is death in our current climate. 1) Students aren't moving any more. 2) Full-time faculty are expensive. 3) There's no intrinsic motivation for a student to take specific courses.
Let me clarify on this last point with a story I heard sitting next to Terry Munday by sheer chance once on a flight back from Atlanta. Terry sustained the development program at IWU in the days when IWU didn't really have big donors. I believe if you bracket out a few major gifts (some of which Terry did the ground work for), IWU has yet to raise in a single year what he raised in his last year here before he retired.
If a pastor gets up in the pulpit and just asks for an offering out of the blue, people won't give as much as if someone is willing to go individually to potentially larger donors and ask for a number beforehand.
The story was about a church where the pastor needed about 1.1 million more to complete a building fund. The pastor, not wanting to face the awkwardness of asking for money of certain members in the congregation, was just going to make a general plea from the pulpit. Terry told him he would miss his need by some number like 6 or 7 thousand if he did it that way.
Instead, Terry went with the pastor to several homes, one by one, before the general offering, and they asked for a specific number, a number more than these individuals would have pledged in a general offering sitting in a pew. The end result was that the church was able to finish the building project.
He's written a book on fund raising if you dare to read it.
I mention this because students will register for a specific offering, a specific cohort, a specific venue. You'll get a lot more students this way than if you just say, "Come here and take whatever course you want." A targeted sale gets more customers than, "Come in; we've got stuff." It may sound crass to speak of seminary as a business. There's no question that we care about every student. But if someone at a seminary or university isn't thinking these sorts of things, even intuitively, there's trouble ahead.
c. In our fourth year, 2012-2013, Wayne facilitated the launch of two new venues for the Seminary--a contextualized, urban MDIV cohort in Indianapolis and a contextualized MA cohort based out of 12Stone® Church...
Previously on Seminary take-aways:
Pre-Seminary
1. There are key moments of opportunity.
2. You need the right people.
3. Good leaders collaborate and navigate.
Year 1: Launch Year
4. Innovation requires some trial and error. (1)
5. Innovation requires some trial and error. (2)
6. Innovation requires some trial and error. (3)
7. New leaders bring new strengths. (1)
Year 2: Growing Pains
8. Administration never ends.
9. New leaders bring new strengths. (2)
10. New leaders bring new strengths. (3)
Year 3: The Year of Maturity
11. Complexity works against sustainability.
12. There are advantages to being embedded in a broader university. (1)
13. There are advantages to being embedded in a broader university. (2)
14. Our guinea pigs survived.
Year 4: The Year of the Faculty
15. Faculty share governance with administration. (1)
16. Faculty share governance with administration. (2)
17. Faculty share governance with administration. (3)
18. Faculty share governance with administration. (4)
Showing posts with label church growth. Show all posts
Showing posts with label church growth. Show all posts
Thursday, March 05, 2015
Wednesday, December 31, 2014
Church Growth and the Spirit
My brother-in-law, Dwayne Winterberg, repeated an interesting thought by A. W. Tozer today. I'll just quote the first half for reflection: "If the Holy Spirit was withdrawn from the church today, 95 percent of what we do would go on and no one would know the difference."
What do you think? I do think that a church can grow very successfully with charismatic leadership and good organization, regardless of whether the Holy Spirit is present or not. At the same time, a church can have charismatic leadership, good organization, grow, and have the Holy Spirit moving as well. Surely that is what we all hope for!
What do you think? I do think that a church can grow very successfully with charismatic leadership and good organization, regardless of whether the Holy Spirit is present or not. At the same time, a church can have charismatic leadership, good organization, grow, and have the Holy Spirit moving as well. Surely that is what we all hope for!
Friday, December 19, 2014
The Gospel in Cuba
No doubt because it's something President Obama is doing, a good deal of the American church will mindlessly and predictably condemn the idea of opening up relationships with Cuba again. I don't know enough to have an opinion that matters, although it seems to me I'd rather Cuba be friends with us right now than Russia.
That's not the point of this post. The opening of relations will undoubtedly open up more opportunities for Christianity in Cuba. In fact, it already has. We've already seen in recent years increased opportunities for the church in Cuba.
I hope we'll be very careful about this re-entry. On the one hand, I suspect this one will work a lot better than our work in Russia, which has seemingly evaporated after over two decades of work with little to show for it. One of our difficulties in Russia, I believe, was the fact that the Baptistic form of Christianity we tried to plant in Russia had little traction with the culture of Russia. Why didn't we try a reform movement within the Orthodox Church, much as Wesley did within the Anglican church? My hunch is because we didn't have enough historical or theological depth to see what that would look like. My hunch is that we just assumed a Billy Graham church growth approach was the Christian approach. I could be wrong.
The situation is different in Cuba. There is already a virulent form of Protestant Christianity in Latin America, and it fits much better with the culture of the Wesleyan Church than Russia did. In other words, we might be historically and theologically unaware of ourselves and still be able to present a form of Christianity there that resonates with the culture.
What I do hope is that someone somewhere in our church will actually be thinking about these things. I would hate to see happen what seems to have happened in Russia--initial great openness to spirituality after the iron curtain came down, followed by somewhat of a rejection of the cultural form of Christianity that rushed in thereafter.
That's not the point of this post. The opening of relations will undoubtedly open up more opportunities for Christianity in Cuba. In fact, it already has. We've already seen in recent years increased opportunities for the church in Cuba.
I hope we'll be very careful about this re-entry. On the one hand, I suspect this one will work a lot better than our work in Russia, which has seemingly evaporated after over two decades of work with little to show for it. One of our difficulties in Russia, I believe, was the fact that the Baptistic form of Christianity we tried to plant in Russia had little traction with the culture of Russia. Why didn't we try a reform movement within the Orthodox Church, much as Wesley did within the Anglican church? My hunch is because we didn't have enough historical or theological depth to see what that would look like. My hunch is that we just assumed a Billy Graham church growth approach was the Christian approach. I could be wrong.
The situation is different in Cuba. There is already a virulent form of Protestant Christianity in Latin America, and it fits much better with the culture of the Wesleyan Church than Russia did. In other words, we might be historically and theologically unaware of ourselves and still be able to present a form of Christianity there that resonates with the culture.
What I do hope is that someone somewhere in our church will actually be thinking about these things. I would hate to see happen what seems to have happened in Russia--initial great openness to spirituality after the iron curtain came down, followed by somewhat of a rejection of the cultural form of Christianity that rushed in thereafter.
Tuesday, January 21, 2014
Worthen: The Church Growth Movement (7)
Chapter 6 of Molly Worthen's, Apostles of Reason: The Crisis of Authority in American Evangelicalism.
Reviews of previous chapters include:
Introduction
Chapter 1 (Birth of Neo-Evangelicalism)
Chapter 2 (Evangelicals on the Edges)
Chapter 3 (The Strivings of Christianity Today)
Chapter 4 (Mennonites and Nazarenes in the 50s)
Chapter 5 (The Drive to Accreditation)
Now chapter 6, "Missions Beyond the West"...
Around the turn of the millennium, Robert Webber wrote a helpful book called The Younger Evangelicals. Much more broadly than Worthen, he depicted the first two phases of evangelicalism in the twentieth century as 1) traditional evangelicals and 2) pragmatic evangelicals.
Even this far into Worthen, we can see that Webber's picture was somewhat simplified. By traditional evangelicals, Webber referred to the leaders of the neo-evangelical movement. But even then there were older style evangelicals around, like Nazarenes, who didn't fit C. F. H. Henry's mould.
With this chapter, we get to the pragmatic evangelicals and the church growth movement. For Worthen, this is another strand in the complex puzzle. My colleague Bob Whitesel knows the CGM intimately, and the father of my colleague Charles Arn is actually mentioned in this chapter. If they happen to look at this post, I hope they will register any disagreements or reflections.
1. colonialism
The mid-twentieth century saw an increased sensitivity to the imperialism of the West. Missionaries found increased resistance to their evangelistic endeavors. "Missionaries struggled with their reputations as agents of the white man's oppression" (125). For centuries the West had exploited its colonies and treated indigenous peoples as inferior or even dirt. Newly empowered, colonies were re-evaluating missionaries and their methods.
So the Soviets used the West's previous exploitation to try to bring colonies to their side. Islam used the Western nature of Christianity to draw converts. These dynamics had an impact on reflective missionaries like Donald McGavran, Eugene Nida, Charles Kraft, and Peter Wagner. For Kraft and Nida, it drove them to become sophisticated in their understanding of culture. For McGavran, it drove him to use analytics and social-scientific research to determine the best ways to grow a church. For Wagner, it led to a rediscovery of spiritual gifts and spiritual warfare.
2. science of mission
If Billy Graham had used a frontal assault for evangelism, these mission minded practitioners called for research before storming the castle. The blunt evangelistic approach called for an individual decision, even going door to door passing out tracts. McGavran had enough missionary experience to know that families are more often the key to conversion in a world context.
But in the US, this observation led to a controversial approach that has seemed deeply problematic in more recent times. Like clings to like. McGavran advocated conversion in "homogeneous units," and advocated a data-driven approach to doing it. The unintended consequence was to create a lot of large middle to upper-class white churches. "The Church Growth movement, with its assumption that Christians prefer to attend church with people like themselves, may have slowed the pace of integration in many evangelical congregations--an ironic twist on its spirit of cultural accommodation" (140).
3. understanding culture
It is interesting that Charles Kraft and Eugene Nida were sometimes viewed negatively by other evangelicals and fundamentalists. I personally view them as brilliant and opposition to them largely a matter of ignorance. When Wesley Seminary first started, I pushed for Kraft's book Christianity in Culture to provide the lens through which our students would process culture and be able to distinguish the timeless from the transitory. Nida's Customs and Culture similarly helped missionaries see how relative practices and ways of thinking are to culture.
Those lacking serious interaction with other cultures of course lambasted them as relativists. Even people like John Howard Yoder saw these anthropologists as fudging on core doctrines and practices in the name of conversion. Should the church really turn a blind eye to polygamy?
On a popular level, the CGM tended to downplay matters like theology in the name of getting people in the church. The seeker-sensitive service pushed doctrinal distinctives into the background and emphasized an entry-level type approach. Elite theologians and fundamentalists alike thus tended to scoff at what they saw as either a shallow movement or a corrupting influence.
4. the color line
Mission work tended to push churches back home toward embracing the civil rights movement. "Missionaries complained loudest that segregation cost souls abroad" (136). Yet at home, "magnanimous feelings on converting the 'noble savage' thousands of miles away did not always temper their reactions to African-American children bound for their neighborhood's newly integrated school" (137). Some churches softened. On the other side, Bob Jones still wouldn't accept black students in 1970.
5. charismatic movement
One of the most distinctive elements of the 60s and 70s in evangelicalism is the rise of the charismatic movement. If the CGM was very rational and quasi-scientific, individuals like John Wimber and Peter Wagner wanted to reclaim the spiritual gifts of the early church. Tongues were sweeping every church, including churches like the Episcopals and the Anglicans. Meanwhile, the Jesus People were "getting high on Jesus."
This was the time when Oral Roberts and Kathryn Kuhlman were on the rise. Classic dispensationalism was revised in the light of current events. Israel's restoration as a nation in 1948 became part of a newly issued Scofield Bible. Miracles were extended beyond the apostolic age.
6. conclusion
As usual, I'm not exactly sure what to take away from this chapter. It of course reminds us that it is hard to get a good perspective on what is going on when it is happening. If you think back to the positions different people took at these junctures, there were obviously cultural elements to what they thought. It perhaps behooves us not to take ourselves or our ideas too seriously. May we never look back and be embarrassed because we made a big deal out of something that ultimately really doesn't matter.
Reviews of previous chapters include:
Introduction
Chapter 1 (Birth of Neo-Evangelicalism)
Chapter 2 (Evangelicals on the Edges)
Chapter 3 (The Strivings of Christianity Today)
Chapter 4 (Mennonites and Nazarenes in the 50s)
Chapter 5 (The Drive to Accreditation)
Now chapter 6, "Missions Beyond the West"...
Around the turn of the millennium, Robert Webber wrote a helpful book called The Younger Evangelicals. Much more broadly than Worthen, he depicted the first two phases of evangelicalism in the twentieth century as 1) traditional evangelicals and 2) pragmatic evangelicals.
Even this far into Worthen, we can see that Webber's picture was somewhat simplified. By traditional evangelicals, Webber referred to the leaders of the neo-evangelical movement. But even then there were older style evangelicals around, like Nazarenes, who didn't fit C. F. H. Henry's mould.
With this chapter, we get to the pragmatic evangelicals and the church growth movement. For Worthen, this is another strand in the complex puzzle. My colleague Bob Whitesel knows the CGM intimately, and the father of my colleague Charles Arn is actually mentioned in this chapter. If they happen to look at this post, I hope they will register any disagreements or reflections.
1. colonialism
The mid-twentieth century saw an increased sensitivity to the imperialism of the West. Missionaries found increased resistance to their evangelistic endeavors. "Missionaries struggled with their reputations as agents of the white man's oppression" (125). For centuries the West had exploited its colonies and treated indigenous peoples as inferior or even dirt. Newly empowered, colonies were re-evaluating missionaries and their methods.
So the Soviets used the West's previous exploitation to try to bring colonies to their side. Islam used the Western nature of Christianity to draw converts. These dynamics had an impact on reflective missionaries like Donald McGavran, Eugene Nida, Charles Kraft, and Peter Wagner. For Kraft and Nida, it drove them to become sophisticated in their understanding of culture. For McGavran, it drove him to use analytics and social-scientific research to determine the best ways to grow a church. For Wagner, it led to a rediscovery of spiritual gifts and spiritual warfare.
2. science of mission
If Billy Graham had used a frontal assault for evangelism, these mission minded practitioners called for research before storming the castle. The blunt evangelistic approach called for an individual decision, even going door to door passing out tracts. McGavran had enough missionary experience to know that families are more often the key to conversion in a world context.
But in the US, this observation led to a controversial approach that has seemed deeply problematic in more recent times. Like clings to like. McGavran advocated conversion in "homogeneous units," and advocated a data-driven approach to doing it. The unintended consequence was to create a lot of large middle to upper-class white churches. "The Church Growth movement, with its assumption that Christians prefer to attend church with people like themselves, may have slowed the pace of integration in many evangelical congregations--an ironic twist on its spirit of cultural accommodation" (140).
3. understanding culture
It is interesting that Charles Kraft and Eugene Nida were sometimes viewed negatively by other evangelicals and fundamentalists. I personally view them as brilliant and opposition to them largely a matter of ignorance. When Wesley Seminary first started, I pushed for Kraft's book Christianity in Culture to provide the lens through which our students would process culture and be able to distinguish the timeless from the transitory. Nida's Customs and Culture similarly helped missionaries see how relative practices and ways of thinking are to culture.
Those lacking serious interaction with other cultures of course lambasted them as relativists. Even people like John Howard Yoder saw these anthropologists as fudging on core doctrines and practices in the name of conversion. Should the church really turn a blind eye to polygamy?
On a popular level, the CGM tended to downplay matters like theology in the name of getting people in the church. The seeker-sensitive service pushed doctrinal distinctives into the background and emphasized an entry-level type approach. Elite theologians and fundamentalists alike thus tended to scoff at what they saw as either a shallow movement or a corrupting influence.
4. the color line
Mission work tended to push churches back home toward embracing the civil rights movement. "Missionaries complained loudest that segregation cost souls abroad" (136). Yet at home, "magnanimous feelings on converting the 'noble savage' thousands of miles away did not always temper their reactions to African-American children bound for their neighborhood's newly integrated school" (137). Some churches softened. On the other side, Bob Jones still wouldn't accept black students in 1970.
5. charismatic movement
One of the most distinctive elements of the 60s and 70s in evangelicalism is the rise of the charismatic movement. If the CGM was very rational and quasi-scientific, individuals like John Wimber and Peter Wagner wanted to reclaim the spiritual gifts of the early church. Tongues were sweeping every church, including churches like the Episcopals and the Anglicans. Meanwhile, the Jesus People were "getting high on Jesus."
This was the time when Oral Roberts and Kathryn Kuhlman were on the rise. Classic dispensationalism was revised in the light of current events. Israel's restoration as a nation in 1948 became part of a newly issued Scofield Bible. Miracles were extended beyond the apostolic age.
6. conclusion
As usual, I'm not exactly sure what to take away from this chapter. It of course reminds us that it is hard to get a good perspective on what is going on when it is happening. If you think back to the positions different people took at these junctures, there were obviously cultural elements to what they thought. It perhaps behooves us not to take ourselves or our ideas too seriously. May we never look back and be embarrassed because we made a big deal out of something that ultimately really doesn't matter.
Thursday, December 05, 2013
Some not too spiritual thoughts...
... about how people today often join a church and come to Christ (that order is intentional).
A couple things triggered these thoughts in my mind. The first was a conversation I had with a pastor about a high capacity individual who had recently started attending their church. The pastor was salivating to get this person into leadership. [Insert here all the usual warnings about exposing new people too soon to the dark side of the church.]
The second trigger was a meeting I was in this week where someone from another state was involved. They were from a secular organization interacting with Indiana Wesleyan University. I wondered how the experience was for them. Did they attend church back in their home location? Did we seem any different as an audience from any other place?
I pictured a scenario where a not-too religious person comes into contact with some people he or she likes. Maybe they're friendly. Maybe they're nice. Maybe they're honest. Maybe they're good. There's something attractive about them. The person thinks, "I'd like to hang out with people like this."
So they start attending their church. Is this person an exception to the environment there? Or are there more people like them at the church? Are these positive people, people who really want to help the world in ways that most people would agree are helpful? Or are they a bunch of curmudgeons? Or is this a place to vent anger--that's attractive to some but more likely to be a shadow church. A shadow church is a church that pretends to be a church but really has very little to do with Christ.
Now comes another scary part for me. Once a person has become a part of this community, the ideas of the community will become a bigger and bigger part of the new person's life. Whatever the community--Mormon, Wesleyan, Baptist, Muslim--the person who has become a part of the community now becomes vulnerable to whatever the ideological system of the community is. That's how you turn a normal person into a suicide bomber or a fundamentalist.
My hope is that we will remember why they started coming in the first place and major on the major... it's not our ideas. Love God and love neighbor--that's the idea we should be teaching. Anything that distracts from that is infection.
Make them lovers.
A couple things triggered these thoughts in my mind. The first was a conversation I had with a pastor about a high capacity individual who had recently started attending their church. The pastor was salivating to get this person into leadership. [Insert here all the usual warnings about exposing new people too soon to the dark side of the church.]
The second trigger was a meeting I was in this week where someone from another state was involved. They were from a secular organization interacting with Indiana Wesleyan University. I wondered how the experience was for them. Did they attend church back in their home location? Did we seem any different as an audience from any other place?
I pictured a scenario where a not-too religious person comes into contact with some people he or she likes. Maybe they're friendly. Maybe they're nice. Maybe they're honest. Maybe they're good. There's something attractive about them. The person thinks, "I'd like to hang out with people like this."
So they start attending their church. Is this person an exception to the environment there? Or are there more people like them at the church? Are these positive people, people who really want to help the world in ways that most people would agree are helpful? Or are they a bunch of curmudgeons? Or is this a place to vent anger--that's attractive to some but more likely to be a shadow church. A shadow church is a church that pretends to be a church but really has very little to do with Christ.
Now comes another scary part for me. Once a person has become a part of this community, the ideas of the community will become a bigger and bigger part of the new person's life. Whatever the community--Mormon, Wesleyan, Baptist, Muslim--the person who has become a part of the community now becomes vulnerable to whatever the ideological system of the community is. That's how you turn a normal person into a suicide bomber or a fundamentalist.
My hope is that we will remember why they started coming in the first place and major on the major... it's not our ideas. Love God and love neighbor--that's the idea we should be teaching. Anything that distracts from that is infection.
Make them lovers.
Tuesday, December 18, 2012
Bishop 4 (Grow or Die)
Moving on to chapter 4 of William Willimon's Bishop, "Bishops Cultivating Fruitfulness." Previous chapters were:
1. Methodists, Alabama Conference in Motion
2. Summoned to be Bishop
3. Bishops Sending Pastors
Here were the things that jumped out at me in his fourth chapter:
1. This is a chapter about metrics and accountability. A line he quotes from Lencioni sums it up: "People who aren't good at their jobs don't want to be measured... Great employees love that kind of accountability. They crave it. Poor ones run away from it" (54, quoting Three Signs of a Miserable Job, 128).
I think we have to forgive Willimon for what sounds like a "capitalist business mentality" because the United Methodist Church is in the early stages of death. Willimon likens his role as bishop to that of a mortician at this stage of the church's history (46). In the last five decades, they have lost nearly 3 million members and nearly 10,000 congregations. The median age of its membership is fifty-nine years old.
If he were talking to a healthy church, I would say he overdoes the numbers bit, but he is talking to a decaying flesh that could be saved if someone would just do something other than worry about nice little nest eggs for its career clergy.
2. "Few of our pastors know how to handle a congregation of more than 150 in attendance, shrinking a congregation to a size that is less demanding on pastoral leadership skills" (53). This fits with Lyle Schaller's old gem that different size churches require different styles of leadership. Someone in my own church suggested that most pastors simply weren't equipped to lead a church over 200. His advice was that we do our best to identify those that can and focus church training energies on them.
There is another alternative, of course, which is for the pastor who doesn't have the gifts to pastor a church over 150 to give birth to other churches. Church plants that are watched over by a mother church have a better chance of surviving than the stand alone plant. Also, a church can "internally" plant churches by multiplying venues that more or less run themselves.
2. The Wesleyan Church, my church, doesn't look as bad from the trends of the overall numbers, but if you dig down, you find some interesting statistics about my own church.
3. So Willimon's focus on metrics is perfectly legitimate. He is addressing a complete lack of accountability for growth in the UM church. He reiterates over and over that accountability was central to Wesley's own approach to ministry. He believes bishops should be accountable for something. They aren't. Their job description is even somewhat vague.
He rejects appointment by seniority and guaranteed appointment as the bane of the church. Rather, they should appoint the very best pastoral leadership to fulfill the mission of each congregation. Obviously he supports women in ministry, but he is clearly sick of subsidiary concerns trumping the focal concern of healthy, growing churches. "Concerns about an individual pastor's career advancement, familial and marital happiness, gender, ethnic heritage, age, and educational background must be subordinate to the responsibility to appoint the very best pastoral leadership for each church" (55).
4. Willimon finds Methodist seminary education sorely lacking. Twenty new ministers he hired in Alabama had a collective debt of a million dollars. Meanwhile, one pastor noted that, "My seminary education gave me complex rationalization for leading decline and called what it gave me, 'theology'" (53). Methodist seminaries, in his opinion, are producing pastors suited for serving people in their sixties who are upper middle class or better.
5. I of course don't think the parable of the fig tree is really about numerical growth. The parallel cleansing of the temple implies that Jesus is rather condemning the leadership of Israel's injustice toward the poor and the foreigner. Nevertheless, there is a time to be slapped in the face for being unproductive and clearly Willimon is doing that to the UM church.
There's a lot going on today behind the decline of Christianity in the US. I don't think spirituality is the key to numerical growth, although it is essential. But a lot of small, dying congregations have bags of spirituality... although probably not a lot of the ones Willimon is addressing, which probably are withered fig trees that are destined for Jesus' cursing. But it will take good leadership and greater relevance for churches to grow in this day and age, in my opinion.
1. Methodists, Alabama Conference in Motion
2. Summoned to be Bishop
3. Bishops Sending Pastors
Here were the things that jumped out at me in his fourth chapter:
1. This is a chapter about metrics and accountability. A line he quotes from Lencioni sums it up: "People who aren't good at their jobs don't want to be measured... Great employees love that kind of accountability. They crave it. Poor ones run away from it" (54, quoting Three Signs of a Miserable Job, 128).
I think we have to forgive Willimon for what sounds like a "capitalist business mentality" because the United Methodist Church is in the early stages of death. Willimon likens his role as bishop to that of a mortician at this stage of the church's history (46). In the last five decades, they have lost nearly 3 million members and nearly 10,000 congregations. The median age of its membership is fifty-nine years old.
If he were talking to a healthy church, I would say he overdoes the numbers bit, but he is talking to a decaying flesh that could be saved if someone would just do something other than worry about nice little nest eggs for its career clergy.
2. "Few of our pastors know how to handle a congregation of more than 150 in attendance, shrinking a congregation to a size that is less demanding on pastoral leadership skills" (53). This fits with Lyle Schaller's old gem that different size churches require different styles of leadership. Someone in my own church suggested that most pastors simply weren't equipped to lead a church over 200. His advice was that we do our best to identify those that can and focus church training energies on them.
There is another alternative, of course, which is for the pastor who doesn't have the gifts to pastor a church over 150 to give birth to other churches. Church plants that are watched over by a mother church have a better chance of surviving than the stand alone plant. Also, a church can "internally" plant churches by multiplying venues that more or less run themselves.
2. The Wesleyan Church, my church, doesn't look as bad from the trends of the overall numbers, but if you dig down, you find some interesting statistics about my own church.
- 1 in 20 Wesleyans in North America go to one church, our largest church at 12Stone in Atlanta.
- 20% of all Wesleyans attend just the top 10 largest Wesleyan churches.
- About 30% of all Wesleyans attend just the top 25 of our largest churches.
3. So Willimon's focus on metrics is perfectly legitimate. He is addressing a complete lack of accountability for growth in the UM church. He reiterates over and over that accountability was central to Wesley's own approach to ministry. He believes bishops should be accountable for something. They aren't. Their job description is even somewhat vague.
He rejects appointment by seniority and guaranteed appointment as the bane of the church. Rather, they should appoint the very best pastoral leadership to fulfill the mission of each congregation. Obviously he supports women in ministry, but he is clearly sick of subsidiary concerns trumping the focal concern of healthy, growing churches. "Concerns about an individual pastor's career advancement, familial and marital happiness, gender, ethnic heritage, age, and educational background must be subordinate to the responsibility to appoint the very best pastoral leadership for each church" (55).
4. Willimon finds Methodist seminary education sorely lacking. Twenty new ministers he hired in Alabama had a collective debt of a million dollars. Meanwhile, one pastor noted that, "My seminary education gave me complex rationalization for leading decline and called what it gave me, 'theology'" (53). Methodist seminaries, in his opinion, are producing pastors suited for serving people in their sixties who are upper middle class or better.
5. I of course don't think the parable of the fig tree is really about numerical growth. The parallel cleansing of the temple implies that Jesus is rather condemning the leadership of Israel's injustice toward the poor and the foreigner. Nevertheless, there is a time to be slapped in the face for being unproductive and clearly Willimon is doing that to the UM church.
There's a lot going on today behind the decline of Christianity in the US. I don't think spirituality is the key to numerical growth, although it is essential. But a lot of small, dying congregations have bags of spirituality... although probably not a lot of the ones Willimon is addressing, which probably are withered fig trees that are destined for Jesus' cursing. But it will take good leadership and greater relevance for churches to grow in this day and age, in my opinion.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
