Chapter Ten: "Where do we start?" - Bishop Alan Scarfe

Bishop Alan Scarfe

Changing the Conversation
Chapter 10: Where do we start?

By Alan Scarfe

“Where do we start?” is probably the most pressing question as we move beyond the written page into the action phase of our engagement with Anthony Robinson and his book “Changing the Conversation.” Robinson himself writes of his own frustration with congregational groups with whom he has worked as they reach this stage and turn further to him for their next steps. His hope was that they would know at that point that the answers to that question come from their own selves. Adapting the familiar words of Gandhi he invited them to “be the change you want to see in the Church. If you want the Church to be more spiritually alive and engaged, then do that in your own lives, your own faith, and in your own leadership.”

To that end, he offers in this final chapter five possible starting points for the “next steps.” All of them are obvious and none are beyond us or require expert help. 

1. First, start with study and conversation. Take the discussions to the larger body of the congregation, and widen the conversation and deepen the research. Give yourselves ten weeks and then ask how you can build and share the experience.

2. Second, start with prayer and discernment. This is appropriate for a congregation already sensing the urgency of their situation. He invites them to ask God to help discern the essential from what is merely important. In an metaphor which should please an Iowan’s ear, he says “prepare the ground, loosen the soil, make sure you have good drainage, and enrich the soil with compost or fertilizer if necessary. Prayer and s process of discernment are a way of preparing the ground”. His focus again is on learning what God would have us do – an essential recognition that we exist for God’s mission and God’s mission alone. Churches do not exist for themselves but for a higher purpose which we seek to capture in Iowa through our own vision statement of being “In mission with Christ through each and all.”

3. A third starting point is for those places where it has been difficult to get people’s attention, and yet the congregational leader has opportunity to address the whole community through the sermon time. Start with a sermon – perhaps about the changing landscape of the mainline church, or ask what business are we in? or what is our purpose/mission today? There may be resistance, but Robinson reminds us that “resistance and a certain amount of discomfort are indications that you are on to something important.” The discomfort congregations feel may be due to the fact that overtime they have actually displaced God’s purpose for the Church and have forgotten their true reason for being.

4. The fourth starting point is geared for those places that are urgent and enthusiastic for change. Here the temptation is to move forward into programs – a new worship service or a new ministry project. Do they however fit into the longer term framework of a strategic and clear purpose? Propose a long-term clarity of purpose and then seek only those programs and activities which fit into Its fulfillment.  “Getting reasonable clarity about a compelling purpose is crucial for congregational reform and renewal. Such clarity becomes the basis for developing a vision (the three to five things we need to do in the next three, five, ten years tomake progress on our purpose).” 

5. Robinson’s final starting point may be available for some congregations but not all and possibly not many in Iowa, and that is to use the moments of leadership transition as a potential new start. Be clear to the candidates that you are not “simply seeking a chaplain but a leader,” he writes. Leaders think long term; tend to think in terms of systems and the relationships between parts and the whole; have the capacity to motivate and inspire others; emphasize things like vision, purpose values; can connect with the multiple constituents in the congregation; and always think in terms of renewal. Hold out, he urges, for such candidates and don’t settle for less.  Consultants can also bring the same qualities to a congregation which is not in search and that can be transformative to the congregation at every level of leadership, including the incumbent ordained leader.

Finally, we brought Anthony Robinson to Iowa for the Baptismal Living Day on April 4^th, and sought to introduce his ideas in Changing Conversation because we are seeking new methods for new times. These times for change are upon us, and the opportunities are fast passing us by. 

As your bishop I echo Robinson’s words “This can’t wait. We have to get on this right away, today; not tomorrow or next year.” Jesus invited us to be dressed for action with our lamps lit. “You know how to interpret the appearance of earth and sky, but why do you not know how to interpret the present times?” (Luke 12:56).   

We are reminded that “(this) sense of urgency is a product of the gospel and of the reading of our times. I believe that the gospel is true and that the gospel is about saving lives. I am passionate about that.” 

It is urgent work, but it will also take time and requires patience. It will need time to ripen the new ides and the new learning. Yet it is the Spirit who will be working with us in bringing about the change God seeks.

In summary I take away from Robinson’s book the following reflection. He offers us a platform, a comprehensive platform, for renewal that makes sense, is approachable, and possible. We have to face up to the urgency of the time, and yet be ready to show patience as we work through the concepts offered to us.
 

Focus and a clearly identified purpose are key. We need the discipline of attentiveness – keeping our eyes on the prize that is ours and the world’s in Christ Jesus – and refusing to be distracted by the temptations of immediate results that our commercial driven world exalts. The Gospel is at the center of everything that is presented to us. Growing the people of God in faith and in a sense of mission will secondarily grow our numbers, but that attention to what helps us grow as such people is primary. That is why study, prayer, discernment, challenging conversation, ongoing study is important. These need to be a life force within each congregation, and not just for a small few but with an urgency for all of us. 

And finally, in all things God is at the center. It is God’s purpose and God’s mission for which we exist as Church and as baptized people. We are those who Christ invites to be willing to lose our lives that we may gain them. As we say at the Eucharist, it is an invitation to “walk in love, as Christ loved us and gave Himself for us, an offering and sacrifice to God”.     

Chapter Nine: "Death and Resurrection" Part 2 Guest Blogger Lauren Lyon

Part 2

Changing the Conversation: Chapter 9, “Death and Resurrection”

By Lauren Lyon

Bethany UCC’s successful rebirth offers an interesting contrast with the other two models Robinson introduces in this chapter because buildings figure highly in all three. The University Ecumenical Parish proposal would have taken advantage of high real estate values in its neighborhood to build a resource pool for the single, merged congregation. One wonders if the fact that the merger hasn’t taken place has at least something to do with reluctance in its constituent parishes to give up their respective buildings. People get attached to sacred spaces, sometimes because they’re familiar or beautiful, but also because of what they have experienced in them. I met and married my husband, was ordained to the diaconate and priesthood and saw all of my nieces and nephews baptized in a particular church building. After having served for more than 20 years in the diocese where it is located, I assumed that my funeral would take place there. The knowledge that that might not now be true has been one of the more profound realizations of my recent migration to a new diocese. There are many congregations whose viability is impaired by the unsustainable demands of their buildings but whose members seem willing to endure almost any hardship or risk, including the closure of their churches altogether, in order to continue to worship in those buildings.

Robinson’s vision of a church without walls is a further step beyond the plan for the University Ecumenical Parish. It incorporates the rental of space for administrative work and learning, but imagines a congregation worshiping in different spaces on a schedule that Robinson does not define. It seems hard for many people to get their minds around the idea of a church that doesn’t have some kind of building.  I’m aware that there are people who connect with spiritual sources online and that there are congregations that worship in school gyms, movie theatres or decommissioned big box stores. But for a lot of people, context still matters in worship. Maybe having to do without a specific context isn’t a deal breaker for everyone like it seems to have been for the constituent parishes of the proposed University Ecumenical Parish. But for many people sacred space requires more than the command or collective decision to “make it so” in whatever space they happen to gather. Could the “moveable feast” style church work for a congregation intentionally built around that model? I think probably yes, but not unlike Bethany UCC, it would require intention and planning and it would attract a specific group of people.

Our attachment to church buildings and the costs they impose on us has been around for a long time. Preparing the blog post on this chapter got me thinking about the construction of the great medieval cathedrals. The advances in materials, engineering and architecture during this era came about through brutal hardship imposed on the builders of these masterpieces and through tragic accidents. The road to greater height and more elaborate decoration was paved with buckled walls, collapsed arches and crushed worshipers and workers. Some of those tragedies were the result of hubris, some of human error and some the unfortunate timing of a windstorm or an inherent weakness of locally sourced mortar or timber.

In Chapter 9 Robinson refers frequently to Ronald Haifetz’s distinction between technical problems and adaptive challenges. Technical problems are easy to identify and can often be solved by expert knowledge. Solutions are generally well accepted, their scope is defined and they can be implemented quickly. Adaptive challenges are often difficult to identify, easy to deny and they require the people with the problem to solve it by changing their values, attitudes and behavior. These changes have to happen in a variety of places, often across organizational boundaries. Many congregations are still looking for rebirth via some organizational version of the flying buttress. The examples given by Robinson in Chapter 9 indicate that what we’re looking for is something more like the Council of Jerusalem and the centuries of slow transition that followed it.

Bethany UCC is the success story of Chapter 9. I am all but certain its leaders are still working as hard as they were in the first few months of its lifetime to adapt to things like changes in their neighborhood and resource constraints and to find productive ways to respond to new opportunities. Whether or not the vision for the University Ecumenical Parish is still viable or if anyone is trying to create and maintain a “movable feast” model church, it’s hard to say. Maybe someday it will happen and it will be as lively, creative and effective as Bethany UCC appears to be now.

The big lesson of Chapter 9 is that there is no universally applicable quick fix for churches to avoid or halt declines in their membership, health and effectiveness. Solutions are going to be local, specific, disciplined, very well led and carefully planned. They will focus on the needs and well-being of congregations as communities of service, not the individual demands of perpetually lost sheep. The work will never stop. Realizing creative new initiatives like the University Ecumenical Parish or the “moveable feast” church will involve moments of opportunity in which a willing and adventurous community comes together with visionary leadership. Some of those experiments will succeed, some will fail. Like the builders of the Cathedrals, we will need to learn to live with variable outcomes. 

The Rev. Lauren Lyon serves as Rector at Trinity Episcopal Church, Iowa City, Iowa.

Chapter Nine: "Death and Resurrection" Part 1 Guest Blogger Lauren Lyon

Changing the Conversation

Chapter 9: Death and Resurrection 

(Part 1 of 2)

By Lauren Lyon 

Chapter 9 of Changing the Conversation is entitled “Death and Resurrection.” It includes two case studies of churches in the Seattle metro area and Robinson’s imaginative sketch for a church without a building.

In the first case study, a once prominent United Church of Christ congregation makes the decision to close. Its active membership had diminished to about a dozen people whose average age was more than 80 years. Their judicatory was eager to turn their beautiful, historic building into office space for church administration, but the members of the parish approached its death with a different vision for its resurrection. They celebrated its long and productive life on a final Sunday, then the church closed for eight months.

That quiet interval was used for planning the start of a new church to serve the lively, multiethnic neighborhood surrounding the historic building. That new church was created with the advice and financial support of another UCC congregation whose early 20^th century history included sponsorship of several new churches. The new church advertised itself to prospective members in the neighborhood, recruited a pastor with roots there and an ethnic background similar to a substantial proportion of its residents. The new church, named Bethany United Church of Christ, has grown steadily and remained true to the vision and identity that it adopted at the time of its opening.

The second case study was a work in progress at the time the book was written. Several mainline protestant churches in Seattle’s University District envisioned a merger in which all but one of them would sell their large and relatively empty buildings. The churches imagined pooling proceeds from the sale of their respective buildings, along with other resources, as a single merged congregation, the University Ecumenical Parish, that would be located in the remaining building. It would incorporate worship space for the entire membership of the merged congregation in addition to denominational chapels whose worship would reflect the traditions of each constituent church. The building would also house a supermarket, parking and other amenities in demand by the residents and workers in its neighborhood. It appears that this project has not yet been realized. An Internet search indicates that at this time the constituent congregations of this envisioned ecumenical church continue to operate separately in their own respective buildings.

The third model Robinson explores in this chapter is for a church without a building. He envisions a congregation that acquires administrative and small group meeting space in an office building, but worships peripatetically in borrowed churches, theatres and other public venues. Robinson characterizes this church as a “moveable feast.” He sees this model as a fit for a major urban center where real estate is impossibly expensive and a congregation’s vision is focused on a ministry of action that lends itself to work in a variety of locations. He mentions reading about a Presbyterian congregation operating on this model in New York, but an Internet search did not reveal its identity.

Robinson begins the chapter by stating that some churches need to die, that, in fact, some already have died and either don’t know it or won’t acknowledge it. They offer worship on Sundays but their focus is inward on the needs of their members.  Their sense of mission and vision has more to do with “hanging on” than it does with taking the gospel to the ends of the earth. He’s correct in that assessment. One of the reasons why churches continue in this condition for extended periods of time is that their viability is measured by their ability to support themselves financially. If they can reduce their costs and keep their buildings from falling in, they can go on for years until the death of a sustaining member or catastrophic building failure forces them to close. There are plenty of reasons why churches find themselves in this situation and plenty of reasons why nothing is done to change it.

Robinson’s first example of the “resurrected” congregation, Bethany UCC, did some very specific things that gave it a good chance to thrive. Its founding leadership team were determined to look forward, not back. The members of the closed congregation who took part in that group were there because of their knowledge about the neighborhood – not to represent the interests of the congregation they had belonged to. Bethany UCC is deeply and intentionally rooted in that neighborhood. I’m sure it welcomes people who want to drive in from somewhere else for the unique experience it offers, but its focus is on serving the community that surrounds the church building.

If you look at the parish web site, you get a sense that the way this congregation worships intentionally reflects the ethnic mix of its parishioners. It doesn’t appear that they do much with “traditional” worship with hymns, pipe organ and traditional vestments – and other liturgical options they might have offered in the hope of attracting a wider range of parishioners. They’ve chosen to build community in a fairly small, geographically defined area by offering a distinctive and specific worship and community experience rather than trying to maintain a liturgical and interpersonal smorgasbord.

At the time Robinson’s book was written he reported that the congregation had 150 adult members and about 50 children. My guess is that it will never be a huge congregation, but size in itself is an outdated measure of a church’s health and effectiveness. Robinson notes that the new parish was started with a pledge of support from its sponsoring congregation of $50,000 annually for the first five years with the opportunity to renew. There’s no way to know whether that support continues or if the new church is now financially self-sustaining. In an age of scarce resources, financial independence is often considered a major element in the definition of a congregation’s success. There’s no way to know whether Bethany UCC is held to that standard now or will be in the future. In the first two decades of the 21^st century we’re seeing a move back toward what is smaller, more local and more specialized. Bethany UCC is an example of a church that appears to have thrived in that model and truly served its home neighborhood. One of the critical questions for the future is whether churches that follow its lead can find a way to maintain the resources they need to sustain their ministries.

An historic church building was a critical component of Bethany UCC’s “resurrection.” Productively repurposing that building was a high priority for the dying congregation and the local judicatory. Frequently historic church buildings are simply maligned for the unsustainable burden they place on a congregation rather than praised for their potential ability to anchor a neighborhood, enhance streetscape and sense of place, and invite the surrounding community to reflect on its history. The dying congregation that relinquished the building had rented it to other religious groups. Robinson indicates that Bethany UCC curtailed those rentals in order to make the building available for its congregation’s use, but its web site indicates that the building is available to be rented, a creative way to build revenue and share space.

The Rev. Lauren Lyon serves as Rector at Trinity Episcopal Church, Iowa City, Iowa.

Chapter Eight: "The Church and the Public Square" Guest Blogger Jean McCarthy

Changing the Conversation

Chapter 8:  The Church and the Public Square

By Jean McCarthy

“Toto, I've got a feeling we're not in Kansas anymore!”

This line from The Wizard of Oz came to my mind as I read this chapter.  It feels that way to me quite often, as the world around us seems to change overnight into a global village connected in a web of communication on the internet, collapsing time and space, and connecting ordinary folk with other ordinary folk.  We cannot live in our own little spaces anymore and ignore the rest of the world.  We can no longer afford to make assumptions about church or country or life, for that matter.  Robinson talks about the end of American Christendom in candid terms, naming the tensions that we feel in this country and around the world today.  So what do we do?

The challenging question that Robinson puts forth as one of the most important conversations we need to have is, “What is the role of the church in public life?”  His challenge is for all of us to rethink, reframe, and embody our public life and role.  As I write this, I am packing to fly to Louisville for a Board of Directors Meeting of JustFaith Ministries.  Their motto has been “JustFaith changes people; People change the world”.  That could easily be the mission statement of Christians everywhere. 

JustFaith Ministries was formed with the vision that Robinson articulates in his book.  They work toward changing the conversation in a variety of communities of faith today, concentrating on poverty and systemic injustice.  Robinson stresses that we must take sin and evil seriously, recognizing its complexity and depth.  Perhaps the hardest of all is the systemic injustices that seem so impossible to change in this violent and polarized world.  We need the strength to name the pain honestly and realistically, tell the stories, and then point to the sure and certain hope that is our faith.

Leap to the end of the chapter and read Robinson’s conclusions:  Our world is global.  We are not the center.  What is our faithful response?  How do we become what Robinson calls a church that is “centered yet open”?  

Are we about bringing more people through our doors into the church – or are we about forming Christians who go out the door and live their faith where God has called them to be? 

St. Paul wrote of the body made up of many parts, many “gifts that differ”.  At St. Mark’s we have been exploring faith in many different ways on Wednesday nights for years.  As a Christian and as a rector, I have grown and learned, and have been challenged and humbled, as well as affirmed.  I think that is the gift of diversity that is offered to each of us if we truly seek our center as Episcopal Christians.  We do not have to agree, but we do need to stand in solidarity with each other and learn from each other.

So how do we grow to understand, articulate, and use core Christian convictions that Robinson says is critical to a congregation’s health and vitality?  I had a wise pastor once that considered scripture study to be a wrestling match.  Scripture and our core convictions needed to be planted deep in our bones.  Out of that struggle came one of the best preachers and teachers that I have ever known.  We need “theologians in residence” who are able to bring core Christian convictions and principles into dialogue with congregational life in the wider culture.  Academics have their place, and so do those who fill in the gap between academia and what the church needs and finds helpful.   

Last spring Mike and I attended a gathering of academic scripture scholars, social justice activists, and “folks in the pews” who came together to dialogue with each other, rather than living in their own “ivory towers” – to learn from each other how better to embody the gospel in today’s world.  Our churches work to do that kind of dialogue in respect and openness.  We don’t have to agree, we just have to stand together in solidarity and respect. 

The Indaba process we engaged in as a diocese at our last convention is perhaps a step in this direction.  Such a model asks people to “grow and to grow up in Christ”.  Indaba asks us to truly listen in respect to each other, and to become accountable to each other.  The purpose of the church is to grow Christians who engage the world as people accountable to the gospel.  Church equips all of us for a vital role in the public sphere for the common good.

There is a rich mine of challenges for the future direction of the Christian churches in this 8^th chapter.  May we companion each other well on this journey.  We may no longer be “in Kansas”, but we are deeply rooted and grounded in faith. 

Jean McCarthy

Rector, St. Mark’s Church

Des Moines, IA