Do Something November 11, 2009
Posted by doroteos2 in Church Leadership, Congregational Life, Mission of the Church, Vision.Tags: Christian service, Mission & Purpose, The United Methodist Church
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Is part of our problem that we make things too hard? Maybe the key to congregational health, strength, and vitality is well within our grasp, but we keep looking for some grand answer because the truth seems much to simple and easy. Over the weekend I went through some files and found a set of interviews with church leaders in congregations of under 100 active members. Though “small” in category, each of these churches (numbering 33 in my file) is doing exceptional ministry — all because they found one single thing to focus on and excel at. These churches are all in different cities, towns, or rural areas — all unique in some ways, but quite similar in others. Here are three quotes, one from a church in Ohio, on from Oregon, and one from Texas –
Time Warped November 10, 2009
Posted by doroteos2 in Church Leadership, Church growth, Core Values, The United Methodist Church, Transformation and Change.Tags: church, Church growth, Church Leadership, Trust, Values
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I read an article this last week that says our Council of Bishops approved a plan to make The United Methodist Church ten-year’s younger in a decade. I thought, “That can’t be right.” Just doing the math, we would need 70% of our existing over-50 membership to die or go to another denomination. Then I realized we were talking about the even less-likely scenario of attracting approximately 3 million 20/30-somethings to become United Methodist. There is always a lot of merit in wanting to introduce new people to a lifelong relationship with Jesus Christ. I hope we do this well. But as I look at what it will take to reach our goal, I have a few suggestions:
- Make sure the bishops working on this are all 40 and under (I’m being ironic or sarcastic here, I can’t remember which…) – we know for a fact that Boomers and older Busters can’t do ministry for younger people. This is a no-brainer. The church for the young needs to be the church of the young. Oh, no – not either/or, but both/and. We need the church we have to welcome in baby brothers and sisters. Older children need to learn to share their toys with younger children — and even let younger children have toys of their own – or nothing much good happens.
Strategy 101: Ten Simple Planning Mistakes to Avoid November 9, 2009
Posted by doroteos2 in Church Leadership, Strategic Planning.Tags: Church Leadership, Mission & Purpose
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This is an often-requested article I wrote over ten years ago. I reprint it here, hoping it still offers value to a new audience.
Musicians become true artists by first playing scales. Star athletes exercise daily and practice the same plays time and again so that they can respond in any given situation without thinking. Anyone who ever mastered a craft did so by first learning the basics. Unless you master the basics, you’re likely to make mistakes when it matters most.
Strategic planning is every bit as much art as science. What is true for athletes and musicians is true for leaders as well. If you don’t attend to the basics, you’re likely to make errors. Most strategic planning efforts in local congregations fail, not due to poor work or lack of knowledge or commitment, but due to simple mistakes. Here is a list of the top “don’ts” when planning for your congregation:
1. Don’t waste time being right.
2. Don’t assume concurrence.
3. Don’t gather paper. Instead, gather information from people.
4. Don’t hurry.
5. Don’t over-plan.
6. Don’t write mission and/or vision statements.
7. Don’t “publish” your plan.
8. Don’t generalize.
9. Don’t plan “for” other people.
10. Don’t be too serious.
Dirty Stat Lover November 8, 2009
Posted by doroteos2 in Church growth, Core Values, Critical Thinking, Evaluation and Assessment.Tags: Religious Trends, Values
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An email I received today asked a question I am frequently asked, “How could someone who distrusts and dislikes statistics as much as you do have been a researcher for over a decade?” The short answer to this is that it’s not that I don’t like statistics – I LOVE them, and as with anything you love deeply you come to appreciate not only their strengths, but you become painfully aware of all their shortcomings as well. I am personally enamored of statistics and research, surveys and summaries. What I dislike and distrust is the misuse and misrepresentation of what stats and data actually provide.
Demographics are a prime example. Based on good statistical data, demographers track shifts in populations, preferences, groupings, income, education, and a thousand and one interesting bits and bytes. Based on good statistical analysis, a demographer may project that one particular racial/ethnic group may increase by 20% in a particular area. They may also predict that the majority of the population will be under the age of thirty-five, with a high school education and a median income of $38,750 per year. Great. So what do you actually KNOW that you didn’t before? What you should know is that you now have something to check out to discover what it really means. Any decision you make based on this data beyond further inquiry and study is most likely a bad decision. But do you know how many new church starts are planned based on little more data than that provided above? Too many (though I must admit that while we happily skipped down this blind path regularly in the 1980s and 1990s, we do seem to have learned how reckless and stupid it was, and we don’t do it as often any more…)
Running Church November 6, 2009
Posted by doroteos2 in Church Leadership, Church growth, Core Values, Vision.Tags: church, Mission & Purpose, Religious Trends
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Stephen King wrote a novella entitled, The Running Man, about a brutal futuristic society where game shows and public executions were combined to produce the ultimate reality show. Prisoners were given the opportunity to try to escape death — on national TV — by facing unexpected and unimaginable challenges. The bottom line was to keep moving, keep running, because the moment a person stopped, they died. Now, this might seem an unusual metaphor for our current church situation, but sadly it is not. At almost every turn, well-meaning and good-intentioned people trade our Promised Land for Dystopia. The end result is that we run as fast as we can to lose ground, living in constant fear of imminent demise. Am I being too grim? I hope so, but here are five pieces of evidence that I think support the theory: clergy morale, clergy health, lay apathy, church debt, and lack of vision.
Compatibullying November 5, 2009
Posted by doroteos2 in Core Values, Religion in the U.S., U.S. Culture.Tags: Religious Trends, The United Methodist Church, Values
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The United Methodist Judicial Council has adjudicated the “homosexuality question” for the denomination by deeming the Baltimore-Washington attempt to reframe and redeem the gay-lesbian-bi-transgender issue “out-of-order.” The claim is that homosexuality is incompatible with Christian teaching. Okay, fine, I accept that — but only if we’re consistent. The ordination of women is incompatible with Christian teaching — that is, until Christian teaching was changed. Slavery is compatible with Christian teaching, but only if you are an evil, hateful, ignorant Christian. Greed isn’t compatible, but we don’t want to go there or rich people won’t give us their money. There are food issues, but they’re confusing, so it’s better to ignore them. Incompatibility is a lousy excuse for setting boundaries, because we refuse to use them consistently.
To the Unrealistically Depressingly Fatalistically Statistically Biased November 4, 2009
Posted by doroteos2 in Critical Thinking, Religion in the U.S., Research, Spiritual Trends.Tags: Church Leadership, Church membership, Religious Trends
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We’re old. We’re dying. We’re decaying. We’re declining. We’re ineffective. We’re irrelevant. Doesn’t that motivate you to do better? Come on, be honest. Don’t such messages just fill you with energy, vigor, passion and hope? Sure they do, otherwise why would we dwell so constantly upon them? Why waste time envisioning ourselves as God is calling us to be when we can wallow in all the things we aren’t? Doom-and-gloomers eat this stuff up. The United Methodist Church will be gone in 40 years. The average age of United Methodists is 104. We’re closing 24,000 churches every year. It’s like crack. Once we taste the bad news, we simply can’t get enough of it.
I hate the misuse of statistics, but I have to admit it’s very easy to do. All you have to do is count something, frame it in a specific way, twist it 45 degrees, take it completely out of context and pretend it is the only thing that matters, and then present it as “fact.” It’s fun, and anyone can do it. Plus, once the results are published there is the added joy of all the many ways the findings can be misinterpreted, misunderstood, and miscommunicated. Nothing irks me more than someone who knows better delivering sincere misinformation as insightful and true. I attended a domestic violence workshop once where the “expert” claimed that in the 90 minutes we had been together, “31,000 children were victims of abuse in the United States.” Now, do the math — this is over 340 children a minute, 489,000 a day, 14,688,000 a month — every child in the U.S. is abused no less than twice a year. Yikes, what a terrible childhood we suffer in these United States.
Why People Think We’re Crazy November 3, 2009
Posted by doroteos2 in Congregational Life, Critical Thinking, prayer, spiritual practices.Tags: anti-intellectualism, Myths, prayer, spiritual practices
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There are times when Christians drive me absolutely nuts. One way this happens is when I hear well-meaning and sincere Christians confuse faith and superstition, relying on prayer as a magical talisman or incantation. I listened to a United Methodist colleague share recently that he no longer prays because it never makes any difference. He told of a time when he was getting a cold and he prayed fervently that he not get sick, but got sick anyway. “I have better things to do with my time,” he concluded. Well, duh! Prayer isn’t our opportunity to tell God what to do or to corrupt it as a selfish want list. This irrational magical thinking does nothing more than give Christianity a bad name. We don’t need any help looking less enlightened than we already do to a growing educated and informed segment of our society. Ignorance, self-centeredness, judgmentalism, and narrow-mindedness are the four most prevalent reasons younger non-Christians give for avoiding the church (and the faith). When we promote a mythical-magical, pre-rational (irrational?) faith, we do ourselves no good. For example –
A weepy woman pastor wails on about how Down Syndrome babies are a gift from God. She explains that this affliction is a blessing to test parents capacity to love. That Down Syndrome children are the happiest and most carefree of all His children. She explains that Down Syndrome children are the earthly equivalent of cherubs, and that anyone with a Down Syndrome child is doubly blessed and will be richly rewarded in heaven — where their Down Syndrome children will be restored to full health (though why God would want to tamper with their perfection and blessedness is beyond me…). This lunatic actually invited mothers to pray with her that they might experience the blessing of having a child with Down Syndrome. Now, I don’t know what this lady’s brokenness is, and she may sincerely think she is offering a message of hope to families with a Down Syndrome child, but I do not for one moment believe that it is “God’s will” that a child or a family endure torments and heartache — especially as a test! OMG!
Mission: Impossible November 2, 2009
Posted by doroteos2 in Church Leadership, Church growth, Mission of the Church.Tags: church, Church growth, Church Leadership, Mission & Purpose
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Two recent conversations stick with me and stand in stark contrast to my understanding of the church. Now, my understanding may be completely wrong, so take what I say with a grain of salt. My personal belief is that the church exists to serve in the world — that we are not here to create an oasis or sanctuary that separates us from the world. I believe that our local congregations serve three purposes — to teach, comfort, affirm and equip people in their faith, to constantly promote growth and development in the life of Christian discipleship, and to move out into the world to be the body of Christ for others. For me, there is no church apart from the integration of these three things. However, I have been challenged in these beliefs in no uncertain terms, and it causes me to reflect seriously on what it actually means to be the church.
All Saints, All the Time October 31, 2009
Posted by doroteos2 in Christian witness, Personal Reflection.Tags: church, Witess
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As I prepare to preach on All Saints day, three things come to mind. First, of course, I think of all those significant people who helped to shape my life and faith. I think of my mother’s simple faith — she didn’t want to think too deeply about it, and she never wanted to face any contradiction. She wanted to believe that God was in heaven, watching over us all, with a plan for the world. I think of Reverend Collins — perhaps the least suited man ever to enter ministry. His lack of faith, his severe doubts, and his absence of courage made me wonder why in the world he would ever want to be a pastor. But he loved God and he desperately wanted others to believe. His devotion to God’s people inspires me still. Drs. Carl Andry and Neill Hamilton taught me more than I can believe or ever acknowledge. I am who I am because of these two brilliant teachers and guides. My best friend in college — Steve Paul — brought me back to the church. He deserves all the credit or all the blame. I wish I knew where he was and could contact him. Robert “Andy” Warrner — perhaps the kindest, most compassionate, and most wonderful person I have ever known. There are still days that I wish I could be half the man he is. My wife, Barbara, who is my rudder, my anchor, my ballast AND the wind in my sails — she is the best friend I have ever had and I am thankful to God each day for her presence in my life. And my son, Josh, who has given my life meaning, purpose, joy, fulfillment, and an overwhelming pride and hope. So many people have come before, have walked with, and have offered grace to make me want to serve God faithfully and well.
