The Heroic Model of Church Renewal

In his book on church renewal entitled, Turnaround and Beyond: A Hopeful Future for Small Membership Churches, author Ron Crandall places the hope of small churches to gain traction in the world of church decline on their pastors.  The book is largely a how-to manual for pastors filled with advice and admonitions, which when take together present a daunting list of demands on pastors.  The set of skills required to turn churches around is broad, and the attitudes a pastor has to cultivate are those of a near-perfect follower of Christ.  And, unfortunately, most of the advice is presented as things pastors must do if they are to achieve church renewal.  Little is said about the role of the church, particularly other leaders in the congregation, which leaves the impression that it's up to the pastor whether a church grows or not.

Tell me it ain't so, Joe.

Now, it is true that pastors play a key role in helping churches turnaround.  In most cases, a church isn't going to reverse decline if the pastor isn't committed to that goal and provides effective, enabling leadership.  The problem with Crandall's heroic model of church renewal is that it fails to acknolwedge the fact that a successful turnaround depends on the church more than it does on the pastor.  This is especially true in a small church.  If the members, including especially key lay leaders aren't on board, renewal won't happen.  Period.  A capable pastor can do things to encourage a church, but at the end of the day the church has to have some degree of willingness to be encouraged.  Some churches are capable of renewal, but frankly many are not because of the attitudes, fears, and just plain humanness of the members.

Perhaps some of those that are unlikely candidates for turnaround can in fact turnaround with heroic pastoral leadership.  Granted.  The problem is, sadly, that most pastors aren't up to the heroics.  We make mistakes, fail to present things "the right way," trip over our own foibles, struggle with our own baggage, disappoint people sometimes with cause & sometimes through no fault of our own.  Those of us who are less than heroic can still pastor churches pretty well, but we can't carry the immense burden for renewal that Crandall places on us.  We're just not that good at it.

Compounding the problem of pastoral limitations is the reality that the small pool of "really good" pastors tend to gravitate to larger churches while many smaller churches either have no pastoral leadership at all or depend on part-time pastors or lay leadership.  And, again, in some situations lay pastors and part-time pastors provide outstanding leadership, but as a rule they are even less likely to be able to provide heroic leadership than are full-time pastors.  They are still more dependent on the quality of the church's other leadership as well as the general membership.

At the end of the day, renewal depends on the mix of pastor, lay leadership, and congregation.  Usually renewal depends initially on the initiative of the pastor, although I know of cases where it originated with lay leaders in the church itself.  If the pastor seeks to jump start renewal, it then depends on the response of the membership, and at the end of the day a church can't be tricked or cajoled or finessed into "going along."  It has to want to, especially its key lay leadership, leaders who just might perceive a threat to their own place in the church in the whole idea of renewal.  If they resist, the result can be conflict, which only makes renewal less likely.

There are those who will interject that the Holy Spirit can transform any situation into something good.  "Where there's God, there is always hope."  That, in fact, is an important observation, but it comes with its own issues.  The Spirit does work with and through human agency, but it apparently works best when we are reasonably willing to be worked through.  The Spirit does not magically turn incapable pastors, resistant lay leaders, or weak churches into something else.  In our humanness, we can either open channels for the work of the Spirit, clogged up as the channels may be with that humanness, or we can throw up dams that frustrate the work of the Spirit.  The trick, then, is to know how to be a channel rather than a dam, which is very different from mastering all of the skills, investing the life-consuming time, and always displaying the proper attitudes demanded of a pastor by Crandall's heroic model of church renewal.

Various sports figures are reputed to have said, "The harder I practice, the luckier I get."  In terms of church renewal,  we might well say that the more church and pastor together behave in line with the Spirit, the more likely the church is to grow.

A New York New Species

The species of frog from NY Times

A recent posting in the NY Times online entitled, "A New Species in New York Was Croaking in Plain Sight," reports that scientists have identified a new species of frog has been discovered in New York City and surrounding counties in New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut. It is enough like other, more common frogs that nobody who knows about frogs noticed it until recently—so similar, in fact, that biologists had to do DNA testing on it to confirm that it is a separate species. Evidently, it makes a different call, but for a long time nobody noticed that either. Kinda makes you wonder what might be lurking up here in Lewis County. Surely if an unidentified species of frog has been hanging out in the Big Apple all these years, there has to be some hitherto unknown species of something waiting to be discovered in the back yards of Lowville.

By the way, they haven't named the new species yet.  The NY Times invites suggestions.

Two-edged Sword

CNN.com's Tech page recently posted an article entitled, "In today's warp-speed world, online missteps spread faster than ever," which I recommend for reader's consideration.  It makes the point that the various Web media can be used for rapidly disseminating misinformation that can sometimes be hurtful.  The Web has created a hunger for instant news, instant contact, and instant involvement.  Haste easily makes waste, and in the world of the Web once the cat is out of the bag it can spread at viral speeds.  Sometimes, a person simply acts hastily and unwisely, and sometimes a person or agency spreads lies deliberately.  It turns out, for example, that the story about a banker who supposedly gave a 1% tip to a server and wrote a derogatory message on his receipt is not true.  It is a hoax.  Still, if you google the story you will find the uncorrected story all over the Web.

It's a word to the wise for all of us who use the Web to communicate and rely on it as a source of information.  It really is like a knife.  It is useful and not safe all at the same time.  The thing is that often enough it is more like a dull knife than a sharp one—more likely to cause cuts and to leave jagged wounds.

Megachurches

The appearance of blessing on the surface may obscure the fact that [megachurch] churches are frenetic, showy places with lots of bells and whistles, filled with people who are not all that committed to Christ, but who have become addicted to stimulation and entertainment in their spiritual walk. They want to experience Christ’s presence but only if it comes wrapped in an exciting package.

N. Graham Standish, Becoming a Blessed Church (2005), p. 72

Theological Disputation Over the Person of Jesus (xlii)

Lion of St. Mark, Piazza San Marco, Venice

This posting is the 42nd in a series (originally written in 1998) looking at the Gospel of Mark from the perspective of a historian. The first posting in this series is (here).

As we have seen in postings 36 (here) and 13 (here) in this series, the Gospel of Mark insists that Jesus' divine identity was hidden from those around him. It also portrays Jesus as trying to keep things that way by ordering demons and those he healed to keep quiet about himself. What's going on here? It's hard to understand why a gospel writer would want to proceed in this manner, and certainly both Matthew and Luke rejected Mark's approach even as they availed themselves of his information. Mark, in short, wanted to inform his audience that Jesus' divine nature wasn't historically evident. It seems only logical that Mark's audience must not have realized the hidden nature of that identity. If they did there'd hardly be any reason for the author to write in this manner. That audience, furthermore, could hardly have been non-Christian. It would be ridiculous for Mark to engage in an evangelistic approach that emphasized the difficulties in discovering who Jesus was. The author wrote for a Christian audience that believed that Jesus' divine nature was self-evident.

It could be that the author of Mark disagreed that Jesus' divine nature was so entirely clear. It could have also been that this author felt it was incorrect to overlook the human side of Jesus' person and ministry. Do we have, then, a historical work that intended to restore balance to the early church's interpretation of Jesus? Was the author using historical data to resist a theological trend that tended to overlook Jesus' humanity? Historically, Greek-influenced factions within the earliest Jewish church began to emphasize the divine aspects of Jesus' person and works almost from Pentecost. It could be, in sum, that the author of Mark felt that those who over-emphasized Jesus' divinity were forgetting the realities of his person and ministry. Perhaps the author feared that they were turning belief in Jesus into a groundless superstition. Why else would she or he be so insistent on emphasizing the humanity of Jesus and the fact that Jesus divine nature wasn't self-evident?

Attention Smokers: Cigarettes are radioactive!

If you are a smoker or if you are regularly subjected to "passive" cigarette smoke, I would strongly urge you to read a posting at ABC Science entitled, "Cigarettes as radioactive as x-rays." It turns out that two packs of cigarettes contain the same level of radiation as a chest x-ray. And so-called "passive" smoke is toxic as well.  Smokers, if you must smoke, please, do it where others aren't subjected to it.  Please.  But, it would be best all the way around if you would stop smoking entirely.

An Ancient Research Historian (xli)

Lion of St. Mark, Piazza San Marco, Venice

This posting is the 41st in a series (originally written in 1998) looking at the Gospel of Mark from the perspective of a historian. The first posting in this series is (here).

The common view among mainline academics seems to be that the Synoptic Gospels were cobbled together by "editors" whose main task it was to integrate oral and written traditions about Jesus into a coherent unit. Their creativity as writers was largely limited to the choices of material they made, how they combined that material, and the order they gave to it. Many would argue that it's incorrect to consider the Gospel writers as authors. Others see those writers as creative individuals, worthy of the title of "author" but still as mostly re-working the traditions they relied upon.

We need to think more about this. The author of Mark was a highly creative individual. He may well have invented the gospel genre. He has a central theme, namely the unfolding the divine identity of the man Jesus. He shows a clear awareness of historical developments. His sources didn't just appear magically on his writing table. He had to go out and collect those sources. He might have conducted interviews in the process. It's very difficult to believe that the author hadn't gone through a personal discovery of who Jesus was for himself. That experience would have had a formative influence on how he wrote his Gospel. Isn't it possible that what we have here is, in fact, the original work of an ancient research historian, based on his sources as any history must be but still an original work? I think so.

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2012 reflections: The argument I pursued back in 1998 is an important one.  If it is correct that the author of the Gospel of Mark was a credible ancient historian and the gospel reflects actual events, then its stories cannot be simply dismissed as a work of zealous fiction.  I'm not claiming here that the Gospel of Mark is proof that Jesus was the Christ, but I am saying that those who followed him believed him to be so with what they took were good reasons just as those who resisted him did so for what they thought to be good reasons.  The judgment that Jesus of Nazareth was the Son of God and is our Lord and Saviour is a faith judgment not a historical one.  The judgment that Jesus was a remarkable individual who taught with power, performed what the people of his day considered miracles, challenged authority, sided with the poor, and ministered to them is one historians can make.  Indeed, it was the judgment of several ancient historians including the authors of the four gospels.

It is clear that the author of Mark wrote as a person of faith.  My argument 14 years ago and today is that the author also wrote as a credible ancient historian who worked with sources, shaped the data mined from those sources, and did what historians do, which is to tell the story of the past.  We moderns may discount the conclusions the author made in faith, but we cannot simply explain away the data that informed the author's faith.  That's the point.

It's Not All About Gibbs

The NCIS Team at Work

The popular TV crime show NCIS offers an interesting metaphor for local church life.  Although Special Agent Leroy Jethro Gibbs, played by Mark Harmon, is the ostensible star of the show and most of the plots revolve around him, the show is not all about Gibbs.  It is about the team of special agents and forensics specialists who each contribute to catching the bad guys week after week.  The show is popular because the team's characters are believable, from Abby Sciuto (Pauley Perrette), the Goth forensic scientist, to Tony DiNozzo (Michael Weatherly), the team's smart-aleck & sometimes obnoxious number two guy. In some ways the members of the team are mismatched, and one wonders how they can ever work together. They have their troubled histories, which come into play in one way or another most weeks. Yet, out of all of this humanness they craft a remarkable team, dysfunctional and effective all rolled up into one.

Churches are pretty much the same. Sometimes, it is a wonder that they function at all, but at other times remarkable things happen out of the combinations of skills, concerns, and abilities individual members bring to the mix.  It may at times not be helpful to expect too much of a church, but more often it isn't wise to expect too little.

Rethinking Church Entirely

The Rev. Bruce Reyes-Chow, a teaching elder in and former moderator of the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church (USA), is in the process of planting a new church——an online church, a facebook church, or as they are now being called, a virtual church. It will not be a church that has a facebook page but rather one that is located on a facebook page.  In a recent posting on his personal blog entitled, "We’re Starting a New Presbyterian Church," Reyes-Chow outlines some of his thinking about the shape and direction this new, as yet unnamed church, might take.  He intends it to be a "real" church, that is with elected leadership, fellowship, ministries, and worship.  Instead of occupying physical space, however, it will "occupy" online social media with the purpose of creating a genuine faith community where members connect through the social media rather than physically.  He writes, "This is not about building up a crazy number of followers, friends or likes. This is about creating community that finds healing, discipline and love SO that we get the heck out into the world and do some good."  Reyes-Chow intends that this new church will be a member congregation of PC(USA).  It will be interesting to see which presbytery it joins.  Will the day come when there are enough virtual congregations in PC(USA) to form a virtual presbytery?  Would such a virtual presbytery even be necessary?

For readers who are intrigued by the idea of a "virtual church," you might want to look at the debate that has taken place on the blog Out of Ur (here - scroll down the list of articles to find those involved in the debate) on the subject.

As a pastor, I spend a good deal of time with folks in their 80s and 90s even, and most of them do not own a computer, do not understand much about computers, and are not the least interested in getting involved with them.  Quite a few folks in this age category took an early retirement or decided to definitely retire because their workplaces were in the process or computerizing.  Those of us in our 60s and into the early 70s came at this whole thing as maturing adults.  We've not had any choice about learning to compute, and many of us do it reasonably well.  But we did not grow up in the virtual world.  It doesn't come "naturally" to most of us, although some first wave baby boomers are as cutting edge as anybody and have played a major role in creating the virtual world of internet.  Still, I must confess personally that this virtual church or facebook church is just not my cuppa.  It sounds as though it might have great potential, but not for those of us who are just too wedded to living "out here" in the real time and space world.

That being said, perhaps Reyes-Chow's congregation represents one possibility for the church of the future.  The virtual world is a real world, and it makes sense that the church should find its place and pursue its ministries in that world.  It also offers another possibility for small Presbyterian congregations that can no longer maintain their building, employ a pastor, and do all of the things churches have been expected to do.  Perhaps, there is a way to embody his virtual church in local groups of Presbyterians who gather physically as well as virtually.  And, maybe, some of us in the bridge generation (from the pre-world to the post-world) will eventually find ourselves sharing in an online faith community as well as a physical one.

God Utters Me

God utters me like a word containing a partial thought of himself.

Thomas Merton

Source: Unknown

From:  inward/outward