What is in Kelvin's Head?

  • Nine things I learned on sabbatical about church growth

    I was prompted by someone yesterday on facebook to outline some of the things that I learned about churches and particular something about church growth that I learned whilst on sabbatical in North America. I came up with a quick list and thought that I would share it here too in a slightly expanded form.

    The actual question that I was asked was regarding why people are giving up Mission Action Planning and looking for something else. It is indeed the case that I heard of people giving up doing Mission Action Planning. It is also the case though that lots of people in the States and Canada are still using that as a tool. The people who were giving up on it would say that they were giving up on it because it doesn’t work. The other reasons they might give would be these:

    • It can make people feel guilty
    • The risk is that it involves asking those who quite demonstrably don’t know what to do, what should be done.
    • It can often lull people into thinking that if they just do what they’ve done with a bit more effort then all shall be well when perhaps it won’t.

    In trying to think about patterns of church life amongst those who seemed to be doing well at helping congregations to grow, I would identify the following themes, which I’ve been thinking about since I came back:

    1. The need to stop talking about mission – no-one joins a church that is so needy as to advertise that they are interested in “doing mission”. (Advertise in this context means any website, poster, church sign or magazine)
    2. The need for strong high quality lay education – I was impressed by EFM http://www.sewanee.edu/EFM/
    3. The need to train people in good quality congregational development – I was impressed by this: http://www.cdcollege.org/
    4. The urgent need to think about quality in every aspect of church life. Especially worship. But not just worship.
    5. Quality costs money and that means deliberate stewardship work to raise the money needed. Note that the giving at St Mary’s is currently 14% higher year on year than it was and that these are the austerity years. This is partly down to a lot of very hard work done by a small number of people and partly because of ways of talking about money that I learned on sabbatical. The moral of the tale is that sending clergy away on fabulous trips can pay off financially.
    6. The need for leaders (mostly, but not exclusively bishops) taking a lead on hard issues like guns, drugs, gangs, marriage. This may mean talking to gangsters, taking a surprising opinion about drugs in public and joining the Pride parade.
    7. The need for conscious work on teaching people a religious identity. Teaching people how to be an Anglican – what you do as an Anglican – how to keep Holy Week and Easter as an Anglican – how to say Compline etc
    8. The need not to waste institutional and personal time trying to be ecumenical in a lowest common denominator way
    9. The need to start things up as often as you close things down and do both deliberately and intentionally

4 responses to “Here is the sermon…”

  1. Beth Avatar
    Beth

    I remember that workshop being done as part of an LGBT group meeting. I was slightly skeptical about it in the beginning, but ended up getting a lot out of it and thinking about God in ways that I hadn’t consciously before.

    Reply
  2. Tim Avatar
    Tim

    FWIW, in order to dot some `t’s and cross some `i’s, my sensibly heretical book The Five Gospels colours all the speech black apart from the saying about women grinding corn (which merits a grey, at best). Ie, none of the text goes back to any historical Jesus, with the apocalyptic context added by the gospel authors; the `thief in the night’ is an Christian saying of the early churches (witness other epistles, written before Matthew, where the image appears) and therefore probably planted, in that order, in Matthew.

    I guess taking what you most charitably will out of the passage is entirely reasonable, then. 🙂

    Reply
  3. Tim Avatar
    Tim

    (I had to read that, and a bit from Romans at church up here, too… was “interesting” turning a blind eye to it. 🙂

    Reply
  4. Tracey Avatar
    Tracey

    Thanks for that Kelvin. When I read that Gospel at the 8:30 service, i remembered the severe fundamentalist church I was brought up in as a child, and it made me uncomfortable. Reading your comments, I remember my first few visits to an Episcopal worship service and remembering how joyful and non-scary it was, and being amazed by the fact that I didn’t have to be afraid of God. Thanks for the reminder.

    Reply

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