What is in Kelvin's Head?

Sticking with being a welcoming church

09/05/2013

There’s been a post on another blog that has been doing the rounds over the last week or so which really made me think. Indeed, I lost count of the number of times I saw people refer to it on Facebook and every time, it made me think some more.

It was entitled: “We will no longer be a welcoming church” and it can be found on the website of Robert Moss, who is pastor at Lutheran Church of the Master (Evangelical Lutheran Church in America) in Lakewood, Colorado.

You can probably see straight away why it grabbed my eye. The slogan we’ve been working with since I came to St Mary’s is “Open, Inclusive, Welcoming”. It is one of those claims that is easy to make and harder to live up to. If you say on every bit of paper that you ever produce that you are welcoming then that has to be backed up with some sense of reality. However, St Mary’s generally is a friendly place and I find that lots of people who come do find it very welcoming. That won’t be true for everyone of course but it is true more often than not. Being in Glasgow makes it easier to be a welcoming church of course. When folk round here are not trying to murder you they are the friendliest people in the world after all.

Generally speaking, I can see what Robert Moss is getting at when he says that it is time to stop focussing on being a welcoming church in favour or thinking about being an inviting church. However, I’ve a feeling that the whole “inviting church” thing may be in danger of putting the cart before the horse.

I used to think that what we needed to do was teach people how to invite people to church. That’s the essence of so many worthy church growth strategies and mission plans. It is at the core of the much-lauded “Back to Church Sunday” initiative and is at the heart of what http://www.unlockingthegrowth.com/ is up to.

It isn’t just them, it is lots of people. The theory is, if you can teach people to invite people to church then they will do so and all shall be well and all manner of things shall be well.

I used to think this was the answer but I don’t any more. I’ve become convinced that if you want people to invite others to church you’ve got to begin by giving them something really great to invite them to. The thing is, if what you are offering is on the button, you don’t need to teach anyone how to invite people to church. They’ll do it anyway. Indeed, if they are having enough fun, if it meets their spiritual needs, if it is a place they have a chance of making friends, if it teaches them something good about how to live in this crazy world and make sense of it then they won’t be able to stop themselves. They’ll invite people anyway.

We don’t need to teach people how to invite others to church. We need help congregations to become such that people will do it anyway.

The trouble with things like Back to Church Sunday is that it invites people to come back to something that they probably had good reason to leave.

Let quality, friendship, love and joy loose and you don’t need mission plans. And within that vision is a taste of heaven.

So, good luck to the Lutheran folk in Lakewood, Colorado. I hope the initiative works. For now, here, I think we need to stick with being a welcoming church whilst working at being a church which is a barrel so full of delights that people can’t stop themselves from sending those Facebook invitations, tweeting those tweets about what their church experiences and from gossiping that they’ve seen the church, that which they thought was dead, alive and dancing.

(And before anyone starts wittering about cathedrals, resources, & congregational size, this is exactly what I tried to do in a much smaller church than I work in now).

Back to Church Sunday, inviting church, mission, welcoming church

7 responses to “Whither the Kirk?”

Pausing Place

25/08/2010

I missed last night’s programme, but I thought your comments were interesting.

In a sense, perhaps it’s unsurprising if the SEC is inwardly more positive about itself than the CofS. My take is that in the recent past, at least, the SEC started from a lower common denominator, not being the “local” church in the same way as the Kirk, and so it doesn’t have to contend with others saying of it “look how the mighty have fallen” in quite the same way.

As to the health of the Kirk (and the SEC for that matter), I think we need to reflect on our self-perception and to consider carefully the points and places in which a dying church (congregation or denomination) should be allowed to die gracefully, and the ways in which we might see new life emerge from the rubble.

As a young(ish!), relatively new Christian I have seen examples of (both urban and rural) SEC and Kirk congregations where there are few signs of new growth, little to draw in younger (under 50 year olds, to pick a random-ish number) new folk, and much to sustain negative preconceptions of church as boring, irrelevant and so forth.

We as a faith community need to get much better at stepping up to the mark in our creativity and engagement with our society. The sad truth is that most young adults do not know and have not heard about Jesus Christ, and unless we engage with them in ways culturally relevant to them, and which do not presuppose previous knowledge (too often taken for granted) they never will.

It troubles me, but I do think it’s true to say that in the SEC and in the Kirk we have a church sustained by the traditions and cultural reference points taught to a previous generation. Culture has shifted radically, with the result that the same will not be able to be said in 20 years time.

Our challenge is clear. Whether the Kirk and the SEC can step up to the mark to address what it means to live out the Great Commission in the 21st century is less so.

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Cal

25/08/2010

I didn’t really understand who this programme was aimed at, or even what its aim was.

Yes, numbers have fallen, but perhaps the small number of people who remain are there because they actually want to be, not because it’s the done thing on a Sunday morning.

And personally, I rather like the idea of a church “sustained by traditions”. Clearly the church has to be relevant to modern society, but in abandoning the traditions of worship then you lose the centre of why the church exists in the first place.

There was something very Presbyterian about the programme with its “we’re doomed” mentality. I find the SEC generally more positive in outlook.

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John

25/08/2010

The only book the presenter seemed to have used in his research was ‘The Death of Christian Britain: Understanding Secularisation 1800-2000’ By Callum G Brown – indeed Callum Brown was one of the speakers. The thesis of this well argued sociological study is that “quite suddenly in 1963 something very profound ruptured the character of the nation and its people sending organised Christianity on a downward spiral to the margins of social significanceâ€. That something he identifies as new media, new gender roles and a moral revolution which has dramatically ended peopleâ€™s conception that they lived Christian lives.â€ It could be said to have happened as â€œsex beganâ€ between the end of the Chatterly ban and the Beatles first LP as the poet Philip Larkin so famously put it.”
To balance this statistical decline the programme flagged up some of the “church without walls ” iniatives in a lame sort of way. All in all a most unsatisfactory programme that only told half the story.

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Kenny

25/08/2010

Good crit Kelvin. My reflection at the end of the programme was, “Lord, we visited this stuff over 30 years ago, and have come out of it stronger and better Church in the SEC.” Hopefully, we stopped longing for ‘the good old days’ a long time ago!

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MartinRitchie

26/08/2010

I thinking “Pausing Place” makes a good point about needing to creatively engage with society. From my own experience of working with a CofS congregation, this creative engagement is a weak spot for many.

As a counterpoint to the programme, interesting to note in the latest “Life and Work” a very positive article about a growing CofS congregation in Stornoway – and I mean really growing! So not all doom and gloom, and I’m sure there are many more examples of bright spots, just as there are in the SEC!

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Graham Vahey

28/08/2010

If the C of S disappeared completely we would be at a loss. During the dark and bleak years of Thatcher’s reign she refused to visit Scotland for 5 years. When she did she expressed shock that we had Royal Regalia and ordered it to be removed immediately for safe-keeping to England. Her ‘Sermon on the Mound’ is now historical for its condescension to the Scots. She was none too pleased to be handed two reports on poverty in Scotland by the powerful Church and Nation Committee. Indeed, it was to this Committee that the population turned to for a moral lead during Thatcherism. When James VI (‘Jamie the Saxt’) became James I in England, the population turned to senior Scottish earls for a moral lead. Unfortunately, the Piskie Church does not give a moral lead in Scotland, apart from the work of the Scottish Constitutional Convention in the recent past. The RC Church does pronounce on moral issues. Could it not be conceivable that all the major Churches could unite in a Committee to pronounce for Scotland on moral issues as the Church & Nation Committee once did?

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Aldous N. Gaiters

01/09/2010

Speaking as a Nonjuror myself I am sure the SEC has a right to a moral voice in Scotland. Taking the US daughter church of the SEC as a model you could see where the fissures would appear. There is room for a modern liberal Christian voice, but even I an old Liberal myself, would have to fear that such a voice might appeal to only a select few.

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