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 “Reclaiming the web”

Paul Hutchinson

14/10/2015

Thank you for making me think in a different direction just before pausing for lunch. I have never had a blog, so came quite late to Internet social discourse, and have engaged more since joining one major network in 2010 and another in early 2014 – normally using those networks rather than a comment box such as this. Not all of us are natural creators of substantial original content, but like to be thoughtful in brief exchange, and so both those major networks, though cursed with many difficulties, serve those brief exchanges quite well. I do agree that the endless recycling of links (on both of them) can be wearying, and I do wish that some old friends would be a little more self-critical. But the price of any kind of social discourse is that one is vulnerable to the otherness of the other.
I feel I ought to be writing a more substantial comment here, but hope that this is enough. The time is not always there to offer deeper reflection: but sometimes a blogger needs to hear at least a small splash from the stone thrown down the well!

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1. Kelvin
  
  14/10/2015
  
  Thanks for the comment, Paul. I’m aware that not everyone is a content creator, but perhaps what I miss is the sense of discovering different communities online and keeping the comments more or less in one place helps with that.
  
  The glory days of 50 or more comments on a post are probably over. I suspect I mourn the sense of community being created even more than I miss the interesting reflections of others. Retweets and shares are always welcome – but they are the means of amplification. Becoming loud isn’t the same as becoming wise, nor the same as becoming connected.
  
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Seph

14/10/2015

It’s a damnable shame—and mostly the fault of Facebook. Twitter at least has an etiquette of sorts, wherein it is considered impolite not to respond to the original tweet, which is usually made by the blogger in question.

Facebook, in short, is the scourge of the Internet. I have often been in groups which have decided to do all of their organizing on Facebook, despite my protests that I’m not on Facebook and don’t want to be, and really an e-mail list would be just as easy, and would they like me to set one up. This inevitably leads to my marginalization within the group, as no-one bothers to keep me abreast of the discussions to which I am not party.

Can you tell I’m upset about this?

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Daniel Lamont

14/10/2015

I am only an occasional user of Facebook but I know what you mean, Kelvin. And indeed, I never read the comments ‘below the line’ on newspapers like ‘The Guardian’. You offer some useful advice. I read yours and one or two other blogs on a regular basis but don’t always comment. However, I can see that the author of a blog would like some feedback. I would be sad not to have the blogs that I do read because they do give me a sense of what people are thinking and an odd sense of community.

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Father Ron Smith

14/10/2015

My own contribution to the blogopshere is, I’m afraid, Father Kelvin, limited to comments I make on other people’s blogs (such as ‘Thinking Anglicans’ and ‘Anglican Down Under’ – a local NZ forum; plus my own blog ‘kiwianglo’, where i pluck articles that interest me personally from the web and provide my own commentary. This still interests me, personally, and provides my few readers with information they might not otherwise be bothered to glean for themselves. Like you, I am no longer an avid Facebook fan.

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David Campbell

16/10/2015

Hi Kelvin – thoughtful as ever – and yours is invariably the first blog I turn to each day. That you bring pressing issues to a wider audience and to people who know, or used to know, the church you serve is a great thing. I’m still blogging relatively strongly, but it’s certainly a different blogging experience when work is set in a very different context and especially community from previously, writing these days mainly for myself about things that interest me, although not quite at the address you have in your Blog Roll. http://www.limpingtowardsthesunrise.com is where it’s “all” happening.

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1. Kelvin
  
  16/10/2015
  
  Thanks David – nice to hear from you. I’ve amended the link.
  
  I don’t think many people use blogrolls to find blogs these days but whenever I remove it my mother complains…
  
  Reply