By Pastor Kerry Nelson
This will be my final post to the Mission Possible Network. I thought it would be helpful – to me certainly and potentially to you – to wrap up this little corner of the work that I have done among you for the past 18 months with a few closing thoughts about what I have learned along the way. Some will be confirmation of ministry principles that I have long tried to embrace. And some will be discoveries that I have had while working in the synod office. I’ll try to capture these thoughts in five broad statements.
1. Jesus is Lord and the closer we stay to that reality the more effective we will be in ministry.
I began this work with a vision to join Bishop Rinehart and his team in helping our congregations make more Lutherans. Immediately I got pushback that it was inappropriate to strive to make more Lutherans. I heard from people, “We need to make more Christians, not more Lutherans”. “Lutheran” is an adjective; “Christian” is the point. I agree with that. Point taken. (On the other hand, the reality is that we have spent 22 years in the ELCA making less of just about everything so what difference does it make to argue semantics?)
I was surprised by that pushback; I assumed people would understand that is what I meant. Lutheran and Christian are not mutually exclusive terms for me. I expect Baptists to make more Baptists so what is the problem with a Lutheran seeking to make more Lutherans? Unless more Lutherans would be unhelpful to God’s work in the world…in which case we ought to close our doors.
But we all live and work in the real world. In the real world, no one equates Christian identity to a name in a big red Parish Book. There IS something deeper to church membership, isn’t there? Yet in the real world, our name can be in a membership list for a congregation in which we play no part, believe little of anything taught, believe perhaps the opposite of what is taught, and no one is the wiser. As Pastors, we are free to be as spiritually disengaged from ministry as we choose to be. Short cuts abound. This is all dangerous to our identity, our purpose and our calling.
At the end of the day, if we all aren’t spiritually engaged – if we are not seeking God’s direction in our lives, we’re not praying about everything, we’re not engaged in Bible study, active in worship and service, accountable to a few other Christians – then we will never reach our God-given capacity for ministry. I need to improve in these areas; most people I know need to improve in these areas. We all know it. Probably time that we make time for it.
When we take the Lordship of Jesus seriously then our lives will reflect that. We will live, work and do ministry as if we belong to God and our goal is cooperating with God in incarnating the Kingdom of Heaven for the good of the world.
2. A faithful congregation makes every decision in the best interests of, and on behalf of, those who are not yet here.
I get pushback – even my own stomach churns – when I say this one out loud. Evidence perhaps that it lies right at that crucial cutting edge of the kind of missional thinking that leads to missional ministry. We push back because we sense that this principle calls us to selflessness, creativity and change. It goes against the grain of common sense (the world tells us that membership has its privileges, not its responsibilities.) But every time that I remember this principle in the midst of a question about congregational practices or leadership directions, it becomes a compass pointing due north to the truth.
Embracing this principle requires three things from us. First, it requires intuition. If we have been around the church our whole lives it will be almost impossible for us to “see” our ministries, our buildings, our practices, from the point of view of a new person. Even if we didn’t grow up in the church, once we have been around a little while we tend to forget what it felt like to be new. So we must imagine. We must intuit.
It might help here if we imagine a congregation like a restaurant. If you were designing, opening and running a new restaurant, what would you have to be thinking about in your design, your marketing, your customer experience, that would lead to a successful business?
Second, we need people who can speak up on behalf of those who are not yet here. They might be the voices of young people, of boys in their 20’s, of our newest members who can still remember good reasons why they chose our congregation. We need to listen to the voices of those outside of our congregations who can help us see needs in the surrounding community that aren’t being met but potentially could be places for our congregation to serve.
And third, we need to be checking in with our newest people to see how we are doing. We need to measure our effectiveness in stories as well as statistics. There is plenty of room in the church for excellent mistakes, for trying our best with the best of intentions but failing miserably to reach our goals. Such failures are only failures if we fail to learn something from them. We only learn if we ask.
3. Christianity is a team sport.
I realize that the popular culture around us divides spirituality and religion. Frankly, we need to accept an appropriate level of responsibility for sewing the seeds of such a divide. Many is the congregation, and the Christian, whose words and deeds have failed to align to such a degree that the institution, and the person, lose credibility.
But the popular answer in the culture has been to leave the church in droves. That is precisely the wrong answer! It is wrong in that it is unhelpful in two ways. Let’s call them “protection” and “production” to make them easy to remember.
First, isolated individuals cut off from Christian community lose the best when they leave the rest. They open themselves to all sorts of goofiness. They run from the church but they can’t run from God. They fall prey to American individualism run amock, just a “me and Jesus on the golf course” kind of faith that is more like the man building his house on sand in Jesus’ parable than finding God in the 8th hole sand trap. People who say they believe in nothing tend to swallow anything that feeds their selfishness, isolation and shame. Being part of Christian community protects us.
Being part of Christian community also helps us be more productive in the best sense of that word. We make a much more significant mark in the world by working with others than we can alone. We can enjoy the support of good friends. Our lives, living in a rhythm of worship and prayer and fellowship, become more centered around the Center that lies at the center of life. It is healthy for people of faith to be connected to others of faith.
The Bible tells us that Body of Christ is just that, a living organism comprised of many interdependent members. When we function as a part of the whole, for the good of the whole, we are at our best. Christianity is a team sport. And that calls us to live with a healthy sense of connectedness within our own networks of family and friends, within our local congregation, our ministeriums, our synod and our denomination. We thrive together and we die alone.
4. A minister can attract new people but it takes a ministry to retain them, nurture them, help them grow and set them free to serve.
People are complicated. There is nothing simple about us. It is no wonder, when you team a bunch of us up together in a congregation, that congregational systems come out as complex as they are. There is no BIG ANSWER to congregational health, grow and vitality. There isn’t a program or a pastor who can “fix us.” All there is is the love of God which has captured us and the common call to live that love in the world. We work out how to do that together. That is where it gets tricky.
Having said that, we all do well to learn as much as we can about leadership and the life dynamics of congregations of various sizes. We learn that from others who have been there before us (books, websites, personal conversations, congregational visits), from learning events (best experienced in groups), and from our prayer lives as we seek God’s direction in applying what we learn to our lives and our ministries.
The most effective congregations include pastors and lay leaders who are hungry to learn as much as possible about congregational leadership and congregational health. Pastors, of course, get paid to learn such stuff. Our people expect that from us. But once we learn something new, we need the active and on-going partnership of others to make it happen and make it work.
Far too often pastors settle back into the routine of what they have always done, wondering why they don’t get different results. Far too often, lay people who aren’t really engaged in a spiritual life sit back and take potshots at pastors for not “growing the church” like we “pay you to do.” Neither route gets us home.
Christianity IS a team sport and congregations do best when they play to win, when they play as a team, when they follow leaders who lead well in doing the right things.
5. The only healthy theology of stewardship is healthy stewardship of life.
I have also been responsible for working in the area of healthy stewardship and mission support for the wider work of the church. Frankly, while we did some good work in drafting a synodical plan for growth as stewards, I didn’t spend as much time or energy in this area as I have in evangelism and congregational growth. There is a reason for that.
Money does in fact follow mission. When we come to the place that we fully realize that we belong to God, it is a very short step for us to then realize that what we do with our lives, all of our lives, every corner of our lives, reflects this identity.
Mature Christians don’t need to be reminded to be generous, they are eager to be generous. They don’t need to be beat over the head with reminders of finding an outlet to serve the world through their gifts/passions, they are already doing it.
The Christian church today, including the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, doesn’t have a money problem today, we have a faith problem. And we don’t solve that faith problem by raising more money.
Along with Rolf Jacobson, I’ve learned some wonderful new insights into Christian stewardship this year that will last me for years to come. Among them:
o The church needs to do a much better job talking about money (helping people to understand and steward the role and power money plays in their lives) and less time talking about giving. As Mark Allan Powell says, the Bible has much to say about how we acquire money, regard our money, manage our money and spend our money.
o Healthy stewardship concerns 100% of our lives. Everything (all of our time, our interests, our passions, our pursuits) comes from God and matters to the world. We sew misunderstanding if we only talk about 10% of anything at church.
o The culture in which we live is post-Christendom but our congregational practices remain firmly rooted in Christendom. That needs to change. We need to re-think the whole ball of wax.
o We still collect offerings weekly in little offering envelopes as if people still get paid cash weekly in little pay envelopes.
o We still have an annual “pledge drive” in the fall even though a very high percentage of us no longer make our living from agriculture and therefore wait until harvest season to see how we did for the year. Not to mention that some of us won’t know what we will be making in the next year because new salary adjustments don’t happen until January.
o We plan our annual stewardship programs around our annual budgeting process and then wonder why our people don’t get it when we tell them that they aren’t giving “merely to support a budget.”
o We host Time & Talent drives and thereby feed the unholy notion that the only spiritually significant work that Christian people do in the world is volunteer for church stuff. That isn’t our theology, it has nothing to do with the idea of the priesthood of believers unleashed into the world to serve the world (and therefore fulfill God’s will) in their normal home/family/daily work lives. So why do we do it? And then, when it doesn’t work as intended, do we complain about the same people doing the same things all the time?
o And I will value Charles Lane’s exegesis of Luke 12:34 (beginning with reminding us of how easy it is to remember that verse reference…1,2,3,4) in seeing the relationship of our treasures and our hearts as Invitation rather than Prescription. If we want our heart to be more engaged in something, it helps to send our money there first.
At the end of the day, God will provide for our needs. Not only our daily needs but for the needs of the ministry of God’s church. And we in turn do well to remember what Martin Luther taught us about the 4th petition of the Lords’ Prayer: In fact, God gives daily bread without our prayer, even to all evil people, but we ask in this prayer that God cause us to recognize what our daily bread is and to receive it with thanksgiving.
Thank you for the privilege of serving the church here in the office of the Texas-Lutheran Gulf Coast Synod of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America. Thank you, good people of Faith Lutheran Church in Bellaire, Texas, for taking the risk of inviting me into your presence for the next twenty years (I hope neither of us live to regret that.)
May God bless and guide us as we seek to be a part of a network of growing, Christ-centered, outwardly focused congregations passing the faith to the next generation.
