Page 5000 – Christianity Today (2024)

One way to introduce a song with great words but difficult music is to sing it to a familiar tune. And likewise, familiar words can take on new meaning and power when placed in a new musical context.

This is why I rely on the metrical index, a feature in many of the better hymnals. Because likemetered hymns are virtually interchangeable, this can add freshness to congregational singing.

The following list represents just a few examples of the hundreds of possibilities a metrical index provides. The numerals indicate the number of syllables per line; the letter D stands for a doubled (repeated) metrical pattern.

Long Meter-8,8,8,8

All People (Old 100th)

Jesus Shall Reign

When I Survey the Wondrous Cross

‘Tis Midnight

Just As I Am

O Master, Let Me Walk with Thee

Doxology

Short Meter-6,6,8,6

A Charge to Keep

Rejoice, Ye Pure in Heart

Come We That Love the Lord

Blest Be the Tie

I Love Thy Kingdom, Lord

Breathe on Me

Short Meter Double-6,6,8,6D

Crown Him with Many Crowns

This Is My Father’s World

Make Me a Captive, Lord

Common Meter-8,6,8,6

Jesus, the Very Thought of Thee

O for a Thousand Tongues

While Shepherds Watched Their Flocks

Majestic Sweetness

All Hail the Power

Alas! And Did My Savior Bleed

O God, Our Help in Ages Past

Amazing Grace

Joy to the World

Common Meter Double-8,6,8,6D

The Son of God Goes Forth

I Heard the Voice of Jesus Say

I Sing the Mighty Power of God

It Came Upon the Midnight Clear

O Little Town of Bethlehem

8,7,8,7D

Glorious Things of Thee Are Spoken

Hail, Thou Once Despised Jesus

Love Divine, All Loves Excelling

Come Thou Fount of Every Blessing

Once to Every Man and Nation

What a Friend We Have in Jesus

Alleluia (Chorus)

Savior, Like a Shepherd Lead Us

Oh, the Deep, Deep Love of Jesus

7,7,7,7,7,7

Jesus, Savior, Pilot Me

For the Beauty of the Earth

Rock of Ages

7,6,7,6D

O Jesus, I Have Promised

The Church’s One Foundation

O Word of God Incarnate

O Sacred Head Now Wounded

Stand Up for Jesus

Lead On, O King Eternal

-Howard Stevenson

Copyright © 1990 by the author or Christianity Today/Leadership Journal.Click here for reprint information on Leadership Journal.

Nobody wants a tumbleweed ministry, where people settle in church for a while only to blow away. To do God’s work, churches need planted people, and Christlikeness will grow in individuals only when they are rooted in local congregations.

So how can pastors help this generation-mobile, fast-paced, restless-connect to the church? And then, how can they help people put down deeper and deeper roots?

To answer those questions, LEADERSHIP gathered four pastors who face different challenges in assimilation.

Rick Lobs is rector of St. Mark’s Episcopal Church in suburban Geneva, Illinois.

Ray Maldonado pastors Hope Christian Fellowship, an urban and multi-ethnic congregation in Chicago.

Doug Self pastors The Church at Redstone and The Church at Carbondale, located in a mountain valley in Colorado.

Ken Travilla is associate pastor at Wooddale Church in the Minneapolis suburb of Eden Prairie.

Leadership: Describe how assimilation feels. Tell us about a group, apart from a congregation, that you’ve become a part of.

Doug Self: When I first came to Redstone, the community was forming a Search and Rescue Squad. I, along with fifteen others from our community, attended one of the first training classes for Emergency Medical Technicians. When we came together, none of us knew each other well. Yet as we learned and practiced together, we began to think as a team, discovering slowly our individual abilities and roles. Our common interest and task pulled us together.

Rick Lobs: My athletic experiences and service in the Marine Corps are two areas where I was most readily assimilated. In fact, last week I was sporting a Marine Corps T-shirt as I walked down the street, and a man stopped me and began talking about his days in the Marines. It’s been thirty years since I went through boot camp, but I felt a bond with him. I think a common purpose, in sports or the Marines or whatever, helps assimilate people.

One place I have felt least assimilated, sad to say, is the Christian church, particularly in ecumenical clergy groups. We have different social and theological concerns. We use different language, wear different clothes, worship differently-all these things divide us.

Ray Maldonado: Five of us from the church were taking a class together at SCUPE, Seminary Consortium for Urban Pastoral Education. When the assignment was given, I started doing it in my usual style-completing assignments early, reading ahead, trying to get a little edge on the others. But the group became uncomfortable with that. None of them had the college experience I had, so they weren’t working at the same pace, nor with individualistic goals.

So they pulled me aside and asked, “What’s happening? What are you trying to do? What are your motives?” I was shocked; I didn’t feel I was doing anything wrong. But they felt we were in that class as a group. We were to study together. To them it looked like I was out there doing my thing. It’s not that they wanted me to do poorly; they just wanted us to do well.

In addition, the class was designed for Anglos who were going to work in the city. But the five of us were second-generation Puerto Ricans who already worked there, although we needed more training. The group felt that to maintain our identity and purpose in that class of thirty-three, we needed to hang together better.

So they pulled me back into the group. For the rest of the year, I worked with at least one or two of the other guys on projects.

Ken Travilla: Let me talk about a different type of experience, but one that taught me a great deal about assimilation. I remember my first Sunday at Wooddale Church. I stood in the foyer, knowing few people and none well. I remember sitting in the congregation and looking up and not knowing one person in the choir. Yet I had just come from a church where I not only knew everybody in the choir, but I knew their families, their children. That was a terribly lonely feeling for my wife and me. After that, I carried a new concern for people visiting the church.

Leadership: What signals that a person is assimilated in a church?

Maldonado: Frankly, in some respects I’m uncomfortable with the word assimilation. It may imply that newcomers must give up some of their essential personality to become like the rest of the congregation, to conform to the predominant culture. That can be a problem for a Hispanic growing up in a predominant Anglo culture.

There was a time I tried to straighten my hair, like an Anglo. I suppose I thought I would assimilate-fit in better. Of course, it didn’t work.

So, I prefer the word belonging, helping people feel like they belong to a community, in spite of their differences.

Travilla: To me assimilation doesn’t mean making people all alike. We use the word quite a bit. In fact, for a while, it became a buzzword in our church-“How are they doing in being assimilated?”

But I prefer to use the word connected. If a person doesn’t get to know somebody else, make a friend, feel connected, he or she won’t stay. So for us, assimilation means getting connected to something or someone in the church.

Self: During my upbringing, assimilation was clear-cut: it happened when someone joined the church. During the altar call, people came down and shook the pastor’s hand and usually transferred their letter from another congregation. So, everything was geared toward that one point. You knew when you were assimilated, and you knew when you weren’t.

In my present situation, we don’t encourage people to join the church formally. People have come to Redstone to get away from social strictures, especially joining organizations. I don’t think I’ve had a dozen people in the last twelve years ask about joining. It’s possible to join if somebody wants to. (Laughter) But for most of our people, it has never crossed their minds.

So, my perspective has changed. Instead of pushing formal membership, I consider people assimilated when they feel they are a part of a congregation. Some people attend only four times a year, but we both sense they’re on board and they’ll be around awhile.

Leadership: So, people are assimilated when you can count on them returning in the future?

Self: Not necessarily. It’s more nebulous. It’s when people feel, This is my church, or, He’s my pastor. They may come only once or twice a year.

A few Sundays ago, I recognized a couple as newcomers, so I made my way to them after worship and introduced myself. In the course of the conversation, I asked them where they attended church. They looked startled and said, “Well, we go here. This is our church.” I found out that they’re among those people who come about once a year. But from their perspective, they’re assimilated.

Lobs: For me, assimilation has something to do with church growth, but that’s where it gets complicated. When assimilation means only church growth to me, I notice I am unsure about my ministry; I’m usually trying to justify my ministry with numbers. However, when I think about assimilation as a process of biblical hospitality, of which church growth is often a happy by-product, I feel good about my ministry and my church.

So assimilation begins when we welcome and make room for “the sojourner.”

Maldonado: Assimilation is signaled to some degree by worship attendance, but not always. There are other ways a person can identify with us and say, “This is my church.”

We have a food pantry ministry. Four or five volunteers not only give people food but offer to pray with them, or, if appropriate, share the gospel. The vast majority of people coming to our pantry want to hear some good news, some encouraging words, and have someone pray for them. Many of those people still don’t come to worship, but when they talk about the church, they say, “My church over there . . .” or point to us as “the church I go to.”

They’re connected to the church by the food pantry, even though some of them come only one Saturday a month.

Leadership: Is that the goal of assimilation-for people to identify with a congregation?

Self: It’s the beginning. After that, there’s no limit. I think we’re saying that rather than the church organization announcing someone belongs, people decide whether they feel included.

Leadership: What are the steps, then, in your assimilation process? How do you help people feel they belong-and then take them further?

Travilla: Wooddale Church is located in a fast-growing suburb of Minneapolis-St. Paul. Our attendance averages over two thousand each Sunday, and we draw from eighty-seven Zip Codes. We have to be intentional about our assimilation process.

It begins with contacting the first-time, local visitor, about thirty-two per week. The senior pastor sends a letter of welcome, but, in addition, two other pastors telephone visitors the week after they attend and obtain information about them. We’re trying to determine in which “congregation”-our adult fellowship groups and classes-they would best fit. The pastors also ask whether the newcomer would like a visit from a member of one of our congregations-although 95 percent don’t.

Self: Ninety-five percent don’t want a visit? I call on 100 percent of our visitors. They seem to be surprised by it but appreciative of the personal attention.

Travilla: Not in our situation. In fact, a nearby Presbyterian church was encouraged by a well-known church consultant to visit visitors. A pastor was hired to that end. But two years into the job, the pastor told my wife, “I’m losing my job. People don’t want personal visits.” We’re finding the same thing.

In any case, whether people want a visit or not, we give their names to our People Assimilation and Care Coordinators (PAACC), who, in turn, visit the newcomers, if requested, or simply telephone and invite the new people to their congregation.

After “visitors” come to our church three times in an eight-week period, they become “new regular attenders.” At that point, the senior pastor sends another letter to them, thanking them for their continued interest. We also send them an engraved name tag and phone them, asking how they are liking Wooddale Church. If they’re not in a congregation yet, I send their names to the PAACC people again to have them extend another invitation.

We continue to record their worship attendance, as we do with our members and regular attenders. When people miss four consecutive Sundays, a member of our Discipleship Board phones to ask how things are going.

We also offer newcomers a seven-week elective called the New Connection, designed to help people become oriented to the church. In addition, we invite new regular attenders to a social time with the pastors and their wives.

Self: I’m amazed; our environment is so much different. Most people who visit our church have no recent church background. Their expectations of the church are not organizational.

They’re checking things out and aren’t in a rush to join anything. So it’s important that I be careful not to rush them. I usually wait a couple of weeks before I casually drop by for a visit.

I may not see them in worship for another three months, and after that, not for another year. Then maybe they’ll come two Sundays in a row, and then not for three months. Over time, they may begin to come more often than they don’t.

Maldonado: In terms of assimilating people to a deeper level, we encourage people to become part of a koinonia group-for Bible study, sharing, prayer, and worship. We also want them to become involved in some ministry. At that point they can become a member of the church, and that’s when they belong in the fullest sense.

Self: I see several concentric circles in our church.

In the middle are those serving in ministry-the core group of about sixty. In the next ring are regular attenders, another sixty to eighty. The next ring is composed of infrequent attenders, people who attend worship several times a year, and beyond that are those who merely identify with the church. Of course, there are a lot more people in the last two circles. As people become involved, they move toward the inner core. Like Ray says, people are fully assimilated when they’ve taken up the purpose of the church, serving in leadership.

Leadership: Is it necessary for a person to be in leadership to be fully assimilated?

Maldonado: Not in the sense that every person gets involved in leadership, but that people go beyond meeting Christ and become involved with things the Lord is doing. That gives people a greater sense of purpose, which is especially important in our setting.

Our community’s fundamental problem is not gangs (although they are a problem) but low self-image. When people become involved in doing Christ’s work-the furthering of the kingdom-that enhances their self-worth.

So we encourage people to do the ministry. We’re less interested in hiring interns, people coming in from the outside, than in developing leadership among people in the church.

Lobs: Since I see assimilation as the process of hospitality, I’d call these other stages something else. Hospitality is welcoming, helping people feel at home among us. For an individual coming every week, that process takes three or four months. But that’s different than discipling them, or finding them a place to work, or training them for leadership.

Leadership: How do you welcome people?

Lobs: After the worship service, we greet the visitor with a packet of information about the Episcopal Church and our particular parish. Visitors also receive a phone call from one of the priests who arranges for a lay visiting team (usually a family) to call on them. When they make the call, they bring a loaf of bread with a note talking about the importance of bread, linking it with the eucharistic ministry of our parish.

Four times a year we invite personally all visitors for a meal and a short presentation by staff members. We also invite them to the Inquirers’ Class, which takes place three times a year-nine hours of instruction on Anglican culture and beliefs, and, of course, the gospel.

Travilla: However we each do it, meeting the emotional needs of people comes first. One common mistake, however, is to address theological questions first. That’s not what most people are interested in.

First they want to know, “Do you like me?” and “Can I find a place here?”

Leadership: Who are the people you’re concerned about assimilating? What are their particular needs you try to address?

Maldonado: Our community is primarily Puerto Rican. Other churches in the area also minister to Hispanics, but we are one of the few churches whose largest single group is second-generation Hispanic. But, we’re not just a Hispanic congregation-Anglos and blacks also attend, and our services are all in English.

However, when it comes to people we’re helping to belong, I primarily think of two other groups. First, there are people who are alone in the city, with few friends. They can live in the same block or apartment complex for years and not know their neighbors. They don’t join groups. They go to work and come home and want to be left alone, or simply are left alone.

Then there are the joiners, people who want to belong. For some it’s a political organization or community group, for others a baseball or bowling league. For many young people, it’s a gang, which is a highly structured group with unique symbols and specific social rules-how you stand, what you wear, and so on.

Naturally, how you reach out and assimilate each group is different. With young people, for example, the desire to belong is powerful. So the church must get kids involved in the life of the church. They’re either going to belong to the church or to a gang or to something else. And the fact is that many kids not in a gang are in a church and vice versa.

Loners are a bigger challenge. Often they are people who have been hurt by a group or victimized by crime. Somehow we’ve got to let them know we’re an okay group to belong to.

But loners are difficult to get in touch with. We may initially meet them through the food pantry, but we can’t follow up on many of them. Some of their apartment complexes are impossible to get into. We buzz them, but there is no answer, or there may not be a bell at all. So you have to phone to let them know you’re there or coming soon. We’re constantly looking for creative ways to get to loners.

Lobs: The group that produces most members for our church is made up of people with a conservative, evangelical background. The next largest group is ex-Roman Catholics. Although they bring strengths of their respective traditions, they also bring baggage (usually a great deal of anger) they’re trying to get rid of.

An ex-Roman Catholic comes knowing a great deal about the tradition and liturgy but may need instruction in the Bible. The evangelical knows the Bible but little about symbols, tradition, or liturgy.

So we offer multiple classes, on classical spirituality, Bible surveys, and other subjects.

Maldonado: Do you ever use a person from one group to teach people from another group?

Lobs: Yes; that usually happens naturally. The people who know the Scripture tend to want to teach it, and those who understand spirituality or liturgy like to share those subjects. Meeting intellectual needs is the easiest part. Responding to the emotional needs of each group isn’t as easy.

For example, evangelicals and Roman Catholics often have endured authoritarianism, or manipulation, or empty formalism, or whatever, and they’ve come to our church to be free from that.

Take a song like “Just as I Am,” for instance. Whereas the ex-Roman Catholic might appreciate learning a “new” hymn, it may resurrect unpleasant memories for the evangelical, and even elicit some anger. The ex-Roman Catholics may still be steaming that they were taught the tradition but were left virtually ignorant of the Bible, and so they may resist our emphasis on the traditions.

We have to be faithful to Christ, and that means not letting either group determine how we’re going to present the Christian faith. So we communicate, over time, that people coming into the church must buy into an already-existing organization. It is a way of life and a way of praying that we won’t allow them to change, unless they first become part of the community.

When they’re integrated into the parish, these people have the freedom to work through their frustrations about the past in the context of St. Mark’s, and that process often puts their problems into perspective.

Self: It is strange to hear you describe unchanging tradition as a strength. Most of the people coming to us are the unchurched; in fact, they are trying to get away from unchanging tradition. Many have had church backgrounds as children, but they left the church because they found it boring or irrelevant. Often they have a story of how they were burned by a church. So they’re against organized religion.

The community, 70 percent baby boomers, is primarily composed of people who have come to get away. Redstone attracts individuals. They don’t come there to join things. They move there to achieve a dream. And that dream usually involves outdoor activities and rugged individualism. Privacy is important: homes are far apart and nestled back in nooks of the woods.

So when people show up on Sunday morning to check out our church, it’s phenomenal to me; it’s miraculous that they’re there. They haven’t gone skiing or hiking; they haven’t stayed in bed or stayed home to read the paper. They haven’t done a dozen other things. They’ve come to church!

Leadership: So why do they come?

Self: Some, after they’ve been in the mountains for a year or two, realize the mountains aren’t going to solve their problems. Often the birth of a child, the death of a loved one, or an important transition will heighten people’s spiritual interest. They become curious about the church; they’re going to check it out one more time to see if it’s any different. Maybe it can help.

They’re guarded, pretty sure they’re not going to like it, but they’re hoping against hope that they’ll find something genuine there.

So our assimilation begins with a low-key response, meeting them at their own mood level, on their terms, accepting them as they are. We’re careful not to hustle them but to come alongside them.

The man who does most of our greeting doesn’t meet people at the door with a glad hand, pat them on the back, and talk church language. In fact, sometimes when people get out of their cars, rather than greet them immediately, he will fall in step with them as they walk to the church, entering into casual conversation on the way. That’s an important symbol for us.

Leadership: But, in contrast to Ken’s situation, you make calls on every visitor. Doesn’t that come across to these skittish individualists as pushy?

Self: No, because I mainly listen when I visit. I try to find out why they’ve come to church and why they don’t like church. I try to elicit the-church-did-this-to-me stories, because nearly everybody has one. The anger is there, so it’s best to get it out in the open, for them and for me.

When people start talking about their resentment of the church, I don’t get defensive. If they say, “The church is always after money. Every time you sit down, they shove that offering plate under your nose,” I’ll say, “That’s terrible! I hate it when churches do that. It makes me mad, too.” It so happens that we don’t pass an offering plate at our church but have a box on the wall to receive donations.

Whatever the resentment, however, I try to empathize with the sense of injustice or frustration. Once they see that I’m not interested in making them religious or churchy, they’re more receptive to our church and the gospel.

I also try to discern the needs of these “prospects” and practice pastoral care with them. This gives them the best idea of what our church is about. Just empathizing with them already helps assimilate them.

Leadership: Who are the people you find it most difficult to assimilate?

Travilla: For us, it’s not so much a social unit or age grouping as it is a person with the “What are you going to do for me?” attitude. We reach out to people, but they have to meet us halfway.

Also, we have few poor people. We’re a white, suburban, upper-middle-class church. If a poor person wandered into our church, I would hope people would welcome him or her, but I don’t know if that person would stay.

Maldonado: We have a hard time attracting and keeping people who make good money-those who have a considerably higher lifestyle than our average member. They have a difficult time facing constantly the many poor families in the church, especially single-parent families, generally the poorest people in a community. Sometimes the well-to-do become more generous with their time and money, but often they end up leaving the church, although not necessarily the neighborhood.

Lobs: We have a hard time assimilating smokers, since our church is a nonsmoking area. That excludes a significant number of people.

People who don’t like to see women in leadership won’t be easily assimilated into our church. But theological liberals would find it difficult to feel comfortable with us. Although our building is handicap accessible, it’s still a difficult building to get around in for the handicapped, so they won’t be easily assimilated.

I could go on. There are a lot of groups with peculiar needs or characteristics that we miss.

Leadership: Do you feel that if there are minorities in your community, you need to have them in your church? Do you feel incomplete without them?

Lobs: No, I accept the church growth principle that churches usually will have some diversity but will remain largely hom*ogeneous. That’s true of virtually every place I see.

Maldonado: We strive to be a heterogeneous group, although I recognize the part that hom*ogeneity plays, especially in terms of modeling.

For example, the fact that I, the pastor, am Hispanic helps attract Hispanics. My education helps attract certain Anglos. I like sports; that attracts some of the young people.

Still, we try to accent our diversity. In worship we sing spirituals, traditional hymns, and coritos, Spanish choruses. We make sure Hispanics, blacks, and whites are each represented in leadership.

Sometimes this creates difficulties. For some of us, when we’re intent, we talk a little louder, and our hands move. That’s how we show our conviction. Some Anglos, however, might think, You’ve lost it, man; you’re out of control. Talk to me later when you’re cool and calm.

But when the Anglos back away, the Hispanics think, Hey, we’re just now getting into it. Let’s deal with things now.

Leadership: so what holds the Hispanics, blacks, and whites together?

Maldonado: The mission of the church. We’re a community-based congregation. Many of our people walk to church. We have an emphasis on doing ministry in the community with indigenous leadership. People actually move into the community to be a part of us. And since our community is culturally mixed, it’s more natural to have a culturally mixed congregation.

Also, we are hom*ogeneous in language. There are other churches doing ministry in Spanish. English is a common denominator that allows Anglos and blacks to participate fully in the church.

Leadership: What obstacles to assimilation do you encounter in that situation?

Maldonado: Invisible borders surround city blocks. If you’re a young person who lives two blocks further east, it’ll be difficult to assimilate you.

Recently another pastor brought a couple of young men from his church to help return chairs to our church. When they arrived, the pastor told me, “Listen, these guys are scared. They’re in your neighborhood.” So while these kids were coming in and out I had to literally stand in the front door to protect them, to let other kids in the community know, “Don’t mess with them. They’re with me. They’re just dropping off some stuff, and then they’re leaving.”

That type of turf mentality makes it difficult to evangelize people in other areas of the city.

Leadership: We’ve talked about how the church adapts itself to make people feel welcome, comfortable. At what point does the church stop adapting itself to people and start asking people to adapt to it?

Self: In our community, many people have beefs with the traditional church-they don’t like the rigidity of liturgy, singing hymns, or long, theological sermons. We try, then, to remove as many obstacles as possible so that people can consider Christ, and him only. So we make people comfortable sociologically, but we never water down the gospel.

Travilla: There’s a difference between the form the message takes and the message itself. The form is never equal to the message, which remains unchanged. We may change the form to attract the market around us, but never the message.

Maldonado: Sometimes you have to draw the line. A visiting couple who lived together started attending our church. We welcomed and accepted them as they were. But as they became more involved and grew spiritually (and we learned the man was still married to another woman), we challenged them with the lordship of Christ on that issue. That’s when things got a little hairy.

Yet they moved apart. He addressed the issue of his nonfunctioning marriage, and eventually this couple started seeing each other again. They were hurt, saying, “You didn’t accept us as we are.” But in our church we try to encourage people to live according to the Scriptures. In the long run, I think people want a church to take spiritual stands.

Lobs: Sometimes people come to us and want to receive only the by-products of the Christian church. They have no intention of assimilating. This is a special problem for well-established denominational churches.

People who last attended an Episcopal church in fifth grade still call themselves Episcopalians, though they’re assimilated nowhere. When they want a child baptized or a marriage or funeral performed, they think, Episcopal Church, and come asking for one of these by-products of community life.

We strongly encourage them to worship with us weekly for three months before we talk about marriage or baptism. I say, “If you want to be married here and take those vows, you must first reconsider your baptismal vows, and the first step for doing that is coming back into the body of Christ.”

People sometimes are hurt and angry when we refuse them. But this would be a place we draw the line.

Self: That’s just the opposite of the way we operate. When people come and want to be married, I take it as a spark of interest in Christianity, for whatever reason. I’ll work with them on their wedding, and, as a result, some will start getting involved in our church. Some, of course, I may never see again. But I feel it’s important that I respond to the interest they show.

Travilla: What happens, though, if a couple who is living together wants you to perform their marriage?

Self: Well, you’ve just described 95 percent of the people who come to me for weddings. Many times they’re unaware of why they’re wanting to be married by a minister. But there’s usually some quasi-spiritual motive. So, rather than put up a barrier by saying, “You’ve got to meet these criteria first,” I use their coming as a starting point for discussion.

Now if they are Christians, I talk to them about their living situation. We’ve had several of those couples move out until they were married.

Maldonado: There’s a difference between assimilating a non-Christian and a Christian. At some point, no matter how welcome you make visitors feel, you’ve got to talk to them about belonging to the family of God. And that means you have to ask them to make a decision about Christ-not always a comfortable decision.

Travilla: That question is asked when people want to join our church. At that point, we make it clear that one of the requirements for being a member of Wooddale Church is to have a vital relationship with Jesus Christ as personal Savior. But up until that time, we do everything we can to help them like it there, without asking them to change.

Leadership: What is the pastor’s role in this process of assimilation? How active are you in it and how much do you delegate?

Maldonado: In a small church, people expect the pastor to be directly involved. I do that, among other ways, by incorporating a variety of people in leading worship. That communicates to visitors that people get involved in our church. Just the other day someone said to me, “We noticed there were a lot of people leading worship. One person did the welcome, another the offering, and another this and that.” He got the message.

Travilla: The pastor needs to have some interest, otherwise assimilation isn’t going to get the attention it needs. Although our senior pastor delegates much of the task, he also sends a letter of welcome and a follow-up letter and attends gatherings of newcomers. In addition, he sets a tone in sermons and conversations that ours is a church that wants to connect with people.

Maldonado: In a church, someone is going to reach out to newcomers, so it had better be the pastor or someone the leadership or pastor designates. You don’t want problem people drawing others to themselves. I think of Absalom, who began to draw people to himself and so took the hearts of Israel away from David. You want people to be drawn to the core of the church, not a splinter group.

Leadership: So how much time can a pastor devote to assimilation? When does it start to take time away from other essential pastoral duties?

Lobs: That raises a question for me. For years churches have gotten along without intentional programming, assimilation seminars, and the like. How did we get by without Lyle Schaller? (Laughter)

So it does make me wonder, Do we think about it too much? Are we too intentional about these things? Our assimilation process is intentional, right to the loaf of bread-we even count the poppy seeds. (Laughter)

Self: In one sense, all that we do at Redstone is assimilation, helping people feel they belong and then helping them grow in Christ to a deeper sense of belonging. Everything that I am and do, everything our church does-the setting, the low-key worship, the use of nontechnical Christian words-is an attempt to help people feel comfortable in the church.

Lobs: I think one of the pastor’s main roles is to affirm the church’s heritage. We have a variety of church traditions here, and each of us has enthusiasm for his situation. There are no apologies for what we’re doing.

I don’t understand why some Episcopalians, for instance, feel apologetic for our long, noble history. That’s our selling point to some people who want to be rooted, to know that they are part of an unbroken parade that began with the apostles.

Some people yearn for a complex liturgy that takes a lifetime to understand. Yesterday, for instance, that flower unfolded for me a little more when I recognized this: the feast of the birth of John the Baptist is near the summer solstice; so, from the day we remember the one who preached repentance and judgment, the days grow darker. On the twenty-fifth of December, near the winter solstice, we celebrate the nativity of Jesus, the Light of the World, and from that point the days grow brighter. It’s a small thing, but I expect to keep learning things like this through the years.

So, I think it’s sad to watch an Episcopalian priest abandon this heritage and try to inflict another tradition on the congregation. I’ve also seen nonliturgical people try to impose liturgy artificially on their congregations. It reveals a lack of centeredness and undermines the assimilation process. A sense of well-being about one’s place is a key in the assimilation process, and the pastor is in the best position to communicate that.

Self: I think we’ve arrived at our levels of comfort by “analyzing the market” and making “the product” as appealing as possible. For me, that means recognizing that the people in our community rebel against tradition. For Rick, it means reaching out to people who yearn for tradition.

Lobs: Also, I’m thankful that as important as our role is, we’re not always in control of the process. I know people who should have fallen through the cracks, pretty wide cracks. We didn’t call or visit them, for example, and yet they quickly became faithful members of the church. In other people we’ve invested all kinds of time, money, lunches, brunches, meetings, and classes, and they never became a part of us.

That’s a relief to me-to know that if, at times, our cracks are large, all is not lost. We have more than adequate back-up with the Lord. He normally calls and dispatches through the process, but sometimes in spite of it.

Copyright © 1990 by the author or Christianity Today/Leadership Journal.Click here for reprint information on Leadership Journal.

Newcomers don't come with Velcro already applied. It's up to the congregation to make them stick.

But that's easier said than done. Experience shows that not everyone who attends church once wants to return.

A variety of visitors arrive at our church doorstep: disgruntled church hoppers, seekers who want spiritual or material help, newcomers to town, recent converts, and spiritual prodigals returning to God. Each comes with a different set of fears and expectations. All must be handled carefully if they will come back a second time.

At times, church insiders fail to realize how intimidated newcomers feel when attending church. Insiders, familiar with the traditions, the rubrics of worship, the machinery of church programs, and even the layout of their facilities, tend to forget that outsiders view these efficient functions as intimidating barriers to becoming part of an unfamiliar church.

It's a Big Job

A study by the White House Office of Consumer Affairs indicates that 96 percent of dissatisfied business customers never take their complaints to the offending company. In other words, for every complaint a company hears, twenty-four complaints are never received. The study's most frustrating finding, however, is that each of those dissatisfied customers will tell an average of ten friends about the problem. People who attend church aren't much different.

I know the reasons some people stick with our church. Those who have stayed tell me about the friendliness, the opportunities for ministry, and the sense of God's presence in the services. But how do we find out why others never return, those who are conceivably the worst advertisem*nts for our church in the community?

Churches' track records in getting first-timers back for a second visit aren't good. One pastor of a church that works meticulously to follow up visitors, who even has a secretary assigned to help integrate newcomers, says perhaps 2 to 3 percent of first-timers ever return. Most of us think we're doing better than that, but we probably aren't.

It's hard to define a successful rate of assimilation. The apostle Paul didn't keep everyone. Some who heard him came back only to throw stones. We need to accept without rancor the fact that not all will consider our church worth joining. That's only realistic. But I don't want to be the cause of someone's not returning. Although we'll never meet everyone's needs, we can work to make newcomers feel welcome and to arouse social and spiritual appetites that make them want to return.

Our family has attended many kinds of churches while on vacation. In the car after a service, I've frequently asked, "If we lived nearby, would you want to go back to that church?" I've heard mixed responses. When I've asked why, these were some of the replies:

"Everyone seemed so happy."

"Unfriendly."

"No sense of God's presence."

"The place was alive. Everyone was involved."

"I didn't know the words to the music."

"No one showed us where to go."

"The preacher was cold."

"The preacher told some great stories."

"I felt like everyone was looking at us."

Looking back at scores of churches I've visited, I've classified three broad factors that determine a newcomer's willingness to return. In management terms, they are "the critical success factors": obstacles, atmosphere, and structure.

Obstacles to Assimilation

A church's composition, history, or philosophy of ministry can throw up a wall newcomers have a difficult time scaling. Here are some of the situations a congregation may face that can place barriers before newcomers.

Large family networks. In our church, three family circles with a chain of relationships connect more than 175 people. These networks have their own social gatherings in which outsiders aren't included. The Thanksgiving dinner table has little space for strangers. The families enjoy built-in care. News about needs spreads internally, apart from the church. Relatives often are so busy taking care of family needs, little time remains to consider the needs of outsiders. Such networks can be deadly to our ideal of assimilating newcomers.

We've done two things to deal with this issue. First, we tactfully alerted members of these families to the potential problems, challenging them to take care to include outsiders in some of their social gatherings. Second, we've outgrown the family circles with new growth, so they no longer dominate our fellowship.

Existing friendships. The fellowship of churches known for friendliness and care sometimes can be difficult to crack. If the energy of the congregation is given to caring for existing members rather than identifying the needs of newcomers, love becomes ingrown.

Even pulpit statements about friendliness can irritate newcomers. I remember visiting one church and hearing the pastor talk about their friendliness. The church was friendly. I watched people in animated conversations with their friends, but the whole time, I sat alone on the pew, feeling like an ice cube. No one talked with me. The pastor's comments and the excited conversations around me only accentuated the fact I was an outsider. A time for greeting newcomers would have structured a way for that church to share warmth beyond already-established circles.

Facilities. The design of church buildings, especially poor layout of the foyer and other entrances, can be an obstacle to a newcomer's welcome. In some churches even finding the sanctuary is a challenge. No signs direct you to entrances, the nursery, or rest rooms. Such inconsideration makes newcomers uncomfortable. Indirectly, but forcefully, the church is saying to visitors, "We weren't expecting you."

Facilities, however, can communicate friendliness and warmth. In order to create a feeling of intimacy in a large, old building, one small congregation removed the pews, placed padded chairs in a cozy arrangement, and brought the platform closer to the congregation. These people knew a small congregation in a large room makes newcomers feel uncomfortable, so they contrived an intimate atmosphere, even in a cavernous space.

People respond to crowded facilities in a variety of ways. Some outsiders interpret a full sanctuary as a good sign. They think, Something's happening here, and I want to be a part of it! Others see it as an indication there's no room for them so they aren't needed. Researchers believe a congregation generally won't grow above 85 percent of the sanctuary seating capacity. Unless the church is a going concern in a generally lackluster spiritual community, a packed sanctuary communicates, "We don't care to make room for you."

A church's history. Some congregations seem more interested in the past than in the future. Sermon illustrations and announcements constantly refer to past events and cherished traditions. Continual references to names of former members and leaders are meaningless to outsiders and say the church is more interested in its past heroes than in newcomers.

Even excessive denominationalism can hinder assimilation. People seeking help today don't go to a church because it belongs to a historic denomination. They go because they believe they will receive help. One researcher discovered that of Christians moving from one city to another, 50 percent switched denominations. The shopping mall mentality toward church attendance means people "go where the action is," regardless of denominational affiliation. Transfers aren't assured.

What people seek is a refreshing alternative to the world outside. Few return for a second visit because a denominational flag has been waved; they come back because they experienced God's presence and the acceptance of God's people.

Special events. Some folk fail to stick because the event that first attracted them is not part of the church's regular diet. For example, a guest musician may pull in a crowd, but the crowd he attracts comes with taste buds for a certain type of music. If the church doesn't deliver that type of ministry on a regular basis, the person feels hungry.

Generally, people expect as a norm the kind of ministry that first attracted them to a church. This, of course, is one of the major problems in integrating new converts who've come through TV and radio ministries. Normal church life doesn't match expectations caused by the media ministry. People attracted to a church by special events likely will stick only if the kind of ministry that first attracted them is sustained-a difficult undertaking.

Philosophy of ministry. If the pastor or congregation believes church life is generated from the platform on Sunday morning, integration means getting as many people into the sanctuary for Sunday mornings as possible. In such situations, allegiance tends toward the pastor and not the congregation. Both strong pulpiteers and flamboyant personalities can build a following, but they may be only attracting a crowd, not assimilating members into a church body.

If, however, a church's ministry emphasizes interaction among members and shared ministry, integration means providing facilities and programs for people to build friendships and to become involved in service. Church life is what happens among members, as well as in the public worship service.

A woman was converted and started attending our services regularly. Her husband drove her to church each week and picked her up afterward. The first time he attended a service at our church, he said, "You people are so different. Church is something you do together. In my church, I go to Mass as a stranger. I can be a good church member and not know anyone else in the parish, let alone talk to anyone. You can't do that in your church!"

Ministry of the body is as important as ministry on the platform, not only for nurturing the saints but also for assimilating new members.

A reputation of tension. Newcomers quickly pick up strife between members. Animosity is a poor advertisem*nt, because newcomers want no part of a church torn by dissension.

A while back I was called to mediate a church fight in a divided congregation. A visitor from that community who had attended just one service told me about his icy reception and how both sides viewed him suspiciously. During the following week he was visited by members of both sides in the dispute, each trying to recruit him to their side. Naturally, he never went back.

The answer, of course, is an emphasis on forgiveness and reconciliation. A torn church cannot weave in new members. Until strife becomes the exception rather than the way of life, the church cannot expect to attract and hold new members.

Confusing service styles. Visitors often feel uneasy when they first attend church. They're on strange turf. Much of what we do in our services, though familiar to members, is intimidating to visitors. An expressive worship style frightens someone who doesn't understand; a highly liturgical service loses the uninitiated. Choruses sung from memory exclude newcomers.

Our Sunday morning service includes the reading of Scripture. While most of our people bring their Bibles, visitors often don't. Therefore, we print the Scripture passage in the bulletin so outsiders aren't excluded. (It also solves the "Which translation?" issue.)

Offerings may make visitors suspect the church only wants money. So, during the offering at special events that draw a significant number of outsiders, I usually say, "If you are a visitor, you're our guest, and there's no obligation for you to participate in the offering. However, this is one way the people of our congregation express their worship to God."

Even during our recent building program, I said little about money from the pulpit. Our special appeals were made primarily through mailed literature. Many people new to our church have commented on how they were initially impressed by our financial discretion.

Class and cultural distinctions. There are rich and poor people. There are retirement communities, university communities, and working-class communities. There are farm towns, inner-city ghettos, and suburbs. People aren't all the same. Even if they speak English, they don't all talk the same language. And while those differences shouldn't affect how people interact, they do make a difference in how comfortable outsiders feel when they come into a church.

Some churches try to be all things to all people. But most churches have difficulty providing an environment in which everyone feels comfortable. Usually one social culture dominates.

The solution is to sensitize insiders, gently and consistently, to the need to make everyone welcome, while recognizing that a church's growth likely will reflect its cultural and social composition.

Poor attitudes. Perhaps the greatest obstacle to newcomers' integration is the attitude of insiders. Not everyone is as blunt as one person who told me, "Pastor, our church is big enough. We really don't need any more folk in our church!"

Negative attitudes toward outsiders come from many quarters. Church power brokers, fearing a threat to their power base, may resist newcomers. Existing members can resent the financial cost of providing space and staff to care for the needs of newcomers. Church pioneers can withdraw emotional support from the church. No matter how strong the appeal from the leadership, such attitudes, even if expressed by few, freeze newcomers out of the church.

We sensitize the congregation to newcomers by including them on church committees. Obviously senior leadership positions require a record of faithfulness in the church. However, we've worked at including at least one relatively new person on as many committees as possible. The new persons' interaction in the committees is a refreshing reminder to oldtimers that newcomers think differently and must be taken into consideration.

These various obstacles hinder assimilation. Not every church will suffer from all these problems, but every church does well to consider which might be insidiously holding back the integration of newcomers as productive and growing members.

An Atmosphere of Acceptance

Another critical factor in retaining newcomers is atmosphere. Some churches exude an atmosphere that says, "Visitors are welcome here." It doesn't derive from handouts or slogans. It's not particularly what happens up front, though that helps. It's an air that permeates the whole congregation, an intangible that says to first-timers, "We've been expecting you, and we're glad you've come."

Growing churches are service oriented rather than product oriented. In the words of Ken Blanchard, author of The One Minute Manager, "Large and small companies alike are learning that in today's competitive marketplace, it is often good service-not product superiority or low pricing-that determines success." In other words, it's not the companies with the best products that succeed; it's those who take the best care of their customers that become profitable.

The same can be said of the church. Growing churches make a commitment to meet the needs of newcomers. They create an environment in which everything is designed with the newcomer's experience in mind. They remember the humanness of their visitors.

As the pastor assigned to do most of the preaching, I can become so caught up in sermon preparation and delivery that I forget the needs of the very people the sermon addresses. That's like a quarterback trying to complete a pass while eyeing the scoreboard. The sermon and other aspects of the church's ministry need to focus on the quality of the newcomers' social and spiritual experiences, providing the subtle yet overriding message: "Newcomers are wanted and needed here."

How is that done? For one, by pastors when they tune vocabulary to outsiders; when ordinances are explained in the language of nonchurched people; when the leadership style is warm, personable, and conversational. There's what a friend of mine calls "pastoring from the pulpit."

He says he accomplishes in those moments some of the pastoral care he is unable to achieve throughout the week. He also says it's the time in the service when visitors come alive. His vulnerability and openness as he chats pastorally with the congregation partially breaks down the barrier between the pew and pulpit that newcomers often feel.

The atmosphere of warmth and acceptance, however, is expressed most effectively by people who hold no official position. That's because the most gratifying welcome a visitor can receive is from someone he wouldn't expect to welcome him, in a place he didn't expect it to happen. It may be a warm comment by the person in the next pew. It might be several smiles and a lot of eye contact in the foyer before the service. Certainly there's touch. We may not kiss as they did in New Testament days, but at least as the Phillips translation puts it, there should be "a handshake all around!" Welcoming isn't just something done at the door; it's something everyone does all over the building.

Such an atmosphere can't be structured, but it can be fostered. Here are some things we encourage to create an atmosphere of warmth.

We have men directing traffic in our parking lot as people arrive for services. This not only heads off a lot of confusion, it also tells newcomers we want to make it easy for them to find their way. There's a warm smile even before people get out of their cars.

Several people are assigned to minister in the church foyer. Our greeters shake as many hands as possible. Others, our hosts and hostesses, watch especially for visitors. They're prepared to answer visitors' questions and to give directions. They also attempt to get first-timers to sign the guest book or a visitor's card. We also have a staffed information counter. In addition, we train our ushers how to be friendly and sensitive to outsiders.

Two other methods help foster the atmosphere we seek. First, I talk about visitors often. I use them in sermon illustrations. I remind the congregation how uncomfortable visitors may feel. I liken our congregation to the staff of a large department store. We're there to serve newcomers.

Second, during a time for greeting in our services, we suggest people welcome at least six to eight people. I encourage people to start their greeting with the words, "Hi! I'm ___." There's something personable about a first name. It also saves embarrassment by helping people learn the names of others in the congregation.

Structured to Include

What happens if people like the atmosphere of a congregation but then find no group of people with whom they can relate? Churches of all sizes share this woe. Small churches sometimes become cliquish or ingrown. Larger churches may seem impersonal, making the newcomer feel insignificant.

But this need not be a problem if a structure is in place to identify and place newcomers into smaller groupings in which they can minister and find a place of belonging.

Several years ago we adopted Peter Wagner's concept of "celebration, congregation, and cell." Basically, the idea is that the Sunday morning celebration can continue to grow indefinitely if two other groupings exist within the church. In addition to the Sunday celebration (everybody gathered for worship), there needs to be a number of both congregations (a subgrouping of forty to one hundred people) and small, intimate cells (informal networks of friends; intimate, task-oriented groups; or structured small-group gatherings).

We've paid particular attention to building the congregations; they've been invaluable for integrating newcomers. These groupings are large enough not to intimidate newcomers, yet small enough for them to get to know others. We're convinced that if we can get newcomers into one of these congregations, there's a high probability they'll remain in our web of love.

We have about thirty of these congregations, some based on fellowship, some on special interests, and some on ministry. For instance, each of the choirs is a congregation. The workers of many of our programs also become little congregations in which there is a network of friendships and accountability.

Our most important congregations for integrating newcomers are our age-divided adult fellowship groups. We've divided our church by ten-year age spans and placed each person in one of these congregations. Each has its own lay leader and committee, as well as its own pastor. These groups meet weekly as Sunday school classes, hold regular social activities, and provide a caring ministry for the needy within the group.

Each of our adult fellowship groups has lay members who assist in the ministry of integration, watching for recent newcomers on Sunday, making midweek contact, inviting them to informal coffee gatherings, and introducing them to other members of the class.

But how do we channel people into these congregations?

Assimilating churches build structures that ensure newcomers are identified, cared for, and integrated into the fabric of the church. Here's how we go about it.

Identifying newcomers. We identify newcomers in a variety of ways. During services we ask each visitor to fill in an information card. Pastors and hosts working in the foyer carry visitor cards that they fill in on the spot with names and addresses. Counselors fill in response cards for those who respond to an altar call.

Some newcomers don't want to be spotlighted; it's anonymity that attracts them in the first place. So we try not to overpower them. But we know that if we don't get a name and phone number or address, our chances of holding and helping visitors is greatly diminished.

One yardstick of success for a Sunday is the number of new names and addresses of first-timers we garner. New names and addresses are our prime contacts for ministry through the week. Without those names and addresses, midweek ministry to newcomers suffers.

One interesting source of information about newcomers is our offering envelopes. It's amazing that with all our efforts to contact visitors, some are missed. Yet some not only keep attending, they also start using offering envelopes! Our bookkeeper alerts us to these people.

Making midweek contact. Follow-up ministry starts Monday morning. My secretary helps me send a letter of welcome to every visitor. For a while, we didn't send the letter to out-of-town visitors, but now we do. We discovered some out-of-towners were in the process of moving to our city, and it was important to give these visitors a feeling that they were noticed and appreciated.

A staff member processes these names on Monday and Tuesday. He makes an initial phone call, welcoming the people to our church and asking if they would like someone from the church to visit them at home. He attempts to gain further information, such as the approximate age of the adults and ages of children. He completes a family information form as the call is being made.

Following the call, this pastor may visit the family or assign it to one of the other pastors. He matches the family with the most suitable staff member, taking into account age, spiritual need, and special interests.

Copies of the family information sheet are shared during our staff meeting on Wednesday mornings. From that point, one pastor is assigned to be responsible for each newcomer. In addition, we see that the appropriate lay leaders in the youth department, ministry programs, and Sunday school are notified of the new family.

Maintaining a newcomers directory. We keep records for all newcomers in a separate directory for six months. This list is reviewed at staff meetings, and pastors report on people's progress. After six months on the list, the name is (1) placed in the church directory as an assimilated family, (2) deleted as someone unlikely to come back, or (3) left on the newcomers list for another six months since the status is still undetermined.

Providing a "Welcome to the Family Class." This class is an invaluable tool for making newcomers feel a part of the church. It's promoted as a class for all newcomers, not just new converts.

I lead this class during the Sunday school hour. We believe newcomers are attracted to a class led by someone with a high profile in the worship service. Two lay couples also work with me, befriending and encouraging newcomers.

The class is a relaxed and informal opportunity to get acquainted. Over coffee, we try to make newcomers feel at ease in the church. The content of the class varies, depending on who is present. We spend a great deal of time prompting and then answering questions about what we believe and how our church functions. Over a six- to eight-week period, we cover the basic teachings and practices of the church.

I spend considerable time outlining how the church functions and how to build church friendships. Mostly, I watch for specific needs, spiritual problems, and questions newcomers may have. Through our lay leaders, we reach out to meet these needs. We strongly encourage people to become involved in the church's activities, stressing that friendships are built as a by-product of doing things together.

After someone has attended the class about two months, our lay leaders introduce the person to the lay leaders of the appropriate adult fellowship group and the pastor assigned to that group. Responsibility for integration is passed from the Welcome to the Family Class to the adult fellowship group. Newcomers are invited to attend Sunday school.

Each convert is encouraged also to attend one of the midweek home fellowship groups especially designed for new Christians. Each newcomer who is not a new Christian is introduced to the leader or host of one of our regular Neighborhood Bible Study groups.

Integrating into ministry. We believe it's critical for newcomers to become involved in the church's ministry as quickly as possible. In fact, we feel that until newcomers assume some ministry responsibility, they won't feel emotionally one with us. They will think of the church as "them" rather than "us."

Newcomers must not only feel wanted, but also feel needed.

So we talk regularly about ministry opportunities. We highlight what's being done. We share our vision. We explain the diversity of ways people can become involved. Though critical recruiting is done individually, from time to time we encourage the congregation to fill in a ministry-opportunity sheet. These sheets are of little value for long-standing members, but they give newcomers an opportunity to express their interests.

The Ones Who Stick

Some people don't want to be integrated into any church. They may lack a basic commitment to God, and no amount of friendliness will make them stay. Others bear the imprint of our culture that recoils from commitment to anything.

Such people drift through every congregation. Seeing them fall away can be disappointing, especially when we work so hard to show them the challenge and benefits of commitment to a local church.

The thrill of pastoring, however, is to look over a congregation on Sunday morning and see the people who have come and been helped and assimilated.

• Glen decided to become a Christian at a drama presentation. Today, he's an usher.
• Phyllis was delivered from an oppressive spiritual environment. Today she works in one of our children's ministries.
• Paul accepted Christ in my office. He's active in the church with his wife and two children.
• Russ and Cathy prayed for salvation with me in a restaurant over lunch. They became involved in our sound ministry.
• Ed and Karen felt they were part of the church when they were asked to serve on one of our adult fellowship committees.

These special souls—and a host of others—are all part of each Sunday's celebration. They're there, not because of a specific program but as a result of a Velcro congregation that helps newcomers stick.

One cynic declared, “All pastoral search committees lie.” I prefer to think a search committee puts make-up on their church to present it as attractively as possible to pastoral beaux. That’s the nature of courtship, but it causes some surprise when you see her on that first morning without her face on.

While none of us can learn everything about a church’s history or avoid every surprise in a new ministry, we can minimize the surprises by asking some key questions before we venture “I do” to a call. The relationship of pastor and church needs to be built on the solid reality of what both the church and pastor are getting, as well as on the call of God.

Questions for Early Courtship

One of the initial questions I’ve asked search committees is: “How familiar are you with my resume?” I’ve found I may need to familiarize them with specific items in my resume.

I learned this the hard way once, several stages into the interview process. They knew much about me by this point. My wife and I were convinced this was the church, for everything seemed so right. I flew in on a Monday to interview and see the church. Wednesday I was to fly home so I could return on Friday with my wife and preach Sunday for a call.

During the final interview, they returned to an item on my resume about my wife’s pursuit of an MBA degree. “This,” they informed me, “is unsuitable for a pastor’s wife. We’d want you to ask her to find her fulfillment in the church.”

Horror stricken, I asked why they had waited so long to bring up something so clear in my resume. “Oh,” they replied, “we hadn’t noticed it.” I made sure every other search committee did.

Second, I ask, “What in my resume sparked your interest in me?” This spotlights those particular aspects of my ministry they think can help them. Knowing these hot spots, I can balance this information with what I’m looking for in a call.

Another question helpful in discerning the nature of the potential marriage partner is “If your church were a woman, what would she be like?” This often draws blank stares, so I elaborate: “That is, how old would she be? What kind of car would she drive? What would she do for a living? Is she outgoing or reserved? What is she concerned about most in life?” A good follow-up is “What if your church were a man? Describe him to me.”

They typically struggle with this off-beat question, so I clarify my intent by explaining that every church has a personality reflected in the kind of people who attend and the atmosphere of the services. I want them to identify the corporate characteristics of their church.

I asked this of the staff of my present church, and later of the small-group leaders. Their answers coincided. I learned that my church is a 35-year-old, slightly balding accountant who has two children and drives a station wagon. He dresses conservatively and is cautious but open about change. He is cerebral, moved more by information than emotion. He is friendly to those with whom he wants to be friendly but can appear standoffish. He is a spectator in sports, not a participant. He has no hobbies because he is too busy. He feels frustration and guilt over what he fails to accomplish.

This picture gave me a great deal to work with in contemplating my potential ministry among these people: Is my personality compatible with that kind of person? Can I live with the kind of leadership style necessary to guide such a person? Do I influence more by emotion or by information? Having been in my present church two years, I can affirm the accurate analysis I received from this question.

Also, those candidates who haven’t yet been burned might not understand the importance of asking, “How much debt is the church carrying, and what is the present state of the budget?” Many of the surprises come in the area of finances. The pressure of debt can make boards, treasurers, and ultimately pastors act rashly. Often an unspoken expectation says a new pastor will bring in new revenue in some mystical way. We’re wise to gain some idea of the nature of this pressure beforehand.

Questions about Previous Husbands

One of the most fruitful lines of inquiry I’ve found is to have the committee talk about their previous pastors. Many search committees react to the previous administration, thinking they want to swing the ministry in a new direction. If the former pastor was weak in the pulpit but strong in administration, the committee often looks for a powerful preacher whose administrative skills need not be so virile.

The importance of asking questions about the previous minister increases in proportion to the problems the church had with him. Therefore, I ask the committee and others from the church, “Would you describe for me the strengths and weaknesses of the previous pastor and his ministry?”

It’s not uncommon to have to sort through some extreme answers on both ends of the scale. But if most answers fall far toward the positive or the negative, it sends up a red flag worth investigating. Either situation presents major difficulties for an incoming minister.

Negative responses invite investigation. I’m not interested in digging up dirt; I’m doing marriage counseling to find out why the couple had such a hard time getting along. Since I’m thinking about marrying the same spouse, I want to know if she is bringing unresolved problems into our relationship.

In candidating for my first pastorate, I learned the previous pastor had been fired. The board had told him after a morning service that they didn’t want him back in the church, period. I discovered the previous pastor’s style had been authoritarian and abrasive. The infamous Sunday he’d been fired, he’d preached on how that church was a disgrace to the community.

Knowing I had a different style of leadership, I didn’t anticipate the same problems. Ten fruitful years in that ministry justified my conclusions.

In contrast, a friend was called to a beautiful church with some wonderful people but perennial problems. An element chewed up every pastor they called. My friend failed to ask about attitudes toward the previous administrations, and I watched that church tear up him and his family, just as it had the others.

I also see a caution flag when I hear overwhelmingly positive comments about a previous minister. If a church remains enamored with the previous husband, ministry is difficult to impossible. Working in someone’s large shadow invites continual negative comparisons and congregational dissatisfaction.

One pastor, who followed a man who’d retired after forty years of prominent ministry at the church, told me during his first stormy year there, “You know, I feel I’m the sacrificial lamb for this church. They need me in order to get over Pastor ____.” He left in his second year.

Though such a church may appear to offer a solid, stable marriage, it may need time without a pastor-a time to grieve its loss-to prepare it to open its arms to a new spouse without making unhealthy comparisons.

Questions for Previous Husbands

When I’m getting serious about a new church, one of my first requests is how I can reach the previous pastor, or, as with one church that had gone through several pastors in rapid succession, two or three of the previous pastors. I should never be so naive as to think my experience will be different.

I’ve gained a wealth of information by questioning these former husbands who have given a portion of their lives to that spouse. Whether positive or negative, their perspective on the ministry matches no other.

I ask, “What kind of problems did you encounter? What did you seek to do and why? Why did you leave? What kind of pastor do you feel the church needs now, and why?” I conclude with my most important question: “If I were to take this church, what three pieces of advice would you offer?”

When I asked the former pastor of my present church this last question, he said, “First, don’t promise anything silly, such as visiting everyone the first year.” He knew the time it takes to get around Toronto. Visiting the congregation would have left me with little time for anything else. “One hospital call can take all afternoon,” he told me, helping me budget my time more effectively from the beginning.

“Second,” he said, “don’t be afraid to trust your board members. I probably should have entrusted to them more of the ministry than I did.” He’d hit one of the few criticisms I’d heard about his ministry, something I could learn from.

“Third, don’t even rearrange the flowers on the platform the first year. As an American, you may not know that Canadians are suspicious of rapid change. Let them get to know you and trust you first, and then they’ll be willing to listen and take direction from you. There is tremendous potential, but you can destroy it by moving too fast.”

His perspective on the ministry was invaluable, and I followed it. He has since become a good friend. It’s healthy for the congregation to see that I respect and care about the man who previously embraced them.

Questions for Church References

Most efficient search committees check a candidate’s references, realizing a sharp resume and personal charm may cover flaws known only after long association. The candidate expects this. But a candidate who wants to minimize surprises also asks the church for references concerning its ministry.

In the final stages of courtship, a pastor can ask for a list of addresses and phone numbers of several people knowledgeable about the church. These references can be contacted to obtain basic information about the church, its history, its reputation, and what they feel about the church and why. And why not pose the question I ask the former pastor: “What three pieces of advice would you give me if I were to become the pastor of this church?”

This is one of those “if I had it to do over again” lessons for me. I didn’t seek such information from churches I’ve pastored, but it would have helped immeasurably to call the following:

1. A neighbor near the church who does not attend, whether a Christian or not. The aim here is to find out the church’s reputation in the community. This information can help pastors know what they may be up against. It also makes a positive contact in the neighborhood. Most neighbors would be glad that a new pastor cares what they think.

The family that lived next to my first church had received little attention from the church, though they’d lived there eight years. “Your people keep pretty much to themselves,” the man told me one day, confirming my frustration over some family cliques within the church. Even as the pastor, I had had trouble breaking into the family circles. The neighbor felt that, too.

The family across the street could have told a story. They had attended the church for years but had left over trouble with the first pastor, which would have been helpful information for me.

2. A nearby minister within the same denomination. Other pastors are often aware of the problems in sister churches, either through picking up stray sheep or from fellowship with the former minister. In addition, such contact gives the candidate a feel for the church’s reputation within the local district of the denomination.

My eyes were opened to a major problem in my first ministry by talking to the pastor of a sister church. I was amazed to find out how much he knew about our church. He clued me in on several families with problems.

Garrison Keillor, in his Lake Wobegon monologues, describes how members of one congregation often will go to the minister of another congregation for a “second opinion.” This neighboring pastor undoubtedly was the second opinion for some of my members struggling to digest the counsel of previous pastors.

In addition, he said, “Ken, do you know your church’s sport teams have a terrible reputation?” No, I didn’t. I hadn’t actually centered on church sports in the candidating process. But I’ve since learned that teams reflect the spiritual maturity of the men and women in the church. That unpleasant surprise could have been anticipated had I phoned this pastor while I was candidating.

3. Two individuals who have left the church recently, one happy with the ministry and one unhappy. People not presently in the church can speak from a different perspective.

For my first hospital call in ministry, I visited an irascible woman in the hospital for gallbladder surgery. She hadn’t attended the church for two years, due to a falling out with the previous pastor, but her relatives alerted me to her need.

She gave me an earful on subjects the search committee never broached. Some of what she said certainly was jaundiced (“Every pastor they’ve had was weird”), but other stories alerted me to areas of corporate sensitivity, which, I later would discover, were on target.

While candidating for my present ministry, I had the opportunity to talk to people who had left the church to plant a daughter church. They told me their views of the mother congregation, both positive and negative-its helpfulness, its vision (or lack of it), its ministry orientation. That valuable information helped me see I had something to contribute to that church, even though it was different from my first church.

A Conference with God

I have to realize that people to whom I talk may have axes to grind. No one piece of information ought to scare me away without careful cross-checking. And no church is perfect, just as no candidate is. But all this research helps me define the task before me, outline its boundaries in comparison to my abilities, and eliminate unpleasant surprises.

I need most of all to bring this information before God and talk it over with him. I’ll not anticipate everything, but I know the One who holds all knowledge, and he has some opinions about my candidacy.

Copyright © 1990 by the author or Christianity Today/Leadership Journal.Click here for reprint information on Leadership Journal.

Warming the Welcome

Greeting newcomers and visitors is a continuing ministry for most congregations. Here’s how three churches structure their informal contacts with first-timers.

1. At First Church of God, San Diego, California, gift certificates from a popular ice cream parlor encourage newcomers to join the Sunday evening singles group for an after-meeting treat. Pastor Terry Fisher also encloses the gift certificates in personal letters written to other visitors.

2. Each Sunday Noel Memorial United Methodist Church in Shreveport, Louisiana, greets twenty to fifty visitors from all over the city. Within 48 hours someone from the church will deliver a batch of homemade cookies to those visitors’ homes.

The church’s membership list is computer sorted by Zip Code. Each Monday evening Associate Minister Scott Adams and one volunteer take the visitor list from the previous day and locate church members living in the same Zip Code areas as the visitors. One of those members is asked to deliver cookies, so the goodies arrive in the hand of a neighbor who attends Noel.

A side benefit has been the opportunity to contact inactive members. “This nonthreatening call gives inactives a chance to be involved in the church once again,” says Adams, who finds very few members, active or inactive, saying no to the request to deliver cookies.

3. After the sermon at North Highlands Bible Church in Dallas, while the congregation sings a hymn and the offering is taken, visitors are invited to follow Pastor Dennis Eenigenburg out the door to a reception area for refreshments and getting acquainted. Elders, greeters, visitors, and their family members leave with the pastor.

At the reception the pastor greets visitors, tells them about the church, and invites them to Discovery I, a weekly class held during the 11 A.M. worship service. The class runs continuously on a four-week cycle, and leadership is alternated among church elders.

Visitors are also invited to Discovery II, an eight-week small-group orientation class led on Wednesday evenings by the pastor and his wife. Thus it is possible for a first-time visitor to make a comfortable transition through these Discovery groups to a decision about further participation in the church.

Each of these churches displays an intentional, but informal, method of responding to visitors. Reaching out with warmth is not left to chance.

Coordinating Care Cards

Most church members intend to send notes to friends who are ill or missing from church events, but good intentions aren’t enough. First Presbyterian Church of Sherman Oaks, California, has a system for making sure those with special needs are remembered.

In the patio area of the church, a deacon sets up a table each Sunday with a sign that says, “Intensive Care Center.” There are greeting cards expressing sympathy, get-well cards, missing-you cards, and thinking-of-you cards. These are provided for members of the congregation to send to friends who may not be present for worship that day.

In his announcements, Pastor Don Maddox mentions particular persons who are ill or shut-in and invites everyone to stop by the ICC and sign an appropriate card. The deacons then address the cards and mail them the same day. The person remembered may thus receive a card with the signatures of 20 to 40 friends. Calls of thanks to the church office prove how much these cards are appreciated.

Visiting Door to Door Without Knocking It

Persuading church members to make cold calls in the church’s neighborhood is usually hard to impossible. People going from house to house knocking on doors are received with suspicion, if at all.

Veteran church planters David and Barbara Cross, most recently in Perth, Australia, have found an effective way to reach the neighborhood with information about their churches.

“During the first two years of each church’s existence, more than half the visitors came because of the door-to-door literature drops we made every three or four months.”

Following the example of political parties and utility companies, the Crosses prepare plastic bags to be hung on doorknobs by volunteers. The material in the bag includes information about the church, an invitation to visit, and a list of activities with telephone numbers for further information. Periodically they drop off a newspaper, Living Water, which contains announcements of church activities, articles about improving family life, recipes, and Bible studies on the plan of salvation. They feel that if the newspaper includes several resources, it has a better chance of being kept for future reference.

Frequently visitors arrive at the church with some of the literature in hand asking, “Is this the church?”

The Crosses find that literature drops make the church more visible, are cheaper than mail, and reach people who are reluctant to open the door to a stranger.

Reported by Muriel Larson

Greenville, South Carolina

Pastoral Birthday Care

How can a pastor let persons know they are recognized and cared for as individuals? During his eight years as pastor at Bethel Baptist Church in Kalamazoo, Michigan, Robert Nienhuis found that a birthday letter is one simple way to do this.

He asked his secretary to prepare a note card for each day of the year listing the names and year of birth for members whose birthday fell on that day. Pastor Nienhuis wrote a three paragraph letter. The first and third paragraphs were the same for every member. The second paragraph was personal. Each week he dictated the middle paragraph for the letters going out the following week. The secretary then prepared the letters and mailed them in time to arrive on the day of celebration.

The second paragraph of the letter was used in several ways. “I expressed appreciation to longtime faithful volunteers, or I congratulated a member who had recently received an award or other public recognition. Even a gentle rebuke, when done carefully, had a powerful impact. Sometimes the letter invited further communication from someone I hadn’t seen in church for a while,” said Nienhuis.

When he knew he would be away from the office, he simply dictated the letters ahead of time. They were typed and signed, ready to mail at the proper time.

Eventually Pastor Nienhuis resigned his pastorate to pursue doctoral studies. At the farewell reception, the most frequently voiced comment was how much members would miss his personal letters. Several indicated they had saved all their letters, and one woman said that on her birthday, she always drove home during her lunch hour just to get her birthday letter.

“The goodwill those letters generated was invaluable in allowing us to initiate new ministries with a minimum of delay, and it produced a forgiving spirit when I made a bad decision,” says Pastor Nienhuis. “We went from being a pastor and congregation to being friends.”

Other recipients who might appreciate a letter: parents of children entering school for the first time, 16-year-olds receiving their first driver’s license, people celebrating the anniversary of baptism, and parents during the week their nest first becomes empty.

Sunday School as Media Event

Every growing congregation faces the constant need for new lay leadership and teachers for Sunday school.

Pastor David Macfarlane of Islington Evangel Centre in Etocico*ke, Ontario, came up with an idea that made the congregation aware of the effectiveness of the Christian education program, created enthusiasm in the teachers, and motivated volunteers to get involved.

While watching a television newscast where a minicam photographed action from Beirut, Macfarlane thought, Why couldn’t we report to the congregation in the same way-live. Why can’t we show Sunday school in action?

The idea became reality when one of the church members found he could borrow television equipment from his company: a camera, a cable long enough to reach down the hall to all the classrooms, and an amplified microphone. The church already owned a television projector and eight-foot screen, which were installed in the sanctuary for this occasion.

“We advertised the event as widely as possible, and because it was a new thing, it created a lot of curiosity. On the day Sunday school was to be televised, the church was packed with people who did not regularly attend,” says Macfarlane. “This alone was worth doing the event.”

After worship was opened in the usual way, the Sunday school program was introduced and the sanctuary darkened. Then the pastor’s picture came on the screen. He began by interviewing the Sunday school superintendent about how many people attend Sunday school and the number of teachers who volunteer.

Followed by the camera, the pastor entered each classroom in turn, interviewing teachers and children. Some of the kids’ comments were hilarious, some profound, and others touching. Some told about asking Jesus into their lives.

The ten-minute live telecast closed with another shot of the superintendent, who spoke about how the congregation could help in the future: encourage teachers, volunteer, get children there on time. He also mentioned some future events in the Sunday school department, giving Pastor Macfarlane time to return to the pulpit.

This brief report gave a glimpse of Sunday school to adults who were unaware of the extent of the church’s ministry. The children had the opportunity to invite neighbors and relatives who came to see them on TV, and the teachers had an opportunity to tell the congregation how rewarding their ministry is.

The church has presented a live Sunday school report three times and will continue to do it once a year. “Other churches might have to rent equipment to duplicate this event, but we think the benefits make it worth the investment,” says Macfarlane. A less expensive version could be produced using a personal video camera to make a tape for presentation to the congregation. Then the children could see themselves in Sunday school.

An unexpected benefit for Macfarlane was this comment from one person in the congregation: “When we saw the pastor interviewing the children, we realized how much he cares for our kids.”

What’s Worked for You?

Can you tell us about a program or activity that worked well in your church?

LEADERSHIP continues to pay $35 to $50 (depending upon length) for each published account of a fresh and effective church ministry.

Send your description of a helpful ministry, method, or approach to:

Ideas That Work

LEADERSHIP

465 Gundersen Drive

Carol Stream, IL 60188

Copyright © 1990 by the author or Christianity Today/Leadership Journal.Click here for reprint information on Leadership Journal.

A column of current statistics selected especially for Christian communicators

Percentage of the information that will be available in 2010 that we have now: 3

Percentage of “A” students in college who attend religious services weekly: 43

Percentage of “B” students who do: 32

Estimated number of arrests of prolife activists, since 1987: 30,000

Percentage of American women who think they are overweight: 49

Percentage of American women who are truly overweight: 27

Number of aspirin taken by Americans each year: 33,000,000,000

Percentage of the world’s people who lived in cities in 1970: 33

Percentage of the world’s people who live in cities today: 50

Estimated number of commercial messages an American is exposed to each day: 1,500

Odds of a first-year marriage not ending in divorce: 5 in 10

Of a ten-year marriage not ending in divorce: 7 in 10

Of a marriage of 35-39 years not ending in divorce: 98 in 100

Average speed on Los Angeles freeways in 1988: 35 mph

Average projected speed in 2010: 19 mph

If the world had 1,000 people, the number who would live in a shantytown: 600

Percentage of Americans who say that religion is very important in their lives: 57

Who say that religion is fairly important in their lives: 29

All-Time Best-Sellers

People’s fears and dreams are reflected in the five best-selling paperback books of all time:

Baby and Child Care, by Dr. Benjamin Spock

How to Win Friends and Influence People, by Dale Carnegie

The Hobbit, by J.R.R. Tolkien

1984, by George Orwell

The Exorcist, by William Peter Blatty

Publisher’s Weekly

Why Clergy Seek Counseling

According to Dr. Charles Shepson, director of Fairhaven Ministries, a Tennessee center specializing in counseling for ministers, these are the leading reasons why “church workers” seek professional help: Depression (13 percent); marital problems (11 percent); extra-marital affairs (8 percent); problems with authority (8 percent); and burnout (7 percent).

“Forced terminations” and “conflict with parishioners” also made the list, but below these reasons. Perhaps this indicates that ministers need to care for themselves and their marriages even more than they do their congregations’ harmony.

Pentecostals Growing Rapidly

Pentecostals and charismatics, who are growing at the rate of 19 million a year, have become the second largest family in Christendom. According to David Barrett, editor of World Christian Encyclopedia, Christianity’s various clusters have reached the following sizes:

Roman Catholics – 944 million

Pentecostals/charismatics – 352 million

Reformation Protestants – 318 million

Eastern Orthodox – 178 million.

With this growth, 21 percent of Christians – 1 in 5 – consider themselves Pentecostals or charismatics, and all ten of the world’s largest churches are Pentecostal.

– Reported in Pentecostal Evangel, 12/26/59

What We Do on Christmas

The Roper Organization knows when we’ve been sleeping and knows when we’re awake on Christmas Day. Here’s what they discovered Americans do on the holiday:

Open presents (68 percent)

Visit family or friends (61 percent)

Watch a football game (31 percent)

Have a fire in the fireplace (15 percent)

Leave food out for Santa (10 percent)

Stay in bed sick or alone (4 percent)

Go caroling (2 percent).

Still ahead of the football game is attending church, an activity chosen by 39 percent of Americans.

Sources – Expanding knowledge: The Frog in the Kettle by George Barna (Regal, 1990). Grade-A collegians: PRRC Emerging Trends, 9/89. Prolife arrests: Operation Rescue, reported in Harper’s, 1/90. Overweight women: Los Angeles Times Poll; National Center for Health Statistics; cited in U.S. News & World Report, 2/19/90. Aspirin: Reader’s Digest Book of Facts. City dwellers: U.S. Census Bureau, cited in U.S. News & World Report, 2/19/90. Commercial overload: The Frog in the Kettle by George Barna (Regal, 1990). Divorce odds: National Center for Health Statistics, reported in American Demographics, 2/89. L.A. freeway speeds: Newsweek, 7/31/89. Shantytown dwellers: Development Innovations and Networks, Geneva, reported in Chicago Tribune. Importance of religion: PRRC Emerging Trends, 9/89.

Leadership Fall 1990 p. 129

Copyright © 1990 by the author or Christianity Today/Leadership Journal.Click here for reprint information on Leadership Journal.

I spent my three-month summer sabbatical on a cross-country tour with my family, visiting twenty-five of “the most effective” churches in the United States.

Before I left, I expected to find a lot of similarities. The differences, however, surprised me most. I came back without a clear, monolithic model of effective ministry. Instead, I found myself confronted with options and choices.

Plotting the Search

I began planning this trip a year before it took place. My ministry experience had been limited to one nineteen-year pastorate in a university town, where our independent church had grown largely in isolation from any one model or tradition. I felt the need to see firsthand how other churches worked.

So I contacted a number of respected Christian leaders and asked each to give me the names of five congregations with unusually effective ministries.

As my list grew, I noticed some congregations mentioned repeatedly. I contacted their pastors for the names of yet other model congregations.

I narrowed the list to twenty-five congregations, most of which were in the Midwest and West. My limitation of three months for travel dictated that I cut out the Northeast and Southeast. Since I lived in the Southeast, I reasoned I could more easily visit these areas later. I targeted several congregations in specific metropolitan areas (Chicago, Los Angeles, Denver, Dallas) in order to use my time more efficiently. But I also visited some out-of-the way churches.

Then I contacted each of the twenty-five churches and asked to meet with the staff and lay leaders, observe services, and do whatever they thought would be most valuable for me. I was grateful for the degree of cooperation I received from large and small churches alike.

During the trip, I took notes, collected materials, and wrote summaries of each visit. After returning to North Carolina, I shared my observations with our church leaders and let it all soak for several weeks. Then I started formulating some conclusions.

A Startling Variety

I quickly observed that it takes different kinds of churches to reach different kinds of people.

The congregations I saw varied from large megachurches like Willow Creek Community Church in South Barrington, Illinois (fourteen thousand weekend attenders) to relatively small (two hundred attenders) Trinity Church in Seattle. Some were predominantly black, like Oak Cliff Bible Fellowship in Dallas; some were charismatic, like the Vineyard Fellowship in Anaheim, California; some were denominational, like Covenant Presbyterian Church in West Lafayette, Indiana; while others were independent, like Elmbrook Church in Brookfield, Wisconsin. Most were quite different from our congregation in Chapel Hill, as I had hoped. I was less interested in critiquing than in learning.

It’s hard to do justice to the great diversity I saw, but let me suggest four broad categories that distinguish these churches. I realize that if asked to describe themselves in terms of my categories, most of these congregations would say they’re striving for a balance. And because my visits were relatively short and not nearly as thorough as I would have liked, I run the risk of being too intuitive in my assessments. Nonetheless, from my observation each church tended to emphasize one theme over the others.

Here are the four broad philosophies of ministry I encountered, along with the strengths I observed and some questions that lingered after the trip.

The Reaching-out (Market-driven) Church

Many of the large, fast-growing churches were “market driven”-focused on reaching out to the unchurched creatively and sensitively. They aspire to speak to people’s needs with spiritual insight in known tongues.

Willow Creek Community Church, pastored by Bill Hybels, is perhaps the most prominent example of this style of ministry. Striving for excellence and authenticity in all it does, Willow Creek reaches out to young, unchurched urban professionals.

The service I attended modeled this strategy. Music, in contemporary style, was performed, a drama presented, and an interview conducted with three church members who were enduring physical suffering at the time. Bill asked them, “What is it like?” and “How has Christ made a difference?” They responded candidly and with hope, yet without simplistic resolution of their difficulties. Bill followed with a short biblical message on finding God in the midst of our suffering.

Of all the services we visited during the sabbatical, this service most impressed my two teenage children.

As I talked to folks behind the scenes at Willow Creek, I was struck by their careful attention to detail and their well-defined focus on reaching their target audience (35-year-old, unchurched males). I got permission to attend a rehearsal for the Saturday evening service-a privilege comparable to attending one of Dean Smith’s basketball practices in Chapel Hill! The rehearsal schedule was printed out to the minute and followed to the letter.

As I walked through the spacious halls of their facility with one of the staff, we noticed a hand smudge near a cleaning closet. I was told that it would be scrubbed off or painted over before the next service. “Young executives go to work every day in a world that does not tolerate smudges. When they come here, we want them to say, ‘Hey, these people care as much about their ministry as my company does about my business.’ “

Willow Creek is a phenomenon that deserves its high profile among those who seek to speak the language of a yuppie culture.

This market-driven approach has become popular and widespread. I visited several such congregations, including Saddleback Valley Community Church in Mission Viejo, California. All had a passion for reaching and winning their communities for Christ through creative, upbeat, user-friendly services.

The strengths in this type of church are many: It reaches people (lots of people) who otherwise wouldn’t be reached. It energizes people for evangelism and celebration. It is a model of efficiency and stewardship of resources. It gets folks excited about Jesus and his church. May the tribe increase.

With all of these strengths, however, some questions remain:

1. Such ministries seem to require a tightly structured organization. The stronger and more specific the goals of a congregation, the greater the pressure for individuals’ thinking and ministries to conform. My question: Can this pressure create unhealthy tension? What happens when the call of God ventures beyond the well-defined goals?

I wondered if some of these people feel herded rather than shepherded? Are they encouraged to discover their own calling, or to fulfill someone else’s (usually the senior pastor’s) vision?

Most dynamic congregations with successful outreach ministries are blessed with strongly driven leaders who set the pace for their congregation. Without intending to do so, do these leaders, with their great influence, leave the impression that the kingdom of God is for goal-oriented “Type A’s” only? Is stress a fruit of the Spirit?

One person observed that while talking with such a pastor, “I feel like I have his attention only so far as I fit into his vision and goal. I don’t sense he’s listening to me or sharing with me but rather he’s on a mission that could use me but not really enjoy my fellowship.” Do people attending feel pressure to perform and conform or be considered second class?

2. Are the values of the subculture (excellence, efficiency, aesthetics) inadvertently presented as Christian values? Are those who don’t share them seen as somewhat sub-Christian?

When we “become all things to all men that we might reach them,” we often adopt the tastes, styles, and some of the values of our target audience. For example, “excellence” (defined as productivity and reaching measurable objectives), “efficiency” (creatively maximizing resources and gifts), and “quality” (appealing to aesthetic tastes) are hallmarks of the value structure of a yuppie subculture.

This may win the attention and respect of unchurched Harrys and Marys. But can Harry and Mary be transformed from their worldview to a kingdom perspective where these values are not necessarily a priority?

God’s ways are often contrary to the wisdom of humankind, especially in terms of efficiency and quality. Do congregations that are committed to excellence recognize the seductive power of idolizing excellence? Do they know that excellence can actually present an obstacle to many people?

I recall an annual Christmas talent show at our congregation where the first act was a husband and wife duet on guitar and harmonica. Halfway through the second verse of the song, Christi forgot the words and kept playing her guitar as she sang, “I forgot the words.”

Her husband said, “I haven’t forgot my part” as he kept playing the harmonica. The atmosphere was relaxed; they felt safe to fail because they were with their spiritual family.

To me that reflects the spirit of Christ’s community, and that can be attractive in a stressed-out and graceless world where it is seldom safe to fail. I couldn’t help but wonder how that experience would have played at some of the megaministries.

The Reaching-in (Relational) Church

A second category I call the koinonia or “relational” church. These congregations fell into two types-“affirming relationship” churches and the “mercy ministry” churches.

The affirming churches emphasize gracious relationship and community. Menlo Park Presbyterian Church in that affluent community south of San Francisco might best fit this category. The warm, personal style of the services has drawn many people to drink the soothing water of God’s grace.

It’s easy for me to preach about grace and then, in church relationships and programs, suggest that the fine print in our gospel is law. That wasn’t the atmosphere at Menlo Park. This was a safe place to fail, hurt, struggle, and be honest without fear of rejection.

This congregation of more than three thousand has 60 percent of its people in small support groups that meet during the week. Ministries are geared to “station” and “crisis in life” issues. One of the staff explained, “We try to speak to people in their most teachable state and that is (1) where they struggle to succeed in the world and (2) when their world crashes in.”

The challenge for this type of church is not to let its emphasis on relationships and unconditional love smother the gospel message. One person (a nonbeliever) who enjoyed attending the church expressed her one complaint to me: “They make too big a distinction between those who are Christians and those who are not.” I didn’t consider that the worst indictment for a strong relational ministry.

The second type of reaching-in church focuses on mercy ministries. Trinity Church in Seattle stands in contrast to Menlo Park with respect to its constituents. Trinity has drawn together a group of families into a close community based on their commitment to minister personally and individually to the down-and-outers of their area. This church has been described as “a human salvage yard”-not very pretty in the world’s eyes but certainly attractive to anyone in touch with the Spirit of Christ.

The stress in this congregation is produced not by performing well before thousands of attenders on Sunday morning, but rather by living with six foster children in a double-wide mobile home, as does one of the pastors.

As I met with key families at Trinity, I was received graciously and I sensed an immediate rapport.

When I asked about the Christian education of their children, they replied that they didn’t use written curriculum; instead they wanted their children to watch the parents reach out to and take in needy people. They felt that if their children grew up seeing God’s heart in their homes, they would be drawn to him and eventually seek to know everything they needed to know about him.

As for the strengths of reaching-in churches: Christians teach through their lives and their care for people. They understand the pain of living in a fallen world and provide a safe respite from the storms of life. These congregations have less evangelistic growth but a deeper sense of community. They tend to attract Christians who’ve been burned out and wounded, sometimes from overinvolvement in more highly structured ministries.

As one person put it, “I had become a mile wide and an inch deep. Now I need a place that will listen to my hurts and not just keep challenging me to help the pastor reach his vision.”

My lingering questions center around keeping the delicate balance between unconditional acceptance and the inherent exclusiveness of God’s kingdom.

1. Can “affirming relationship” congregations be relational in style without sacrificing truth at the altar of love? For instance, I never did get a clear answer in some of these congregations when I asked, “When did you last exercise church discipline, and how did you do it?” I was left with the impression that any kind of correction would be perceived as rejection, and the threat of exclusion was incompatible with the overarching goal of love. Insensitivity or intolerance prompted the most disapproval, rather than immorality or apostasy. In what ways do these churches present the cost of discipleship?

2. I also wondered whether these congregations also didn’t exclude certain types of people. In the “mercy ministry” congregations, for instance, I wondered if a person could fit in without either (1) an identifiable dysfunction (“What support group do I join?”) or (2) the skill, commitment, and passion necessary to work with the dysfunctional.

The Reaching-up (Worship-centered) Church

A third category of church I visited could be described as the reaching-up church, centered around worship and prayer. Again, there seem to be two distinct types in this category: charismatic and liturgical. I happened to visit more charismatic congregations than liturgical on this trip.

The Vineyard Fellowship in Anaheim, California, is a model of the charismatic congregation that emphasizes the power of prayer. We found the morning service to be like many large charismatic gatherings-worshipful, spontaneous, lively. But it was what happened after the service that impressed me. Several hundred folks stayed around for prayer.

The sermon had little or nothing to do with intercession or healing. There was no invitation from up front to stay. But my wife and I stayed and decided to request prayer for some of her unresolved relational conflicts.

A rather unassuming middle-aged counselor listened to our brief request and then asked if we had a good spiritual support group back in North Carolina. We assured him that we did, and then he said that in a few moments we would understand why that was so important. He laid his hands on us and quietly prayed-in English and then in tongues.

My wife broke into tears and for a few moments began to quiver uncontrollably. When she had recovered, we thanked the counselor and left.

The experience was dramatic, and shortly after that, things began to change for my wife. She experienced a new freedom from inner turmoil, something new to her. The next several weeks were emotionally tumultuous for her as she overcame the pain of the past. We were grateful for the forbearance and encouragement of an understanding Christian community at Chapel Hill.

Today she stands amazed that what four years of intense counseling had not accomplished was begun through the power of prayer after that service.

Another such congregation we visited is Applegate Christian Fellowship near Medford, Oregon. Pastor Jon Courson’s charisma and giftedness in so many areas (teaching, leading worship, personal relations) helps explain why Applegate Christian Fellowship, in a rural county, draws 3,500 on Sunday.

They have three types of meetings during the week. Wednesday night is ninety minutes of expository Bible teaching. Sunday morning is praise and worship, with an uplifting message exhorting folks to apply the lessons taught on Wednesday night.

The Sunday evening service centers upon the Lord’s Table and prayer for freedom from emotional, physical, and spiritual bondage. As folks feel led (during any part of that service), they go forward to receive the bread and cup. There is no sermon, just people bringing their burdens to God’s Table in a spirit of worship. Jon Courson told me that when people come to him for counseling, he first sends them to that service. After going to the service, people often didn’t need counseling.

These churches possess great strengths. In each, evangelism was effective; they attracted and converted many unbelievers.

Many of these congregations also impressively demonstrate that the unity of Christ’s Spirit breaks down social and racial boundaries. Of all the congregations I visited, these had the least internal socioeconomic uniformity. What bound them together was a strong expectation that God would minister to physical and spiritual needs with dramatic power, and that direct revelation (usually through the leader) was to be respected.

Power in many of our congregations looks too much like the power of our culture and not enough like the supernatural power of the kingdom we talk about. By contrast, these congregations dare to trust God to display an authentic power that the world doesn’t know.

This approach, however, also raises some concerns. While some of the congregations I visited managed to avoid the following pitfalls, these questions remain:

1. How does one deal with the confusion when too much regard is given to “special revelations,” especially when there is no consensus? Also, how can one avoid the tendency to equate the presence of powerful answers to prayer with the carte blanche blessing of God on anything that person believes or practices?

2. What checks and balances exist for leaders who fail to be self-critical? How can people be encouraged to develop healthy critical thinking and kept from blindly following powerful leaders?

3. Is there a tendency to focus on God’s dramatic crisis intervention and to neglect the more routine, disciplined process of spiritual growth?

The Handing-down (Bible-teaching) Church

The fourth category is the “feeding station” or Bible-teaching church. These congregations center around powerful Bible-teaching ministries that don’t just draw spectators but produce fruitful action in many areas of the congregation’s life. They make no apology for emphasizing the importance of knowing Bible doctrine.

Richard Strauss, the pastor of Emmanuel Faith Community Church in Escondido, California, is a good example. This congregation is more conservative and traditional in style than the churches mentioned above, but it is no less effective. It was clear from everyone I met at this congregation that expository Bible teaching was at the core of its ministry. Richard Strauss is a gifted teacher-humble, clear, down-to-earth, and in touch with people’s hurts.

You see the effect of his ministry, not only in people’s enthusiasm for his teaching but also in their enthusiasm for relationships and ministry in a wide range of areas-youth, parents, singles.

I also met a number of folks who became Christians in fast-growing, outreach-oriented churches but who wound up in the feeding-station churches, where they felt they could grow further. They tended not to be attracted by the more energetic and entertaining approach of market-driven churches.

These congregations have an important strength: they teach the Word. The popularity of these churches can be attributed to the great hunger among God’s people for a practical understanding of the Bible. These congregations tend to appeal to folks who want a biblically grounded faith.

Because I’m in a Bible-teaching ministry, I’m painfully aware that some questions need to be asked of this type of church.

1. Is intellectual understanding of the truth rewarded even when it is not applied or integrated deeply into life? How can the church avoid emphasizing a great love for Bible content at the expense of excitement about knowing and following Christ? (Sometimes, I’ve found, people in my church equate the two.)

2. Does worship have its own significance, or is it a sort of pregame warm-up for the teaching? Or the larger question: How do we keep from reducing truth to propositional categories and tight linear logic, leaving little room for mystery, awe, or process?

Some Hybrids and Exceptions

Although some congregations I visited clearly emphasized one approach over others, some were hybrids. For instance, some churches used social service primarily as a way to reach out.

First Christian Church in Fort Collins, Colorado, an upper-middle-class congregation, has one building on their large campus set aside to meet practical, physical needs. The upper floor is a sewing center where women from the community (many of them retired) volunteer their time to make quilts and toys for the local hospitals and needy families. The lower level houses a food pantry and clothing store for the needy. It is run like an old-time general store, except the “customers” aren’t charged. Other churches in that community help stock the store with food and clothing.

Bear Valley Baptist Church in Denver runs an inner-city storefront school for street families and has been instrumental in starting a low-cost medical clinic for the more unfortunate in the area.

Both of these congregations face many difficulties in reaching out like this. Their ministries aren’t showy, but nonetheless, they effectively touch the needs of people.

Naturally, not every church fits neatly into my four categories. For instance, some churches revolve around major weekday programming (Lutheran or Christian Reformed churches often devote themselves primarily to a day school). Other churches revolve around a series of special events (concerts with big-name artists, cultural exhibitions), which defines the church in the community’s eyes. These, too, can be effective churches.

Some Common Characteristics

Although I was impressed more with more dissimilarities than similarities, all these congregations still shared three common elements.

They all knew practical frustrations. Many of the congregations experienced challenges in similar areas-the need for more and better lay leaders, the tendency for people to become spectator/consumers as the size of the congregation grows, the challenge of finding the right staff, the tendency of people to fall through the cracks, the search for appropriate CE curricula.

Although I had hoped to find easy answers to some of these questions, I was repeatedly disappointed. These pastors merely joined me in my groping and groaning; their congregations were not without their share of problems-staff conflicts, financial pinches, mistakes in policy and direction.

They shared a similar outlook. Despite the ubiquitous difficulties, they shared a sense of expectancy-“we can do it with God’s grace”-and a willingness to grow, take risks, and be stretched to the point of discomfort. They inspired commitment and participation. Many of them rewarded people for creativity and initiative.

They shared a clear sense of purpose or calling. They didn’t punctuate their affirmations with question marks. Most were able to articulate their purpose clearly. Saddleback Community Church put it this way: “A great commitment to the Great Commission and the Great Commandment makes a great church.”

They tended to have supportive (as opposed to competitive) attitudes toward other Christian groups. Some of the traditional distinctives-dispensational versus covenant, charismatic versus noncharismatic, political liberal versus conservative-seemed less important than simply being faithful Christians.

Each had transferred leadership to the pastors and ministry to the congregation. These churches had strong pastors who set the direction by word and example. All were intentional about what they were doing. That’s pastoral leadership.

And yet, ministry responsibility was freely distributed to members. These churches understood the church as a living organism composed of people who are to be active in ministry.

The buildings used by these churches were functional rather than opulent. Some churches enjoyed aesthetically pleasing facilities (Willow Creek), while others (Saddleback Community Church) met in public schools. But never did I sense the facilities were anything other than tools for spiritual ministry.

The weekend services were special events, and a lot of attention was given to making the worship services meaningful to the people who were there, rather than those they wished were there. It was obvious, however, that the bulk of ministry occurred during the week. The folks in these churches were in the process of integrating faith into life.

How Much Balance?

Most churches will say they want a balanced emphasis, reaching all four directions-out, in, up, and down-at the same time.

The church I visited that does perhaps the best job of balancing all four areas is Elmbrook Church in Brookfield, Wisconsin. Stuart Briscoe’s teaching ministry is widely respected; the gracious atmosphere invites community; the outreach is active, creative, and effective; the openness to the power of the Holy Spirit and the joyful worship is refreshing; and the attitude of the staff is relaxed yet purposeful.

Nonetheless, it was clear to me that most congregations I visited tended to emphasize one approach more than others. What are we to make of these various emphases? Here are my reflections.

1. We do need a certain degree of balance. All four bases have to be covered to some extent. We can’t ignore outreach or caring ministries or worship or instruction. All are part of the church’s mission. In our congregation we have plans to put a pastor over each of the four areas to promote balance.

2. We don’t need to apologize for our church’s unique emphasis or strength. Most likely, we won’t do all things equally well. Churches reflect different personalities, each effective in a different way.

We are primarily a Bible-teaching church in a university town. Being in a student environment, we have a lot of turnover every year. Because we are committed to that unique ministry, we are prepared to put up with a lot of hurdles (limited finances, leadership changes, inexperienced lay workers, etc.) for the benefits of reaching this special subculture.

Rather than chafing at these circ*mstances, we must accept them and work around them with understanding, patience, and thankfulness.

3. We must admit that some people won’t be attracted by our church’s particular emphasis. We have to recognize that the body of Christ is bigger than a single congregation. We must allow God to provide for some needs through ministries other than our own. We’re not always called to duplicate the ministries of every other church in town.

This also means that we give our people the freedom to draw upon the ministry strengths of other congregations. For example, a congregation in our area has a powerful prayer ministry. We encourage our folks to bring special needs before that congregation. People from other churches come to some of our meetings for teaching. We welcome them but don’t want or expect them to leave their church to join ours.

Where We Go from Here

I’ve asked myself and our church two practical questions. Here they are and the answers we’ve come to at this point.

How does a church identify what its personality and emphasis should be? Obviously you have freer rein if you’re planting a church. Otherwise, the church’s past strengths greatly influence your choices.

Another test is the voice of the congregation. Why do they come and stay? Take a survey to find out.

Another test still is the pastor’s passions. Which motivation is strongest?

1. To reach the lost? Then a reaching-out church may be your calling.

2. To experience God’s power? Then worship may be your primary calling.

3. To create a loving community? Then your calling may be to create a reaching-in congregation.

4. To help people know God’s truth? Then yours may be a calling to a Bible-teaching church.

Larger congregations can seek multiple staff who complement one another’s strengths. If you are a teacher, seek to align yourself with someone skilled in outreach, worship or body life. If you are the only pastor, you can work with key lay people to balance your strengths.

Does an emphasis on any element automatically attract certain kinds of people and implicitly exclude others? There does seem to be a tradeoff. This is where some kind of balance is necessary.

Being just down the road from the “Dean Dome” in Chapel Hill, I can’t help but use the analogy of a basketball team. Someone must occupy each of the five positions on the team. A team will never be strong unless it is effective at each position, but everyone doesn’t need to be the star.

If you have a star, use him-give him the ball often and don’t apologize for the fact he scores half the points. And don’t apologize when your church’s strength garners half the newcomers. A congregation should be able to accommodate a wide variety of people, but it’s true, some will be more comfortable with a given church’s strengths than will others.

My passion is to help build a congregation that reaches out, in, up, and down. And with what I learned on my sabbatical, I feel better equipped to make a significant contribution toward that end.

Editor’s Note: For our next issue, we’ve invited pastors representing the four types of churches Jim Abrahamson identifies to respond to the questions he raises.

Copyright © 1990 by the author or Christianity Today/Leadership Journal.Click here for reprint information on Leadership Journal.

Several Sundays ago at church, my wife met a woman who recently had been divorced, deserted by her children, and fired from her job. Scraping together all her money-$950 in cash-she had put it into a briefcase, and then the briefcase had been stolen. Then her car had been impounded because of a stack of unpaid parking tickets. Had she not had an arrangement with her landlord to clean vacated apartments, she would have been on the streets.

But down those long streets she had walked to church that Sunday: a newcomer.

What happens to such a first-time visitor?

It depends on the church. Some churches, strong and sure of themselves, brimming with corporate energy, healthy and outward looking, will embrace such a vulnerable person. (In fact, a member took this woman home that first Sunday, and a group in the church has been helping her since.) But churches struggling with internal conflicts and disabilities may not have the corporate energy and health to spare anything for needy people. Such churches lack the wherewithal to give much of themselves to incorporate a newcomer-or to hold on to members in less dramatic circ*mstances who are slipping away.

Not all people arrive on the church doorstep with the needs of this woman, but research indicates that most people who, on their own initiative, walk into an unfamiliar church shoulder emotional pain or stress. They may have just moved to the community, or given birth to a child, or undergone the C. S. Lewis-like trauma of conversion. Such events bring stress in people’s lives.

Visitors typically carry with them an anxiety cluster that may, when shared, overwhelm the unwitting congregation that is struggling with its own difficulties. The church with a hefty burden of corporate pain will back away from such individuals, because that church typically isn’t ready to deal with any more pain. Such a newcomer will be screened out rather than assimilated.

Such a congregation becomes a Teflon church, an organization to which visitors cannot stick because the church is unable to summon the energy to hold them.

Assimilation and Pain

Assimilating someone into the life of the church is different than helping them become a member. Rounding up bodies and getting them to join the church doesn’t finish the task. People who join a church may well drop out a few months later. The church needs to incorporate them into the life, the emotion, the ministry of the congregation. People need to become a part of the church body rather than be merely attached to it.

To do this, however, a congregation must have a positive self-image; it must believe in itself. The reasons are obvious. First, it takes energy to incorporate a foreign body into the church body.

Consider the people who join a church. Although these people likely are coming because of their own anxieties, the church expects them to make new friends, accept unfamiliar beliefs and practices, learn new social rules, and become active in the congregation. But the newcomers are troubled, trying to find a house or struggling with a new job or patching together a shattered life or learning to be a parent. They’re coming to church in hope of finding friends. They want help, not new assignments.

Consequently, the church that wants to incorporate these people will have to do most of the giving, bending, and reaching out. That burns corporate calories.

And some churches don’t have enough calories. Their own traumas, battles, or discouragements have sapped their congregational vitality. They carry too much group pain.

I know of a seven-thousand-member church that lost a thousand members and one million dollars of income last year. Two Sunday school classes, each with over two hundred members, pulled out to start their own congregations. Then, after the sermon one Sunday, the head of the congregation convened a congregational meeting and fired the pastor on the spot. Now, how much energy does that congregation have to incorporate newcomers?

Investing Necessary Energies

Expending the energy to enfold newcomers is a front-end investment: if you expend the energy at first to reach out and embrace new members, you obtain a net gain in corporate energy. The more robust a church, the more it can enfold a large and diverse group of newcomers. And those newcomers add to the vitality of a congregation, giving it even more energy to reach out.

In fact, the new-member assimilation record of a church provides a fairly accurate indicator of its wellbeing.

Yet, the energy requirement is almost a Catch-22: it takes corporate energy to assimilate members, but if you don’t assimilate people, you lose energy. Then again, even the hungry summon the drive to find and eat food, expending the energy to gain energy.

A positive church self-image is necessary for effective assimilation for another reason: attractiveness. People simply aren’t drawn to a listless or combative church.

A little church my wife and I worked with fired its pastor, but he wouldn’t leave. When the church brought in an interim, the fired pastor walked into the service on Sunday and interrupted Communion, announcing, “This is my church, and I’m taking over worship!” Before the morning was over, two police officers were in the church trying to oust this guy from the building. It was eighteen months before a court order dislodged him from the parsonage.

That church holds little attraction for any unsuspecting newcomer who happens to visit, and even if it did, the congregation has little emotional attention to spare.

Corporate pain also works to delete people already in the church. One church with which I consulted had recently changed pastors. The previous one had alienated many people, many of whom had left. The new pastor was so warm, gentle, and loving that some of those people started coming back.

This angered one of the stalwarts who’d hung on through the difficult times. “I’ve been here doing the hard work,” she complained. “I paid my pledge, but these people opted out. I don’t know if I can let them get as active as they were!” Had the congregation not deliberately interceded, this woman would have screened out the returning Diaspora.

Corporate pain also tends to delete from the body not just marginal but healthy and resourceful people. Such people will size up a deeply troubled congregation and say, What’s going on here? This isn’t for me. A sinking ship isn’t the most hospitable environment, and when the healthy get the picture and start leaving, the decline becomes self-perpetuating.

The local congregation can exist in one of four stages of health: excellent, neurotic, declining, and demising. Each stage displays an identifying communication pattern, energy level, goals, and dominant theology, as well as a distinctive coating of new-member Teflon.

Excellent Churches

These well-functioning, healthy churches take in new members, nurture them, place them in responsible ministries, and assimilate them into the life of the congregation. The level of corporate pain in excellent churches is low to nonexistent, and they have no Teflon coating. People stick.

Effective assimilation in such churches is explained by their characteristics.

Communication patterns. In a healthy church, people give the right information at the right time to the right people, and decisions are made in an open and orderly manner. Members don’t do business furtively in the church parking lot after worship. Pastors aren’t talked about behind their backs. Feedback is allowed-even encouraged-whether it is positive or negative.

I worked with Ted Weeden, who took the large but declining Asbury First Methodist Church in Rochester, New York, and turned it around. He did it in large part by his openness to feedback.

I served as director of the calling and caring ministry, and he’d regularly ask me, “What are our people hearing about our church when they make calls?” He’d coax every scrap of information out of me, and not once did he become defensive.

The healthier the organization, the more open people are to feedback.

Energy level. In the excellent church, things are happening. Congregational life is full, and the members reach out to others. For instance, the excellent church actually calls on those who are beginning to drop out of church life.

Excellent churches have high levels of input and output. Output means the congregation reaches beyond itself. To use business language, the representatives are in the field selling the product. In a church, that means that people go beyond the church walls to care for and evangelize those not yet a part of God’s church.

Input means the sales people are getting orders for the assembly line. In other words, people are being brought into the life of the church. When members are saying, “We have a wonderful church. Why don’t you join us?” outsiders are taking them up on it. The excellent church brings in more healthy people.

Goals. A healthy church has clear goals that stretch the organization. It knows where it’s headed. It stages its operations to arrive at its goals on schedule. And when it meets these goals, it makes new ones.

In other words, the excellent church has vision and can articulate that vision in concrete goals.

Dominant theology. The excellent church supplies its members with a rich and full theological diet. Although the sermons are consistent in theology, they vary in the kinds of topics covered. Missing are hobbyhorses and tirades and one-issue bandwagons. Difficult topics aren’t skipped, because the church has the energy and health to tackle them.

In short, healthy churches attract people and actively enculturate them into congregational life.

Neurotic Churches

The neurotic church is just beginning to experience troubles. It can assimilate people, sometimes in Sunday school classes or small groups, but not with the agility of the excellent church. A thin Teflon coating begins to form on a church characterized like this:

Communication patterns. A church’s pain, whatever its source-board politics or a pastoral firing or a changing neighborhood-needs to be discussed. But in a neurotic church, people who try to deal with pain run into roadblocks.

Some pastors will not let congregations deal with strong emotions, because anger or sadness seem sub-Christian. Sometimes the pastor is threatened by conflict. In one church, the pastor said from the pulpit, “If you disagree with me, you’re my enemy.” When that happens, the congregation no longer openly discusses internal conflict, although it may exhibit passive aggression, such as boycotting events the pastor plans.

Another communication roadblock is inappropriate pious language-language of denial. The emphasis here is on inappropriate. For example, a secular counselor referred a woman to me, frustrated that he was getting nowhere with her. “She talks only in religious language!” he grumbled.

When I asked her how I could help, she replied, “Jesus told me to come see you. You know, I love Jesus.”

“That’s good. In what way do you love Jesus?”

“Well, when I get up in the morning, I ask Jesus what I should put on, and Jesus always tells me. And Jesus tells me what to make for breakfast.”

“Hmmm.”

“I really love Jesus, you know,” she continued. “I take Jesus to bed with me at night. He’s a marvelous lover . . .”

That’s an extreme case of inappropriate pious language. The woman had been suicidal but had had a deep religious experience. That sealed off the pain. But when she had a big fight with her husband, her suicidal thoughts returned, and she didn’t know how to deal with them because she had claimed for years that Jesus had healed her. She ended up avoiding the whole issue by talking religious nonsense.

Neurotic congregations can assume many of these traits. They talk about everything but their pain, carefully walling it out with inappropriate pious language: “Count it all joy, praise the Lord. Isn’t the Lord good?”

A third communication roadblock is set up by those who circumvent the established systems. When there’s a problem, they don’t talk to the right person about it; they go to someone else, and the grapevine takes over. Role confusion sets in; people begin to get fuzzy on who’s supposed to do what. They often take projects into their own hands, making an end run around the committee structure. This labyrinthine communication pattern confuses the newcomer and distracts the members from reaching out to the stranger at their door.

Energy level. In neurotic churches, more and more of the corporate energy is drained in an effort to suppress pain. They’re too busy dealing with hidden and disrupted messages. That means less energy is available to do ministry.

Goals. The neurotic church begins to fail to achieve some or many of its goals. Some goals are actually sabotaged. An event is planned, and a handful of people show up. Nobody has complained, but neither have the people bought into the goals. Or a budget is planned, and then people withhold their pledges.

The goals of a neurotic church begin to look unattainable. Healthy people start to say, “Church, you’re in trouble.”

Dominant theology. The theology of the neurotic church becomes pharisaic. It begins believing it should avoid trauma and try to look perfect on the outside, and the preaching follows this belief. The church looks white on the outside but is full of rotten pain on the inside.

God’s church started as a wounded institution. After all, the group in the Upper Room after the Crucifixion was eleven rather than twelve. And a wounded institution it has been ever since. But the neurotic congregation’s theology attempts to avoid that reality. It denies the pain, the problems, the difficulties. And that means denying entrance to people who need the church’s energy and attention.

Declining Churches

In declining churches the Teflon coating is thicker and smoother still. The church fails to reach and incorporate people at a rate equal to the loss o f healthy members.

The declining church is like a declining industry: the sales force isn’t selling much product, so the assembly lines are shut down. Then the salespeople begin quitting because there’s nothing to sell. Keep that downward spiral going, and pretty soon all the resources are gone, and there isn’t much institution left.

Communication patterns. In declining churches, information is not only given to the wrong person (as in a neurotic church) but also only partially.

For instance, if someone has a beef about the choir, he’ll tell the associate pastor that worship isn’t feeding him the way it used to. The associate walks away thinking, Maybe I should tell Doctor Wills that his sermons need to be meatier. In such a situation, those trying to work within the church don’t have all the information they need. Messages get crossed, and people start filling in the missing gaps, often incorrectly.

In such churches, pastors may hear mixed messages, such as, “You’re a good pastor. You probably won’t stay here very long.” What does that communicate? First, such pastors who stay begin to wonder if they’re good pastors after all. And if they leave, it only corroborates the parishioners’ hunches. Either way, the church loses.

Energy level. The church in decline has a flattened energy level. What energy it has is being consumed in internal matters-avoiding conflict, denying reality, putting out fires. Pretty soon it’s feeding off of itself, eating up its own resources and adding nothing to increase its corporate spunk.

Healthy people have sized up the situation and sought a more energetic fellowship. The people who visit and remain are often “clinkers.”

In a coal furnace, a clinker is a piece of slag or iron or slate mixed in with the coal. The heat of the furnace melts the clinker, but the clinker doesn’t burn. Therefore it doesn’t add anything to the fire. In fact, it saps energy from the burning coal to heat it, and actually lowers the furnace’s fuel-conversion efficiency.

Church clinkers attend but are never assimilated. They tend to sap some of the remaining energy from the group as it tries to work with them, but clinkers don’t contribute their time and gifts to the congregation.

Such people make wonderful scapegoats in a neurotic or declining church, which can say, “No wonder we aren’t growing if people like this are what we get.” Declining churches will complain about clinkers but rarely do anything. Why? They don’t have the energy.

Goals. In declining churches, corporate low self-esteem begins to dim the vision and sabotage the goals.

One member of a church with which I worked gave me the classic line for a declining church: “Anybody who is anybody goes to the church down the street.” That’s an inferiority complex, and God-pleasing goals cannot derive from such a mind-set.

The goals of a declining church aren’t lofty. Perhaps they’ll set the goal of slowing the decline. Or maybe they’ll get brave and try a new program, but one that doesn’t really attack their problems. Or they will ratify goals year after year-and then forget them until the next year.

Dominant theology. A declining church latches on to remnant theology: “People are leaving, but we’ll survive. If those people want to leave us, we don’t want them anyway. We who are left really love one another.”

Remnant theologians refer often to Gideon or Jesus and the ten lepers (of which only one came back). They assume decline is a product of separating wheat and chaff. Whole denominations are in this stage!

The declining church operates in a deficit economy, expending more of its people than it takes in. People are sliding off the Teflon and out the door in increasing numbers.

Demising Churches

When in demise, the church doesn’t necessarily close, but it no longer affects its community. The church is comatose, or at least catatonic. It is breathing-barely-but it no longer breathes life into its surroundings. For all intents and purposes, its function and purpose have stalled. At this point the Teflon is so effective, you couldn’t bake a new member on in a blast furnace.

Communication patterns. The demising congregation has not only lost all its resources, it will not accept further help. The problem: it doesn’t believe it has a problem.

I met with a pastor last year whose church’s worship attendance had declined from two hundred to only twenty-two. His church hadn’t taken in one new member in seven years. Someone in the church told me, “No visitor ever comes back more than twice, because the message from our congregation is clear: ‘You’re not wanted here.’ ” Unbelievably, the pastor still couldn’t understand that he had a problem.

Such churches would rather die than deal with their pathologies. They reject help. That was the case in a church I visited last year. I made my initial visit. Later the pastor got the church together and told them that to have anyone come in from the outside-particularly me-would be a work of the Devil. They then voted and, by a vote of twelve to ten, barred my return. That’s denial; meaningful communication has ceased.

Energy level. In demising churches, no one is willing to call on the visitors or departing members. No one even thinks about it. It just isn’t worth it.

One fellow in the church of twenty-two members told me, “I wouldn’t ask my best friend to come to our church.” When I asked why, he stated honestly, “Because there’s nothing here for him to come for.”

“So why do you still go?” I asked.

“This is the only place I know.” He has attended that church for over sixty years, and he feels stuck. Not committed, but stuck; there’s a difference.

Goals. Demising churches have no goals. Hope is gone. When I interviewed one pastor of such a church, he said, “We can’t do anything about it. All churches are dying these days. There’s no church of our denomination growing in the state anyhow.”

Dominant theology. Demising church pastors never preach on such themes as abundant life or the Great Commission; they most often preach abstractions. The demising church hears ” ‘Peace, peace!’ when there is no peace.”

I sat through a sermon by the pastor of the church of twenty-two. The man had a Ph.D. in New Testament Greek. He lectured for twenty-five minutes on topics so foreign to the life of the congregation that everybody else blocked out the sermon long before I did. I’m a trained listener, and I had a hard time following him.

Why did he preach irrelevancies? Because if he passed anywhere closer to the actual “life” of the congregation, he might hit on something too painful to deal with.

But in the demising church, almost no one listens to the preacher, anyway. That was given up a long time ago. A new person who would happen upon such a service would find nothing relevant.

How does the church assimilate a newcomer in such a situation? It doesn’t. Like greased Teflon, it allows the person to slip right off.

Scraping Off the Teflon

How, then, does a slippery church begin to retain members? A fearless congruence is a good place to start. Church Teflon may well be little more than an updated version of the Pharisees’ whitewash.

Churches need to allow their outside appearances to reflect the realities of their inward dispositions. Avoiding pain and conflict and continually trying to look great on the outside are shams.

The people around us are wounded, and if the church can honestly acknowledge its own woundedness, the candor alone will attract people. But when the church denies the reality of its conflict and pain, it moves into the spiral toward demise.

Let’s investigate how churches in each of the stages, beginning with the sickest, might begin to remove their Teflon coating.

Demising churches. Without a healthy pastor, the demising church doesn’t have a chance. One of our staff members said of a pastor he worked with, “This pastor can break stuff faster than I can fix it.”

I asked one church whose pastor was causing some problems, “What would happen if you changed pastors?”

“Oh, we can’t do that!” they replied. “We had a terrible time with the last three pastors, and we promised ourselves we’d never ask another pastor to leave.” They’d had three painful experiences in a row, and they hadn’t dealt with any of them adequately. They were using the ostrich method to avoid conflict.

Besides getting a healthy pastor, two other techniques can help demising churches.

First, a healthy pastor can change the church’s ingrained belief system. An attitude that expects no success can be countermanded by a pastor who constantly strokes the congregation by celebrating every little success and never condemning failure.

Such a pastor says things like, “Isn’t it marvelous what happened in our church this past week! Did you know that every day, Betty called on a man dying of AIDS in the hospital? What an example of Christian love! You know, folks, you’re a very caring people.”

When the pastor does that every week, the worship service doesn’t become a place of the doldrums. There are no floggings, only celebrations of the success of the gospel in people’s lives. The cure is long, however, and it demands a long-suffering pastor.

Second, fellow congregations can help a demising church with another rescue technique. The “screeners” who keep newcomers at bay in a demising church easily overwhelm visitors. But what if the visitors overload the screeners?

Let’s say that a Presbyterian church is dying. The presbytery can ask for two or three volunteer families from several nearby churches to join the dying church for two or three years. This ingesting of two to four dozen healthy families acts like a marrow transplant for a leukemia victim: it overwhelms the system with healthy cells. The screeners may try to screen like crazy, saying in many ways, “We don’t know if we can handle you,” but the sheer number of newcomers makes the screening ineffective.

The healthy new families help create an atmosphere in which off-the-street visitors can be assimilated. Of course, it means having a pastor in place who supports the process.

Declining churches. To turn a declining church around, you must deal with corporate pain. Such pain nearly always seeks a vulnerable individual to vent upon, and sometimes that’s an innocent pastor.

The pastor of a three-thousand-member church called me at 11:00 at night and began crying on the phone. “I’ve been here only two weeks, and I don’t know what’s happening,” he gasped. “I’m getting life-threatening phone calls from parishioners at 3 A.M. My kids are being physically hassled on the school grounds. Frankly, I’m scared. I don’t know what I could have done in two weeks to cause all this!”

“I hate to shoot down your ego when you’re not feeling good,” I reassured him, “but there’s nothing you can do in two weeks-even twenty-four hours a day!-that could cause you all this grief. You’ve inherited twenty-eight years of corporate pain.”

He was a young, gentle, caring man. I went to consult with the church, and his church is the only one where I’ve been physically attacked. The poison in that congregation was horrendous. Still, it had to be uncorked for the church to survive and for the innocent pastor to continue.

Some pastors shoulder more of the responsibility for decline. Another church I worked with expected itself to be healthier and more successful than the pastor would let it. He said to me one day, “I’m aware after being here ten years that this church is too good for me.”

This pastor had become a master saboteur in little things. Although he was a gentle, caring man one-on-one, put him into an administrative setting, and his sensitivity left him. For instance, he quoted me in a sermon, but it was something I’d never said. He’d done similar things with his leaders, and they’d lost confidence in him. For this church to get well, they needed a new pastor who had a belief system that allowed success, and they finally found one.

Most declining churches also need an infusion of new vision, new hope. One church that formerly was declining now believes it can do well. Their pastor has been with them ten years, and his belief in the church is beginning to pay off. I notice the difference even in how they speak about themselves. They’ve developed new support groups, and the church is becoming healthy again. It takes a long time to return to health, but it happens.

Neurotic churches. Neurotic churches have more internal resources from which to draw. The key is to utilize remaining resources in nonneurotic ways, which is easier said than done.

One of the greatest resources for a congregation is its healthy members. They come in two varieties: new and existing.

Even in the neurotic stage, the church usually has plenty of existing healthy members who haven’t left. These individuals need to be mobilized. Some churches form a Resourcing Task Force that directs people with needs to members who can help. That way, individual pain is handled rather than covered over. In much the same way, conflict resolution teams can tackle corporate pain.

Then the formerly neurotic church won’t lose its other human resource: healthy new members. Newcomers, instead, transfuse new energy into the congregation, helping push it toward excellence.

Excellent churches. These churches are already holding on to the newcomers, but they always want to do it better. One such church, First United Methodist Church of Jefferson City, Missouri, has developed a structure to keep the system healthy.

Congregational traumas fire off all kinds of emotions. Perhaps a key leader comes down with cancer, or a child is diagnosed with AIDS. What can a church do to handle that kind of trauma rather than push it underground?

Gene Rooney, First Church’s pastor, has helped create support groups for the various events that cause such difficulty. Say your wife comes home from the doctor with the news she has cancer; the church has two groups available: one for you and one for your wife.

This large church has handled many traumas lately with its many healthy small groups. With many groups, it has not only a variety of support entities, but it also has damage control; if one group collapses, it doesn’t affect the whole church, because other healthy cells can fill in where the one left off.

Smaller churches may not have lots of resourceful people to care for the congregation in this way, but they can band together. If several farming families go bankrupt in a rural community, a group of churches can provide a support group for the families, helping them find psychological and financial help. People never leave a church that gives them that kind of care.

I once saw a sign on a mental health center wall. It read: THE ONLY WAY OUT IS THROUGH. Not over, around, or any other means but through is the way churches must handle corporate pain.

One of the healthiest stories for churches is the one of Peter trying to walk to Jesus across the stormy Sea of Galilee. Peter walks into the storm when Jesus says, “Come.” But then he gets scared and begins to sink. Jesus is right there, however, reaching out and drawing him up.

It’s a marvelous story for churches to appropriate, because when we enter our congregational storms, it is scary and it takes faith. It takes a belief we sometimes don’t have in our churches. But once we’re invited into the storm, then Jesus stills it-not before.

The church that holds on to people is the healthy church that has walked into its own tempest and emerged, holding on to Christ.

Copyright © 1990 by the author or Christianity Today/Leadership Journal.Click here for reprint information on Leadership Journal.

On the night before I preach, I pace-back and forth in my room, mumbling sermonic thoughts, testing them, scorning a hundred thoughts, exulting in one or two that shine like coin, investing those.

I grow breathless when I pace. I make strange noises. But the house must be as silent as death. And the mighty God must stand by me to save me, because there surely will come great waves of doubt to drown me, and then I will splutter, “Help me, Lord!” and gasp: “What do you want me to say?”

Not all the scriptural interpretation in the world will save me from this nighttime ride on stormy water: I’m going to preach, and I get scared. In the few hours I sleep, I dream. In my dreams I arrive at church too late, and people are leaving. I can’t find my vestments, my clothes are shabby, and people are impatient. Or (the second greatest horror) smack in the middle of preaching, I notice that I’m in my underwear. Or (the worst) I’ve forgotten totally what I’d planned to say.

I wake at 5 A.M. I don’t eat because I can’t. My internal self is as unstable as water. But when I meet the people, my external self has donned a smile, speaks softly, touches everyone, and moves to worship with aplomb. And lo, I preach.

And on any given Sunday, I succeed. No one expects a pastoral collapse. Everyone takes this sermon for granted, while I breathe secret reams of gratitude to God. But when Saturday comes again, I pace again, wild-eyed and terrified.

You too? Does success astonish you, as well, since the prospect of preaching had cut you at the gut?

When I was young, I thought experience would calm my fears. It didn’t. For years I prayed God would grant me a pre-sermon peace. God didn’t. And I accused myself of faithlessness.

But now I wonder: Perhaps the fear goes with the office. Perhaps, because this task requires the whole of the preacher, our entire beings become involved in the tension of preparation, and so our tummies start to jump.

It is-but it is not only-a function of our intellects to preach. We are doing more than passing pure thought to the people. Our souls are required of us, that we believe what we say. Moreover, to believe means that we have ourselves experienced what we declare: it’s a part of our personal histories, real in our suffering and joy, real in our sin, in forgiveness and grace and freedom. So we become a standing evidence of what we preach, and the whole of us-soul and mind and body and experience-participates in the holy moment of preaching.

It is Christ who saves. But in human community, it is this particular vessel whose voice, whose person, and whose preaching proclaim that Christ. No, I can’t hide in my cape of authority and still persuade the people of a dear, incarnate, near, embracing Jesus.

I can never abstract my self from the preaching, nor ever be wholly nerveless before it, since the very purpose and the passion of the task involve my love. I preach because I love, love twice. These two loves define my being.

For I love the Lord my God with all my heart and with all my soul and with all my mind. I’ve nothing more important in all the world to communicate to anyone than the One I love completely. This is a stupendous responsibility. And it is my own, because I can’t divide my beloved from my loving, nor my loving from my self. When I speak of God, my passion is present: in passion do I make God known! But the glory of the Lord makes me self-conscious. Am I worthy to whisper the name?

I have no choice but to try. For I love this people, too-these faces, these eyes-with a sharp, particular, personal love. The best that I have to give, I must give to them. To them, in their language, for their individual lives.

And on Saturday night, I worry: Will they hear it? Will they let the hard word hurt them, the good word heal them, the strong word lead and redeem them? Will I speak it so that they receive it from me? O people, people, the depth of my love is the depth of my fear for you!

So I pace.

Walter Wangerin, Jr., pastored Grace Lutheran Church in Evansville, Indiana.

Copyright © 1990 by the author or Christianity Today/Leadership Journal.Click here for reprint information on Leadership Journal.

Several years ago while on her way to church, one of our members was stopped by an irate man. Pat had been accustomed to cutting across this gentleman’s yard on her way to Sunday school. She said the man yelled, “You wake me up every Sunday morning when you thunder your way along the path you are making in my yard. Find another route!”

Pat asked me, “Can you believe he raised such a fit?”

Although I mumbled a sympathetic comment, I identified with the man. Sometimes neighbors have legitimate gripes-whether it’s because of people walking (or driving) on the neighbor’s lawn, chimes that play at too high a decibel level, a softball team that keeps hitting foul balls into a neighbor’s yard, or a rowdy youth group in the parking lot on Sunday night.

On the other hand, some neighbors are simply antagonistic. Some like to be in control and won’t agree to any church initiative that affects their common boundary. Some antireligious neighbors fight the church on philosophical grounds.

Most conflicts with neighbors, however, can be avoided. Central to good relationships remains good communication. In addition, two other principles help churches remain good neighbors.

First, be certain the church is serving the community, not just itself. Churches have numerous opportunities to provide services for the community that no other resident can provide. The grounds, parking, and fellowship space often provide the church with opportunities to be a good neighbor.

In Louisville, our church provided parking for a neighbor during his annual Kentucky Derby barbecue. Although he had the picnic area to host two hundred people, he couldn’t park their cars.

When neighborhood organizations need a facility, we can respond warmly, as good neighbors.

Second, agreements with neighbors should be written. Any agreement should be between the neighbor and the church, not the neighbor and the pastor.

Years ago, my predecessor and a church neighbor agreed to share a volleyball set. The neighbor would purchase the net and poles. In return, the equipment would be placed on church property. The neighbor would have priority if a scheduling conflict arose.

Time passed. My predecessor resigned and departed with the agreement in his mind but not in the files. The following Fourth of July, an argument erupted when the church and the neighbor’s guests decided to play volleyball at the same time. Although the argument was short, it could have created hard feelings. The pastor had made an agreement without informing the church or writing it down.

When disagreements do arise, I’ve discovered several options.

At times, patience will solve the problem. Our church shares a property line with a healthcare corporation. We have an agreement concerning the maintenance and use of a parking facility: all spaces designated as shared parking are accessible during business hours to the corporation; at all other times, the church has use of all the parking.

Last year the corporation placed a barrier across one of their entry roads to cut down on traffic during the night hours. We expressed our disagreement with this plan, since it would limit access to our parking. We requested a key to open the barrier. On Sunday morning, however, I arrived only to find the barrier in place, and we hadn’t been given a key.

Since we had already voiced our disagreement, I was angered. I wondered whether they had simply forgotten to give me the key or were attempting to display their authority.

Although ready to issue a complaint, I decided to wait a week to see if the problem was going to repeat itself. Six months have passed, and the chain has never been fastened again.

At other times, compromises can be worked out. Years ago, a neighbor wanted our church to keep the three acre lot behind the church mowed with the same frequency and perfection as her own lawn. The cost for this was prohibitive. Finally, we compromised on a mowing schedule that moderately satisfied her and still fit within our church budget.

Then again, litigation may be the only solution. When one church and its neighbors clashed over the construction of a tunnel under a major city street, the church had to litigate the issue and allow the courts to decide. Although we always try to avoid such a confrontation, sometimes it is inevitable.

When I find myself in conflicts with a neighbor, my mind drifts back to my home church in rural Iowa. It was bounded on all four sides by a cemetery. There, neighbor problems were a dead issue.

But for most other churches, no matter how much land we purchase, we find neighbor relations unavoidable. It’s been that way ever since God gave his people the Promised Land. But he also commands us to be good neighbors, so we do our best.

-Robert B. Watkins

Cumberland Presbyterian Church

Oak Ridge, Tennessee

Copyright © 1990 by the author or Christianity Today/Leadership Journal.Click here for reprint information on Leadership Journal.