FaithQuest Revisited

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Make-No-Wave United Methodist Church

By

Dan R. Dick

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I received an interesting email from a pastor today who “followed my advice” and raised questions about expectations and accountability in the church.  He asked the “what is the church?” and “what is the church for?” questions, and zeroed in on what our membership vows really mean.  He was shocked when the chair of the church council responded by saying, “well, we don’t have time to talk about this now.  We have church business we need to deal with.”  Later that evening, the chair of SPRC (Staff-Parish Relations Committee) called to schedule an appointment — “We need to talk.  As soon as possible.”  The pastor was surprised early the next morning when the SPRC chair, the Lay Leader, the church Council chair, and the head of Trustees all showed up together.  The conversation went something like this (church leadership in bold; pastor normal type):

We need to know what’s gotten into you?

What do you mean?

This kick you’re on to push; to make us feel bad about not doing enough?

I’m not trying to make anyone feel bad.  I’m just trying to offer people something better.  I want to help people grow in their faith.

Well, that’s fine, but a lot of people are perfectly happy where they are.

I know they are, but that doesn’t mean they should be.

See?  That’s exactly the kind of pressure we’re talking about.  Who are you to judge what kind of Christians people should be?

It’s not a matter of “judging” anyone.  It’s a matter of helping people grow in their faith.

You made a lot of people uncomfortable last night.  You made it sound like we should be doing more.

We SHOULD be doing more!  I brought up the issues for a reason.

But that’s not why people come to this church.  People come here because they know they will be loved and cared for, not judged and made to feel guilty.

Being loved and cared for and becoming faithful disciples are not mutually exclusive.  People should want both.

In your opinion.  None of our previous pastors said any of this stuff.

But it isn’t just my opinion.  It’s in the Bible.  It’s in our Book of Discipline.  I didn’t make this stuff up. 

No, you said you pulled it off the web and we all know how reliable things are you can find online.

You’re kidding, right?  You’re saying because I got the articles off the web that we shouldn’t pay attention to it?  All I raised were three questions: what is the church? what is the church for? and how do we hold people accountable to the promises they made to God and one another.  That’s all.  These are good questions to ask.

But they’re unnecessary.  We’re not trying to be super-Christians.  We’re just normal people who love God and need to know that God loves us.  That’s all.  We don’t need you telling us how we ought to live our faith.  It’s none of your business if we pray or not or read the Bible or even how often we attend church.  You are here to be our pastor, not our conscience.

But I wouldn’t be doing my job if I didn’t preach and teach from the Bible and challenge people to be the best Christians we can be.

Look, you’re young and we want to support you, but you need to be reasonable.  People are busy — we have full lives.  We don’t have time to be saints.  We need you to do your job — lead worship, visit church members, teach confirmation, pray for us, and try to grow the church.  We just don’t need you making things harder than they ought to be.

I don’t know what to say.  You tell me you want me to do my job, but when I do my job you don’t want me to.  This is impossible.  I didn’t do anything wrong last night.  In fact, I did exactly the right thing.

The pastor received a call later in the day from his district superintendent.  Hoping for support, he was irritated to discover that his DS sided with the congregation’s leadership, asking that he “back off.”  The DS told him that he needed to make this appointment work, and that he couldn’t afford to alienate key leadership.  Again, he heard that he needed to be “reasonable.”

What am I missing here?  I was called to ministry.  I am part of a church whose mission is to make disciples, but when I bring up acting like disciples I am told to back off.  If we  can’t even have discussions about what it means to be the church in the church, we’re in big trouble.  Anyway, I just wanted you to know that your “basic” questions are not “simple” questions at all.

This is one of the more dramatic responses I have received, but in no way is it rare or unusual.  Some of our United Methodist churches are held hostage by low expectations, complacency, lack of vision, and a distinct aversion to anything remotely disciple-like.  What are we going to do about it?  When mediocrity becomes the standard, it is only a matter of time until we cease to exist.  No relevancy, no urgency, no commitment = no church.  Unless it is safe and even encouraged to rock the boat, makes some waves, and shake things up, we may be looking for a new church real soon.

124 responses to “Make-No-Wave United Methodist Church”

  1. Jeff Uhler Avatar
    Jeff Uhler

    Taylor said, “At ten people you don’t even have a congregation anymore. That’s just a group.” Must confess – I got a chuckle when I read this.

    Whether you want to call them a congregation or not is entirely up to you – but they still consider themselves to be a congregation. Dr. Sims, and my experience in a multitude of such small congregations (one I served in Illinois had an average attendance of 5 when everyone was healthy and home), bears out your conviction that such a “group” is inherently more flexible. Here’s the choice – death (closure) or something new and different. But I’ve had such attitudes in other small UMC churches as well.

    So for my question to you – At what count does a group become a “congregation”? When has such a group become institutionalized enough that such flexibility becomes difficult and, therefore, the approach you propose is much more beneficial.

    I would suppose that you can’t really place a numerical value on it because it would still come down to the people’s attitudes in that congregation/group. For me, it means that books like “Cracking Your Congregation’s Code,” “Good to Great”, “Unlearning Church” become helpful.

    No matter which model/plan/process one uses, however, it still seems that the appropriate word of God at the appropriate time is vital – or, as another of my mentors puts it – asking the right questions at the right time…

    Reply
  2. Taylor Burton-Edwards Avatar
    Taylor Burton-Edwards

    @Jeff– At ten people you don’t even have a congregation anymore. That’s just a group. Groups are inherently more flexible and less resistant than congregations. So I wouldn’t see this as an example proving there’s a warrant for an Easum-style “Hail Mary” with a congregation as such.

    @Dave Whitman… I agree with your approach– and so does Alan Roxburgh, John Wesley and the host of those David Keuker has named.

    The one qualifier I’d add is that the point of changing individuals is not to change the congregation per se. It is rather to help those individuals begin to live as disciples engaging God’s mission in the world. As they do that, and stay connected in the congregation as well, the congregation may– or may not!– learn how to be more “discipleship friendly”– but I’d argue that it remains unlikely that the congregation per se would DO discipleship per se as is primary focus.

    Yes, I know the Discipline says it should. And I know a few congregations tend to pull that off– the rare exceptions. But for the most part, if this process helps the congregation, as such, become “discipleship friendly” rather than “discipleship neglectful” or even “discipleship averse,” you’ve achieved a great outcome.

    And actually, I think you can help the congregation join God’s mission as a congregation (given its strengths and limitations as such) in all sorts of ways that don’t require it to be engaging in and sort of intense disciple-making per se– mission projects, encouraging generosity, supporting local community improvement efforts institutionally, allowing your space to be used for good ends while you’re not using it, becoming an advocate for justice for persons in your community or globally– all of these things can be and often are joining God’s mission, too. But none of them, per se, is the same thing as making disciples of Jesus Christ who are competent and humble enough to engage God’s mission to transform the world.

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  3. David Kueker Avatar
    David Kueker

    Some authors for this lay driven approach – Greg Ogden, Neil Cole, David Garrison, David/Paul Yongii Cho, Karen Hurston, Joel Comiskey, Edwin Friedman, Peter Steinke, William Beckham, Ralph Neighbour Jr, Win Arn and Christian Schwarz, plus more secular authors such as Everett Rogers, Geoffrey Moore, Peter Senge, Rodney Stark, Robert Putnam, Malcolm Gladwell and M Scott Peck.

    Reply
  4. David Kueker Avatar
    David Kueker

    I hope to be able to affirm the good results that can come from approaches such as Bill Easum’s and others while advancing a very different paradigm.

    Craig Miller mentions the concept of a “discipleship system” in his book, NextChurch.Now. I expanded on it in my 2008 Doctor of Ministry project where I attempted to identify the specific, systematic actions used by third world cell churches to make disciples (apart from other church functions) and adapt them to midwestern UMC churches under 100 in attendance.

    I found that disciple making actions of a 700,000 member cell church had more in common with a small UMC church than with the program oriented churches of 300+ attendance in the USA, and very little in common with what is taught typically about how to help our churches grow. Yet they are the second most effective disciple making system in the world, generating 20,000 converts annually.

    The whole 210 page project is online at http://www.disciplewalk.com for download; Chapter 2 specifically deals with discipleship systems.

    It’s hard to generalize too much, but this sort of discipleship system is lay driven rather than clergy driven, decentralized rather than centralized, based on relationships rather than events, involves lots of individual prayer rather than performance worship, bible reading rather than instructional classes, happens outside the building rather than inside the building, and results in multiplication rather than addition because it focuses on making disciple makers as the end result of the Great Commission. That’s the basic difference with Bill Easum’s ‘Hail Mary’ list.

    As it happens alongside of worship and traditional church programming rather than within it, nothing much has to change in the traditional church to make disciples, resulting in less systemic conflict. It is particularly effective in hostile environments and with the poor, oppressed and illiterate.

    Generally, the discipleship system in operation becomes visible in small groups where evangelism is the primary priority. Frequently it is referred to as “organic” disciple making. The best example I know that contrasts the two paradigms is here: http://www.christianitytoday.com/le/2008/fall/11.34.html

    Reply
  5. Jeff Uhler Avatar
    Jeff Uhler

    David, what are those “recognizable characteristics”?

    While there are many with experiences against Easum’s approach, I’ve witnessed at least one success with this type of approach – Dr. Rose Sims was appointed to Trilby UMC in Florida a number of years ago. There were less then 10 in attendance on the first Sunday. While she didn’t hit every single one of Easum’s list, the approach she took is the closest to it that I’ve seen. Sims’ book is “New Life For Dying Churches: It Can Happen Anywhere.”

    I’ve also been reading Searcy (Launch), Stetzer, Roberts, Caldwell and Kallestad, Kelso, and Rainer and their books dealing with church revitalization or planting. Thus the reason for my question. They all have some similar principles, but they also all have their biases.

    Reply
    1. Dave Whitman Avatar
      Dave Whitman

      I heard Dr. Sims speak at a Congress on Evangelism. She changed my understanding of “it can happen anywhere!”

      I use her as an example of a positive attitude that overcomes even her own denominational processes to answer God’s call to change lives.

      Thank you for recognizing her outstanding contribution…

      Reply
  6. David Kueker Avatar
    David Kueker

    Bill Easum is a genius and has been an inspiration to me. But this ‘Hail Mary’ list is a last ditch attempt to transform a dying church into a disciple making institution – which to me is not only an oxymoron, it’s change so drastic that any institution would resist it to the death.

    If the church is a living system (body of Christ), it has a subsystem responsible for making disciples – a discipleship system. With this perspective, everything changes. It is actually the discipleship system that is the active ingredient in numerically growing churches, and it has recognizeable characteristics.

    From this perspective, Easum’s ‘Hail Mary’ list doesn’t address any of these characteristics but rather reinforces the factors for decline – i.e. the same things that are killing the church now, only with more intensity.

    There’s a third alternative. Take the ‘Hail Mary’ list and begin to compile scriptures references that support each item and references that seem to contradict each item, then look at what you have. It’s good advice to 20th century churches, but I contend you won’t find it in the New Testament.

    Reply
  7. Jeff Uhler Avatar
    Jeff Uhler

    I think Easum’s advice is that most folks will attend a worship service rather than suggesting that the worship generates discipleship. And the worship was only one part of his list of eleven things to do as a Hail Mary approach. Hail Mary also suggests that this is a last ditch effort, the local church doing this has no other real options. So, in case I’ve misquoted and to keep from leaving out the complete picture again, here’s the link to what Easum says: http://www.billeasum.com/?p=438

    Easum’s approach is much more radical than merely starting a new worship service. Thanks for the challenge, Taylor.

    Reply

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