Picture, if you will, a small, rural congregation. The average age in the church is early 60s. The weekly worship attendance is approximately 50, and there is one nine-year-old who comes about once every three weeks. She is the whole Sunday school. The community is a church-going community — about […]
How we see ourselves is often very different from how others see us. In my “former life” doing research for The United Methodist Church, I often went to “secular” audiences to get their impressions and opinions about our church. It was very easy to do, because my office was half […]
¶252.7 Book of Discipline — The Church Council shall endlessly discuss the best course of action for the local congregation, finally approve it, and then present it to the whole church where it will inevitably be rejected after contentious debate. No, don’t bother looking this up in the Discipline. It […]
Recently, there was an interesting discussion being held by some clergy leaders in the Wisconsin Annual Conference about the “ideal congregation.” This brings to mind old conversations we used to have in New Jersey about “the perfect church.” In both cases, most of the answers revolve around faithful commitment on the […]
Within a twelve-hour period of time I had essentially the same conversation with three different pastors. The topic was leadership and the dilemma was unrealistic expectations. Here is the gist of each conversation: My church people talk all the time about how they want to change and grow, then they […]
I have worked with churches in a wide variety of settings and a wide range of relative states of health. From these experiences, a conceptual frame emerges that I have found helpful as a consultation tool, and as a way of understanding not only what is happening in a given […]
I will say it again: our future does not lie in our past. Trying to “become” what we once were is like trying to put the toothpaste back in the tube (a lot more trouble than it is worth). Why can’t we be the church we were in the 50s […]
Church, church, you are distracted by many things… In response to a pastor’s call to pray for the people of Haiti (and the current cholera crisis), I heard a lay person whisper, “I thought we took care of that!” I think she was referring to the earthquake response earlier in […]
This morning’s USA Today has a front-page story below the fold on bullying among teens. It appears that bullying is widespread, and apparently acceptable. 52% of students have hit someone in anger in the past year. 50% admit that they have bullied, and 47% report being the victim of bullying. […]
A conversation at the Commission on Religion & Race in Milwaukee this past weekend brought to mind three encounters — two from my time in Tennessee and one since coming to Wisconsin. About eight years ago, I got into a conversation about peace, and what it means to be a […]
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