Transforming Congregational Culture

Transforming Congregational Culture

Anthony B. Robinson

Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co. 2003

Chapter

3. From Civic Faith to Human Transformation

7. From Board Culture to Ministry Culture

8. From Community Organization to Faith-Based Ministry

9. From Democracy to Discernment

10. The Budget: From End to Means

11. From Fellowship to Hospitality

12. Membership Growth: From Passive to Active

...technical or programmatic change, or even restructuring, is not a sufficient response to the challenges of the day. What we face is far deeper than that. We need to be talking about changing the very culture... I argue for a radical - to the roots - change and shift in the culture

If part of what we are dealing with is change in the larger North American culture and society - its religious makeup and ethos, I will also use "culture" and "cultural change" in a second sense. Response to these larger cultural shifts on the part of the once mainline churches will involve change in the culture of congregations. Programmatic change is not enough. Restructuring is not enough. Neither will go deep enough. Most clergy and church leaders get half a dozen mailings each week that describe the latest, hottest, and newest program for congregational renewal. Some of them are quite good. But few of them get to the level of change in the culture of the congregation. (Here I am using the term "culture" in an anthropological sense to mean the thick network of symbols, language, and behaviors that characterize and define a human community.) The challenge we face in the historically mainline Protestant churches is the challenge of cultural change in this latter sense.

To be sure, asking questions is not easy and will seldom be well received. In many respects what I have described as giving leadership for facing adaptive challenge - asking questions, letting people feel the pinch of reality, dis-orienting, drawing out conflict, challenging norms - is the work of a prophet. And we all know what happens to prophets.

Too often we preachers have taken it as our task to make the faith fit in with the modern world rather than to challenge it. We have exercised technical leadership, but not leadership for adaptive change.

If you are in the market for an adventure, it is a great time to be a leader in the church. And because the church today is facing such an important and essential challenge, it is a wondrously exciting time for ministries that help congregations enter into cultural change and the new life that comes with it.

It is true that the church is no longer the conscience of the community, the instrument of aid to the least fortunate, or the center of community and family life, and if we recognize that faithfulness requires more of us than being a good social club for our members, what is the church's business today? Again, it is a time of wonderful opportunity for the church. The post-christendom, postmodern era has given the church the opportunity to discover, or rediscover, a purpose more in keeping with its Scriptures and its own origins and formative years.

The purpose of the church today, a purpose much more in keeping with the purpose of the church in its earliest, pre-Christendom era, is that of human transformation. Our purpose is to change lives. As a pastor I find that one of the reasons that this is such a good time to be the church and to be a minister is that many people - and many of those who seek a church today - are seeking change in their lives. Gone is the era when people come to the church as a way of being part of the community or being good citizens.

The church is not the fellowship of those who have been fully and completely changed or saved and who require nothing more. In other words, the church is not the saved who are then to save others. The church is a fellowship, a gathering of those who are in the process of being changed, of those who are being saved and made new, and who invite others to join them in this adventure and in this life.

Today, in a new time, the purpose of the church and its ministries is more adequately described as transforming people in the light of God's grace - revealed in the Exodus, the Incarnation, and the Resurrection.

FROM CHRISTIAN EDUCATION TO CHRISTIAN FORMATION

Copenhaver provides a further helpful summary of contrasts between education and formation, none of which, he emphasizes, ought to be pushed too far, but which help us to see the differences.

First, the purpose of Christian education is to inform; by contrast, the purpose of Christian formation - as the word itself implies - is to form, to shape, to mold.

Second, Christian education engages the intellect; by contrast, Christian formation engages the whole person.

Third, the goal of Christian education is understanding; by contrast, the goal of formation is faithfulness.

Fourth, Christian education can be pursued in settings dedicated to that purpose (such as classrooms); by contrast, Christian formation cannot take place in isolation. Indeed, Christian formation takes place in the complex and dynamic context of the entire life of the community of faith. To put it another way, Christian formation is the whole person molded in the context of the whole community. It is life lived in the round.

Fifth, Christian education can take place in fairly straightforward ways. We know a lot about how to dispense information. It follows predictable patterns. Progress can be measured. By contrast, how Christian formation takes place is harder to trace. Because formation depends heavily on the work of the Holy Spirit, it is not nearly as predictable. In most instances, we are reduced to saying something like this: Christian formation often seems to happen in this kind of setting, when these elements are present. That is, it is harder to trace fully how one is formed than it is to trace how one is educated.

Congregational Spirituality: From Givers to Receivers Who Give

...in congregations where the shift in congregational spirituality from "givers" to "receivers who give" has been experienced and supported, the leaders are those who are also led. They seek and respond to the leading of God, of Christ, and of the Holy Spirit in their lives. They are not solo operators. They recognize that being a leader involves an openness to and a capacity for the Spirit. As leaders they are learning to say, and to mean, "Not my will, but thy will be done." Their leadership is funded by worship experience, by prayer, and by study of the Scriptures.

Leaders are those who are led - led by the Spirit. They are givers who have received.

Today the new post-christendom, postmodern era is upon us, and the church is once again seeing that "mission" is not a department, a budget, the activity of a designated "mission" committee or the transfer of resources overseas. In this new time, everything the church does is, in some sense, mission. In our secular, religiously pluralistic, Western context, every congregation is - at least potentially - a mission outpost, a beachhead of the empire of God in the midst of the empire of America. "Mission" is not one of the many programs of the church, the church exists for mission, for the changing and transforming of human beings and human communities, in light of the gospel.

This is the backdrop for the shift from "board culture to ministry culture." The work that was asked of congregation members in earlier times, participating in running the church, has been changed in this new time to a calling of congregation members to be engaged in ministry themselves, not simply to manage the church's ministry and the clergy's ministry.

The board culture tends to operate from a scarcity approach: "There are all these board slots, positions, offices - how will we ever fill them?" A ministry culture tends to operate from the idea of abundance; God gives all people gifts for ministry. The church's task is to help people discover, identify, claim, and exercise those gifts. In that way we will get as much "ministry" done as God calls forth.

Paul Sherry, immediate past president of the United Church of Christ, was once invited to speak at the dedication of a new youth center in Chicago. At the time, Sherry was the executive director of the Chicago Renewal Society, a social-service agency that had Christian roots. Another one of the speakers was Harold Washington, then mayor of Chicago, who had had many associations with Sherry. After the ceremony, Mayor Washington invited Sherry to have a cup of coffee with him at a local diner. When they sat down, Mayor Washington quickly got to the reason for the invitation.

"You know, Paul, I appreciate all your efforts in getting this center opened, and I also appreciated your remarks today. But you are a Christian minister and I didn't hear you say anything today that couldn't have been said by somebody else. We need to hear something else from you. We need to hear something form the gospel!"

"A 'majority rules' way of thinking," observes Copenhaver, "is what happens when we take God out of the congregational process. It is not that no one can tell us what to do (a frequent claim of American Christians, especially those in churches with a congregational polity). Rather, we seek together to discern what Christ would have us to do. We listen to one another because we are listening for the voice of the Spirit, and you never know whom the Spirit will choose to speak through. We wait upon the Spirit, as did the people of Pentecost, the Spirit that alone is able to fashion understanding and unity out of diversity."

In the average congregation there is considerable experience with democratic decision-making and parliamentary procedures. But members of those same congregations are less likely to understand discernment. Teaching about discernment as a spiritual practice will be important. Discernment involves listening to one another and listening for the Spirit. Moreover, as we listen to one another, the point is not necessarily to identify the will of the majority but to discern the mind of Christ and the will of God. "Attitude," goes the saying, "is everything." In this case, the attitude with which we approach our work and life together makes a great deal of difference. Do we seek the will of the majority or the mind of Christ?

...the budget often became an end rather than a means.

...as congregations became less goal-and mission-driven, the budget and budget processes became, ironically, more complex and arcane. Charts, pies, lists, lines, funds (some visible, some hidden), and associated turf battles came to characterize the annual slicing of the pie. It was a classic case of "work avoidance." rather than asking the important questions, we micromanaged the budget! When this becomes the case, chances are good that congregations have forgotten - or been afraid to ask - the prior questions. What is God calling us to be and to do? What is our purpose as a church? What are we trying to accomplish? What is our business?

A budget is really a planning and administrative tool - and nothing more. In this new time, we are challenged to break the pattern of letting the budget take on a reified status and instead seek to allow God's Spirit to direct what is possible, and then seek the resources to accomplish it.

When we allow the congregation's budget to become an end in itself, we have often succeeded in creating a system that acts as if God did not exist!

"The true and real sacrament of the Protestant church," observed one wag, "is the coffee hour." When church is out, coffee is on and people gather in fellowship halls across the land for what we have come to designate as "fellowship." Of course, "fellowship" in its origins is not as pallid or superficial as the typical church coffee hour may seem to be. The Greek word koinonia bespeaks a kind of bond, an affection, a unity that is deep and enduring, not superficial and episodic.

Not only has fellowship been thinned out to the coffee-hour experience, but congregations have come to judge and rate themselves on their "friendliness": "We are," say many congregations, "a friendly church." To not be "friendly" is to be a bad thing, a failure as a church. But are friendliness and fellowship all that they are held up to be? Too often, I suspect, what we mean by fellowship and a friendly church is that we find people like ourselves in that church. We find the church full of people of our social group, educational background, lifestyle, values, and so on. When we find compatible people, we deem the church to be friendly, comfortable, and "a good fit."

Hospitality is a very different concept than friendliness. According to John McFadden, "When we extend hospitality to the stranger, we make no assumption that this person will have anything at all in common with us, much less that we will like one another. It could be someone unpleasant, even dangerous; we are still obligated to offer our hospitality." In these ways hospitality is at odds with friendliness.

Hospitality does not rest on the assumption that we are all the same, or that in getting to know someone we will find that we will really like that person. Hospitality allows the other to be other, to be different. The biblical origins and stories of hospitality are many. Sarah and Abraham welcomed passing strangers, inviting them to rest and eat with them. It turned out that one of the strangers was God himself, who had come to announce to the old folks that they would have a child, their first, before the year was out.

The New Testament begins, one might say, with a story of hospitality - or failed hospitality. When Joseph and Mary journey to Bethlehem to be counted in the Roman census, they find that there is "no room for them" at the inn. They take shelter in a cattle shed, or cave. The innkeeper has unwittingly turned away the Son of God, an act that foreshadows the way the world will prove inhospitable to a God whose ways are strange to us.

"In some churches," writes John McFadden, "there is emphasis - even an insistence - that all members believe the same way, live the same way, vote the same way.

They seem to think it is their mission to force all members to conform to a single identity."

A different way might be described as a church with a clear center but open boundaries. Rather than drawing a hard line that says who is in and who is out, the centered church articulates and honors its center in the Lordship of Jesus Christ. But the walls have many doors. The boundaries are porous. Whoever is moving toward the center is welcome, no matter how far from the center they may be coming from.

Membership growth is, in many ways, a by-product of effective ministry and mission, and not its goal.

I agree with Kirk Hadaway that our goal in congregations is not necessarily to be large churches or even to be great churches, but rather to be real churches. By "real" Hadaway means communities of faith where the sacred is experienced in life-transforming ways, and where the Christian faith becomes incarnate in the life of a congregation and its members.

Growth happens where lives are being changed, and in all likelihood that growth will involve the vitality of engagement in ministry.

Membership growth is a symptom, an important but secondary effect, of a congregation that participates in some measure in the new life of the kingdom of God.

No single factor is more important to congregational vitality than leadership.

Leadership is a partnership of leaders and followers. Good leaders will call forth and enable the leadership gifts of others. Sometimes key leadership in making shifts in congregational culture will not come from designated or elected leaders, or even from a congregation's defacto leaders. Sometimes, when you're doing adaptive work, leadership will come from the outside or below. It may come from a person new to the church; or it may come from someone new on a board or committee. It may come from a teenager or group of teenagers. It may come from a person or persons at the margins of the congregation's power and decision-making structure. Typically, those inside the structure are content with the way things are; but those who have been excluded - or at least not included - may be one's best allies in the work of adaptive and cultural change in a congregation. Designated leaders, such as clergy, need to practice the strategy of protecting those who would lead from below or outside.