Thrive: Spiritual Habits of Transforming Congregations

By Ruth A Fletcher

Are there any solutions to dying churches?

Many historic Protestant churches lost their way when the ground beneath their feet began to shift in the last part of the 20th century. Back then, congregations became confused about why so many Americans had become indifferent toward church-going. They became anxious about their shrinking numbers and aging membership. How would they survive? They could not see the way forward.

But now, a few ordinary congregations are finding their way into the future by cultivating certain spiritual habits which transform them so that they, in turn, can transform the world.

Dr. Ruth A. Fletcher shares her her pastoral experience, judicatory work,consulting ministry, and personal research in which she has discerned some spiritual practices that characterize congregations that are thriving.

This is an excellent read whether you are a pastor, church leader or concerned member of a fellowship groaning in the labor of reaching out to the “disenfranchised others.”

Thrive is the third volume in the Academy of Parish Clergy's Guides to Practical Ministry series.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Energion Publications
• Release date: Jul 15, 2015
• ISBN: 9781631992100

Book preview

Becoming New

The important thing is this:

to be able at any moment to sacrifice what we are

for what we may become.²

– Charles Du Bos

Transforming congregations adapt to changing conditions. As situations arise in their neighborhoods, they respond nimbly, sacrificing what they are in order to become new. One of the best examples of a transforming congregation adapting to its environment comes from the country of El Salvador. It is the story of the church of Fe y Esperanza (Faith and Hope). Congregations in the United States can learn from the ways it took creative action when circumstances called for new ministries.

The year was 1982 and El Salvador was embroiled in a civil war. Death squads invaded villages. They kidnapped children to train as soldiers and burned food supplies and homes. Over 70,000 villagers were murdered. Others fled for their lives. Six hundred of those men and women who escaped found their way to a piece of property in the countryside purchased by the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America at the request of the Lutheran Church in El Salvador. That land served as a sanctuary for those escaping the ravages of war.

It was there that Fe y Esperanza began. Volunteers from other historic Protestant churches helped out wherever they could while the Green Cross tended to wounds. Families cooked food in shared outdoor kitchens as was their custom back home in their own villages. Together they lived in long cinder block buildings that provided the bare minimum shelter. When soldiers came, church leaders hid the refugees in underground bunkers. For seven years, the mission of Fe y Esperanza was to provide a safe haven for those who had been displaced.

But in 1987, things changed. A peace accord was signed. Some villagers went back to the places where they had grown up, hoping to reconnect with members of their families. Others began constructing settlements right around Fe y Esperanza. Now, because the needs of the people had changed, Fe y Esperanza became something different. The leaders built a large hall and classrooms on the property and began offering worship services, Sunday school, youth groups, and seminars about how to prevent violence. They set up workshops where people created traditional Salvadoran art to support themselves. Once Fe y Esperanza had offered safe space for refugees; but its new mission became helping people build for the future.

Now, Fe y Esperanza has altered its mission focus again. It teaches resettled families ways to sustain themselves on small parcels of land through the latest techniques in organic agriculture. Families can produce the food they need right where they live using methods that care for creation.

In each phase of its ministry, Fe y Esperanza engaged in a specific mission determined by its context. It adapted itself to the changing circumstances of its neighbors. It listened to the people it was called to serve in order to discern their most critical needs. It strategized about how to meet those needs and took action. Then when the need for a particular ministry was over, Fe y Esperanza stopped whatever it had been doing in order take up a new, more necessary ministry. Over and over again, the church willingly died in order to be reborn as a more effective instrument of God’s love. It became new in order to be relevant.

Changing Conditions

Even though most historic Protestant congregations in the United States do not serve in a war zone, the circumstances in which the church is called to minister keep changing. Here are some conditions which characterize the present:

GLOBALIZATION reduces both geographic distance and time. Now, it is possible to buy a Coke in both Kansas City and New Delhi, to shop at The Gap in both Seattle and Shanghai. A computer made in Indonesia may be shipped to a British customer and serviced by a technician in India. When revolutions take place in the Middle East, news sources all over the world simultaneously receive reports and photographs from individuals communicating via satellite.

INTERDEPENDENCE creates a web of relationships so every individual action affects the whole. Bank failure in the United States distresses the domestic housing and job markets while affecting the banks in Europe as well. The world now is so interconnected that a small incident can set off a chain of events with far reaching consequences. An economic or political crisis in one nation affects other nations. An ecological disaster in one location holds implications for the entire planet.

DISPERSED POWER results from readily accessible information that comes from many sources. People do not depend on experts to give them the answers. They do not endow the clergy, the Bible, or the church with assumed moral authority. They chat, blog, post, and click to express their own views within a marketplace of ideas and opinions.

RACIAL AND RELIGIOUS DIVERSITY increases as waves of refugees and immigrants change the cultural, political, and economic backdrop in many North American communities. On the street, residents hear others speaking languages they cannot understand and they associate with neighbors who have a variety of skin tones, religious beliefs, values, customs, and viewpoints.

EVOLVING COMPLEXITY characterizes the post-modern world where species continue to evolve and systems continue to interact with each other. The theory of cause and effect has given way to new explanations that consider random actions and reactions. Where once leaders relied on linear step-by-step problem-solving to provide answers, now they recognize rational thought as only one way of knowing.³

NEW ETHICAL QUESTIONS present themselves as science and technology continue to make new discoveries and to invent new tools. Who should have access to innovations? How should such innovations be used? What affect do new advances have on life and death issues? Current generations face alternatives that their grandparents never imagined.

A GROWING GAP BETWEEN RICH AND POOR exists in the United Sates where a tiny one percent of the population owns forty percent of the wealth.⁴ In the global community North Americans devour eighty-five percent of the world’s goods and services even though they make up only one-fifth of the world’s population.⁵

THE END OF NON-RENEWABLE PLANETARY RESOURCES such as drinking water and fossil fuel is now a reality. Deserts encroach, seas rise, and storms grow larger and more destructive as the climate changes. Violence erupts over who will control the diminishing food supply. Some parts of earth are becoming more crowded.

Meanwhile, rather than responding to these cultural shifts, most historic Protestant congregations today continue to hold onto an anachronistic way of life from a bygone era that renders the church irrelevant. Sociologist Nancy Ammerman calls that way of life Golden Rule Christianity.⁶

Golden Rule Christianity

The majority of Golden Rule Christians are Anglo-North Americans who build their lives around the principle of treating others as they would like to be treated. They do not go overboard about their religion. They see religion as only one aspect of life, as a personal set of beliefs that individuals freely choose and do not discuss outside the church building. Golden Rule Christians feel no need to impose their beliefs on others, neither do they find it necessary to change the whole world; rather, they are content to do good within their own circle of family and friends.

Golden Rule Christianity was forged when the GIs came home from fighting in Germany and Japan. Those returning veterans and their families voluntarily joined the church much like they joined other organizations. At church they could build relationships, make business contacts, and create friendships that filled the void of relatives who lived far away. New parents found a wholesome, intergenerational place to raise their children at church where they focused on the power of positive thinking⁷ after the gruesome carnage of war.

Back then, the culture and the church supported each other, blurring the distinctions between the civic and the religious. The name of God was invoked both in Girl Scout meetings and in Bible studies. The American flag graced both the room where the Rotary Club met and the church sanctuary. On Sunday morning, businesses closed because it was assumed that most people would be in worship.

People in the Golden Rule Church did not spend much time defining Christianity. They did not have to. The church’s habits of helpfulness, civilized behavior, niceness, and friendliness were values they held in common with the conventional Anglo-American culture.

The Golden Rule Church was a destination. People went to church. Time spent in church was the measure of faithfulness. Successful congregations were the ones that could afford a big building, that increased their budget each year, and that added more and more programs to serve a growing number of members who joined.

In the Golden Rule Church, it was the job of the pastor to lead the flock. The minister was expected to preach, to teach, to administer the sacraments, and to single-handedly care for church members. One of the main ministerial tasks was visiting. The pastor was to call on church members both in the hospital and in their homes, focusing attention on the sick, the bereaved, and those who could no longer get out of the house to go to church. The rest of the minister’s week was taken up with preparing engaging Bible studies and planning an inspiring sermon.

For Golden Rule Christians, worship was the centerpiece of church life. Each Sunday, the order of the service was pretty much the same. The tone was quiet reverence and those who were up front moved with dignity, formality, and orchestrated precision. The worshiping body was usually fairly homogeneous with regard to class, race, and ethnicity.

The Golden Rule Church provided a social life as well as a religious life for its members. Classes, recreational sports leagues, and fellowship events filled the church calendar. Each week, a small army of volunteers kept those programs running by serving meals, teaching classes, leading youth groups and repairing the church building.

I grew up in the Golden Rule Church. My parents counted on the congregation where they were members to socialize me into middle-class American culture and to teach me to value moral character, good citizenship and polite behavior. In the Golden Rule Church, Bible verses and simplistic aphorisms were used to convey in short, pithy bits of wisdom the essence of the Christian life. Be ye kind one to another (Ephesians 4:32) was emblazoned across the wall of my Sunday School classroom, probably in hopes that it would inspire discipline. Almost every week, I heard the person giving the Call to Offering in worship remind us, God loves a cheerful giver (2 Corinthians 9:7). When a disheveled man smelling of alcohol showed up on the front steps of the church asking for a handout, adults often would cluck their tongues and invoke the quote they thought came from the Bible: God helps those who help themselves.

The Golden Rule Church made sense of the world by ignoring much of its complexity, viewing reality from a frame of reference that relied on dualistic categories of right and wrong, good and bad, insiders and outsiders. Although the insiders might help the outsiders with good works, it was important to maintain the social boundary between the two groups. Insiders were the ones who gave money and received services provided by the church when they were sick and when their families went through passages such as births, coming of age, marriage, and death. Outsiders were the object of the church’s charity.

We live in a time when religion in general and Golden Rule Christianity in particular have lost credibility with the public. People today do not look for an organization to join. They do not seek to add church activities into a schedule that is already too full. They do not want more things to do. They do not find much in positive thinking, polite behavior, simplistic aphorisms, or dualistic thinking that allows them to navigate the complexity of a global culture. They are not interested in acquiring a set of beliefs that assure them a place in heaven. They do not see the church as the authority with a monopoly on the truth. They do not find meaning in orchestrated formality. They do not have to come to church in order to connect with friends.

Adherence to religion in the United States is declining. Thirty years ago, thirty-eight percent of North Americans attended at least one religious service each week; today only twenty-five percent do.⁸ In 1970, thirty percent of the population worshiped occasionally; today only sixteen percent attends church or synagogue every so often.⁹ Although the decline of the church can be attributed, in part, to a decrease in the birthrate and population shifts from farm to city and from north to south, many of those who are no longer affiliated with a church say they left because Golden Rule Christianity became irrelevant.¹⁰

Responding to Cultural Shifts

How does the Golden Rule Church respond to such critique? Some congregations continue to carry on as if they are still living in the 1950s. They do not believe it is the task of the church to be relevant in changing times. They see the church as a refuge, a stable tradition amid the shifting sands of the world outside its doors. They stick to the old prayer book, the old hymnal, and the old rituals that provided comfort and constancy in the past, claiming the church must stand firm in the eternal truths it proclaims rather than allowing ephemeral cultural trends to shape its ministry.

Some try to take shelter from the changes taking place on the cultural landscape. They welcome only those visitors who look like them, who fit into the unspoken norms of church life, and who have the potential to replace the members they are losing. They try to protect themselves from the dangers of pluralism, diversity, and uncertainty. They build large worship centers that create an isolated environment. They listen only to Christian music, Christian radio, and Christian television. Some ultra-large congregations actually resemble theme parks where people can find one homogeneous brand of education, entertainment, literature, and social life, all without leaving the compound.

Some Golden Rule congregations actively work to reverse the changes that have occurred in the culture. They feel disenfranchised and angry about the church losing the power, prestige, and privilege by which it benefited in years gone by. Hoping to return to the way things used to be, they seek to reclaim the authority of the clergy, the certainty of scripture, and the social order of the past in which various segments of society accepted their assigned roles and stayed in their places.

Some admit they do not know how to respond in any meaningful way to the changes taking place in the culture around them. They do not understand why the creativity and joy that used to permeate the church’s life and work walked out the door. They do not know why their children and grandchildren choose to spend Sunday mornings sleeping in, reading the morning newspaper, drinking coffee, going to the lake or the ski slope, attending soccer games, shopping, or doing projects around the home instead of choosing to come to worship. So, they try harder, doing the same things they have always done with the wishful hope they will achieve different results.

Some try to make superficial changes in order to attract new members. They trade their pews for chairs, add espresso bars and information booths, and offer mid-week classes that range from aerobics to parenting skills to money management.

They install screens and projectors in their worship space, add drums and bass guitars to the keyboard that accompanies congregational singing, do away with worship