Money and Mission

In many ways, this summer has revealed this to be the worst of times and the best of times for raising money for the work of Christ’s church. Historically, churches feel the effects of a financial recession about a year after the recession’s beginning. We are certainly finding that to be true. Our Conference receipts both for mission and for clergy benefits have taken a dramatic drop. We could receive the lowest percentage of apportionments this year in the last decade. Anticipating a shortfall of many hundreds of thousands of dollars, we have made some painful cuts in our Conference staff and budget. (Sadly, few of our congregations have had to cut their budgets as much as the Conference has been forced to cut its budget -- a commentary on the trend of some of our churches to keep more money within the confines of their own congregation.)

On the other hand, this was the summer that our churches raised over $400,000 within a couple of months to save Sumatanga. This was an unprecedented outpouring of support for our beloved institution. I have not seen such generosity since our response to Katrina. On top of that Matt Lacey tells me that this summer saw a marked increase in short term mission teams being sent from our churches to places of need all around the world.

I’m sure that there are many lessons to be learned about stewardship in this worst of times, best of times. In order to learn as much as I could, I read J. Cliff Christopher’s Not Your Parents’ Offering Plate: A New Vision for Financial Stewardship (Abingdon Press, 2008). Christopher chides church leaders like me who sound the alarm and plead for more money for ministry:

The church is the only nonprofit I know of that seems to believe that the more you cry that you are sinking, the more people will give to you. The exact opposite is true. No nonprofit I know of would ever send out a donor letter stating that they are running a horrible deficit and they just want the donors to help balance the budget. They know that such a letter actually discourages giving rather than motivates it. A nonprofit board will deal with budget matters in a board meeting but never publicize such to its donor base. The church goes out of its way to do just that.

In the nonprofit world, two institutions continue to outperform most of the others. The Salvation Army continues to get more donations each year than any social service agency or group. Harvard University leads all universities in endowment-giving year after year. Do they send out a message that they are dying on the vine and must have one more contribution to stay afloat? No, they say, “We took your money last year and we did great things with it. If you will give us more, we will do more great things.” And people give and give to them. People want results and these institutions give positive results!

Above all, Christopher stresses that “money follows mission.” He asked a group of pastors why people give:

They started blurting out, "taxes, guilt, involvement…" No one was even close. Finally, a lady who had been sitting quietly in the back raised her hand and said, "Number one is a belief in the mission. Number two is a regard for staff leadership, and number three is fiscal responsibility." She was right. I was stunned. I asked her where she was a pastor and she sheepishly said, "I am not a pastor, but my pastor told me about this seminar and thought I might learn something. I am the Executive Director of Habitat for Humanity."

The one absolutely most important factor in why people give is mission:

People want to make the world a better place to live. They want to believe that they can truly make a difference for the better. There is embedded in us, it seems, a desire to finish out our work on this earth with a sense that we amounted to something. To sum it up, people want to be a part of something that changes lives.

The best way to raise money for your church is simply to DO YOUR JOB! I get frustrated reading newsletters of church after church that tell me how the men's group is going to have a breakfast on Saturday and the women are going to have a bazaar next Thursday and the youth will have a dance next Friday after the ball game. Then, over in the corner, usually separated by a bold line so that it stands out, I see financial statistics, which usually indicate that a certain amount was needed and a lesser amount was received, with a quote underneath, "God loves a cheerful giver."

When I see that I want to say, "What have I got to be cheerful about?" Did you show me one life story in this newsletter about how the church has been making our world better? Is there one life-changing story in the entire document? Do you really just exist so that men can have breakfast, women a bazaar, and youth can dance? What is it exactly that you want me to support?

I have noted, in our churches, that apportionment giving seems to be a barometer of the spiritual health of a congregation and of the congregation’s confidence in their pastor’s vision. Christopher confirms this:

What I have learned after working with over two hundred churches is that the person leading the flock makes a lot of difference in whether today's donors contribute as completely as they can. When they see a pastor who has a great vision and shows excellent skills in leadership, they will invest in that pastor's vision and trust in his or her skills to make the hopes of the donor come true.

How is your church doing in its stewardship fidelity? Log into the Conference Website and check out your church’s current giving patterns under our “Church Stats” page. Let us all see the current financial crisis as a time to reconsider our commitments, to focus on the main mission of the church, and to enable all our people, through their giving, to be part of Christ’s mission.

Will Willimon

This week I’ll be with our Order of Elders meeting at Sumatanga, exploring ways that our elders can be more effective in our leadership of the church

If This Were A REAL Church...

In spite of Jesus’ repeated warning that if we faithfully follow him we were sure to be crucified with him we keep thinking that the Christian faith is a technique for smooth sailing in life (Joel Osteen).

During a recent discussion with a conflicted congregation one of the leaders said, “If this were a truly Christian church, we wouldn’t be having these problems.” The assumption was that the congregation’s crisis was due to a failure to be real Christians.

Sometimes that’s the case. But not always. Sometimes we find ourselves in a painful, conflicted and difficult mess not because we’re not faithful to Jesus but because we are following Jesus!
In Judges 6, amid all sorts of defeats and struggles related to the conquest of Canaan, an angel appears and tells the Israelites that God is with them. Gideon impudently asks the angel, in effect, “If the Lord is really with us, why are we in this mess?” The implication is that, if the Lord were really behind us, we wouldn’t be failing.

But when the Lord promised to give Hebrews land, the Lord did not promise it would be easy. When Jesus promised us salvation he did not promise it would be painless.

Jesus calls us not only to get along with one another but to love one another, to forgive enemies, to love the truth which is Jesus Christ more than we love comfort and security, to both honor the past and be faithful to a living, loving God. That’s tough.

Most human institutions are content to survive, to make it from one year to the next in solvency. The church must make disciples, be light to the world, tell a deceitful, death-denying culture the truth, etc. In other words, Gideon, sometimes we’re in a mess because the Lord is really with us! And we find ourselves in peril because we’re really with the Lord.

Our church faces many challenges – financing ministry in a recession; managing a complex far-flung organization; attracting people who have so many options in their lives, etc.

Let us remind ourselves in worship this Sunday that our greatest challenge is that which it has always been – loving and serving a living, truthful God!

William H. Willimon

This coming weekend Patsy and I will be at the Clergy Spouse Retreat at Sumatanga. I hope to greet many of our clergy spouses at this great gathering.

PRIORITIZING OUR WORK

Knowing where you are going is more important than know how you will get there. - Gil Rendle

North Alabama Conference Priorities:
New Congregations
Natural Church Development
Effective Leadership for the 21st Century
Empowering a New Generation of Christians
Missions

After church consultant Gil Rendle met with the Cabinet in 2006 we devised a set of Priorities to recommend to the Conference and to focus our work. One of the challenges our church has had is to identify and to focus upon “the one thing needful” in our work. There are so many things we could do; what is the most important thing for us to do in this time and place?

These priorities have acted as magnets, drawing us forward, pulling us into a more vital future. The priorities have given us some tangible successes:

• We quickly became a leader in starting New Congregations. We are still closing three times more churches than we open, but we now have a structure for equipping new church pastors and supporting new communities of faith and we have reorganized our efforts so that we are starting a greater variety of new churches.
• A couple of hundred of our established congregations are experiencing renewal and vitality through their participation in Natural Church Development. At last we have a proven, effective way of equipping pastors and congregations to move forward.
• Empower a New Generation. Our Board of Ordained Ministry has reorganized itself to seek and ordain new young clergy. Although this has been a priority that has proved difficult to attain, the average age of our candidates for ministry is the sixth lowest of any Conference.
• Effective Leadership. We have defined clergy effectiveness in terms of ability to lead growth. We now have (in the Conference Dashboard) up to the minute measurementof results and fruit in key areas of growth for every congregation. We have exited some of our least effective clergy and we are attempting to administer our clergy appointment system with greater attention to fruit. Yet (judging from our results in terms of continued declines in giving and in attendance and membership) we have much more to do. Our Lay Leadership needs to take much more responsibility for effective, accountable leadership.
• Missions. Our newest priority is linked to the attainment of all our other priorities. It is also an area that shares much activity in all sorts of churches. And yet our poor Apportionment support and the number of congregations who are not participating in mission show that we’ve got lots to do.

How does your congregation look when measured by these priorities? The good news is that God is giving us new fruit. The challenge is that, we still have pastors and congregations who have yet to experience the joy of being drawn forward by this vision. And yet, by the grace of God, we are experiencing documented forward movement. Thanks be to God.

William H. Willimon

The Church Formed by the Power of the Word

Fleming Rutledge (an Episcopal priest in New York) is one of the brightest, best biblical preachers whom I know. She has written some wonderful books of sermons and has been an astute critic of some of my preaching. In her essay “A New Liberalism of the Word,” Fleming suggests that the core problem with much of today’s preaching is theological in nature. (Perhaps, at the core, this is always the most significant challenge of preaching in any age – to keep our talk in the pulpit as talk about God in Jesus Christ.)

Fleming says that our theological problem as preachers, “can be precisely identified in the words of Jesus to the Sadducees: ‘Is not this why you are wrong, that you know neither the scriptures nor the power of God?’ Jesus’ point against the Sadducees is that the power of God is able to create an entirely new reality that transcends all human categories.” Rutledge notes that the scriptures and the power of God are inextricably related. The scriptures mediate the power of God, a power that has in it the potential to transform and make new. The word is the unique, God-ordained vehicle for God’s transforming power. To know God’s word, to stand and speak God’s word, is to know the miraculous way God uses the word to raise up the church in every age.

Preaching is powerful when it is biblical, when it takes the biblical witness with primary seriousness, when it is first interested, not in the limits of the hearers, or in our felt needs and cares, but in what God, in power, wishes to say to us, how the Holy Spirit, in power, wants to transform us. Nothing can create the church, nothing can raise up a new generation of Christians, we believe, other than the originating, fecund, life-giving power of the word.

Let us meditate on that as we gather in our churches and submit to the Word this Sunday.

Will Willimon

(Fleming’s essay is found in Loving God with Our Minds, ed. Michael Welker and Cynthia Jarvis; Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2004, p. 252.)

P.S. This month Abingdon Press publishes Undone by Easter, my newest book on preaching. It's a study of the way that preaching keeps fresh by working with God's time.

Christians as Consumers or Disciples?

Tony Robinson’s book, What’s Theology Got to Do with It? has some good insights on the theological basis of the church, insights that can help our efforts at congregational renewal in the Wesleyan spirit. This week I continue with some of Tony’s insights that I have found helpful.

Lutheran pastor Michael Foss argues that the central challenge facing many congregations today is to shift their dominant paradigm from being cultures of membership to cultures of discipleship. When Foss describes what he means by a culture of membership, he turns to the model of the now-ubiquitous health club. Writes Foss:

I don’t want to push the analogy too far, but for the sake of illustration, let’s think of the membership model of church as similar to the membership model of the modern health club. One becomes a member of a health club by paying dues (in a church, the monthly or weekly offering). Having paid their dues, the members expect the services of the club to be at their disposal. Exercise equipment, weight room, aerobics classes, an indoor track, swimming pool—all there for them, with a trained staff to see that they benefit by them. Members may bring a guest on occasion, but only those who pay their dues have a right to the use of the facilities and the attention of the staff. There is no need to belabor the point. Many who sit in the pews on Sundays have come to think of church membership in ways analogous to how the fitness crowd views membership in a health club.3

Foss argues that this understanding has misplaced the true purpose of the church and distorted its nature. The point is not membership. The church does not have clients, members, or consumers of goods and services. The point is discipleship. The church exists to form and sustain individuals and a people who are followers of Jesus Christ, who are his disciples. Rather than buying into a consumer model of the church, where the customer is king and the church simply meets customers’ needs, the church does more; the church redefines our true needs. The church transforms people according to the life and pattern revealed by God in Jesus Christ. It unites them with others who are committed to this way of life.

Nevertheless, perhaps because we have grown so accustomed to thinking of ourselves as consumers of various goods and services, the membership ethos is hard to break. I have noticed, for example, that in many congregations, when a new group gathers for the first time, the default option for introductions tends to take the form of name and number of years of membership. Length of tenure provides some useful information, and there is much to be said for loyalty and commitment, but something else often seems to be going on during such a ritual. A pecking order is established based on length of membership and an insider-outsider dynamic is suggested.
Indeed, as Foss notes, “The membership model identifies who is in and who is out. No wonder those outside the church consistently say that church people are more judgmental than others.”4

One Sunday when I was free from my pastoral responsibilities, I went to visit this small church. I parked on a nearby side street and walked to the front door, which was closed. I pulled on the door and found it would not open. It was locked. The Sunday service was to begin. I knocked on the door. After a while, an older member of the congregation pushed the door open and invited me in, saying, “We usually don’t open this door; everyone knows to come in through the back door.” Well, this arrangement was very cozy and friendly if you were part of the “everyone” who made up the aging and shrinking cohort of the congregation. If not, you hardly felt welcomed. The message was clear: members only. However, and here’s the crucial point, the congregation’s members were oblivious to the message of the locked front door as well as to the implications of their confidence that “everyone knows to come in through the back door.”

Congregations and clergy seemingly have often misconstrued or misunderstood the closing scene in the Gospel of Matthew where Jesus meets the disciples on a mountain and charges them with the Great Commission: “Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything that I have commanded you” (Matt. 28:19-20). Somehow it seems we have heard Jesus say, “Go therefore, and make members . . .”

While at times in the past, clergy or other church leaders may have had so much power and authority that they have been indifferent to the needs, desires, and opinions of church members, I am not advocating this stance as the antidote to religious consumerism. Yet perhaps we have swung in the other direction. Yes, congregational leaders must take seriously the experience of congregational members, but the church is not driven simply by people’s needs and wants. It is driven by God’s dream and purposes for creation.

Will Willimon

Church Renewal as Theological Recovery

Tony Robinson has long been a good friend of mine. He published a book awhile back that gives a wonderfully theological take on church renewal. (What’s Theology Got to Do with It? Convictions, Vitality, and the Church, Anthony B. Robinson, Alban Institute, 2006).

Over the next couple of weeks I’m going to share some of Tony’s insights on the theological purposes of the church.

It concerns me that the literature on what it takes to create healthy congregations includes a great deal on systems theory, leadership studies, conflict management… but little that is explicitly theological or biblical in nature. By and large, it seems that congregational health is not considered to have much to do with either the core convictions of the Christian faith, theology, or the Bible. In particular, little attention is paid to ecclesiology—the theology of church. In fact, Christian conviction about the church often seems to be missing entirely. This lack, I believe, should be central to our efforts as we work to build healthy congregations for the future.

Theologian Ellen Charry, who teaches at Princeton Theological Seminary, puts the matter directly: “I am increasingly realizing that a number of our ministerial students have no ecclesiology to speak of. For them the church is a voluntary not-for-profit organization run like a local franchise.”1 This is perhaps understandable given the pervasiveness of the consumer economy, including churches that compete in the free-market of spirituality in North America. … If our efforts to be and build congregations do not rest on a core of Christian conviction about what the church is, we tend to go to default options from the culture. The church becomes an entertainment experience with audience ratings, a purveyor of spiritual goods and services, a religious club for people who share the same worldview and experiences, a coalition united around a set of causes or sociopolitical agendas, or simply a gathering place where people ha ve their individual spiritual experiences. The biblical sense of the church as a people or body is lost.

Consider, for example, the “congregation” (in this case, I use the word advisedly) that gathers around the compelling personal presence of one preacher and leader. A number of such charismatic leaders operate in North America. Some are televised. Many are not. Some do wonderful things. Some use and abuse their members or participants. In all cases, though, the attention of the faithful is centered on the dynamic leader. When something happens to that person—a mental breakdown or accusations of sexual harassment or financial malfeasance, for instance—the church usually goes from boom to bust in short order. When the charismatic founder dies, “the ministry,” as it is often referred to, simply dies also. The church is the ministry of that one person. Usually, in such instances, there has been no real church. There has been a charismatic leader and his or her followers. This is but one of the common disto rtions of church today. Lacking core Christian conviction about this thing called church, distortions and pseudo churches flourish, although only for a time. Established and more traditional congregations that lack a sufficient ecclesiology often lose their sense of identity and purpose.

The very word ecclesiology provides clues to its importance in understanding what it truly means to be a church or congregation. It comes from the Greek word ekklesia, which means “a people called” and “the visible assembly.” Church is not the building in which people meet, nor is it the leader. It is people gathered into community in response to God’s call in Jesus Christ. Church happens, as Jesus said, where “two or three are gathered in my name” (Matt. 18:20).

Churches, like other organizations, develop their structures, systems, and rituals for governance and continuity. These can be quite important, for they sustain common life and work, but such structures are in the end provisional. In Paul’s words, they are “clay jars,” not to be confused with the “extraordinary power [that] belongs to God” (2 Cor. 4:7). The church belongs to and owes its existence to God and not to us. God has created and claimed the church for God’s purposes.

The owner is God. Thus, the church is not simply a consumer-driven entity that exists to meet the religious needs of those who come to it. Churches may meet people’s needs, but they must do more than that. At least potentially, they transform people by drawing them into a larger purpose and identity. “Once you were not a people,” writes Peter, “but now you are God’s people” (1 Pet. 2:10).

As the exodus event transformed the Hebrew people into a people called and set apart by God, so the new exodus, the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus Christ, calls and sets apart a people of God, the church. This people owe its being to God. The people of God are called to be faithful to this creating, redeeming, and sustaining God. And, as Israel itself was blessed to be a blessing to all the peoples of the earth, so the people of God—the church—also are called by God to be a blessing to others. God calls the church not to receive special favors or protection but to carry out a unique vocation: service to God and to the world God loves.

Will Willimon

Lessons Learned in Saving Sumatanga

The past three months have been remarkable. Beginning with Director Bob Murray’s emotional appeal, we have saved a beloved ministry that showed every sign of dying. Our churches have raised an unprecedented half a million dollars in gifts in three months. Sumatanga is being reorganized. This beloved camp now has a future. This is a very different result for us. Here’s what I have learned:

• People respond to the truth. A frequent response to Bob’s speech at Conference was, “I had no idea Sumatanga was in so much trouble.” For too long the Trustees tried to struggle alone with Sumatanga’s problems. Transparency and facing hard realities are essential, especially in the church. Our people show that they are eager to respond when they know the truth.

• Preserving the past is no substitute for adaptation to the future. We cannot save the old Sumatanga. Change or die. We can only see the present crisis as an invitation from a living God to serve the present age, to pray for creativity and fresh courage. Rather than be bound by the many management mistakes and poor decisions of the past, Bob Murray spoke to us all in ordering us (in his speech to Annual Conference), “Get over it!”

• People are the key. The arrival of Bob Murray, the innovations produced by Bart Styes, the new team they have assembled, the day that Mike Byrne became chair of the Board made everything possible. The best way to change an organization is to change the leadership. Furthermore, Sumatanga knows that their future is not in getting more money from the churches but in getting more Christians at the camp. As Bob says, Sumatanga is in the hospitality ministry. If Sumatanga keeps focused on servant ministry to people, its future is assured. It’s such a temptation for the church to forget that we serve God and our neighbor; we don’t preserve buildings and institutions.

Thank you for giving Sumatanga a future. Over the years, God has used Sumatanga for some extraordinary acts of vocation, revelation, and renewal. By God’s grace, and your generosity, Sumatanga’s ministry continues.

William H. Willimon

Later this month some of us will gather at Sumatanga to celebrate a wonderful grant that we have obtained this summer from an anonymous Foundation. The good news continues!