At Una Familia, mothers and volunteers work with children in a summer tutoring program on Virginia's Eastern Shore. Leaders of Una Familia took part in the Ministry Accelerator workshops to help them expand the size and impact of their ministry. Photos by David B. Hollingsworth
Faith & Leadership
INNOVATION, MONEY, SUSTAINABILITY
Ministry Accelerator helps organizations grow
INNOVATION, MONEY, SUSTAINABILITY
Ministry Accelerator helps organizations grow
Ministry Accelerator helps organizations grow
VIRGINIA METHODISTS ARE HELPING EXISTING MINISTRIES EXPAND THROUGH TWO-DAY PROGRAM
Virginia United Methodists are helping established ministries expand by teaching them new skills in a two-day “accelerator” program.Once upon a time, in a poor community along Virginia's Eastern Shore, a teenager working on a high school service project gathered five young children from her Spanish-speaking neighborhood for afternoon tutoring sessions at a nearby United Methodist church.
As the students' academic skills improved, word of the program spread among Accomack County's Latino parents, many of them immigrants who had struggled to help their children with English, math and other school assignments. Within a few years, the once-tiny service project had blossomed into a full-blown regional ministry.
The ministry, called Una Familia, offers help to 130 elementary-through-high school-age students at five area churches, a small scholarship program, and advocacy and translation services for families.
Its leadership now wants to help even more people by addressing the need for affordable housing and by expanding into a neighboring county.
With these ambitious goals in mind, several of Una Familia's team members attended a pilot program called Ministry Accelerator in January 2017.
Tutor Walta Pruitt helps a girl with vision issues count using her fingers.
Helping ministries evolve was exactly what the Rev. Chris Bennett had in mind when he proposed the Ministry Accelerator concept in 2015.
Like Brown, Bennett serves on the grants subcommittee. He said he noticed that grant recipients often returned year after year, not necessarily for funds to increase the scope of their work but for more money “to keep doing what they’re doing.”
The grant recipients were doing good work in their communities, he said, such as providing meals, educating children, repairing homes and offering financial counseling.
But, he wondered, what if they had the tools to take their ministries to the next level?
“What would it look like if instead of giving them this money, we built capacity?” Bennett said.
Children at Una Familia start the day by retrieving their individual work folders from a plastic bin. Through a seminary friend, Bennett met Todd Nuckols, the director and founder of Lighthouse Labs, a Richmond nonprofit that’s one of the country’s top-ranked startup accelerators.
Each year, Lighthouse Labs hosts a 13-week business boot camp in which business founders live in Richmond, sharing work space, meeting with mentors, receiving guidance on how to improve their products or services, networking with investors, and ultimately, transforming an idea into a high-growth venture.
“It was kind of like drinking from a fire hose the first time I talked to him,” Bennett recalled of Nuckols. “I love that stuff, the whole idea of innovation and ideas and capacity building. I thought there’s got to be some application in ministry. There’s got to be some way to apply this in the church world.”
Nuckols, a lifelong Southern Baptist, agreed with Bennett. The same commitment to service and excellence, the same emphasis on relationship building, and the same “ruthless focus” required to accelerate a startup operation could benefit nonprofits, ministries and other “world-changing organizations,” he said.
In addition to capital, Nuckols said, the accelerator concept is based on three other c’s: connections with mentors and entrepreneurial peers; capability to market an idea and think big; and a community of supporters who can assist when needed.
Bringing like-minded ministries together for an accelerator-like experience would teach them to leverage all those pieces in the same way businesses do, he said.
“I’ve always had a passion for ‘How do you engage the broader congregation and laity?’ Acceleration allows for that. They can be mentors; they can provide connections; they can provide capability to these organizations,” Nuckols said.
“One of the biggest things about acceleration that translates really well,” he said, “is founders getting to know each other. When you bring people together, you create an opportunity to use each other’s experience to get better over time. It spans denominations and the secular and sacred worlds.”
More than just theories
Buoyed by Nuckols’ enthusiasm, Bennett first approached the grants subcommittee, then followed up with the Common Table, which provides nearly 70 percent of the money for the grants.
Brown, of the Common Table, said the Ministry Accelerator proposal was easy to support. It fit in with the conference’s strategy, which emphasized creating new faith communities, renewing existing ones, investing in leadership and “shifting from a culture of maintenance to one of mission and fruitfulness.”
“Rather than just giving money, we also wanted to help offer leadership. It fits right in with what we’ve been focused on for the last 10 years,” Brown said.
Bennett and Nuckols condensed the three-month Lighthouse Labs curriculum into a two-day program geared toward ministries. They also enlisted the help of John Sarvay, the founder of Floricane, a Richmond-based strategic planning consultancy, who also volunteered his time for the effort.
While the team wanted to share some broader concepts -- best practices for recruiting, training and retaining volunteers, for instance -- the Ministry Accelerator, just like a startup accelerator, would provide advice tailored specifically to each ministry that participated.
“We ask the founders to focus on one objective, one metric or measure, one key idea that will push their operation to the next level,” said Nuckols, noting that ministry is no different. “What is one transformational number or metric or thing that you need to do in the next, say, three months that will make the most impact on advancing your ministry?”
Working alongside mentors from the startup community, each ministry is encouraged to think critically about how it measures success.
What is the one thing you can measure that would make a significant difference in your impact?
For instance, Bennett said, a soup kitchen may count the number of meals it serves each week. But what if the soup kitchen were to focus instead on a more transformational measure, like how many people no longer come to the soup kitchen because they can help themselves?
“Transformation is harder and slower work and takes more thought and intentionality,” Bennett said. “We have to feed people in the short term so we can help them in the longer term. But we’re playing the long game.”
Once that “metric” is established, each ministry is asked to identify the action that must be taken -- the “lever” that must be pulled, in accelerator-speak -- to improve that metric.
So in the case of the soup kitchen, what lever must be pulled to increase the number of people who no longer rely on it? Perhaps it’s building relationships with those clients to identify the underlying issues that drew them to the soup kitchen, and then focusing the ministry on addressing those needs.
Next, exactly what steps is the ministry going to take over a designated time period to pull that lever?
“We want people to walk away not with just great theories, great ideas,” Bennett said. “They come in not knowing what to focus on and leave with a 30-, 60-, 90-day action plan they can execute.”
‘We realized we were missing opportunities’
Neighbors Helping Neighbors, a construction ministry based in Lunenburg County, about 35 miles from the North Carolina border, had been repairing homes in the community for about seven years when some of its leadership team members attended the first Ministry Accelerator in 2016.
The ministry, a community effort organized largely by Kenbridge United Methodist Church, raised money year-round for its signature project -- a weekend during which dozens of volunteers painted homes, built handicap-accessible ramps, cleaned yards, and repaired floors and siding for low-income residents.
During the rest of the year, if folks called the ministry with home repair needs, volunteers would essentially add them to the list of potential project sites for the big weekend.
At the accelerator, team leaders quickly realized that if they addressed small repairs for people year-round, they could help more residents and save the bigger, more complex projects for the traditional weekend, said Kenbridge UMC’s pastor, the Rev. Tim Beck.
“We’re doing good stuff, but we’re only doing it two days out of the year, when you get down to it,” he said. “When we stepped back and looked at it, we realized we were missing some opportunities.”
As you accomplish tactical objectives -- feeding people, fixing homes, tutoring children -- are you pausing to reflect on long-term operational strategies?
After the accelerator program, Beck tapped a volunteer to head up a small-projects team, which fields requests to fix falling gutters, crumbling porch railings and the like as they arise. It also uses its contacts in the community to find contractors who are licensed to do work that’s too dangerous for their volunteers, he said.
The ministry learned to avoid duplicating services. So, for example, it still collects winter coats and goods for the food pantry but hands those items over to other established ministries to distribute, Beck said.
“One thing the accelerator program helped us realize was there’s already a network of organizations that do things that we don’t really need to do,” he said. At the same time, they diversified when they saw gaps they could fill, such as by cutting firewood all year long to share with needy residents in the winter.
“It was a very unique aspect of the program that they were able to take us and tailor something unique to us. It wasn’t just a cookie cutter-type thing,” Beck said. “That was probably one of the most effective things about this.”
Moving forward
Participation in the Ministry Accelerator program has been voluntary for grant recipients since the pilot began in January 2016, but it is strongly encouraged, said Brown, of the Common Table. In 2016 and 2017, about 25 percent of grantees attended.
This year, the program included a follow-up meeting in May to check in with the ministries, providing some accountability and encouragement after the initial event, something they plan to continue.
After 14 years as a full-time pastor, Bennett went to work this summer for The Spark Mill, a Richmond-based strategic planning consulting firm whose clients include nonprofits and faith groups. He remains an ordained elder within the United Methodist Church and will serve as chairman of the Common Table’s grants subcommittee during this third year of the Ministry Accelerator.
He hopes that one day it will attract participants from other United Methodist Church grant programs, and even ministries from outside denominations.
If the Ministry Accelerator is successful, he said, organizations like Una Familia and Neighbors Helping Neighbors will be self-sustaining, adept at transforming their communities and willing to mentor and inspire newer ministries down the road.
“In the church world, we get so insulated, so inward-focused, we just assume that everyone thinks and acts like us. The rest of the world around us is moving forward, and we’re still in the 1950s,” he said.
“Let’s look at what’s going on around us. Organizational principles work whether it’s in a church, a nonprofit or a business. Excellent principles are still excellent principles.”
Accelerating your ministry
Do you want to expand your ministry’s impact? Business and ministry experts offer some questions to reflect upon. Todd Nuckols, the director and founder of Lighthouse Labs, a Richmond nonprofit that’s one of the country’s top-ranked startup accelerators, and the Rev. Chris Bennett, the spark behind the United Methodist Church’s Ministry Accelerator in Virginia, suggest that leaders who want to expand the impact of their ministries ask themselves a few questions:
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Leading Congregations and Nonprofits in a Connected World shares emerging practices for leading and organizing congregations and nonprofits in our increasingly networked lives. Drawing on studies of congregations across denominations, and nonprofits with historic ties to faith communities, Hayim Herring and Terri Elton share practical, research-based guidance for how these organizations can more deeply engage with their communities and advance their impact in a socially connected world.
Learn more and order the book »
VIRGINIA METHODISTS ARE HELPING EXISTING MINISTRIES EXPAND THROUGH TWO-DAY PROGRAM
Virginia United Methodists are helping established ministries expand by teaching them new skills in a two-day “accelerator” program.Once upon a time, in a poor community along Virginia's Eastern Shore, a teenager working on a high school service project gathered five young children from her Spanish-speaking neighborhood for afternoon tutoring sessions at a nearby United Methodist church.
As the students' academic skills improved, word of the program spread among Accomack County's Latino parents, many of them immigrants who had struggled to help their children with English, math and other school assignments. Within a few years, the once-tiny service project had blossomed into a full-blown regional ministry.
The ministry, called Una Familia, offers help to 130 elementary-through-high school-age students at five area churches, a small scholarship program, and advocacy and translation services for families.
Its leadership now wants to help even more people by addressing the need for affordable housing and by expanding into a neighboring county.
With these ambitious goals in mind, several of Una Familia's team members attended a pilot program called Ministry Accelerator in January 2017.
Tutor Walta Pruitt helps a girl with vision issues count using her fingers.
Sponsored by the Virginia Conference of the United Methodist Church, the Ministry Accelerator is a model, borrowed from the business world, that was designed to introduce ministries to the principles and skills that help spur growth.
Accelerators are similar to incubators, but they focus on growing established organizations rather than launching new ones.
During the two-day Ministry Accelerator event, leaders of Una Familia learned the art of sharing their ministry, as well as other skills needed to recruit volunteers to the effort, inspire community support and, hopefully, entice financial investors.
“We really were able to focus a little bit more on telling our story, why we exist, and really exploring who we are,” said the Rev. Veronica Barrell, who chairs the board of Una Familia, a program of the Eastern Shore District of the United Methodist Church.
Are you able to articulate your “why” -- your story -- to others?
“It was fun but challenging,” she said. “They made us work, but we got the tools.”
Since then, Una Familia has redesigned its logo and created a brochure to help spread the word, Barrell said. The ministry also has begun taking steps to establish itself as a legal nonprofit separate from the church.
That way, she said, as Una Familia begins the expensive process of addressing the affordable housing need, it can tap into funding from organizations and large companies, including several major employers along the Eastern Shore, that can’t or won’t donate to a religious organization.
“The mentality in church is so different from in business,” she said, “yet we exist in the world, and we have to compete in that sense.”
The last two hours at the community center is for crafts and games. This little girl holds up what she made during craft time.Taking ministries to the next level
Like other participants, Una Familia was invited because it received a grant funded by the Virginia Conference of the UMC.
The voluntary Ministry Accelerator is a new addition to a long-standing grants program. The grants, roughly $100,000 annually, support new outreach ministries for up to three years and provide some ongoing funding for programs that can’t yet stand on their own.
“Ultimately, a big success would be that they didn’t need to come to us anymore; they would become self-sufficient,” said the Rev. Marc Brown, the board chair of the Common Table for Church Vitality, the Virginia Conference’s primary administrative body.
“The other ultimate goal would be that they could teach other nonprofits and church ministries how to do their work,” he said.
Accelerators are similar to incubators, but they focus on growing established organizations rather than launching new ones.
During the two-day Ministry Accelerator event, leaders of Una Familia learned the art of sharing their ministry, as well as other skills needed to recruit volunteers to the effort, inspire community support and, hopefully, entice financial investors.
“We really were able to focus a little bit more on telling our story, why we exist, and really exploring who we are,” said the Rev. Veronica Barrell, who chairs the board of Una Familia, a program of the Eastern Shore District of the United Methodist Church.
Are you able to articulate your “why” -- your story -- to others?
“It was fun but challenging,” she said. “They made us work, but we got the tools.”
Since then, Una Familia has redesigned its logo and created a brochure to help spread the word, Barrell said. The ministry also has begun taking steps to establish itself as a legal nonprofit separate from the church.
That way, she said, as Una Familia begins the expensive process of addressing the affordable housing need, it can tap into funding from organizations and large companies, including several major employers along the Eastern Shore, that can’t or won’t donate to a religious organization.
“The mentality in church is so different from in business,” she said, “yet we exist in the world, and we have to compete in that sense.”
The last two hours at the community center is for crafts and games. This little girl holds up what she made during craft time.Taking ministries to the next level
Like other participants, Una Familia was invited because it received a grant funded by the Virginia Conference of the UMC.
The voluntary Ministry Accelerator is a new addition to a long-standing grants program. The grants, roughly $100,000 annually, support new outreach ministries for up to three years and provide some ongoing funding for programs that can’t yet stand on their own.
“Ultimately, a big success would be that they didn’t need to come to us anymore; they would become self-sufficient,” said the Rev. Marc Brown, the board chair of the Common Table for Church Vitality, the Virginia Conference’s primary administrative body.
“The other ultimate goal would be that they could teach other nonprofits and church ministries how to do their work,” he said.
Helping ministries evolve was exactly what the Rev. Chris Bennett had in mind when he proposed the Ministry Accelerator concept in 2015.Like Brown, Bennett serves on the grants subcommittee. He said he noticed that grant recipients often returned year after year, not necessarily for funds to increase the scope of their work but for more money “to keep doing what they’re doing.”
The grant recipients were doing good work in their communities, he said, such as providing meals, educating children, repairing homes and offering financial counseling.
But, he wondered, what if they had the tools to take their ministries to the next level?
“What would it look like if instead of giving them this money, we built capacity?” Bennett said.
Children at Una Familia start the day by retrieving their individual work folders from a plastic bin. Through a seminary friend, Bennett met Todd Nuckols, the director and founder of Lighthouse Labs, a Richmond nonprofit that’s one of the country’s top-ranked startup accelerators.
Each year, Lighthouse Labs hosts a 13-week business boot camp in which business founders live in Richmond, sharing work space, meeting with mentors, receiving guidance on how to improve their products or services, networking with investors, and ultimately, transforming an idea into a high-growth venture.
“It was kind of like drinking from a fire hose the first time I talked to him,” Bennett recalled of Nuckols. “I love that stuff, the whole idea of innovation and ideas and capacity building. I thought there’s got to be some application in ministry. There’s got to be some way to apply this in the church world.”
Nuckols, a lifelong Southern Baptist, agreed with Bennett. The same commitment to service and excellence, the same emphasis on relationship building, and the same “ruthless focus” required to accelerate a startup operation could benefit nonprofits, ministries and other “world-changing organizations,” he said.
In addition to capital, Nuckols said, the accelerator concept is based on three other c’s: connections with mentors and entrepreneurial peers; capability to market an idea and think big; and a community of supporters who can assist when needed.
Bringing like-minded ministries together for an accelerator-like experience would teach them to leverage all those pieces in the same way businesses do, he said.
“I’ve always had a passion for ‘How do you engage the broader congregation and laity?’ Acceleration allows for that. They can be mentors; they can provide connections; they can provide capability to these organizations,” Nuckols said.
“One of the biggest things about acceleration that translates really well,” he said, “is founders getting to know each other. When you bring people together, you create an opportunity to use each other’s experience to get better over time. It spans denominations and the secular and sacred worlds.”
More than just theories
Buoyed by Nuckols’ enthusiasm, Bennett first approached the grants subcommittee, then followed up with the Common Table, which provides nearly 70 percent of the money for the grants.
Brown, of the Common Table, said the Ministry Accelerator proposal was easy to support. It fit in with the conference’s strategy, which emphasized creating new faith communities, renewing existing ones, investing in leadership and “shifting from a culture of maintenance to one of mission and fruitfulness.”
“Rather than just giving money, we also wanted to help offer leadership. It fits right in with what we’ve been focused on for the last 10 years,” Brown said.
Bennett and Nuckols condensed the three-month Lighthouse Labs curriculum into a two-day program geared toward ministries. They also enlisted the help of John Sarvay, the founder of Floricane, a Richmond-based strategic planning consultancy, who also volunteered his time for the effort.
While the team wanted to share some broader concepts -- best practices for recruiting, training and retaining volunteers, for instance -- the Ministry Accelerator, just like a startup accelerator, would provide advice tailored specifically to each ministry that participated.
“We ask the founders to focus on one objective, one metric or measure, one key idea that will push their operation to the next level,” said Nuckols, noting that ministry is no different. “What is one transformational number or metric or thing that you need to do in the next, say, three months that will make the most impact on advancing your ministry?”
Working alongside mentors from the startup community, each ministry is encouraged to think critically about how it measures success.
What is the one thing you can measure that would make a significant difference in your impact?
For instance, Bennett said, a soup kitchen may count the number of meals it serves each week. But what if the soup kitchen were to focus instead on a more transformational measure, like how many people no longer come to the soup kitchen because they can help themselves?
“Transformation is harder and slower work and takes more thought and intentionality,” Bennett said. “We have to feed people in the short term so we can help them in the longer term. But we’re playing the long game.”
Once that “metric” is established, each ministry is asked to identify the action that must be taken -- the “lever” that must be pulled, in accelerator-speak -- to improve that metric.
So in the case of the soup kitchen, what lever must be pulled to increase the number of people who no longer rely on it? Perhaps it’s building relationships with those clients to identify the underlying issues that drew them to the soup kitchen, and then focusing the ministry on addressing those needs.
Next, exactly what steps is the ministry going to take over a designated time period to pull that lever?
“We want people to walk away not with just great theories, great ideas,” Bennett said. “They come in not knowing what to focus on and leave with a 30-, 60-, 90-day action plan they can execute.”
‘We realized we were missing opportunities’
Neighbors Helping Neighbors, a construction ministry based in Lunenburg County, about 35 miles from the North Carolina border, had been repairing homes in the community for about seven years when some of its leadership team members attended the first Ministry Accelerator in 2016.
The ministry, a community effort organized largely by Kenbridge United Methodist Church, raised money year-round for its signature project -- a weekend during which dozens of volunteers painted homes, built handicap-accessible ramps, cleaned yards, and repaired floors and siding for low-income residents.
During the rest of the year, if folks called the ministry with home repair needs, volunteers would essentially add them to the list of potential project sites for the big weekend.
At the accelerator, team leaders quickly realized that if they addressed small repairs for people year-round, they could help more residents and save the bigger, more complex projects for the traditional weekend, said Kenbridge UMC’s pastor, the Rev. Tim Beck.
“We’re doing good stuff, but we’re only doing it two days out of the year, when you get down to it,” he said. “When we stepped back and looked at it, we realized we were missing some opportunities.”
As you accomplish tactical objectives -- feeding people, fixing homes, tutoring children -- are you pausing to reflect on long-term operational strategies?
After the accelerator program, Beck tapped a volunteer to head up a small-projects team, which fields requests to fix falling gutters, crumbling porch railings and the like as they arise. It also uses its contacts in the community to find contractors who are licensed to do work that’s too dangerous for their volunteers, he said.
The ministry learned to avoid duplicating services. So, for example, it still collects winter coats and goods for the food pantry but hands those items over to other established ministries to distribute, Beck said.
“One thing the accelerator program helped us realize was there’s already a network of organizations that do things that we don’t really need to do,” he said. At the same time, they diversified when they saw gaps they could fill, such as by cutting firewood all year long to share with needy residents in the winter.
“It was a very unique aspect of the program that they were able to take us and tailor something unique to us. It wasn’t just a cookie cutter-type thing,” Beck said. “That was probably one of the most effective things about this.”
Moving forward
Participation in the Ministry Accelerator program has been voluntary for grant recipients since the pilot began in January 2016, but it is strongly encouraged, said Brown, of the Common Table. In 2016 and 2017, about 25 percent of grantees attended.
This year, the program included a follow-up meeting in May to check in with the ministries, providing some accountability and encouragement after the initial event, something they plan to continue.
After 14 years as a full-time pastor, Bennett went to work this summer for The Spark Mill, a Richmond-based strategic planning consulting firm whose clients include nonprofits and faith groups. He remains an ordained elder within the United Methodist Church and will serve as chairman of the Common Table’s grants subcommittee during this third year of the Ministry Accelerator.
He hopes that one day it will attract participants from other United Methodist Church grant programs, and even ministries from outside denominations.
If the Ministry Accelerator is successful, he said, organizations like Una Familia and Neighbors Helping Neighbors will be self-sustaining, adept at transforming their communities and willing to mentor and inspire newer ministries down the road.
“In the church world, we get so insulated, so inward-focused, we just assume that everyone thinks and acts like us. The rest of the world around us is moving forward, and we’re still in the 1950s,” he said.
“Let’s look at what’s going on around us. Organizational principles work whether it’s in a church, a nonprofit or a business. Excellent principles are still excellent principles.”
Accelerating your ministry
Do you want to expand your ministry’s impact? Business and ministry experts offer some questions to reflect upon. Todd Nuckols, the director and founder of Lighthouse Labs, a Richmond nonprofit that’s one of the country’s top-ranked startup accelerators, and the Rev. Chris Bennett, the spark behind the United Methodist Church’s Ministry Accelerator in Virginia, suggest that leaders who want to expand the impact of their ministries ask themselves a few questions:
- What is the one thing you can measure that would make a significant difference in your impact? Maybe it’s increasing your volunteers, your funding or your partners within the community. Find that metric and focus on it.
- What capability do you lack that you think you need?
- Who in the community can you connect with? “How do you get beyond your typical thinking, beyond the assets you have, to build something new with the assets around you?” said Nuckols, noting that people are often eager to lend expertise to a good cause. “It’s easy to marshal people to come alongside other passionate leaders. That’s an easy ask.”
- Are you clear about why your organization exists? Are you staying focused on that “why”?
- Are you able to articulate your “why” -- your story -- to others?
- As you accomplish tactical objectives -- feeding people, fixing homes, tutoring children -- are you pausing to reflect on long-term operational strategies?
- Can you move from impactful to transformational? What would that look like? Sometimes, Bennett said, that means shifting your focus -- for instance, from increasing the number of people served by a food pantry in the short term to decreasing the number of people who need that food pantry in the long term. Whatever your measure of success, that’s the thing you strive for. So, he said, make that measure meaningful.
Faith & Leadership
INNOVATION, CHRISTIAN LEADERSHIP
Victoria Atkinson White: Leaders need not choose between improving and creating
Bigstock/Jonathan Weiss
Leaders need not choose between improving and creating
The church needs both those who are loyal to existing religious institutions and those eager to usher in what the church will look like next, writes the managing director of grants at Leadership Education at Duke Divinity.
My small town has a Lowe’s and a Home Depot. In practice, I don’t prefer one or the other, typically choosing the store that is closer when I remember I need something for a home improvement project.
But Lowe’s has gotten me thinking lately about more than just DIY projects. Its two recent advertising slogans, while for the very same store, feel at odds with each other.
Since 2011, Lowe’s advertising has told us that we should “never stop improving.”
From 2006 to 2011, it said, “Let’s build something together.”
I was reminded of this as I read “Faithful,”(link is external) a report on the future of religious institutions from Harvard Divinity School Ministry Innovation fellows Casper ter Kuile and Angie Thurston and several colleagues.
In the report, they explore the natural tension between “loyalty to what has been and a desire to be part of what is next.” In doing so, they reflect on the need for religious institutions to embrace “two concurrent and vital jobs that need doing: improving and creating.”
They draw an important distinction here. Improving is learning new ways to do what we already know how to do; creating is learning new ways to do what we don’t yet know how to do or may be prevented from doing by polity and practice.
Some churches lean toward a “never stop improving” mentality. They are established and know how to “do” church. They have been successful in the past, as evidenced by their physical plants and generations of tradition. This stability and legacy can be an asset, both reputational and social, yet at the same time, as “Faithful” notes, the associated bureaucratic structures can stand in the way of creating new ministries in the face of the unknown.
Improving, while it might sound like the lesser of two choices, is an important job. If a church already knows how to do something well (for example, children’s ministry), then it is only good stewardship not to abandon what works but rather to “never stop improving” it (for example, with technology, safety and training).
Church starts and new faith communities operate from more of a “let’s build something together” posture. They see needs that are not being met and create new gatherings to address them. These initiatives are often experimental -- coffeehouses, yoga studios, after-school programs, Christian social entrepreneurial ventures -- which means many of them fail.
Nonetheless, they are learning new ways to do what we don’t yet know how to do, new ways to minister, that established churches may find more challenging.
Without a doubt, improving feels safer. It is doing what we already know how to do, only better. It involves little risk and predictable reward. Creating feels more exciting. It opens up new possibilities for faithful community, but it entails more risk and a greater tolerance for failure.
Many leaders, much like churchgoers, are more attracted to and better at one or the other.
The good news, as the authors of “Faithful” write, is that the work of improving and creating need not be an exclusive choice. Both jobs must be done. There is a place at the table for both those who are loyal to existing religious institutions and those who are eager to usher in what the church will look like next.
In a world of finite resources, “improvers” and “creators” often see themselves as rivals. But as the authors of “Faithful” affirm, in order to flourish in faithful community, each must appreciate the church’s authentic need for the other.
“New expressions of community need support, stability, and access to the wisdom of our traditions,” they write. “Established religious institutions need the joy of nurturing new expressions of our own highest values.”
While I might have a philosophical preference for “improving” or “creating” in terms of advertising, both of the Lowe’s slogans promote fundamentally the same goal and seek to equip their customers with the same tools (pun intended).
Isn’t the same true for both established churches steeped in tradition and stability and new Christian communities taking great risks to address communal needs with agility and innovation?
The goal is the same -- to bear witness to the reign of God on earth -- whether by improving upon that which is old or creating that which is new. Why not take the best of both and do it together?
Read more from Victoria White »
Faith & Leadership
INNOVATION, CONGREGATIONAL INNOVATION, CONGREGATIONS, NEW FORMS OF CHURCH
A move to part-time clergy sparks innovation in congregations
INNOVATION, CHRISTIAN LEADERSHIP
Victoria Atkinson White: Leaders need not choose between improving and creating
Bigstock/Jonathan Weiss
Leaders need not choose between improving and creating
The church needs both those who are loyal to existing religious institutions and those eager to usher in what the church will look like next, writes the managing director of grants at Leadership Education at Duke Divinity.
My small town has a Lowe’s and a Home Depot. In practice, I don’t prefer one or the other, typically choosing the store that is closer when I remember I need something for a home improvement project.
But Lowe’s has gotten me thinking lately about more than just DIY projects. Its two recent advertising slogans, while for the very same store, feel at odds with each other.
Since 2011, Lowe’s advertising has told us that we should “never stop improving.”
From 2006 to 2011, it said, “Let’s build something together.”
I was reminded of this as I read “Faithful,”(link is external) a report on the future of religious institutions from Harvard Divinity School Ministry Innovation fellows Casper ter Kuile and Angie Thurston and several colleagues.
In the report, they explore the natural tension between “loyalty to what has been and a desire to be part of what is next.” In doing so, they reflect on the need for religious institutions to embrace “two concurrent and vital jobs that need doing: improving and creating.”
They draw an important distinction here. Improving is learning new ways to do what we already know how to do; creating is learning new ways to do what we don’t yet know how to do or may be prevented from doing by polity and practice.
Some churches lean toward a “never stop improving” mentality. They are established and know how to “do” church. They have been successful in the past, as evidenced by their physical plants and generations of tradition. This stability and legacy can be an asset, both reputational and social, yet at the same time, as “Faithful” notes, the associated bureaucratic structures can stand in the way of creating new ministries in the face of the unknown.
Improving, while it might sound like the lesser of two choices, is an important job. If a church already knows how to do something well (for example, children’s ministry), then it is only good stewardship not to abandon what works but rather to “never stop improving” it (for example, with technology, safety and training).
Church starts and new faith communities operate from more of a “let’s build something together” posture. They see needs that are not being met and create new gatherings to address them. These initiatives are often experimental -- coffeehouses, yoga studios, after-school programs, Christian social entrepreneurial ventures -- which means many of them fail.
Nonetheless, they are learning new ways to do what we don’t yet know how to do, new ways to minister, that established churches may find more challenging.
Without a doubt, improving feels safer. It is doing what we already know how to do, only better. It involves little risk and predictable reward. Creating feels more exciting. It opens up new possibilities for faithful community, but it entails more risk and a greater tolerance for failure.
Many leaders, much like churchgoers, are more attracted to and better at one or the other.
The good news, as the authors of “Faithful” write, is that the work of improving and creating need not be an exclusive choice. Both jobs must be done. There is a place at the table for both those who are loyal to existing religious institutions and those who are eager to usher in what the church will look like next.
In a world of finite resources, “improvers” and “creators” often see themselves as rivals. But as the authors of “Faithful” affirm, in order to flourish in faithful community, each must appreciate the church’s authentic need for the other.
“New expressions of community need support, stability, and access to the wisdom of our traditions,” they write. “Established religious institutions need the joy of nurturing new expressions of our own highest values.”
While I might have a philosophical preference for “improving” or “creating” in terms of advertising, both of the Lowe’s slogans promote fundamentally the same goal and seek to equip their customers with the same tools (pun intended).
Isn’t the same true for both established churches steeped in tradition and stability and new Christian communities taking great risks to address communal needs with agility and innovation?
The goal is the same -- to bear witness to the reign of God on earth -- whether by improving upon that which is old or creating that which is new. Why not take the best of both and do it together?
Read more from Victoria White »
Faith & Leadership
INNOVATION, CONGREGATIONAL INNOVATION, CONGREGATIONS, NEW FORMS OF CHURCH
A move to part-time clergy sparks innovation in congregations
A move to part-time clergy sparks innovation in congregations
Layperson Muriel Dufendach, left, shares a laugh with the Rev. Carol Walton after a service at St. Timothy's Episcopal Church in Henderson, Nevada. Dufendach carries out some traditionally priestly functions, such as presiding at the weekday Eucharist. Photo by Ronda Churchill
Layperson Muriel Dufendach, left, shares a laugh with the Rev. Carol Walton after a service at St. Timothy's Episcopal Church in Henderson, Nevada. Dufendach carries out some traditionally priestly functions, such as presiding at the weekday Eucharist. Photo by Ronda Churchill
Although church leaders often worry that switching from full-time to part-time clergy will lead to decline, congregations across the country are finding new vitality by reimagining the roles of clergy and laypeople.
Editor’s note: Research for this story was funded by The BTS Center, a Maine-based think tank focused on 21st-century faith communities. It included visits to nearly two dozen vital mainline congregations that have shifted from full- to part-time clergy.
Adjusting to life without a full-time pastor has become a pressing challenge for thousands of congregations in mainline Protestant denominations across the country.
Shrinking attendance and ever-leaner budgets have forced churches to pare back the pastorate, and many wonder how effective ministry can happen when clergy are working just 30, 20 or 10 hours a week for the church.
Relearning how to do effective congregational ministry with part-time clergy is no easy task, and denominational officers have no easy answers. The traditional model for mainline churches relies on full-time clergy, and it can be difficult to envision a thriving congregation with a part-time pastor.
“It’s the white, old-line that is having to make the adjustment,” said E. Brooks Holifield, professor emeritus of American church history at Emory University and the author of “God’s Ambassadors: A History of the Christian Clergy in America.”
“The transition is being felt most deeply by churches that had an expectation of a full-time clergyperson who devoted all of his or her time to the church. In other groups and other traditions, that expectation was not always there.”
More and more congregations are likely to face this issue. According to the National Congregations Study, nearly 40 percent of mainline Protestant congregations had no full-time paid clergy in 2012.
In your role, how can you encourage congregations to view considering a transition to part-time ministry as an opportunity for renewed ministry rather than as a defeat or failure?
Yet not all congregations struggle after transitioning to a part-time pastor. Dozens have found vitality by avoiding pitfalls that have caused other churches to stumble when making the shift. As more churches go part time, instructive stories are emerging.
“They recognize their reality that they can’t afford a full-time pastor, but that doesn’t mean they’re not going to have a ministry,” said Darren Morgan, the associate conference minister for the Maine Conference of the United Church of Christ, where 68 percent of the 156 congregations have no full-time clergy.
“The leadership within those churches is strong. They say, ‘We’re not going to be a weak church. We’ll be a strong, small church.’”
Some see it as recovering an ancient tradition for a new time.
“We’re doing things kind of the way the early Christians did before they built churches,” said Mark Raymond, a member of New Sharon Congregational Church (UCC) in New Sharon, Maine, where a handful of laypeople take turns leading worship around a table each week. “There’s more of that spirit,” he said.
The research for this story shows that vitality in those “strong, small churches” doesn’t look the same in every congregation.
Signs of vitality can include growing average Sunday attendance, increasing engagement in ministries, expanding community outreach or some combination. All the congregations featured here have stabilized church finances since going part time and have taken steps to reinvigorate ministries.
Three models have emerged that illustrate how vital churches are making the adjustment: the pastor as equipper of laypeople, the pastor as ambassador and the pastor as team member.
Pastor as equipper of laypeople, not provider of services
With part-time ministries, denominational leaders see a common problem. The pastor has diminished capacity for ministry, and parishioners don’t pick up the slack. Much of what the church once had to offer gets lost or hollowed out.
Vital churches, however, head off this problem by rethinking the pastor’s role. She or he becomes less a provider of religious services and more an equipper of laypeople to perform duties that had previously fallen to clergy.
What might this broader shift to part-time clergy contribute to our understanding of the ordained ministry and of lay ministry?
These congregations are reclaiming dormant threads in their denominational traditions and finding meaning in the process.
Consider the Episcopal Church, where 48 percent of congregations have no full-time paid clergy, up from 43 percent five years ago. Lay Episcopalians are reclaiming ministries they’ve long been authorized to do but seldom did when full-time clergy were around.
If part-time clergy encourage laypeople to take responsibility and experiment, congregants can learn to spread their wings.
At St. Columba’s Church in Kent, Washington, for example, average Sunday attendance has grown 44 percent (from 55 to 79) since its pastorate went part time in 2014. New ministries to raise vegetables for the hungry and shelter homeless men have taken off since then, parishioners say, in part because part-time vicar the Rev. Alissabeth Newton doesn’t try to “run the show,” as founding church member Bob Ewing put it.
Volunteers at St. Columba's take on ministries such as raising vegetables for the hungry.Photo courtesy of St. Columba's Episcopal Church“What I found,” said Micah Kurtz, a young father who used to attend a nearby megachurch, “was an openness to let people own things and say, ‘Hey, why don’t we try this? It might meet your skills. Give it a shot.’” Kurtz is now an active member at St. Columba’s, where he oversees the Just Garden ministry.
In vital churches, priests may defer to laypeople to carry out some traditionally priestly functions. At St. Timothy’s Church in Henderson, Nevada, laypeople sometimes preside at funerals and always at the two weekday Eucharist services.
Laywoman Muriel Dufendach distributes elements consecrated the prior Sunday by the congregation’s priest-in-charge, the Rev. Carol Walton, who sits in a pew and receives with everyone else.
Layperson Muriel Dufendach, right, serves Communion to the Rev. Carol Walton during a Lenten service at St. Timothy's Episcopal Church. Photo by Ronda Churchill
“Laypeople can do an awful lot of stuff in the church,” Dufendach said. And Walton, who serves 24 hours a week, is happy to accommodate.
“I’m not going to take over something that a layperson has been doing, because I think that’s part of vitality: having ministry that people want to do,” Walton said.
Sometimes laypeople have gifts just waiting for an outlet -- and for permission to use them. At Christ Church in Bethel, Vermont, 10 of the 20 members of the congregation take turns preaching. That lightens the load for their volunteer priest, the Rev. Shelie Richardson, who works full time as an insurance agent and preaches just a few times a year.
Not every church has such a stable of talent ready to go, but some congregations are addressing this by making the part-time pastorate into a trainer’s role. This works especially well in a three-quarters-time arrangement, where the pastor can satisfy some congregational needs and still have time to train laity to do parts of his or her job.
For example, at Christ the King Lutheran Church in Tacoma, Washington, the Rev. Peter Mohr uses a portion of his three-quarters-time role to equip laity for functions he used to fulfill.
He meets with Bible study leaders once a month and then leaves the teaching to them. Rather than preaching every Sunday, he meets with congregants who fill in, answering questions they might have about texts or interpretations.
At St. John’s Episcopal Church in Gloucester, Massachusetts, full-time priests used to maintain an active presence around town, inviting people to church, but times have changed.
At 30 hours a week, the Rev. Bret Hays lacks the time for that. Instead, he has trained congregants in a multi-week workshop to be lay evangelists. And like many coping strategies, this approach yields additional benefits.
“It’s not just a strategy of equipping the laity,” Hays said. “It’s also a strategy to respond to the phenomenon that makes an invitation from a layperson count for much more than an invitation from a priest.”
At St. Columba’s Church in Kent, Washington, average Sunday attendance has grown since its pastorate went part time in 2014. Photo courtesy of Daniel Hershman/St. ColumbaPastor as ambassador through strategic use of time
A second type of challenge arises when churches cut clergy hours back to part-time and then fall, sometimes unwittingly, into an insular chaplaincy situation. Pastors spend the little time they have leading Sunday worship and visiting the sick, so that they’re left with no time for anything else.
“But what we know for vital congregations -- those that are having an impact on their communities, are growing and have increased access to resources -- is that a pastor needs to be doing less visiting and more leading and engagement externally with their local community,” said the Rev. Sara Anderson of the New England Synod of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA).
Some congregations have avoided the chaplaincy model by counterintuitively revamping the part-time pastorate to make sure it includes more time, not less, for community engagement.
Since switching to part-time five years ago, St. John’s Lutheran Church in Lakewood, Washington, has doubled average Sunday attendance, from 25 to 50. It’s seeing newcomers from non-faith, Buddhist and Mormon backgrounds, among others. The church has boosted mission giving from zero to 7 percent of the budget over that period.
The Rev. Joe Smith envisions his three-fifths-time pastorate as St. John’s ambassador. And he gets creative with it. He sometimes stands at the curb at rush hour and waves to commuters passing the church. He visits Boy Scout troops as they meet at St. John’s and organizes Scout Sundays, which bring dozens of scouts and their families to worship.
“There was no playbook at all” for how to do part-time ministry effectively, Smith said. “Without it being a circus or too much of a publicity stunt, you do whatever you can to have people in the church, because the critical mass is important. If people come into what feels like an empty space, they won’t come back.”
Down the road in an East Tacoma public housing development, Salishan Eastside Lutheran Mission gathers a self-reliant flock of 15 or 20 for worship in the Holy Family of Jesus Cambodian Episcopal Church.
For worship, the group needs nothing from its pastor, authorized lay minister Lauren Vignec, except a sermon (and sometimes the Cambodian priest covers that part, too). Congregants handle everything else. Therefore, when he’s not on his day job as a financial adviser, Vignec can pour his ministry time into community outreach.
He finds plenty to do. One day he’s delivering emergency food from World Vision to homes in the neighborhood. The next day he’s visiting one of three local casinos, where he tells people he’s a pastor and lets the conversations flow.
Several times a year, Vignec organizes a Salishan “dance church” called Fear No Evil, where street dancers compete before a judging panel. It draws more than 100 dancers and spectators, including many young African-American, Latino and Native American men.
Winners of a dance contest sponsored by Salishan Eastside Lutheran Mission. The event is part of the pastor's outreach. Photo courtesy of Salishan Eastside Lutheran MissionVignec is on a dance team and takes his turn competing. Between rounds, he delivers Scripture readings and a sermon, usually about resolving conflict or managing mental illness.
“The really cool stuff we’re doing here, like with dance church -- I don’t think this would be possible in a normal relationship between a normal pastor and a normal church board,” Vignec said. “The reason why I’m capable of even trying this stuff is because they just told me, ‘Lauren, do whatever you want to do to revitalize this church. Just try it.’”
Pastor Lauren Vignec participates in the "dance church" as a member of a dance team. Photo courtesy of Salishan Eastside Lutheran Mission
In Vignec’s experience, mainline churches often get the part-time model wrong.
“They think of it like, ‘We can have a 15-hour-a-week pastor, because it will take 15 hours to do all the things we want the pastor to do.’
“No, no, no, no, no,” he said. “The church should do those things and let the pastor do something to bring in new people to the church, however that is going to work. And there are a ton of different ways to make it work.”
Sometimes, new experiments require letting go of what had been expected duties. Unlike her full-time predecessors, the Rev. Linda Brewster of Tuttle Road United Methodist Church in Cumberland, Maine, doesn’t attend committee meetings. And once a month, laypeople take over preaching.
With that carved-out time, Brewster, who works full time as a nurse practitioner, tries new types of outreach. Overall, the approach is working. Average Sunday attendance at Tuttle Road has doubled, from 30 to 60, since the church went part time three years ago.
One successful outreach experiment: Messy Grace. Around 5 p.m. on Saturday afternoons once a month, families with young kids who don’t otherwise go to church stop by for a 10-minute taste of worship, followed by music, supper and an environmental lesson, such as gardening or composting.
Children take part in Messy Grace, an informal ministry for young families. Photo courtesy of Tuttle Road UMCFor parents and kids who attend, Messy Grace has become their church.
“We had a wonderful baptism,” Brewster said. “We had a pool of water with some white ducks in it. People sang ‘Wade in the Water’ and danced down the aisle. They wouldn’t have done that during Sunday morning worship, but for some reason they would do it on Saturday afternoon.”
The Rev. Linda Brewster, second from right, talks with families involved in Messy Grace. Photo courtesy of Tuttle Road UMCPastor as team member, sharing the pastorate with other part-timers
When cash-strapped congregations do whatever it takes to retain a full-time pastor, they sometimes court a burnout situation. A disproportionate share of the budget -- and consequently, the ministry expectations -- land on one person who can become overworked and unhappy.
In such situations, switching to part-time clergy, where the pastorate is joyfully shared among multiple part-time staff, can be enlivening.
Clarendon Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) in Arlington, Virginia, for example, can afford a full-time pastor but has strategically opted not to do so.
Before Clarendon made its pastorate part-time in 2012, burnout was a real problem.
“Everything fell on the pastor’s shoulders, from running copies of Sunday morning bulletins to changing burned-out lightbulbs,” said the Rev. David Ensign. He said he told his board the model wasn’t helping the congregation, and “it was killing me.”
The solution: Ensign volunteered to go half time and let the savings go toward hiring a part-time administrative assistant. The change has renewed Ensign’s ministry by delivering less clerical work and more time for family, guitar and other creative pursuits.
The arrangement has helped the congregants as well. The new staffer handles administrative issues related to rental units owned by the church, a job that congregants once had to do.
Are you aware of congregations considering this transition for missional reasons as opposed to economic ones?
With more time for what’s fun and meaningful, people like Ron Bookbinder are more engaged in the Clarendon ministries they care about, such as writing pastoral care letters and going on a mission trip to help flood victims in West Virginia.
“The message I get from the change is that we can be open,” said Bookbinder, a ruling elder in the church. “We can do new things. We can focus on what we’re really good at. And we can explore -- try something different.”
Other congregations are trying a similar approach. Since First United Methodist Church in Hudson, Massachusetts, went part time in 2015, 10 new members have joined, and lay-led classes are thriving.
With those successes and others, some hope the pastorate will become full-time again soon. But the Rev. Rosanne Roberts, a retiree on Medicare, said hiring another part-time employee to work with children and families would be better stewardship.
“As soon as it became clear that we would be ending the year in the black, someone on the finance team said, ‘Oh, great! We can move you up to three-quarters-time or back to full-time,’” Roberts said. “I said, ‘No! You’re forgetting it’s not just the salary.’”
Having a full-time pastor would put the church on the hook for health insurance premiums, she pointed out. “And we’d be in trouble all over again.”
Willing and able laity
One key to all three models is the congregation. Motivated laypeople are instrumental to both the vision and the execution. From leading worship to pastoral care, their new roles are inextricably linked to their congregation’s destiny.
“In order to be successful, the laity have to be willing and able to do this,” said Morgan of the UCC’s Maine Conference.
How might denominational structures and assumptions have to change to recognize the increasing number of part-time or non-paid clergy?
They’re proving they can step up, learn and lead. In the process, pastorates are becoming more distributed across entire congregations and less confined to one individual.
Whether growing vegetables for the hungry, reaching out to the church’s neighbors, presiding at services or sharing administrative duties, the clergy and laity of successful congregations are working together in new -- or rediscovered -- ways. They are reframing the part-time pastorate, allowing new vitality to emerge. And their stories hold lessons for congregations across the country.
Questions to consider:
Faith & Leadership
CONGREGATIONS, NEW FORMS OF CHURCH, INNOVATION, CONGREGATIONAL INNOVATION
Simple Church blends dinner, worship and enterprise to create a new model
The centerpiece of Simple Church, a United Methodist congregation, is a Thursday night dinner when 30 to 40 share the Lord's Supper. Photos courtesy of Simple ChurchEditor’s note: Research for this story was funded by The BTS Center, a Maine-based think tank focused on 21st-century faith communities. It included visits to nearly two dozen vital mainline congregations that have shifted from full- to part-time clergy.
Adjusting to life without a full-time pastor has become a pressing challenge for thousands of congregations in mainline Protestant denominations across the country.
Shrinking attendance and ever-leaner budgets have forced churches to pare back the pastorate, and many wonder how effective ministry can happen when clergy are working just 30, 20 or 10 hours a week for the church.
Relearning how to do effective congregational ministry with part-time clergy is no easy task, and denominational officers have no easy answers. The traditional model for mainline churches relies on full-time clergy, and it can be difficult to envision a thriving congregation with a part-time pastor.
“It’s the white, old-line that is having to make the adjustment,” said E. Brooks Holifield, professor emeritus of American church history at Emory University and the author of “God’s Ambassadors: A History of the Christian Clergy in America.”
“The transition is being felt most deeply by churches that had an expectation of a full-time clergyperson who devoted all of his or her time to the church. In other groups and other traditions, that expectation was not always there.”
More and more congregations are likely to face this issue. According to the National Congregations Study, nearly 40 percent of mainline Protestant congregations had no full-time paid clergy in 2012.
In your role, how can you encourage congregations to view considering a transition to part-time ministry as an opportunity for renewed ministry rather than as a defeat or failure?
Yet not all congregations struggle after transitioning to a part-time pastor. Dozens have found vitality by avoiding pitfalls that have caused other churches to stumble when making the shift. As more churches go part time, instructive stories are emerging.
“They recognize their reality that they can’t afford a full-time pastor, but that doesn’t mean they’re not going to have a ministry,” said Darren Morgan, the associate conference minister for the Maine Conference of the United Church of Christ, where 68 percent of the 156 congregations have no full-time clergy.
“The leadership within those churches is strong. They say, ‘We’re not going to be a weak church. We’ll be a strong, small church.’”
Some see it as recovering an ancient tradition for a new time.
“We’re doing things kind of the way the early Christians did before they built churches,” said Mark Raymond, a member of New Sharon Congregational Church (UCC) in New Sharon, Maine, where a handful of laypeople take turns leading worship around a table each week. “There’s more of that spirit,” he said.
The research for this story shows that vitality in those “strong, small churches” doesn’t look the same in every congregation.
Signs of vitality can include growing average Sunday attendance, increasing engagement in ministries, expanding community outreach or some combination. All the congregations featured here have stabilized church finances since going part time and have taken steps to reinvigorate ministries.
Three models have emerged that illustrate how vital churches are making the adjustment: the pastor as equipper of laypeople, the pastor as ambassador and the pastor as team member.
Pastor as equipper of laypeople, not provider of services
With part-time ministries, denominational leaders see a common problem. The pastor has diminished capacity for ministry, and parishioners don’t pick up the slack. Much of what the church once had to offer gets lost or hollowed out.
Vital churches, however, head off this problem by rethinking the pastor’s role. She or he becomes less a provider of religious services and more an equipper of laypeople to perform duties that had previously fallen to clergy.
What might this broader shift to part-time clergy contribute to our understanding of the ordained ministry and of lay ministry?
These congregations are reclaiming dormant threads in their denominational traditions and finding meaning in the process.
Consider the Episcopal Church, where 48 percent of congregations have no full-time paid clergy, up from 43 percent five years ago. Lay Episcopalians are reclaiming ministries they’ve long been authorized to do but seldom did when full-time clergy were around.
If part-time clergy encourage laypeople to take responsibility and experiment, congregants can learn to spread their wings.
At St. Columba’s Church in Kent, Washington, for example, average Sunday attendance has grown 44 percent (from 55 to 79) since its pastorate went part time in 2014. New ministries to raise vegetables for the hungry and shelter homeless men have taken off since then, parishioners say, in part because part-time vicar the Rev. Alissabeth Newton doesn’t try to “run the show,” as founding church member Bob Ewing put it.
Volunteers at St. Columba's take on ministries such as raising vegetables for the hungry.Photo courtesy of St. Columba's Episcopal Church“What I found,” said Micah Kurtz, a young father who used to attend a nearby megachurch, “was an openness to let people own things and say, ‘Hey, why don’t we try this? It might meet your skills. Give it a shot.’” Kurtz is now an active member at St. Columba’s, where he oversees the Just Garden ministry.
In vital churches, priests may defer to laypeople to carry out some traditionally priestly functions. At St. Timothy’s Church in Henderson, Nevada, laypeople sometimes preside at funerals and always at the two weekday Eucharist services.
Laywoman Muriel Dufendach distributes elements consecrated the prior Sunday by the congregation’s priest-in-charge, the Rev. Carol Walton, who sits in a pew and receives with everyone else.
Layperson Muriel Dufendach, right, serves Communion to the Rev. Carol Walton during a Lenten service at St. Timothy's Episcopal Church. Photo by Ronda Churchill
“Laypeople can do an awful lot of stuff in the church,” Dufendach said. And Walton, who serves 24 hours a week, is happy to accommodate.
“I’m not going to take over something that a layperson has been doing, because I think that’s part of vitality: having ministry that people want to do,” Walton said.
Sometimes laypeople have gifts just waiting for an outlet -- and for permission to use them. At Christ Church in Bethel, Vermont, 10 of the 20 members of the congregation take turns preaching. That lightens the load for their volunteer priest, the Rev. Shelie Richardson, who works full time as an insurance agent and preaches just a few times a year.
Not every church has such a stable of talent ready to go, but some congregations are addressing this by making the part-time pastorate into a trainer’s role. This works especially well in a three-quarters-time arrangement, where the pastor can satisfy some congregational needs and still have time to train laity to do parts of his or her job.
For example, at Christ the King Lutheran Church in Tacoma, Washington, the Rev. Peter Mohr uses a portion of his three-quarters-time role to equip laity for functions he used to fulfill.
He meets with Bible study leaders once a month and then leaves the teaching to them. Rather than preaching every Sunday, he meets with congregants who fill in, answering questions they might have about texts or interpretations.
At St. John’s Episcopal Church in Gloucester, Massachusetts, full-time priests used to maintain an active presence around town, inviting people to church, but times have changed.
At 30 hours a week, the Rev. Bret Hays lacks the time for that. Instead, he has trained congregants in a multi-week workshop to be lay evangelists. And like many coping strategies, this approach yields additional benefits.
“It’s not just a strategy of equipping the laity,” Hays said. “It’s also a strategy to respond to the phenomenon that makes an invitation from a layperson count for much more than an invitation from a priest.”
At St. Columba’s Church in Kent, Washington, average Sunday attendance has grown since its pastorate went part time in 2014. Photo courtesy of Daniel Hershman/St. ColumbaPastor as ambassador through strategic use of time
A second type of challenge arises when churches cut clergy hours back to part-time and then fall, sometimes unwittingly, into an insular chaplaincy situation. Pastors spend the little time they have leading Sunday worship and visiting the sick, so that they’re left with no time for anything else.
“But what we know for vital congregations -- those that are having an impact on their communities, are growing and have increased access to resources -- is that a pastor needs to be doing less visiting and more leading and engagement externally with their local community,” said the Rev. Sara Anderson of the New England Synod of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA).
Some congregations have avoided the chaplaincy model by counterintuitively revamping the part-time pastorate to make sure it includes more time, not less, for community engagement.
Since switching to part-time five years ago, St. John’s Lutheran Church in Lakewood, Washington, has doubled average Sunday attendance, from 25 to 50. It’s seeing newcomers from non-faith, Buddhist and Mormon backgrounds, among others. The church has boosted mission giving from zero to 7 percent of the budget over that period.
The Rev. Joe Smith envisions his three-fifths-time pastorate as St. John’s ambassador. And he gets creative with it. He sometimes stands at the curb at rush hour and waves to commuters passing the church. He visits Boy Scout troops as they meet at St. John’s and organizes Scout Sundays, which bring dozens of scouts and their families to worship.
“There was no playbook at all” for how to do part-time ministry effectively, Smith said. “Without it being a circus or too much of a publicity stunt, you do whatever you can to have people in the church, because the critical mass is important. If people come into what feels like an empty space, they won’t come back.”
Down the road in an East Tacoma public housing development, Salishan Eastside Lutheran Mission gathers a self-reliant flock of 15 or 20 for worship in the Holy Family of Jesus Cambodian Episcopal Church.
For worship, the group needs nothing from its pastor, authorized lay minister Lauren Vignec, except a sermon (and sometimes the Cambodian priest covers that part, too). Congregants handle everything else. Therefore, when he’s not on his day job as a financial adviser, Vignec can pour his ministry time into community outreach.
He finds plenty to do. One day he’s delivering emergency food from World Vision to homes in the neighborhood. The next day he’s visiting one of three local casinos, where he tells people he’s a pastor and lets the conversations flow.
Several times a year, Vignec organizes a Salishan “dance church” called Fear No Evil, where street dancers compete before a judging panel. It draws more than 100 dancers and spectators, including many young African-American, Latino and Native American men.
Winners of a dance contest sponsored by Salishan Eastside Lutheran Mission. The event is part of the pastor's outreach. Photo courtesy of Salishan Eastside Lutheran MissionVignec is on a dance team and takes his turn competing. Between rounds, he delivers Scripture readings and a sermon, usually about resolving conflict or managing mental illness.
“The really cool stuff we’re doing here, like with dance church -- I don’t think this would be possible in a normal relationship between a normal pastor and a normal church board,” Vignec said. “The reason why I’m capable of even trying this stuff is because they just told me, ‘Lauren, do whatever you want to do to revitalize this church. Just try it.’”
Pastor Lauren Vignec participates in the "dance church" as a member of a dance team. Photo courtesy of Salishan Eastside Lutheran Mission
In Vignec’s experience, mainline churches often get the part-time model wrong.
“They think of it like, ‘We can have a 15-hour-a-week pastor, because it will take 15 hours to do all the things we want the pastor to do.’
“No, no, no, no, no,” he said. “The church should do those things and let the pastor do something to bring in new people to the church, however that is going to work. And there are a ton of different ways to make it work.”
Sometimes, new experiments require letting go of what had been expected duties. Unlike her full-time predecessors, the Rev. Linda Brewster of Tuttle Road United Methodist Church in Cumberland, Maine, doesn’t attend committee meetings. And once a month, laypeople take over preaching.
With that carved-out time, Brewster, who works full time as a nurse practitioner, tries new types of outreach. Overall, the approach is working. Average Sunday attendance at Tuttle Road has doubled, from 30 to 60, since the church went part time three years ago.
One successful outreach experiment: Messy Grace. Around 5 p.m. on Saturday afternoons once a month, families with young kids who don’t otherwise go to church stop by for a 10-minute taste of worship, followed by music, supper and an environmental lesson, such as gardening or composting.
Children take part in Messy Grace, an informal ministry for young families. Photo courtesy of Tuttle Road UMCFor parents and kids who attend, Messy Grace has become their church.
“We had a wonderful baptism,” Brewster said. “We had a pool of water with some white ducks in it. People sang ‘Wade in the Water’ and danced down the aisle. They wouldn’t have done that during Sunday morning worship, but for some reason they would do it on Saturday afternoon.”
The Rev. Linda Brewster, second from right, talks with families involved in Messy Grace. Photo courtesy of Tuttle Road UMCPastor as team member, sharing the pastorate with other part-timers
When cash-strapped congregations do whatever it takes to retain a full-time pastor, they sometimes court a burnout situation. A disproportionate share of the budget -- and consequently, the ministry expectations -- land on one person who can become overworked and unhappy.
In such situations, switching to part-time clergy, where the pastorate is joyfully shared among multiple part-time staff, can be enlivening.
Clarendon Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) in Arlington, Virginia, for example, can afford a full-time pastor but has strategically opted not to do so.
Before Clarendon made its pastorate part-time in 2012, burnout was a real problem.
“Everything fell on the pastor’s shoulders, from running copies of Sunday morning bulletins to changing burned-out lightbulbs,” said the Rev. David Ensign. He said he told his board the model wasn’t helping the congregation, and “it was killing me.”
The solution: Ensign volunteered to go half time and let the savings go toward hiring a part-time administrative assistant. The change has renewed Ensign’s ministry by delivering less clerical work and more time for family, guitar and other creative pursuits.
The arrangement has helped the congregants as well. The new staffer handles administrative issues related to rental units owned by the church, a job that congregants once had to do.
Are you aware of congregations considering this transition for missional reasons as opposed to economic ones?
With more time for what’s fun and meaningful, people like Ron Bookbinder are more engaged in the Clarendon ministries they care about, such as writing pastoral care letters and going on a mission trip to help flood victims in West Virginia.
“The message I get from the change is that we can be open,” said Bookbinder, a ruling elder in the church. “We can do new things. We can focus on what we’re really good at. And we can explore -- try something different.”
Other congregations are trying a similar approach. Since First United Methodist Church in Hudson, Massachusetts, went part time in 2015, 10 new members have joined, and lay-led classes are thriving.
With those successes and others, some hope the pastorate will become full-time again soon. But the Rev. Rosanne Roberts, a retiree on Medicare, said hiring another part-time employee to work with children and families would be better stewardship.
“As soon as it became clear that we would be ending the year in the black, someone on the finance team said, ‘Oh, great! We can move you up to three-quarters-time or back to full-time,’” Roberts said. “I said, ‘No! You’re forgetting it’s not just the salary.’”
Having a full-time pastor would put the church on the hook for health insurance premiums, she pointed out. “And we’d be in trouble all over again.”
Willing and able laity
One key to all three models is the congregation. Motivated laypeople are instrumental to both the vision and the execution. From leading worship to pastoral care, their new roles are inextricably linked to their congregation’s destiny.
“In order to be successful, the laity have to be willing and able to do this,” said Morgan of the UCC’s Maine Conference.
How might denominational structures and assumptions have to change to recognize the increasing number of part-time or non-paid clergy?
They’re proving they can step up, learn and lead. In the process, pastorates are becoming more distributed across entire congregations and less confined to one individual.
Whether growing vegetables for the hungry, reaching out to the church’s neighbors, presiding at services or sharing administrative duties, the clergy and laity of successful congregations are working together in new -- or rediscovered -- ways. They are reframing the part-time pastorate, allowing new vitality to emerge. And their stories hold lessons for congregations across the country.
Questions to consider:
- In your role, how can you encourage congregations to view considering a transition to part-time ministry as an opportunity for renewed ministry rather than as a defeat or failure?
- What might this broader shift to part-time clergy contribute to our understanding of the ordained ministry and of lay ministry?
- How might denominational structures and assumptions have to change to recognize the increasing number of part-time or non-paid clergy?
- Are you aware of congregations considering this transition for missional reasons as opposed to economic ones?
- What support do part-time clergy need to sustain their vocations? What support do laity need during and after such transitions? Is your organization able to offer these resources?
Faith & Leadership
CONGREGATIONS, NEW FORMS OF CHURCH, INNOVATION, CONGREGATIONAL INNOVATION
Simple Church blends dinner, worship and enterprise to create a new model
Congregants gather for a sacred weekly meal where the conversation serves as the sermon and freshly baked bread provides nourishment, communion and income. Other churches are using their template to replicate the experience.
When the five last members of North Grafton United Methodist Church in Massachusetts voted to close and sell their building four years ago, they had no idea what would happen.
Denominational officers told them, “We’re going to send you a planter,” said Sue Novia, 73, one of the last five at North Grafton UMC. “We thought, ‘What is a planter?’”
But Grafton-area residents are now embracing a fresh style of worship at the three-year-old church plant called Simple Church(link is external), a United Methodist congregation where 30 to 40 share the Lord’s Supper every Thursday over dinner. The church is also pioneering a revenue model that puts less strain on parishioners by generating income from a trade -- in this case, bread baking.
The format has caught on in other states and Canada, with 11 affiliate congregations now practicing table-centered worship and often relying on trade-based enterprises for revenue. Simple Church is gearing up to plant its first daughter church nearby in central Massachusetts later this year.
Simple Church pays almost nothing for dinner ingredients. This is partly because members bring potluck contributions. They also receive in-kind gifts of vegetables and meat from the hilltop farm where the 28-year-old pastor, the Rev. Zach Kerzee, volunteers. The farm is next door to the parsonage, which the North Grafton church retained after selling the meeting house.
The Rev. Zach Kerzee volunteers on the farm next door to the parsonage, so the farmer donates produce for the meal.Pondering theology in the fields, Kerzee sees a metaphor for a cycle of church life playing out in Grafton.
“In order for us to eat, something has to die, whether it’s an animal or a plant or a microbe,” said Kerzee, a Texas native and son of a Methodist pastor. “Something has to give us life in order for us to live.”
A new model based on an old model
What’s unfolding in Grafton is new to congregants, who had never before worshipped in a sacred-meal format, but the form isn’t altogether new for Christians. Early Christians shared the sacrament in homes in a context of eating and singing hymns.
Nor is the revenue model unprecedented. Just as monks have for centuries plied trades from beer brewing to jam making in order to cover monastic overhead, Simple Church leaders bake and sell bread to generate proceeds for the ministries.
They partner with Grafton Job Corps, a vocational training program for youth ages 16 to 24, to bake in a kitchen they rent (along with worship space) from the Congregational Church of Grafton. Their crusty loaves, retailing for $7 each for subscribers and at farmers markets, clear a tidy profit from ingredients that cost just $1 per loaf.
“It buys us credibility,” said LyAnna Johnson, Simple Church’s church planting apprentice, who will lead its soon-to-be-planted daughter church. “At farmers markets, people can’t believe that two pastors are out there in the heat selling bread.”
“Bread that they baked themselves,” Kerzee said.
Left to right: Kerzee, Kelly Drury, Kendall Vanderslice and Christy Wright. Photo by Eric Grubb“Especially when people are so distrustful of institutions,” Johnson said, “it really helps.”
Do you agree that an act such as bread baking could help reduce skepticism of institutions? Are there gestures or actions your church leaders could employ to ease that tension?
As much as Simple Church is grounded in tradition, what congregants experience is unlike anything they’ve experienced before -- at least in church. Kerzee likens it to a weekly dinner party, noting that it’s much easier to invite someone to a dinner party than to a traditional worship service. St. Lydia's in Brooklyn has pioneered the model.
In New England, where 70 percent of Methodist congregations can’t afford a full-time pastor, its foreignness from church-as-usual and its low entry bar hold much appeal.
With folksy hymnody and simple prayers, dinner church in Grafton strikes a chord with the early-18th-century Methodism of founder John Wesley, said Rick McKinley, the director of congregational development for the UMC in New England. He said traditional churches across his region could easily add dinner church worship to their repertoires.
Dinner church “has the highly relational nature of early Wesleyan movements,” McKinley said. “People were face to face. It wasn’t about consuming a particular product in the way that modern churches consume Sunday morning worship or consume the programming that we’re offered. Simple Church is going back to this understanding of living into a relationship that starts with God.”
Instead of a traditional sermon, participants engage in conversation about the readings.
The conversation is the sermon
One recent Thursday evening, festive trappings made for a relaxed atmosphere as casually dressed worshippers trickled into the rented fellowship hall at the Congregational church. Instrumental music played through speakers in the background. Covered tables set for eight flickered with candlelight. Kerzee waved in new arrivals from atop a stepladder as he strung lights across the ceiling. Potluck contributions covered a table next to a hodgepodge of unmatched plates and bowls. Smells of sauteed onions and baking bread mixed with sounds of laughter in the kitchen.
Once the lights were up, Kerzee greeted everyone he knew with a hug, and many parishioners did the same.
Worship began with everyone standing in a circle and passing the Lord’s Supper bread to one another. It ended similarly almost 90 minutes later with everyone clinking glasses, as if someone had made a toast, before drinking together the wine (actually grape juice) of the cup.
Kerzee pours grape juice for Mark Orfalea. Photo by Alethia WilliamsAlong the way, they bowed heads for prayer and sang along to Kerzee’s guitar and the foot tambourine strapped across his sandaled toes. Participants easily picked up the words even if they’d never heard the tunes. Three children spontaneously got up and danced inside the circle.
Children left for 25 minutes of kids activities while adults got to sermonizing around their tables. This conversation, Kerzee emphasized, is the sermon. Johnson primed the pump with a five-minute reflection on the Gospel story of doubting Thomas. Then everyone had a chance to engage and create, which is what a younger generation hungers to do in church, Kerzee said.
“They’re not looking for something easy,” he said. “They’re looking for something they can give their whole lives to.”
At first, the front-table group was slow to open up. Kerzee, at ease in jeans and a faded Red Sox cap, offered a personal anecdote while urging them to “go deep” and feel free to disagree with each other.
In what ways could you create space for people to "go deep," either in worship or other contexts?
Finally, Marty Pelham, who shared that he’d felt estranged from Christianity for 30 years because he’s gay, said, “I’m ready.” He told what it had meant for him to attend Simple Church for the first time one week prior and why he had driven more than an hour to be there again.
“I came here last week, and I never felt so much like walking into a family,” said Pelham, who is seeking ordination in the Unitarian Universalist Association. He said the experience had enabled him to overcome what’s been for him a longtime stumbling block: the blood of Jesus and what it represents.
“Something shifted inside of me,” he said. “I suddenly realized that I can look beyond whatever I have heard in the past to what it can mean.”
Kerzee reads to the people gathered for dinner and helps spark conversation. Photo by Alethia WilliamsSpreading the word and sharing their experience
By staying true to the “simple” in its name, Simple Church has created a replicable model. The church encourages other congregations to use its resources for their own dinner worship services. Anyone may contact Kerzee and use prayers and hymns from the Simple Church website(link is external) free of charge.
Having internal consistency helps, Kerzee said. Since his college days in Texas, he has made simplicity a guiding principle for his life and a spiritual discipline, which includes limiting personal possessions and keeping his calendar clutter-free.
These practices, coupled with not having to prepare a weekly bulletin or sermon, free up time for the outreach that helps explain Simple Church’s growth from zero to 70 members over three years. Kerzee and Johnson regularly go door to door, inviting neighbors to visit Simple Church. They invite shoppers at farmers markets, too.
“If you have a party and you don’t invite anybody to it, you can’t be surprised when nobody comes,” Kerzee said. “So I make time to invite them.”
Members of Simple Church need not profess any confession or statement of faith. Nor are they expected to be members of solely one church; many also belong to churches that gather on Sunday mornings. At Simple Church, membership means participating regularly in congregational life, giving a proportion of income to the church, and living according to the model set by Jesus.
Prospects for replication are promising, said Casper ter Kuile, a Ministry Innovation fellow at Harvard Divinity School. His work includes researching how secular communities such as gyms and co-working spaces are bringing millennials together in ways that largely happened in church for prior generations.
“In an age of collapsing church membership, where are people going to become the person that they want to be and connect with other people?” ter Kuile said.
Many are discovering dinner parties, he said, where people facing grief or other transitions come together for a purpose.
Simple meals with fresh bread are the hallmark of Simple Church.“Simple Church has much more in common with these new groups on the secular landscape … than it does with a traditional Methodist church with pews and a traditional church setup,” he said.
Seeking out alternative sources of revenue
As easy as Simple Church’s worship might be to replicate, the trade-based revenue model is trickier to pull off. Still, millennials are eager to try.
Proceeds from bread baking will cover about a third of Simple Church’s $100,000 budget for the coming year, when the congregation will fly on its own for the first time following its initial three-year grant. Another third will come from congregants’ giving. The last third will depend on other fundraising, such as from Methodist organizations that support church planting.
When UMC congregations adopt an alternative revenue model, they are expected to derive income from a product or service that benefits the surrounding community, according to Paul Nixon, the UMC’s regional strategist for church planting in the Northeast. Then comes the harder part: generating a surplus to underwrite a substantial portion of church expenses.
At Kindred, a Simple Church affiliate in Houston, bread baking covers only 5 percent of the $190,000 budget. Another 50 percent comes from congregational giving and denominational support. The remaining 45 percent comes from facility rentals, such as office space for lawyers, writers, activists and others. That means the Rev. Ashley Dellagiacoma’s primary trade outside of ministry is property management.
Could outside enterprises help support your ministries? Or might they contribute to mission creep?
“I recruit tenants, negotiate leases, and even break out my tool belt when things need repairs,” Dellagiacoma said in an email. “On Wednesdays, I become a baker as we make fresh bread to sell at the organic market that rents out our hall each week. The same batch of bread provides us with a gift we can give away to the hungry and the lonely and becomes part of Holy Communion on Sunday. We invest in things that serve more than a single purpose. That’s something I learned from Simple Church.”
Bread baking is a new twist on the monastic tradition.At Be3, a United Methodist dinner church plant in Denver -- another Simple Church affiliate -- the congregation is discerning between two potential enterprises: a raw cafe that offers healthy meals to go and a business that matches youth with community service opportunities. Whatever the choice turns out to be, the revenue will be crucial for sustaining a church whose members spend their Sunday mornings outdoors in the nearby mountains, according to the Be3 pastor, the Rev. Lauren Boyd.
Simple Church doesn’t expect all its daughter congregations to bake bread. When Johnson launches hers later this year, for example, catering will provide the extra revenue.
For his part, Kerzee, who also designs websites as an additional revenue stream for the church, expects that enterprise will always be integral to supporting Simple Church. If all goes as planned, revenues will be brisk enough that the congregation’s proportional giving eventually won’t be needed to cover expenses. At that point, congregants’ support can go 100 percent toward mission projects.
Meanwhile, the vision calls for each of Simple Church’s daughter congregations to generate enough from enterprise that they can earmark 10 percent in their budgets to a fund for planting more dinner churches. Simple Church is on its way to setting the example. Its second daughter church is on track to open next year in Texas.
What in your church's life might be worth replicating? How could you resource others to do that in a sustainable way?
Besides the hilltop parsonage, not much remains from the predecessor North Grafton UMC. Four of the five last members have scattered. One no longer goes to church. Another joined a Baptist church, and a couple now attends a traditional Methodist congregation in another town.
But Sue Novia, the lifelong member who asked what a planter was, has joined Simple Church and now attends regularly with a Roman Catholic friend. They confide difficult situations involving family members, grief and addictions, and the congregation prays for them. She’s devoted to Simple Church, she said, because it’s “part of my old church” and also represents the future, especially when she sees kids, teens and young adults happy to be there.
“It’s not just like a regular church where you go, sit there, just listen and don’t talk,” Novia said. “We talk here. People are able to open up. Feelings come out about religion, about sharing your life’s experiences with somebody else and hearing theirs. That’s what makes it grow.”
Questions to consider:
FROM THE ALBAN LIBRARY
When the five last members of North Grafton United Methodist Church in Massachusetts voted to close and sell their building four years ago, they had no idea what would happen.
Denominational officers told them, “We’re going to send you a planter,” said Sue Novia, 73, one of the last five at North Grafton UMC. “We thought, ‘What is a planter?’”
But Grafton-area residents are now embracing a fresh style of worship at the three-year-old church plant called Simple Church(link is external), a United Methodist congregation where 30 to 40 share the Lord’s Supper every Thursday over dinner. The church is also pioneering a revenue model that puts less strain on parishioners by generating income from a trade -- in this case, bread baking.
The format has caught on in other states and Canada, with 11 affiliate congregations now practicing table-centered worship and often relying on trade-based enterprises for revenue. Simple Church is gearing up to plant its first daughter church nearby in central Massachusetts later this year.
Simple Church pays almost nothing for dinner ingredients. This is partly because members bring potluck contributions. They also receive in-kind gifts of vegetables and meat from the hilltop farm where the 28-year-old pastor, the Rev. Zach Kerzee, volunteers. The farm is next door to the parsonage, which the North Grafton church retained after selling the meeting house.
The Rev. Zach Kerzee volunteers on the farm next door to the parsonage, so the farmer donates produce for the meal.Pondering theology in the fields, Kerzee sees a metaphor for a cycle of church life playing out in Grafton.
“In order for us to eat, something has to die, whether it’s an animal or a plant or a microbe,” said Kerzee, a Texas native and son of a Methodist pastor. “Something has to give us life in order for us to live.”
A new model based on an old model
What’s unfolding in Grafton is new to congregants, who had never before worshipped in a sacred-meal format, but the form isn’t altogether new for Christians. Early Christians shared the sacrament in homes in a context of eating and singing hymns.
Nor is the revenue model unprecedented. Just as monks have for centuries plied trades from beer brewing to jam making in order to cover monastic overhead, Simple Church leaders bake and sell bread to generate proceeds for the ministries.
They partner with Grafton Job Corps, a vocational training program for youth ages 16 to 24, to bake in a kitchen they rent (along with worship space) from the Congregational Church of Grafton. Their crusty loaves, retailing for $7 each for subscribers and at farmers markets, clear a tidy profit from ingredients that cost just $1 per loaf.
“It buys us credibility,” said LyAnna Johnson, Simple Church’s church planting apprentice, who will lead its soon-to-be-planted daughter church. “At farmers markets, people can’t believe that two pastors are out there in the heat selling bread.”
“Bread that they baked themselves,” Kerzee said.
Left to right: Kerzee, Kelly Drury, Kendall Vanderslice and Christy Wright. Photo by Eric Grubb“Especially when people are so distrustful of institutions,” Johnson said, “it really helps.”
Do you agree that an act such as bread baking could help reduce skepticism of institutions? Are there gestures or actions your church leaders could employ to ease that tension?
As much as Simple Church is grounded in tradition, what congregants experience is unlike anything they’ve experienced before -- at least in church. Kerzee likens it to a weekly dinner party, noting that it’s much easier to invite someone to a dinner party than to a traditional worship service. St. Lydia's in Brooklyn has pioneered the model.
In New England, where 70 percent of Methodist congregations can’t afford a full-time pastor, its foreignness from church-as-usual and its low entry bar hold much appeal.
With folksy hymnody and simple prayers, dinner church in Grafton strikes a chord with the early-18th-century Methodism of founder John Wesley, said Rick McKinley, the director of congregational development for the UMC in New England. He said traditional churches across his region could easily add dinner church worship to their repertoires.
Dinner church “has the highly relational nature of early Wesleyan movements,” McKinley said. “People were face to face. It wasn’t about consuming a particular product in the way that modern churches consume Sunday morning worship or consume the programming that we’re offered. Simple Church is going back to this understanding of living into a relationship that starts with God.”
Instead of a traditional sermon, participants engage in conversation about the readings.
The conversation is the sermon
One recent Thursday evening, festive trappings made for a relaxed atmosphere as casually dressed worshippers trickled into the rented fellowship hall at the Congregational church. Instrumental music played through speakers in the background. Covered tables set for eight flickered with candlelight. Kerzee waved in new arrivals from atop a stepladder as he strung lights across the ceiling. Potluck contributions covered a table next to a hodgepodge of unmatched plates and bowls. Smells of sauteed onions and baking bread mixed with sounds of laughter in the kitchen.
Once the lights were up, Kerzee greeted everyone he knew with a hug, and many parishioners did the same.
Worship began with everyone standing in a circle and passing the Lord’s Supper bread to one another. It ended similarly almost 90 minutes later with everyone clinking glasses, as if someone had made a toast, before drinking together the wine (actually grape juice) of the cup.
Kerzee pours grape juice for Mark Orfalea. Photo by Alethia WilliamsAlong the way, they bowed heads for prayer and sang along to Kerzee’s guitar and the foot tambourine strapped across his sandaled toes. Participants easily picked up the words even if they’d never heard the tunes. Three children spontaneously got up and danced inside the circle.
Children left for 25 minutes of kids activities while adults got to sermonizing around their tables. This conversation, Kerzee emphasized, is the sermon. Johnson primed the pump with a five-minute reflection on the Gospel story of doubting Thomas. Then everyone had a chance to engage and create, which is what a younger generation hungers to do in church, Kerzee said.
“They’re not looking for something easy,” he said. “They’re looking for something they can give their whole lives to.”
At first, the front-table group was slow to open up. Kerzee, at ease in jeans and a faded Red Sox cap, offered a personal anecdote while urging them to “go deep” and feel free to disagree with each other.
In what ways could you create space for people to "go deep," either in worship or other contexts?
Finally, Marty Pelham, who shared that he’d felt estranged from Christianity for 30 years because he’s gay, said, “I’m ready.” He told what it had meant for him to attend Simple Church for the first time one week prior and why he had driven more than an hour to be there again.
“I came here last week, and I never felt so much like walking into a family,” said Pelham, who is seeking ordination in the Unitarian Universalist Association. He said the experience had enabled him to overcome what’s been for him a longtime stumbling block: the blood of Jesus and what it represents.
“Something shifted inside of me,” he said. “I suddenly realized that I can look beyond whatever I have heard in the past to what it can mean.”
Kerzee reads to the people gathered for dinner and helps spark conversation. Photo by Alethia WilliamsSpreading the word and sharing their experience
By staying true to the “simple” in its name, Simple Church has created a replicable model. The church encourages other congregations to use its resources for their own dinner worship services. Anyone may contact Kerzee and use prayers and hymns from the Simple Church website(link is external) free of charge.
Having internal consistency helps, Kerzee said. Since his college days in Texas, he has made simplicity a guiding principle for his life and a spiritual discipline, which includes limiting personal possessions and keeping his calendar clutter-free.
These practices, coupled with not having to prepare a weekly bulletin or sermon, free up time for the outreach that helps explain Simple Church’s growth from zero to 70 members over three years. Kerzee and Johnson regularly go door to door, inviting neighbors to visit Simple Church. They invite shoppers at farmers markets, too.
“If you have a party and you don’t invite anybody to it, you can’t be surprised when nobody comes,” Kerzee said. “So I make time to invite them.”
Members of Simple Church need not profess any confession or statement of faith. Nor are they expected to be members of solely one church; many also belong to churches that gather on Sunday mornings. At Simple Church, membership means participating regularly in congregational life, giving a proportion of income to the church, and living according to the model set by Jesus.
Prospects for replication are promising, said Casper ter Kuile, a Ministry Innovation fellow at Harvard Divinity School. His work includes researching how secular communities such as gyms and co-working spaces are bringing millennials together in ways that largely happened in church for prior generations.
“In an age of collapsing church membership, where are people going to become the person that they want to be and connect with other people?” ter Kuile said.
Many are discovering dinner parties, he said, where people facing grief or other transitions come together for a purpose.
Simple meals with fresh bread are the hallmark of Simple Church.“Simple Church has much more in common with these new groups on the secular landscape … than it does with a traditional Methodist church with pews and a traditional church setup,” he said.
Seeking out alternative sources of revenue
As easy as Simple Church’s worship might be to replicate, the trade-based revenue model is trickier to pull off. Still, millennials are eager to try.
Proceeds from bread baking will cover about a third of Simple Church’s $100,000 budget for the coming year, when the congregation will fly on its own for the first time following its initial three-year grant. Another third will come from congregants’ giving. The last third will depend on other fundraising, such as from Methodist organizations that support church planting.
When UMC congregations adopt an alternative revenue model, they are expected to derive income from a product or service that benefits the surrounding community, according to Paul Nixon, the UMC’s regional strategist for church planting in the Northeast. Then comes the harder part: generating a surplus to underwrite a substantial portion of church expenses.
At Kindred, a Simple Church affiliate in Houston, bread baking covers only 5 percent of the $190,000 budget. Another 50 percent comes from congregational giving and denominational support. The remaining 45 percent comes from facility rentals, such as office space for lawyers, writers, activists and others. That means the Rev. Ashley Dellagiacoma’s primary trade outside of ministry is property management.
Could outside enterprises help support your ministries? Or might they contribute to mission creep?
“I recruit tenants, negotiate leases, and even break out my tool belt when things need repairs,” Dellagiacoma said in an email. “On Wednesdays, I become a baker as we make fresh bread to sell at the organic market that rents out our hall each week. The same batch of bread provides us with a gift we can give away to the hungry and the lonely and becomes part of Holy Communion on Sunday. We invest in things that serve more than a single purpose. That’s something I learned from Simple Church.”
Bread baking is a new twist on the monastic tradition.At Be3, a United Methodist dinner church plant in Denver -- another Simple Church affiliate -- the congregation is discerning between two potential enterprises: a raw cafe that offers healthy meals to go and a business that matches youth with community service opportunities. Whatever the choice turns out to be, the revenue will be crucial for sustaining a church whose members spend their Sunday mornings outdoors in the nearby mountains, according to the Be3 pastor, the Rev. Lauren Boyd.
Simple Church doesn’t expect all its daughter congregations to bake bread. When Johnson launches hers later this year, for example, catering will provide the extra revenue.
For his part, Kerzee, who also designs websites as an additional revenue stream for the church, expects that enterprise will always be integral to supporting Simple Church. If all goes as planned, revenues will be brisk enough that the congregation’s proportional giving eventually won’t be needed to cover expenses. At that point, congregants’ support can go 100 percent toward mission projects.
Meanwhile, the vision calls for each of Simple Church’s daughter congregations to generate enough from enterprise that they can earmark 10 percent in their budgets to a fund for planting more dinner churches. Simple Church is on its way to setting the example. Its second daughter church is on track to open next year in Texas.
What in your church's life might be worth replicating? How could you resource others to do that in a sustainable way?
Besides the hilltop parsonage, not much remains from the predecessor North Grafton UMC. Four of the five last members have scattered. One no longer goes to church. Another joined a Baptist church, and a couple now attends a traditional Methodist congregation in another town.
But Sue Novia, the lifelong member who asked what a planter was, has joined Simple Church and now attends regularly with a Roman Catholic friend. They confide difficult situations involving family members, grief and addictions, and the congregation prays for them. She’s devoted to Simple Church, she said, because it’s “part of my old church” and also represents the future, especially when she sees kids, teens and young adults happy to be there.
“It’s not just like a regular church where you go, sit there, just listen and don’t talk,” Novia said. “We talk here. People are able to open up. Feelings come out about religion, about sharing your life’s experiences with somebody else and hearing theirs. That’s what makes it grow.”
Questions to consider:
- Do you agree that an act such as bread baking could help reduce skepticism of institutions? Are there gestures or actions your church leaders could employ to ease that tension?
- In what ways could you create space for people to "go deep," either in worship or other contexts?
- Could outside enterprises help support your ministries? Or might they contribute to mission creep?
- Simple Church gives away its resources as a way of creating a network of affiliates. What in your church's life might be worth replicating? How could you resource others to do that in a sustainable way?
FROM THE ALBAN LIBRARY
Leading Congregations and Nonprofits in a Connected World: Platforms, People, and Purpose by Hayim Herring and Terri Martinson EltonLeading Congregations and Nonprofits in a Connected World shares emerging practices for leading and organizing congregations and nonprofits in our increasingly networked lives. Drawing on studies of congregations across denominations, and nonprofits with historic ties to faith communities, Hayim Herring and Terri Elton share practical, research-based guidance for how these organizations can more deeply engage with their communities and advance their impact in a socially connected world.
Learn more and order the book »
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Alban at Duke Divinity School
Durham, North Carolina 27701, United States
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