Alban at Duke Divinity School at Durham, North Carolina, United States for Monday, 13 November 2017 "PRACTICAL WISDOM FOR LEADING CONGREGATIONS: Dwight Zscheile: We're in the innovation business" - Alban Weekly
Dwight Zscheile: We’re in the innovation business by Nathan Kirkpatrick
“Innovation” is a term not typically associated with religious institutions, which tend to be oriented toward conserving and maintaining tradition. Yet at its heart, the Christian church is about innovation—embodying God’s new life, hope, and community for the world. It is time to claim this identity amidst powerful disruptive forces in today’s world.The triune God’s mission is about innovation. God creates the cosmos from nothing and forms humanity for right relationships with God, one another, and the whole earth. When those relationships fall into estrangement, God patiently reforms community through Abraham and Sarah, Israel, Jesus, and the church. Jesus is the one in whom humanity is reborn (recapitulated). The church is a community of the Spirit giving witness to an alternative and hopeful future.
We live in a moment of profound social and cultural change fueled by digital technology and globalization. Organizations of all types are struggling to adapt to new patterns of belonging and participation. Many churches and church systems seem caught and at a loss, unsure what to do as established practices break down and people disengage. Long-treasured ways of connecting and supporting Christian communities do not seem meaningful or accessible to emerging generations or neighbors. Leaders try harder at the old patterns, but feel frustrated and drained by pushing against cultural currents beyond their control.
This is a moment to reenter the central stories of the faith, stories that are not about institutional success or progress, but God claiming and calling unlikely, fallible people into the adventure of God’s mission. This mission proceeds in the Bible through a great deal of messiness, error, and ambiguity, not the linear-sequential steps of a modern strategic plan. God is the great innovator, and God calls humanity into participation and partnership in that innovation. Fundamentally, we are not in control.
What does this mean for local churches and other Christian communities who find their communal life eroding amid these seismic cultural shifts taking place? We might take our inspiration from the stories of Abraham and Sarah, elders suffering the absence of children and a future, who are called by God into a nearly quarter-century of wandering before God’s promise is fulfilled. We might reenter the stories of the prophets, who redescribe the world in light of God’s presence and leadership in the face of empires and exploitation. We might look to Jesus, who relies upon the hospitality of the world as he embodies an alternative kingdom. We might indwell the narratives in Acts of the Spirit leading the apostles through improvised encounters with strangers as they share the hope of the gospel.
We might also learn from some of the best thinking about innovation that has emerged in recent years. As Peter Denning and Robert Dunham observe, innovation is the spread of a new practice in a community. It is less about leaders coming up with brilliant new ideas to sell to people than it is about listening empathetically to breakdowns in people’s lives and collaboratively discovering new stories and practices that offer a way forward.[1] The work of innovation in the face of tough challenges for which there are no easy answers belongs among the people facing the challenge, not just leaders.[2]
Many clergy and other religious leaders feel pressure to fix the church. The last couple of generations have seen tremendous energy put into various attempts to do so (church renewal movement, church growth movement, church health/effectiveness, restructuring, church planting, revitalization). These have not addressed the deeper problems, in part because they have largely been leader-driven. They have also missed the point in a fundamental way.
The root challenge for Christian communities today is cultivating Christian faith and discipleship in a cultural environment that no longer supports it. It is not so much a question of church and culture, but a deeper question of gospel and culture: what does it mean to live a life oriented around the gospel of Jesus in contemporary culture? This question gets far less attention than questions of how to do church differently because in some ways it is harder to answer.
We can begin to do so by listening empathetically to people’s lives and stories, hearing their longings and losses and reflecting together on where the gospel connects with them. We can experiment together with simple, accessible practices for spiritual formation and discipleship in daily life through which the gospel comes alive in us and for our neighbors. We can reorder congregational life around learning the gospel story and living these practices, knowing that unless we go deeper in this basic way, we have nothing unique to offer our neighbors or the world.
This requires a different way of leading. It is less about bringing energy to catalyze flagging participation in church programs and activities and more about tracing the energy of the Holy Spirit among the people of God. It is less about defining bold goals for institutional growth than refocusing the congregation’s life on cycles of listening, discerning, experimenting and reflecting at the grassroots. It calls for interpretive leadership—shaping an environment in which people can make sense of their lives and world in a Christian way.
God is the primary innovator and leader of the church. In a secular age, we have lost sight of this. Many congregations have thus lost their source of hope. It is only reentering and reclaiming the deeper stories and practices of God’s people in scripture and Christian tradition that we can discover a faithful future.
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The Rev. Dwight Zscheile, Ph.D. is associate professor of congregational mission and leadership at Luther Seminary in St. Paul, Minnesota. His most recent books include The Agile Church: Spirit-Led Innovation in an Uncertain Age (Morehouse, 2014) and Participating in God’s Mission: A Theological Missiology for the Church in America(with Craig Van Gelder; Eerdmans 2018).
[1] Peter Denning and Robert Dunham, The Innovator’s Way (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2010).
[2] See Ronald Heifetz and Marty Linsky, Leadership on the Line (Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 2002).
[1] Peter Denning and Robert Dunham, The Innovator’s Way (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2010).
[2] See Ronald Heifetz and Marty Linsky, Leadership on the Line (Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 2002).
IDEAS THAT IMPACT: INNOVATION
Faith & Leadership
Kevin Wright: Amazon, Whole Foods and the future of the brick-and-mortar church
Bigstock/Jonathan Weiss
Amazon’s acquisition of Whole Foods illustrates that innovation isn’t always about starting over but about understanding where and how a community gathers, writes the minister of education at The Riverside Church.
So why did this innovative company that leverages the benefits of not maintaining a traditional retail footprint recently seek to aquire Whole Foods Market for $13.7 billion? Isn’t Amazon aware of the challenges that a brick-and-mortar existence poses to entities ranging from shopping malls(link is external) to churches(link is external)?
Perhaps Amazon knows something that churches don’t.
American brick-and-mortar churches have not fared so well over the past decade(link is external). A decline in attendance and membership has driven churches and denominations to pour money into pursuing “innovative” ideas aimed at reversing the trend of fewer people in the pews. But in this rush to innovate, we risk dismissing elements of our churches’ current brick-and-mortar existence that might actually be vital to our way forward. When we are tempted to wipe the board clean and start over, a company like Amazon suggests that we take another look to see whether the foundation for innovation has not already been laid.
Bruno Aziza, a big data entrepreneur, explained recently on Forbes.com the genius behind Amazon’s acquisition: “Amazon’s move is a pretty clever one if you think about the luxury it will give the online company to reinvent and reengineer the process of buying, moving and selling goods.” Amazon seems to think that the secret to winning at retail doesn’t involve erasing traditional brick-and-mortar stores but rather capitalizing on their rich trove of localized data to better understand and align with consumers’ needs and life situations.
Amazon’s acquisition of Whole Foods is not the company’s first foray into brick-and-mortar retail. I recently visited the newest Amazon-branded bookstore in midtown Manhattan and quickly saw how it differentiated itself from other bookstores.
Small displays mounted beneath each book allowed customers to read reviews and obtain suggestions for other titles they might like. The store’s inventory was significantly smaller than a bookstore of comparable size (by roughly 5,000 titles, I later discovered) because each book was oriented with its cover facing outward, to attract the attention of customers. Although there was a checkout line, customers were able to complete their purchases with their smartphones and verify that the price they were paying in-store was the same as that online.
Every aspect of the store seemed engineered to welcome people into a love of reading while making the experience as intuitive and inviting as possible. In short, Amazon wanted to show that the brick-and-mortar bookstore, as a centuries-old institution, wasn’t dead yet.
I have never met anyone who wants to lead a dying church, but what does it take to lead a vital, living one? My instinct tells me that cultivating a vibrant church is becoming increasingly dependent upon a leader’s ability to be innovative and adaptive when encountering forces like cultural shifts, diminishing financial resources and changes in demographics. The question, then, for those of us who desire to be church innovators, is one posited by my friend the Rev. Dr. Theresa Thames: “How we do not drown in all the tradition and not be overwhelmed by innovation?”
Amazon helps us answer this question with its assertion that the need for bookstores and grocery stores has not just suddenly disappeared. Rather, the need for bookstores and grocery stores that can adapt to consumers’ changing preferences and habits has just become more apparent.
At my church, we’re exploring what it means to be a place that is accessible and adaptable to our community’s changing needs and habits while maintaining our core identity as the body of Christ. Guiding us in this work is a series of questions:
Where do people in our community gather? What types of spaces foster laughter, story sharing, contemplation and inspiration? What do those spaces look like, and why do they evoke these human responses?
How do people in our community gather? When are they in large groups? When are they in smaller, more intimate clusters? Are people gathering online in a Facebook comment thread or in a Twitter feed?
What do people in our community do when they gather? Are they buying things? Are they eating? What part of their gathering gives them support, encouragement or love?
My congregation has launched a number of experiments based on the data and reflections we’ve collected from wrestling with these questions.
We’ve changed the location and design of our fellowship coffee hour after studying cafes around the city and investing time in analyzing how our old space actually fostered isolation rather than personal interaction. We’ve also invested resources in developing strategies to help our digital church community interact with the programs that occur in our physical church space.
The results of these experiments are still unfolding. We’ve seen positive effects from our coffee hour revamp (doubled attendance and increased young adult presence), and we’re still exploring how podcasts and Instagram Stories can share narratives from and raise support for ministries like our food pantry and children’s summer enrichment program.
The call to innovate is not an appeal to sell every building or to scrap every organ. Rather, it is an invitation to delve deeper into exploring what has made our communities distinctively Christian throughout the ages and then imagine how those attributes might be reframed or reinterpreted for our changing world.
Amazon has wagered that brick-and-mortar bookstores and grocery stores still have a place in this world. I’m willing to wager that the same is true for brick-and-mortar churches as well.
Faith & Leadership
Victoria Atkinson White: What is innovation?
Bigstock / Igor Stevanovic
Innovation doesn’t have to be huge to be worthwhile. It can be a small experiment, a risk that won’t harm your institution but has the potential for measurable gain, writes the managing director of grants at Leadership Education at Duke Divinity.
At the same time, we know we cannot simply accept the glossy pictures of health and wellness splashed across magazines and websites; we know the difference between real and Photoshop. We each have to figure out what “healthy” means for our own age, lifestyle, medical history and goals. There is no “one size fits all” when it comes to health and wellness.
The same is true for innovation and the church. We know we need to innovate, and we don’t have to look far to find a top-10 list or a three-easy-steps webinar promising to change how we lead.
“Innovation” is a buzzword that sounds current and future-oriented, cutting-edge and idealistic, worthy of repetition and scale. We need innovation in the church; too many pews are emptying, and the church is losing (or some would say has lost) its voice in the community.
“We have to innovate!” becomes the battle cry to keep the heavy doors of our large and underutilized buildings open. Those within the walls know that change is needed, yet most hope the change will affect those outside (and not inside) the church.
But just as it is challenging to begin exercising regularly or eating less sugar, the idea of leading innovation sounds overwhelming -- expensive and laborious. The stories we hear and tell ourselves about rejuvenated institutions meeting the needs of those on the margins, filling their pews with new life and energy, are not always helpful. Ordinary leaders, churches and institutions worry that we don’t have the money, talent and scale to succeed.
And yet few innovations begin as big projects or grand ideas. The success stories are often years in the making. The scaled innovations that get recognized are preceded by painful and marvelous failures, seeds that were planted with the best of intentions.
A few weeks ago, a pastor was reflecting on a conference his church had offered. The topic was captivating, current and critical. The location was fantastic. The cost was minimal. The timing was perfect. But the church had experimented with targeting a specific age range of participants -- an innovation that backfired and significantly affected attendance. This small failure will now inform how the church innovates for future events.
Another church had its first Trunk or Treat during Halloween weekend this year. As it always does for community events, the church sent a flier to a local elementary school. But this flier was different in one important respect: it was English on one side and Spanish on the other. The turnout was three times what the church expected. To feed everyone, church members cleaned out the freezers and pantries and sent runners to buy more candy. This simple successful innovation -- communicating in English and Spanish -- will inform the congregation’s future events.
In both of these stories, a church tried something new, tweaked what had been done, looked at its ministries from new angles. That is innovation. It is taking a risk -- a survivable risk -- that, should it fail, would not result in a significant loss to the institution and, should it succeed, could result in real, measurable gain. The churches in the two stories had opposite outcomes, yet both came away with valuable lessons.
These are the kinds of stories I have the privilege of witnessing through the Innovation Grants offered to Leadership Education’s Foundations of Christian Leadership(link is external)participants. Each Foundations participant has the opportunity to apply for an Innovation Grant of up to $5,000 to put into practice what he or she has learned.
Most of the innovations they try will not likely scale or achieve recognition outside the immediate community. What is important is that these emerging leaders are taking risks, trying something new and learning from mistakes. They are changing the conversation they have in their communities, asking new questions, building leadership capacities and shifting mindsets. They are not starting something new just for the sake of change; they are building on the best parts of who they are and what they do.
That is the heart of traditioned innovation -- the very kind of innovation the church most needs.
The church has a solid foundation on which to build. We do not need to abandon the past. We need, rather, to carry the best of our tradition forward and faithfully innovate into new ways of bearing witness to the reign of God.
What is the small innovation your institution can afford to make today? At worst, you may learn a valuable lesson. At best, you may far exceed your expectations.
Faith & Leadership
A move to part-time clergy sparks congregational innovation
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
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?
“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 servicesWith 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?
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 multiweek 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. Columba
Pastor as ambassador through strategic use of timeA 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 nonfaith, 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 Mission
Vignec 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 UMC
For 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 UMC
Pastor as team member, sharing the pastorate with other part-timersWhen 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?
“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 laityOne 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?
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?
FROM THE ALBAN LIBRARY
Leading Congregations and Nonprofits in a Connected World: Platforms, People, and Purposeby 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.
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Alban at Duke Divinity School
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