PRACTICAL WISDOM FOR LEADING CONGREGATIONS
With singers from PCUSA congregations across Rochester, Urban Presbyterians Together holds a joint choir concert in October 2015 at Downtown United Presbyterian Church. Photos courtesy of Riverside Neighbors
Faith & Leadership
CONGREGATIONS, NEW FORMS OF CHURCH, CHRISTIAN LEADERSHIP, PASTORAL LEADERSHIP
A city's PCUSA churches band together in the face of ongoing decline
A city's PCUSA churches band together in the face of ongoing decline
CHURCHES COMING TOGETHER BRINGS LIFE, DEATH, AND RESURRECTION
A decade ago, two Rochester, New York, pastors wondered: What would happen if the city’s PCUSA congregations moved into an uncertain future together, instead of separately and alone? The answer: Life, death and resurrection.
Back in 2007, when the Rev. John Wilkinson and the Rev. Judy Lee Hay met regularly for coffee at the South Wedge Diner in Rochester, New York, they often talked about the plight of a growing number of the city’s churches from their denomination, the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.).
Wilkinson, the pastor of Third Presbyterian Church, and Hay, then the pastor of Calvary St. Andrew’s Presbyterian Parish, lamented the dwindling membership and financial decline at so many of Rochester’s PCUSA churches. Their own congregations were holding steady, but others weren’t doing so well. Two had already closed. Two others were barely holding on. Five were without pastors.
They knew that the decline they had been witnessing wasn’t unique to Rochester -- or to the PCUSA. It had been happening across the nation and throughout mainline Protestant churches for decades.
Both graduates of McCormick Theological Seminary in Chicago and both trained in community organizing, Wilkinson and Hay knew the importance of relationship building for any organization. They wondered: What would happen if Rochester’s PCUSA congregations moved toward an uncertain future together, instead of separately and alone?
Yes, they were all part of the same denomination, but as with most denominations, individual congregations typically worked in isolation, operating as though they were independent “franchises.”
If your church is part of a denomination, to what extent does it act as an independent franchise?
“Presbyterians have a connectional polity, but rarely do we live that out as congregations living toward their futures,” Wilkinson said.
Whatever the future might bring, how could the city’s PCUSA churches work collaboratively in ministry, mission and outreach to help a city with serious social ills? And how could they help and support fellow congregations facing closure work through that decision and perhaps explore other alternatives?“Nothing can guarantee church growth or success,” Wilkinson said. “But both for relationship building and strategic planning, we thought, ‘We’re better off together.’”
A network of congregations, a decade of collaboration
A year later, in 2008, Rochester’s then-existing 11 PCUSA congregations -- ranging in size from 150 members at Calvary St. Andrew’s to 1,300 at Third Presbyterian, and all by then with pastoral leadership -- launched Urban Presbyterians Together.(link is external) Now known as Riverside Neighbors -- to mark the addition of several suburban congregations in 2016 -- this loose network of PCUSA congregations has spent the last decade helping one another collaborate in ministry and face the future together.
What churches in your denomination are potential partners in ministry in your community?
For many, that future did not turn out as they might have hoped. Of the original 11 congregations, two are no longer in the denomination and five have closed or dissolved, some in the past year. But with the help and support of the network of PCUSA congregations and the Presbytery of Genesee Valley(link is external), some of those have re-emerged in innovative ways or have otherwise been able to keep a form of ministerial presence in Rochester.Wilkinson said the organization is intended not to replace the denomination but to supplement and support its efforts to help individual churches. Wilkinson appreciates the PCUSA denominational structure and how it sets up local presbyteries to serve as regional administrative bodies while still giving local congregations “enough freedom and flexibility without total chaos.”
“I’m a committed Presbyterian committed to our connectional polity, but I’m also an urban minister, so I care what happens to my own place,” he said.
The coalition’s commitment to the PCUSA hasn’t changed, Wilkinson said, but how the congregations relate to one another and to the Presbytery of Genesee Valley has evolved. The congregations have always been linked to the presbytery, but now they’ve been building relationships with each other as well.
“We now connect as a body rather than individual congregations,” he said. “We are better together, even as we face hard decisions.”
The Rev. Amy Williams Fowler, the leader of the Presbytery of Genesee Valley and a strong supporter of Riverside Neighbors and its ethos of collaboration, agrees.
“This is about building relationships from church to church, about being stronger, about being able to have a wider horizon of what needs and opportunities can be addressed,” she said.
A crowd gathers in the former Calvary St. Andrews sanctuary for the launching of the ROC SALT Mission Center in October 2017.
Building relationships and ministry in RochesterThose relationships -- and the ministries that can flow from them -- are greatly needed in Rochester.
What was once the nation’s first boomtown, thanks to the construction of the Erie Canal, now has the country’s fourth-highest child poverty rate and New York’s lowest high school graduation rate. The city wrestles with structural racism, and continues to feel the impact from numerous downsizings by manufacturing industry giants Eastman Kodak, Xerox and Bausch & Lomb.
“God calls us to change reality based on the values of our faith,” Wilkinson said. “In such a pronounced region where this stuff is real, that’s where the church’s presence is even more vital.”
Over the years, the Riverside Neighbors network has helped foster relationships among the city’s PCUSA congregations, which in turn have led to several joint ministry initiatives.
Congregations built a Habitat for Humanity house together. They have had joint worship services and choir concerts. They have hosted public conversations about race and sponsored reading groups about racial issues, studying, for example, such books as Debby Irving’s “Waking Up White: And Finding Myself in the Story of Race.”
To help connect Presbyterians from throughout the city, the group at the outset hosted get-acquainted dinners for laypeople and monthly get-togethers for pastors.
“It was really a support system for pastors who could say, ‘My church isn’t the only one wrestling with this particular issue,’” Hay said.
To strengthen bonds with the community, the group held “The Big Lunch” on the first weekend of June every year, with each congregation hosting a neighborhood dinner at its own location. These and similar efforts were about building capacity, Hay said.
“It was about conveying the message that Presbyterians are in the city, and that we’re committed to it,” she said.
To what extent is your denomination -- and your congregation -- a visible presence in your city?
In one of their most important accomplishments, the group formed Great Schools for All,(link is external) a grass-roots coalition of churches, community groups, businesses and nonprofit organizations working to improve Rochester schools. Great Schools has been helping create a network of socioeconomically diverse magnet schools in the city’s school system to draw students from throughout Rochester and surrounding suburbs. The movement, which initially grew out of after-school tutoring programs sponsored by Urban Presbyterians Together, has gradually gained traction, and last summer, the Rochester Board of Education approved a resolution to consider developing a regional magnet program.Ongoing decline, but new ways of ministry
But despite its success at forging relationships and helping congregations be in ministry together, Urban Presbyterians Together/Riverside Neighbors has not been able to halt the decline -- and in some cases, the closing -- of many member churches. Even so, some churches have worked together to find new ways to be in ministry.
In 2014, for example, South Presbyterian Church,(link is external) a historic 165-year-old church in southeast Rochester, sold its building to become a “church without walls,” with a variety of worship groups, outreach ministries, and educational and social opportunities in which members can participate.
For the past two and a half years, South Presbyterian has been linked with New Life Presbyterian Church,(link is external) often conducting ministries together. After months of discussion, New Life voted earlier this year to sell its building as well and become part of South Presbyterian, bringing with it the congregation’s own various ministries and programs.
The Rev. Laurie Ferguson, a Presbyterian minister and consultant hired by Riverside Neighbors through a grant from Leadership Education at Duke Divinity, helped facilitate those discussions and similar ones among other congregations facing possible closure. Ferguson said she’s been impressed by congregations’ willingness to have difficult conversations about the future.
How willing is your congregation to have difficult conversations about the future?
“They’re really turning over the ground and sowing seeds,” Ferguson said. “Even when they don’t yet know what will come of it, there is nothing wasted about putting their imagination and sense of possibility out there. They have hung in over this last year, even when it wasn’t clear where they were going.”For several years, two other congregations found a way to share pastoral leadership. After Laurelton United Presbyterian Church lost its part-time pastor in 2015, the Rev. Katie Styrt, who had been serving as associate pastor at Gates Presbyterian Church, stepped in and began splitting her time between the two congregations. That arrangement, in turn, forged other connections between the two churches.
“I wouldn’t have been as good a pastor at Laurelton if we hadn’t been doing joint ministry together,” Styrt said. “We had mission activities and get-togethers and book studies that Laurelton would not have had the capacity to do.”
The Rev. Melissa DeRosia, the pastor of Gates Presbyterian, said the two congregations formed deep relationships that created space for empathy in a way that didn’t exist before.
“We learned their stories, and they in turn have become part of our story,” DeRosia said. “The changing church is real and hard, but we’re figuring out what it looks like to be the body of Christ in the world today moving forward.”
Where do you see the body of Christ moving forward in the world?
But sharing a pastor wasn’t enough to prevent Laurelton’s demise. Much of Styrt’s ministry at Laurelton was about helping the congregation deal with its ongoing decline. Last month the congregation voted to dissolve, and its red-brick building has been sold.Styrt said the congregation met several times with Ferguson, and that those conversations were invaluable in helping Laurelton’s leaders clarify and process the tough changes that were ahead.
“She was good at logistics, but one of her real strengths was getting people who are sad and don’t want to talk to name what’s in the room,” Styrt said. “She got us to open up about the grief that was involved.”
Ministry continues at Calvary St. Andrews Church, as these South Wedge Food Program volunteers can attest.
Life, death and resurrectionDeRosia said that such conversations are an important and necessary part of ministry for the church today.
“This is about life and death and resurrection, and how we’re living into these new seasons together,” she said. “When people die, we don’t stand [by] their bed and yell at them over what failures they are, and we shouldn’t have that kind of language when we talk about a church dying either. We need to have ways to provide space for stories, to celebrate a life well-lived, hopeful for what the resurrection looks like for the church today.”
Sometimes, as other Riverside Neighbors congregations have discovered, resurrection can look very different from what’s expected. Life re-emerges in new shapes and forms.
Last year, after months of discussion and analysis, the congregation at Calvary St. Andrew’s voted to dissolve, and the church held its final service on Easter.(link is external) That was the congregation once served by Hay, the pastor who a decade ago, over coffee with Wilkinson, helped hatch the idea for Urban Presbyterians Together.
Founded in 1856, Calvary St. Andrew’s had held its own and been a vital place of ministry during Hay’s 40 years at the church. But after her retirement in 2013,(link is external) it went through a string of interim pastors and a period of decline.
Typically, the presbytery would have sold the building. In fact, several potential buyers, including a group of investors who wanted to convert the space to apartments, made purchase offers. But Riverside Neighbors and others in the community lobbied against selling the church.
Instead, they proposed using the space to launch a mission center that would tackle Rochester’s persistent poverty, education and race issues. They also wanted to continue operating Calvary St. Andrew’s long-standing food cupboard there. After study and discussion, the presbytery agreed.
Calvary St. Andrew’s is now home to the ROC SALT Mission Center (ROC for Rochester, SALT for Serving And Learning Together), which includes several new partnerships with area social justice programs and the former Calvary St. Andrew’s food bank, now known as the South Wedge Food Program.(link is external)
Martha Cuthbert, co-director of the South Wedge Food Program, is grateful that the Calvary St. Andrew’s building will continue to be an important presence in the community.
“It’s a rock in the neighborhood and something that would’ve been lost without so many people caring about this church,” she said.
Looking back over the past decade, Hay said that Riverside Neighbors accomplished much. Still, the losses have been real and deeply felt.
When Hay and Wilkinson first proposed their idea a decade ago, one of their goals was that no other PCUSA churches in Rochester would close on their watch.
“We lost that battle,” she said. “There is a sense of loss when you close churches like Laurelton or Lakeside, because Presbyterians are no longer in those locations doing ministry.”
The closing of Calvary St. Andrew’s last year was “deeply painful,” she said.
“Never in my wildest dreams would I have thought they would’ve closed the church I was at for 40 years,” she said.
But she’s glad to see ministry continuing in new ways in her old church’s neighborhood.
“That is crucial,” she said. “That’s what a church needs to be, anchored in a neighborhood and making a difference. We can’t save the world, but we can act locally and do some creative things.”
Questions to consider:
- If your church is part of a denomination, to what extent does it act as an independent franchise? What are the benefits of being a “franchise”? Of being in a denomination?
- What churches in your denomination are potential partners in ministry in your community?
- To what extent is your denomination a visible presence in your city?
- How specifically does your church manifest its commitment to your city?
- How willing is your congregation to have difficult conversations about the future?
- Where do you see the body of Christ moving forward in the world? What would that look like In your community?
Read more about Rochester's PCUSA churches »
CAN THESE BONES
A Faith & Leadership podcast »
EDUCATION, SEMINARY
Episode 9: Yolanda Pierce on answering God's call to lead the Howard University School of Divinity
CAN THESE BONES PODCAST: YOLANDA PIERCE
In this episode of "Can These Bones," co-host Bill Lamar talks with the Rev. Dr. Yolanda Pierce, the new dean of Howard's divinity school, about why she's excited about the challenges of theological education.
Why would someone give up a faculty position at Princeton Theological Seminary to become the dean of a divinity school? The Rev. Dr. Yolanda Pierce offers two answers. One is that God said go. The second reason, as she explains to co-host Bill Lamar, is that she wants to be at the table as theological education is shifting. She also talks about her identity as a Pentecostal who believes that the Holy Spirit is still speaking, what it means to be a public intellectual, and the need for conversations about justice and reparations.
Listen to all the episodes and learn more about the hosts.
More from Yolanda Pierce
Howard University School of Divinity(link is external)
Website: www.yolandapierce.com,(link is external) with links to her writing
Twitter:@YNPierce(link is external)
Address, Jan. 16, 2018, at Georgetown University: “Righteous Anger, Black Lives Matter, and the Legacy of King”(link is external)
The Root: 100 Most Influential African Americans 2015(link is external)
Chance the Rapper: “Blessings (Reprise)(link is external)”
Church of God in Christ(link is external)
Transcript
Bill Lamar: From Faith & Leadership, this is “Can These Bones,” a podcast that asks a fresh set of questions about leadership and the future of the church. I’m Bill Lamar.
Laura Everett: And I’m Laura Everett. This is the ninth episode of a series of conversations with leaders from the church and other fields.
Today, Bill, you’re talking with the Rev. Dr. Yolanda Pierce, who is in her first year as the new dean of Howard University’s School of Divinity. What should we know about Dr. Pierce?
Bill Lamar: Laura, Dr. Pierce is a superstar. She really is. She is included in The Root’s 100 Most Influential African-Americans. She is an ordained Christian minister with deep, deep roots in the wonderful Church of God in Christ. She’s a public intellectual, and she has a very, very wide-ranging intellectual interest, including literature and Africana studies and race, as well as womanist theology. She’s a Renaissance woman and an intellect of no mean ability.
Laura Everett: God bless the theologian who decides to enter into administration in theological education in this moment. Let’s listen to your interview.
Bill Lamar: Yolanda Pierce of Howard Divinity School is joining us on “Can These Bones.” Dean Pierce, thank you very much.
Yolanda Pierce: Thank you for having me.
Bill Lamar: What does it mean to be a public intellectual? You’ve been described as such. What does that mean?
Yolanda Pierce: So, Chance the Rapper says, “I speak to God in public,” right? I want to have conversations about God in public life.
Bill Lamar: Could you get me an interview with him?
Yolanda Pierce: Yes, yes, I would love to. I hope he listens to this and we can all go to Chicago and hang out with him.
Bill Lamar: I hear he writes big checks.
Yolanda Pierce: And we could use one: Howard University School of Divinity.
So I’m on Twitter a lot, and Facebook, and cable news and blogs and podcasts and TV, including a TV show on TV One.
The reason I do that is not because I have anything in particular to say that’s extraordinary. It’s simply to say that we need more public voices who are claiming their faith, who are unapologetically black, unapologetically Christian and willing to say there’s a different way. There’s another way to do this. There’s a way that you can walk with Christ that actually looks different than these other models out there.
So to me, to be a public intellectual is to allow myself to actually be vulnerable in public, to talk about my faith, to talk about the work that I do, and to recognize that more people will see me on a television show or will read something that I write for Time magazine than will ever read all of the academic articles and books and essays that I’ve written.
In the classroom, I have 15, 20, 30 students, maybe, per semester, but in the public sphere, if I’m on MSNBC or CNN, millions of people view me. The problem, of course, with that, is you get the backlash, right? You get the people who write you, and you get the hate mail, and you get the death threats even. But I believe that we are, as Christians, called to do this publicly and unapologetically.
Bill Lamar: You are described, in almost all the literature that I’ve researched, as a Pentecostal, that you name and own that tradition. And I think it is one that is misunderstood, and in some precincts maligned. Can you help thicken what Pentecostalism means, for those who really don’t know?
Yolanda Pierce: I was born and raised in the Church of God in Christ. It is the largest African-American Pentecostal denomination in the world. And that will be and always is my home, where I identify myself. I grew up in a very rich, deeply Pentecostal tradition.
It is a tradition that has been maligned for a number of different reasons. I think that there are often people who don’t think that Pentecostals are interested in education, and I am someone who has pursued several degrees and has a Ph.D. So I want to say that that’s a certain kind of stereotyping that has often happened with Pentecostalism.
I think that there’s a way that people only understand Pentecostalism as a static, bodily worship, without an understanding that undergirding Pentecostalism is a deep pneumatology, a theology of the Holy Spirit. And many Pentecostals themselves have a deeply nuanced understanding of their theology.
But I think that I still identify and remain a Pentecostal today because I believe in the work and the power of the Holy Spirit. I believe that God is still moving in the world. I believe that the Holy Spirit is still speaking. I believe that it’s only the power of the Holy Spirit that allows us the possibility of breaking down some of the barriers that we’ve created and erected in our nation and in our world.
So God is moving. And the Holy Spirit is present and alive. And instead of, for Trinitarian Christians, the Holy Spirit being the redheaded stepchild of the Trinity, as a Pentecostal, I affirm its rightful place in the Godhead as active, alive, present and here with us.
Bill Lamar: So there are seismic shifts in theological education. Will it be brick-and-mortar? Will it be online? The economic model for theological education is shifting, changing, maybe broken. Students are amassing massive amounts of debt. There’s a lot going on.
Yolanda Pierce: There is.
Bill Lamar: And you said yes to a deanship. Share with us why.
Yolanda Pierce: So one part of the story of saying yes to a deanship is that I’ve learned to obey God. God said go, and I said yes.
The other part of the story is that, as you mentioned, theological education is in crisis. It will look radically different in 10 years than it looked a generation ago. So I decided I actually wanted to be at the table as it’s shifting, as it’s changing, growing and perhaps even declining.
What should it look like? What should it look like in a landscape when we have people who are spiritual but not religious? What should it look like when we have a lot of people who consider themselves “nones” -- n-o-n-e-s -- not belonging to any particular religious tradition? What should it look like when we know that now less than 50 percent of those who have theological education will actually end up doing primary pastoral ministry? Most are not going to be pastors or preachers or ministers at churches anymore. So what does theological education look like when you are no longer training primarily pastors?
As I was asking myself these questions for the years that I was a professor at Princeton, I decided I needed to be on the other side of the table helping to shift it, helping to change it, helping to make space and room for those who very much feel that they have a vocation, a calling from God, but that vocation might not necessarily lead them to the pulpit on Sunday mornings.
Bill Lamar: You know, some years ago when I first went back to work at Duke Divinity School at Leadership Education, one of the things that my colleagues were considering was, How do you train people to be Christian institutional leaders?
One of the anecdotes that I shall never forget is Will Willimon, once he was elected bishop in the United Methodist Church from the deanship at Duke Chapel -- he said once he was elected, he was given a set of keys and he was given a lawyer’s telephone number. That was the conclusion of his training to be a bishop.
What would you say about the training for this work, the preparation for this work, and also the change, the shift in scale and scope, from being a professor to leading a school?
Yolanda Pierce: So here I would say that the African-American Christian context actually has a leg up on the crisis situation, by which I mean that many of our pastors have traditionally been bivocational. Many of our pastors have always occupied a vocational calling for the church, but also something else. They’ve learned how to merge their “something else” -- their other identities as a schoolteacher, a principal, a business person -- and also what they do in terms of their labor for the body of Christ.
So what I’m interested in are those conversations with people who have been able to see that the work that they do for ministry may not be their primary job. It may not be the job that pays the bills, and yet it is also what their heart is. It’s where their purpose meets them; it’s where their joy is. How do we prepare people to pursue their joy? It’s not easy. There’s no Joy 101 class.
Except the people who come to seminary, who come to divinity school, very much do so because they have a calling. They sense that God is moving in their lives. They want to respond to that calling, even if they know that that calling might not lead them to leadership within a church setting.
So the transition for me was -- instead of thinking about, in my own classroom, as a professor, “What classes am I going to teach? What is my own personal research? What would I like to talk to my students about?” -- to thinking about, “In 10 years, will my students have a job? In five years, will these increasing numbers of women who cannot find a church position find a place to use their theological education?” The question that I occupy myself with now is, “Is the loan debt burden of an M.Div. actually worth the degree?”
Those are the questions that occupy me in a way that I never actually had to think about as a faculty member whose focus was her own research and writing and teaching.
Bill Lamar: What if the answer to that question is, “It’s not worth it”?
Yolanda Pierce: That’s a tough, tough answer. For some people, it may not be worth it. We might actually have to see the decline of some seminaries and divinity schools, the way that we’ve seen declines in mainline denominations.
Some things might die, but other things will grow. And if as Christians we consider ourselves a resurrection people, some things die so that other things can be called to life.
I think that theological education has to be streamlined. I think it will look radically different. I think it will be smaller. I think we will continue to see the closing of schools, and we’ll see the mergers of other schools. That actually doesn’t worry me. Instead of us thinking about that as crisis, let’s think about that as potential and possibility.
Bill Lamar: So you see it as opportunity?
Yolanda Pierce: Absolutely. Opportunity. And so what the world needs now are people who are not only theologically trained but who are open to the realms of politics and sociology and business and health care. All of these different realms where we need people who have a vocational calling. And that vocational calling, like I said, might not be the pulpit.
What would our health care system look like if not only did we have single payer health care, but if we had theologically trained people who were working in tandem as chaplains, as bioethicists, as people who are literally on the front lines of health care? Because you’re caring for both the body and the soul. So let’s talk about health care and theological education as a growth area.
Bill Lamar: I remember years ago I would read “Theology Today” and Princeton would advertise their doctor of ministry program, and the language they used was that of weaving. It seems like you are casting a vision of weaving, of an interdisciplinarity -- that a theological education can be a centering, a ballast for deepening conversations in other fields of inquiry and in other areas of practice. Am I hearing that?
Yolanda Pierce: That’s exactly what I’m hoping. I’m hoping that people will think about the things that they are passionate about -- like I said, be it health care, be it ethics and business -- and say, “What does my theological education say about this? What does our theological education say in terms of interreligious dialogue? What is our theological education teaching us about how do we deal with politics in the 21st century?”
And so there’s this weaving and meshing and quilting together of various disciplines, but theological education can be at the center of that. I want more men and women of faith, whatever faith tradition that may be, to be at the center of important national and international conversations.
Bill Lamar: Traditions such as ours -- I mean, people speak of the black church, but it’s more appropriate to say the black churches -- it’s a very diverse tradition.
Yolanda Pierce: That’s right, exactly.
Bill Lamar: But in the precincts where our tradition is conservative, and not just in our tradition but in others, how do you think about interreligious dialogue? Because the landscape has become much more diverse, in terms of practice. You mentioned earlier about the nones. How does theological education shift, when before, we were in an imaginary -- a Christendom where the culture belonged to Christianity? How do you help to do that kind of work?
Yolanda Pierce: I love what you’re saying about the rich diversity of black churches, and I think that that’s worth sort of pausing for a second, because there is no monolithic black church experience, nor is there a monolithic white church experience, as well. There are varieties of Christianity.
And so one of the things that I see is, within many African-American contexts, a deep theological conservatism, but socially, politically, quite liberal, right? What that allows for are opportunities to come together, opportunities to rally, to protest, to have conversation partners.
What do African-American Christian churches, of whatever variety of denomination, have in common with their Muslim brothers and sisters? Quite a bit, right? And it’s not just about shared theological texts, but for many, it’s their experience of being peoples at the margins. What it means to constantly be under surveillance, what it means to be the threat, the national threat.
And so under all of these structures are opportunities to do interreligious dialogue, and the interreligious dialogue matters because people’s lives are impacted because of their faith. That’s what matters. So I see interreligious dialogue as absolutely necessary for the flourishing of the church.
Bill Lamar: For our listeners who have either found themselves or will find themselves in a very similar situation, where you go from pastoring a church to leading a district as a superintendent, or a conference or a diocese as a bishop, what very practical things did you have to shift in your mental model to move from that classroom experience to managing budgets, managing people, dealing with cultivation of resources, friend raising, fundraising?
Talk to me about that, because many of our leaders have those kinds of transitions, and I’m sure you can teach us something.
Yolanda Pierce: Nothing prepares you for that.
[Laughter]
Bill Lamar: Thank you.
Yolanda Pierce: So all my years of education, and Ph.D., and years teaching as a professor -- nothing prepared me for that. It is wholly other. And because nothing prepared me for that, I now realize we have to actually create a framework to prepare people for that. We need to teach people how to deal with budgets. Many pastors, of course, are already dealing with budgets, but budgets at an even higher scale.
We need to teach people some very practical skills about fundraising and philanthropy. We need to teach people, How do you write grants? How do you solicit grants? How do you fundraise? How do you find resources for your churches or your religious organizations? Those are actual classes that we can implement. Those are actually skills that we can teach. We just haven’t done it.
And so I’m looking back on my own experience. I fell into this, and I’m learning as I go. And I’ve had great teachers and mentors. The mentorship model is important. The way that, for seminaries and divinity schools, we send students to churches to do a field education experience. We assign them a mentor; we understand that they’re under a system of apprenticeship, for better or for worse. We need that in organizational structures.
I need a mentor to be able to walk me through some of the crises that are inevitably going to come, as I am now running an organization and no longer just a teacher in the classroom. But classes can prepare people to do that.
I remember my challenge sitting before an Excel budget spreadsheet. Like, “OK, Lord, I need you now.” And the Lord was like, “The answer to your question is go take a class and learn how to do some Excel spreadsheets.”
And I really did. I really had to learn some basic skills that, frankly, I would wish that we were teaching in college, let alone in graduate school, as preparation for what the work actually looks like.
I say to pastors, I ask them, “How much time do you spend sitting quietly listening to God, you know, preparing your sermons, versus how much time do you spend fielding phone calls from plumbers and someone working on the roof and someone …?” And you laugh, but I know the case is, right, is that ...
[Laughter]
Bill Lamar: I fixed a toilet the other day.
Yolanda Pierce: So precious little time in that golden space of waiting to hear God speak for your Sunday sermon, and a lot of practical time dealing with just the issues of life. We can teach those skills, but we have to be honest that those are skills that need to be taught.
Bill Lamar: One of the things you remind me of is I have to tell myself very frequently that those things, too, are holy.
Yolanda Pierce: Absolutely.
Bill Lamar: And those things make possible the heart of the life of the church. Hearing the voice of God, following God, being swept up into the mystery, and swept up in the transformation of the world as God leads us in that direction.
Yolanda Pierce: That’s such a beautiful thought, to think about that form of labor as holy. My first few weeks as dean, I think, I was frustrated because I wanted to sit at the table. I had such grandiose ideas: “We’re going to transform theological education.” And instead, I’m going through 150, 200 emails a day. And I’m like, “So how is this transformative?”
But that work is holy. It matters that our students have transcripts. It matters that we talk to the financial aid office. And so I’m learning on the ground that all of the tasks that I am giving unto God actually contribute to my students’ vocation.
Bill Lamar: What brings you the most joy in this new work?
Yolanda Pierce: That’s a tough question. For a long time, I don’t think I could answer it, because I just had a lot of fires and frustrations, and so it didn’t feel like much joy.
What I say now is that I know I’m planting seeds. I’m planting seeds of crops that I might not even see grow or come to fruition, but the small changes that I’m making at Howard, the skills that I’m learning which help me to grow as a scholar, a professor, as an administrator, are seeds, and they are being planted. And I will continue to water them, and I might not see the crops grow.
So it brings me joy to know that in every little small area, progress is being made, even if I can’t necessarily put my hands quite yet on the progress.
Bill Lamar: What is frustrating you?
Yolanda Pierce: OK, so what is frustrating me? This is my first experience at an HBCU, historically black college or university. There are only in the country now six HBTIs -- that stands for historically black theological institutions.
It is frustrating for me to see that there are only six, because the vast majority of HBCUs were actually founded as training grounds for ministers and teachers. And so hundreds of [institutions] in the 19th century were founded to train black men and women for teaching, for ministry. And we are now down to six. And so it’s frustrating to me that we don’t sometimes recognize the legacy and the foundation of these institutions, and value them.
I left a very resource-rich institution, Princeton, where I learned so much and gained so much, and I am now at a very resource-strapped institution, whose legacy is so incredible.
But I’m frustrated with how there isn’t a narrative that theological education owes its debt to these men and women of African descent who sent their sons and daughters to these schools in the 19th century and said, “Learn the word of God.” We owe a debt to that, and we don’t recognize and we don’t repay the debt that we owe.
Bill Lamar: I am always intrigued by people who can take the sentimental and flip it, who can look at things at a slant. So one of your quotes: “I’m not interested in most conversations about equality. To whom would you like to be equal, given a broken and morally bankrupt system? Do you want to be equal to the persons, forces and systems which generate the very terms of your oppression? I am, however, interested in the weightier matters of law, justice and freedom. How can we act justly, love mercy and walk humbly?”
That’s heavy. Talk to us about that quote.
Yolanda Pierce: So I’m a theologian. And I spend a lot of time thinking and writing and speaking about the heart of the matter, for me, which is how we talk about God, how we talk to God, how we listen to God. And these past couple of years in particular in the United States, given our political climate, I’ve been thinking about what really matters.
We have a lot of conversations about equity, a lot of conversations about fairness, a lot of conversations about equality, and I don’t feel like those conversations get us to the heart of the matter. And so let’s talk about justice. Let’s talk about reparations. Let’s talk about repairing and restoring.
It’s the way in which people want to have a conversation about forgiveness, but they don’t want to have a conversation about reparations. They want to talk about how do we get along, but they don’t want to talk about the wounds and the deep hurts that undergird the disease that keeps so many of us apart.
So I’m for plain talking and for truth telling. I think, actually, this is the work of the gospel. How do we begin to tell the truth? How do we begin to let those who have been silenced actually speak?
I’d love to talk to people about reconciliation, but reconciliation is the end of the process. Reconciliation is at the very end; that’s what you do right before you go home. Instead, the conversation has to be about this truth telling. It has to be about examining and cleaning the wounds. It has to be about repairing and restoring.
And I find that many Christians are actually uncomfortable with those conversations, even though we have this theological language. We are so quick to point to the healing; we’re so quick to want to get together and have a wonderful ecumenical prayer meeting where everyone leaves thinking, “Look at all of us, and look how wonderful we are.”
Instead, the deep-down, dirty work of what it means to be in community and fellowship with one another, that will require tears and will require sacrifice and will require some people giving up their privilege -- very few people want to talk about that. So that’s where I insert myself.
Bill Lamar: I want to ask again the question you ask at the end of that quote. So many people are trying to get traction around these questions: How can we act justly? How can we love mercy? How can we walk humbly? How?
Yolanda Pierce: We have to believe that that framework actually will take us somewhere. I think it starts there. And so the questions of justice -- we also have to talk about justice for whom, right? And we often don’t want to talk about that.
What I’m trying to suggest here are uncomfortable conversations that take for granted that we want to see a more just world, that take for granted that at the heart of the Christian vocation is this vocabulary of love. And so if we take that for granted, and if we actually believe that humility and humbleness are values and virtue, then these conversations about justice fundamentally shift.
So we can’t, for instance, talk about law enforcement or the criminal justice or injustice system, right, unless we’re talking about justice for whom, by whom, to benefit whom.
I’m taking for granted that there are men and women who very much have at their foundation a sense of this corporate identity rooted and grounded in love and humility and justice. And those are the people that I very much want to call my family of faith. I am deeply concerned about how the title, the language, the label of Christian gets co-opted by a group that is at the far right, and those of us who deeply value what it means to be called, to be a Christian, to be a follower of Christ, somehow don’t get to insert ourselves in those conversations.
So I’m saying, “No, I will not yield the language of Christianity, the language of love, the language of justice, the language of humility and humbleness, to one group. That is my language, and it belongs to me, and I get to insert myself into that conversation.”
Bill Lamar: Finally, I am sure that part of the reason that you are as ebullient and hopeful as I find you to be is because in your mind you’re carrying some students, students currently enrolled at Howard Divinity School, who are bright, gifted, who you think really can change the church in the world. Without giving names, protecting the identity of innocents …
Yolanda Pierce: I have so much hope when I meet young people, not just folks in seminary and divinity school. When I meet the young men and women who are chanting in the streets of Ferguson, and they’re 16 and 17 years old; when I meet undergraduates at Howard who are serving as chaplain assistants and at 20 years old are still saying, “There’s something here in this faith for me”; when I meet the men and women who leave behind everything, sometimes including their own families, to pursue theological education, to go to divinity school, to go to seminary, to take on the loans and the debt, to simply say, “God has called me to do a work, and that work is urgent,” it gives me such deep hope.
I see that right now, even though we are at this crisis point, it is also a “potential” moment. It is also a kairosmoment, in a sense. And so I have a lot of hope when I see folks out at a Black Lives Matters rally, when I see them protesting at Capitol Hill, and being here in D.C., the center of so much protest, the center of so much of the resistance movement.
I have so much hope when I see young people who are 14 and 15 or 25 and 30, because they are not giving up on the idea that their faith, that their deep involvement in religious communities, matters. That gives me a great deal of hope for what the future of religion looks like, what the future of faith looks like, and the idea that this interreligious dialogue of which we have to be a part is the possibility for freedom for a lot of different groups of people.
Bill Lamar: Dean Pierce, this has been wonderful. As we say in the tradition of the black churches, “May the Lord God bless you real good.”
Yolanda Pierce: Real good. Real good. Thank you so much.
Bill Lamar: Hope to talk to you again soon. Thank you.
Yolanda Pierce: Thank you, Rev. Lamar.
Laura Everett: That was my co-host Bill Lamar’s conversation with Yolanda Pierce, dean of the Howard University School of Divinity. Bill, there is so much to discuss in this, but first I want to say that any theologian who starts her exploration of what it means to be a public intellectual by quoting Chance the Rapper, to me, is an exceedingly good place to start: “I speak to God in public, I speak to God in public / He keep my rhymes in couplets.” It’s so good, Bill, and it’s so right.
Bill Lamar: I was really taken away by Dean Pierce’s ability to be able to speak the language of the theological academy and the language of administration, but also the language of some of the highest forms of popular culture. She’s able to synthesize so many things so well, and that’s part of the reason we’ve spoken with her on “Can These Bones.”
Laura Everett: Let’s talk about what it means to be a public intellectual. It’s a risky move, especially in a field that prizes surety and declarative statements.
I’ve followed Dean Pierce on Twitter for a while -- she’s @YNPierce -- a really remarkable woman who both asks questions in public and engages with her community. What do you think is at stake for someone who’s a new dean of a seminary serving intentionally in the role as a public intellectual?
Bill Lamar: I think a lot is at stake, because when she speaks, she speaks also for an old and storied institution. And so she always has to be very careful, in my opinion, about what she says and how others may read it, and then how it may cast light or potential shadow upon the school.
I think because of her constituency and the persons with whom she speaks, and those she’s recruiting, that her social media presence is probably helping to enlarge the footprint of Howard University School of Divinity. As I take a look at her Twitter feed, there are very light things that she may tweet about; there are also political and theological things. So it seems to me that her strategy is to just be authentic and comfortable. And that same authenticity seems to be what guides her deanship.
Laura Everett: This is so resonant for me, that question about authenticity and interactivity. When I teach church leaders about using social media for ministry, I remember the time I was teaching a group of bishops of a denomination that shall remain nameless to protect them on this. I was trying to help them learn how to speak to God in public, how to speak a word of blessing to the people, and ask questions. And I was trying to teach that sometimes that means being vulnerable, asking questions, acknowledging what we don’t know and learning from the people that we’re interacting with in public.
I made this grand presentation, and one of the bishops told me that in his tradition, after being elected, the chief lawyer pulled him aside and said something to the effect of, “Now that you are a bishop, everything you say must be a declarative sentence. Do not wonder aloud, because people will take your word as gospel.” It didn’t give him the space. He had been explicitly told by his tradition, “Do not ask questions in public, because of your status.”
And so I think about the balancing act of someone like Dean Pierce, who is asking questions and interacting with people at the same time as she is interacting and representing an institution -- how hard that is. I know you’ve had that challenge, as well, or you’re thinking about it, also leading a storied institution and trying to speak of God in public.
Bill Lamar: I would say this, Laura, that whoever gave that advice -- this is very, very poor advice. I mean, when you cease to wonder, when you only lead in prose and think in flat, one-dimensional ways, and you can’t stir the poetry in the soul, or the grand visions of the world as we think it ought be, or as we speculate that God intends for it to be, that’s the death knell.
When I think about leading a place like Metropolitan, really being blessed by our church to lead this church, I think about wanting to be as authentic as I am both in the church and in other spheres, so that I don’t have the burden of trying to be three or four Bill Lamars.
The Bill Lamar at home; the churchy, preachy Bill Lamar; the Bill Lamar the advocate or the guy testifying at city council; or the Bill -- you know, it’s just too much to try to keep up with three or four different people in one dark body, as Du Bois might say. So I’m trying to be one whole person.
I want there to be joy. I want there to be laughter. I never forget that I’m serving Metropolitan. I mean -- really, this may be too nerdy and in the weeds, and this is why there’s the magic of editing -- but I’ll never forget in theology talking about the hypostatic union of the divinity and humanity of Christ.
So for me, I feel like there is a hypostasis between just Bill Lamar the regular guy and Bill Lamar the pastor, institutional guy. I don’t really separate it. And it means I’m not carrying a burden; it means that I’m integrated, or at least becoming as integrated as healthily as I can be. I think that Dean Pierce offers us a really, really good model in that.
Laura Everett: I so appreciated her awareness, too, that there is an evangelical role she plays by speaking in communities that would never read her books or her essays or hear her preach, but because she is being intentional about interacting with folks on social media, that she’s in conversation with people who will never enter the church, and that’s OK, and that she actually needs to be doing that in order to be fulfilling her vocation and preparing pastors to serve in a religiously diverse world. I really appreciated that wisdom.
Bill Lamar: You know, one of the things, Laura -- and you were one of the persons I talked with early on -- I was very, very reticent about joining the social media movement, because I saw it as, well, I don’t know, like, ego-driven.
Laura Everett: Yeah.
Bill Lamar: Like, who would care what I’m thinking, what I’m eating, where I am? But what I’ve realized is that if there is something that is of import to you and you want to share it and you want conversation partners to deepen your thought or to extend it, that social media becomes an excellent tool.
So one of the things I’d say to our listeners is it doesn’t matter how big or small you think your platform is, the ideas that animate you probably animate other people. And social media, for me, has been a great place to engage that.
Laura Everett: Yeah.
Bill Lamar: I think that iron does indeed sharpen iron, and it’s not the perfect venue for all kinds of conversations, but social media has been helpful. I think I could probably engage it more. But there are things that happen in the course of a day or a week, or if something says to me, you know, you should tweet this, you should put this on Facebook -- and I think it really has helped some conversations that I’ve had with folks along the way, with people that I see regularly and those I don’t see regularly.
Laura Everett: So Bill, let’s shift just a second to move from Twitter to toilets, because you and Dean Pierce were joking about the holy labor of the mundane, of things -- for you, fixing the toilet.
And, Lord Jesus, did I resonate with the idea of trying to do the work that is in front of me when there are 150 emails! I’m good at many parts of my ministry, but email is not one of them. And I really appreciated hearing Dean Pierce speak about how all of those things can be tasks given unto the glory of God.
Bill Lamar: You know, I think first of all about your frightening alliteration of “toilets” and “Twitter.” I’m sure that there’s someone who is not very happy about that.
Laura Everett: I learned to alliterate from you, Bill.
Bill Lamar: But anyway, I really appreciated Dean Pierce talking about all of the very small things, the mundane things, the minutiae. I remember one of my professors talking about the tyranny of the immediate, all of those immediate things that need to be tended to.
And I think as leaders -- many of those listening, I’m sure, will resonate with this -- you do what you have to do. You know, there are things that I could have called someone else to do, but it needed to be done, and I do it. I think the challenge is that you can lose the energy necessary for leadership if you do that all the time. I think you have to learn how to manage it.
Part of it, I think probably for both Dean Pierce and for us, as we strive to become better leaders, Laura, is you want to be willing to do the things that everybody else in the organization is doing so that you can show that you’re a servant, so that you can show that you are willing to put as much skin in the game as others.
But then there comes a time when if you continue to do those things, then there’s a mission creep, a possible brain drain, and you’re focusing on things that could take you off mission, off vision, off focus. So for me, it becomes a balancing act.
And I think for both Dean Pierce and for us, it means we’ve got to find the secret sauce for the team that we build around us, both paid and volunteer, clergy and lay, that really, really helps to get that work done. I know that Dean Pierce and her colleagues are trying to find the people who can become a part of that vision, to really embrace the vision she has for the School of Divinity at Howard.
Laura Everett: Well, and she’s someone who so clearly has a strong vision that is animating your work. When you were speaking with Dean Pierce, what did you notice about how she holds on to that vision of what a Christian institution like the Howard University School of Divinity can be?
Bill Lamar: Well, I’ll tell you this, Laura. If you’re in Dean Pierce’s presence, you feel this exuberance, this energy; she embodies it. I mean, her physicality just exudes this love for the church and this love for -- if you remember a portion of that interview after I was trying to figure out why on God’s earth would she take such a difficult challenge as theological education is undergoing so many shifts, she was very clear that she wanted to be a part of the new as it emerged, that some things may need to die so that other things live.
So she’s got a clear sense of wading into waters that are not necessarily tranquil seas. And I think, for many of us, we’ve got to understand that we are called into seas that are not always tranquil.
And her early answer, from the beginning of the interview, about why would you do this -- she said, “Because God called me to it.” And on the one hand, you hear that, and that sounds, you know, trite, Sunday schoolish, but it came from a deep, deep place of knowing when God indeed is sending you forth for work and trusting that you will not be abandoned while you’re trying to accomplish that mission.
So I walked away from her as a leader believing that if anybody could wade through these tumultuous waters, it would indeed be Dean Pierce.
Laura Everett: She has such a strong sense of the active, dependable power of the Holy Spirit.
Bill Lamar: Yes.
Laura Everett: I heard her say only the power of the Holy Spirit allows us to break down the barriers that have divided us. I really appreciated that animating sense in her, that the spirit of God is active, active still.
I would argue a little about it being a “redheaded stepchild” -- as a redhead.
[Laughter]
Just to quibble a little bit.
But no, seriously, that she -- it came through so clearly in your interview, Bill, that what allows her to do this work is a sense that God’s provision is present and that she is planting seeds, and she might not see the crops. That she is holding both of those things in her hands, this sense of God’s provision, but also that she is working a good work that she may not see the fruit of. And that mindset is something that I want to hold on to as I also strive to lead a historic institution that is trying to find its second or even third act at this point.
Bill Lamar: And, I think, her profound faith that God is the one who will bring the work to completion.
And it reminded me, as I asked her the question about being a Pentecostal -- because so many people have characterizations about what that means that are just based in ignorance and caricatures that are very, very unimaginative -- her talking about the Spirit reminded me of what Willie Jennings shared with me about a commentary he was writing as a theologian about the book of Acts, where he says that the Holy Spirit ultimately does a couple of things. One, the Spirit blows us into places where we would not normally go -- and I find that to be very true. And the Spirit blows us into people with whom we would not normally dialogue.
And so I really think as we do the work of leadership, expecting the Spirit to be alive and at work, we can expect God to blow us into places we may never have considered, as the Spirit did indeed blow Dean Pierce into Howard School of Divinity, and to blow us into people, resources, conversations in a religious dialogue that we might not normally choose. So I really feel like the Spirit’s at work in what we are trying to do and what our listeners are trying to do as they sense God’s hope of life in some “dry bones” situations.
Laura Everett: Listeners, we hope you hear that vision of trusting the Spirit at work in your life, as we heard it at work in Dean Yolanda Pierce’s. Thanks for the interview, Bill.
Bill Lamar: Thank you, Laura. And thank you for listening to “Can These Bones.” This was a whole lot of fun. There’s more about Dean Yolanda Pierce, including links to her writing, at www.canthesebones.com(link is external).
Who are we talking to next time?
Laura Everett: Bill, I had a great conversation with the Rev. Dr. Eric Barreto. He’s a professor of New Testament at Princeton Theological Seminary.
Bill Lamar: Can’t wait to hear it.
“Can These Bones” is brought to you by Faith & Leadership, a learning resource for Christian leaders and their institutions from Leadership Education at Duke Divinity. It’s produced by Sally Hicks, Kelly Ryan and Dave Odom. Our theme music is by Blue Dot Sessions, and Yolanda Pierce’s interview was recorded at Howard University. Funding is provided by Lilly Endowment.
We’d love to hear from you. Please share your thoughts about this podcast on social media. I’m on Twitter @WilliamHLamarIV(link is external), and you can reach my colleague Laura on Twitter @RevEverett(link is external). You can also find us through our website, www.canthesebones.com(link is external).
I’m Bill Lamar, and this is “Can These Bones.”
This transcript has been edited for clarity.
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IDEAS THAT IMPACT: CHURCH MERGERS
When the fields yield no food: The story of a church merger
In this article, a pastor reflects on his experience of guiding a congregation through the process of merging with another and of the hope he found in the process. At the end of the article, Alban consultant Alice Mann contributes principles for leaders to keep in mind as they guide this kind of congregational change.
When the Fields Yield No Food: The Story of a Church Merger by Brett Opalinski
In the prophetic literature of the Hebrew Bible, Habakkuk ends with the prophet uttering the following words:
Though the fig tree does not blossom, and no fruit is on the vines; though the produce of the olive fails, and the fields yield no food; though the flock is cut off from the fold, and there is no herd in the stalls, yet I will rejoice in the Lord; I will exult in the God of my salvation.1
These, to me, are courageous words of trust in a future that the present shows no signs of providing. Yet the prophet seems to know that there is something more than what is evident. This hope resonates with me as I reflect on the story of Rader Memorial United Methodist Church, a church that embarked on a journey from death to resurrection, but not in the way one may expect. It is not the story of a down-and-out church that changed its ways to find people flocking to its pews. That would have been a nice story to write, but it is not the story of this church. No, Rader’s story is one of death and the unlikely hope that there was something beyond that death.
Rader had a story that its people were very proud of. It was founded in the northeast quadrant of Miami in the early 1920s, and in the 1950s and ’60s it was one of the premier churches in the Florida Annual Conference of the United Methodist Church. The large sanctuary was full on Sunday mornings and Sunday school classes brimmed over with kids and adults. Old black-and-white photos showed a choir loft that was full of people in crisp white choir robes.
Then everything changed. In the late 1960s the neighborhood began to experience transformation; Little Haiti moved closer to the church and church members moved farther away. Between the late 1960s and the early ’80s, Rader lost nearly 1,000 members. It was a period of transition from which the church would never fully rebound. There was a loyal remnant that remained, but a significant number moved to other neighborhoods, other churches. Unfortunately, those remaining had a large facility and a shrinking congregation. Fortunately, there were funds from trusts and the sale of real estate that provided a healthy flow of income to the church. These would be enough for a time.
In early 2004, I was in Denver, Colorado, finishing up coursework in a Ph.D. program in New Testament and early Christian history. Since I knew I would soon enter the dissertation phase, my family and I decided it was time to return home to Florida and request an appointment to a local church. I contacted my district superintendent with my request, and a short time later he called and said, “I have just the place for you, Rader Memorial United Methodist Church, in Miami.”
I asked if I could think about it for a few days and immediately called a friend who had been raised at Rader to ask what he thought. His response was swift: “Don’t do it!” Rader, he said, was perceived as a church moving in the wrong direction and would not be a pleasant place to serve. I thanked him and assured him that I would pray about the decision, which I did. A few days later, I told my wife that I really felt called to accept the appointment and “if it means turning the church around, so be it, and if it means closing the doors, so be it.”
So my family and I found ourselves back in Florida, in the strange, beautiful, diverse world of Miami, and I began my new appointment at Rader. There were some ominous signs from the start. For one, the church secretary quit the Friday before I was to arrive. Some church members quickly scrambled to get volunteer teenagers to answer phones, but that lasted only for a short time. In something of a surreal moment, I even discovered the cremated remains of two individuals in the closet of my office. On my first Sunday I arrived very early to find bulletins that were several months old stacked on pews in the narthex of the sanctuary. In the balcony I found bulletins that were several years old. It was obvious that no one had been in the sanctuary balcony in some time. It also looked as if the carpet in the sanctuary had not been vacuumed in quite a while. As it got closer to worship time, I began to wonder if anyone was even going to show up. A little while later there were only a few people who had arrived to take their places in the rather large sanctuary.
Signs of Hope
Yet there was a moment on that first Sunday that has brought me comfort many days since. As I stood to do the benediction at the close of the service I looked out at the diversity of people in that small congregation: young and old, black and white, men and women, gay and straight, Haitian, Bahaman, and Jamaican. I remember having a strong sense that this representation of diversity is what the Kingdom of God looks like. This vision became proof for me that the living Jesus was at work in this church and with these people.
This was not the only flicker of hope, though. While many of the past church leaders had long since left, others remained, and some of the new members to the church had extraordinary leadership skills. There were also some exciting ministries happening. A food closet passed out nonperishable items on a daily basis, a Wednesday community meal provided food to many in need of food or just basic social interaction, and the small music program had noticeable talent.
I look back at my sermons from that time and they were full of hope, based on the potential I saw in these people and their ministries. In the early days, I honestly believed that if we worked and prayed hard enough, change would come. This prayer was answered, but not as I would have expected or wanted.
Signs of Trouble
The tide started to change, though, a little over a year after my arrival at the church. Some of the financial reports left me with questions and concerns, and as I looked into these matters further I discovered that the trust funds the church had been relying on were running out much faster than anyone had projected. When I arrived, the last remaining trust fund was at $125,000. A couple of years prior, the Finance Committee had decided to begin using some of the principal from the trust with the plan to put the funds back when funds were available; this, of course, is a slippery slope, and it is no surprise that no money was paid back on the principal. As the balance dwindled, it was brought to the attention of the Finance Committee that the balance was now at $55,000. The math was simple: there would not be money left in the account for long. The budget at that point was already skeletal, with funds used almost exclusively for keeping the doors open and the lights on. Money would have to be transferred from the trust fund just to meet that budget. There were pledges to supplement the trust fund transfers (in fact they had increased over the previous year), but there was just not enough money or time to stop the bleeding in the trust fund balance. When that money ran out, the coffers would be empty.
There was another event that, I see now, was significant to the church’s story—the death of a certain member. This gentleman was in his early eighties but had the energy and spirit of a twenty-year-old. He had been away from the church for about ten years caring for his wife, who had Alzheimer’s. When he returned—at about the same time I arrived—he was appalled at the condition of the church. He immediately went to work at organizing a United Methodist men’s ministry to get the men of the congregation more active and involved. He confronted church leadership about how they needed to “clean the bathrooms and vacuum the carpet.” People listened to him. He was determined that as long as Rader was open, the church was going to make a difference. His thick New York accent seemed to motivate people in ways that amazed me. Then, out of the blue, he died of a sudden heart attack in his front yard. The church was stunned and something of the life went out of the congregation. They would never fully recover from this death.
A few weeks later, Hurricane Wilma passed through our area, leaving behind fallen trees and tattered roofs. Some of the people in the area were without power for sixteen days. The church, having a gas stove, served morning coffee and powdered soup to those in nearby homes. A few days later, the United Methodist Committee on Relief delivered several semi-trucks full of supplies that we stored in our fellowship hall and distributed to the community. As we passed out canned goods and health kits, cleaned up tree branches, and put things back together, we didn’t realize that it was the aftershock of the hurricane that would impact us the most.
As the new year began, significant financial problems still faced Rader Memorial. Then the bill for property insurance arrived. As members of the Florida Annual Conference of the United Methodist Church, Rader was part of a conference-wide property insurance plan. As a result of the hurricanes that passed through Florida, our premium rose from $30,000 to over $60,000. There was no foreseeable way to pay this bill.
I do not point to the insurance increase as the reason that Rader had to close its doors. It was simply the event that forced our hand sooner than expected. Even if the premium had stayed the same, there would have been serious financial difficulties to come to terms with, but now we had choices to make. The first big decision involved me. I did not see any way that the congregation could afford a full-time pastor. After much prayer and struggle, I contacted my district superintendent and told her that there was no way I could return the following year. This was especially hard since I had preached such hope at the beginning. But the fields were not yielding the fruit that I had hoped.
Very early in the process I went to my district superintendent to explain the situation. I brought financial data and reports and discussed what I thought were possible scenarios. She helped me work through questions about my leaving Rader and was often a voice of comfort. I cannot overstate the support that I received from her and the difference it made in this process. It became a well from which to draw strength, courage, and reassurance.
Considering Our Options
In light of the situation now before us, I wanted to be proactive. I did some research and reflection and made a list of several options the congregation could consider; including bringing in a part-time local pastor, selling the property and relocating to a smaller facility, merging with another congregation, and sharing facilities with another congregation. In addition, we put together a process for making that decision.
The first step would be to tell our Staff Parish Relations Committee that I would be leaving in June and that this was not negotiable. That same night I would hold a meeting of the entire congregation to explain the issues, walk them through their options one at a time, and answer any questions they may have. A second meeting was scheduled for two weeks later to give church members an opportunity, after they had had a chance to contemplate the options, to ask more questions. The district superintendent agreed to be present at that meeting. A third meeting was scheduled for two weeks after that, where a vote would be taken about what to do.
If this sounds like a hurried process, it was. Funds were running out quickly and decisions had to be made; we did not have the luxury of time. When the third meeting came, there was little discussion. The plan was that we would vote on all eight options, then a second and final vote would be taken on the top two. As the final vote was being tallied, the district superintendent led the congregation in song. I will never forget the sight of longtime church members, awaiting the result of the vote with tears streaming down their faces, singing the old hymns of the church. In the end, the vote was twenty-four to twenty-two in favor of merging with another congregation.
Finding Our New Home
Things moved quickly from there. A team was put together to find another congregation for us to merge with. Interestingly, some churches (most in a similar financial situation as Rader) approached us about joining them, but our view was that we didn’t want to join another congregation in a situation similar to our own. We couldn’t see putting the congregation through all of this again a few years later. We wanted to join a congregation that was United Methodist, active in ministry, financially stable and close enough that members would not have to adjust their commute too much. Further, because the church was proactive, the funds from the sale of the Rader property would be transferred to the merged congregation. This was significant, as the building sold about a year later for several million dollars and this became part of what Rader could offer in the merger of the congregations: we could come with new people and resources.
The team began by brainstorming a list of United Methodist Churches in the area that were candidates. Most of the members of the team were at least somewhat familiar with the churches first mentioned. They knew members of each of the congregations and had worked together on various projects, ministries, and district committees, so there was a level of familiarity with the congregations and the congregations with Rader. Some were easily ruled out for the reasons mentioned above. For those that were possibilities, it was decided that members of the committee would visit the different congregations to try to get an even better sense of them. This took several weeks, and then there were several meetings to reflect on the various experiences team members had had at the other churches.
To some degree, the work of approaching other churches about the possibility of merging was done for us. Among United Methodists in the northeast part of Miami, word about Rader’s situation spread fast. In addition, I had a good relationship with many of the other United Methodist clergy in the area and I had numerous conversations with them about the events at Rader and the congregation’s upcoming decisions. One of the advantages of this was that I could get a sense during these conversations as to whether or not another congregation was interested in merger; most were, because it would mean more people and additional resources for them.
In the end, the Rader team recommended merging with Fulford United Methodist Church, located a few miles north of Rader. They were financially stable, had active ministries, and the personnel and other resources we could bring to Fulford represented great potential for growing the ministries that Fulford was already engaged in. Further, the resources we could contribute would enable Fulford to do some needed work to their facilities to increase ministry effectiveness, such as improvements that were needed to their preschool and education building.
I conferred with the pastor of Fulford, who took the proposal to the church’s Charge Conference (the governing body in local United Methodist congregations). They voted to approve the merger.
Each church now put together a transition team to help work through the process. Interestingly, the biggest question was what to name the merged congregation. The people from Rader graciously stated the name should remain Fulford because of historical significance, and so it did. The other question was property, but it was quickly decided that the Rader congregation would come to Fulford and the Rader property would be sold. The merger also meant there were now two pastors involved in the process. My colleague from Fulford was an amazing pastoral presence to both the people of Fulford and Rader. When I would leave a month or so later, she was left with much of the healing that remained. As my strength was running out, she carried the work through.
There were aftershocks that I never anticipated. There were some at Rader opposed to merger who acted out their grief in difficult ways. I remember one person telling me she would rather see the church’s refrigerator sent to a mission somewhere than go to the new church. There were some who openly stated that they would have preferred to see Rader just run out of money and close its doors. At one point, when I took a few days vacation, some even brought their cars down to the church and began taking plates and cookware from the kitchen, claiming they had paid for it over the years and it belonged to them. Many directed their anger at me for forcing the decision. After my children came upon an angry church member yelling at me one Sunday, we made the difficult decision that my wife and children would go ahead and make the move to Fulford. Even during these last days, denial was present. “There has got to be money somewhere,” one elderly woman insisted. “You are just not looking in the right places.” Many of the members with these reactions refused to go to Fulford, instead finding other church homes. One word of caution that I offer is while additional resources and people sound enticing, merger comes with a cost. There is a great deal of pastoral work to be done and sometimes as a pastor I had to put on a thick skin to walk with people in their grief. There were many days I came home exhausted and depleted, even after the decision was made.
New Beginnings
When Rader Memorial United Methodist Church’s last Sunday arrived, we celebrated its ministry through the years. It was both a sad and a joyful day. At the end of the service, we de-consecrated the sanctuary and recessed out with the cross that had stood on the altar for so many years! The cross was then taken by Rader members the few miles drive to Fulford. As we knocked on the door of the Fulford sanctuary, the congregation was waiting for us with bright smiles and nervous anticipation. We proceeded in and placed our old cross on a new altar table. A new day had begun.
I left for a new church about a month after that day. My colleague in ministry had many more pastoral and administrative issues to deal with. About a year later I went back to Fulford to do a baptism for a close friend. I was nervous about what I would see and experience. I knew that some were still angry with me. What I saw, though, was a beautiful sight: people working, serving, and worshiping together. There in that newly merged congregation, the fields were slowly producing food again. Long-awaited resurrection had finally come.
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NOTE
1. Habakkuk 3:17–18 (NRSV)
Principles for leaders to keep in mind:
Prepare yourself spiritually. The pastor in this story began with prayer for personal guidance and an attitude of openness to many possible outcomes. This preparation enabled him to explore the possibilities for revitalization, then offer firm and loving leadership for discernment about how and whether to continue.
Gather and face the facts. While may it may be painful to see and state the realities, it can also be empowering. By acting promptly, this congregation was able to make a life-affirming choice and bring a generous legacy to the combined ministry.
Consider multiple options. Congregations make better decisions when they weigh all the plausible paths—even those that seem less likely or attractive.
Follow a clear and open process. The three-step process used by this congregation provided a supportive structure within which members could come to terms with painful choices. Without this thoughtful procedure, unfettered anger and grief might well have ruined the possibility for a constructive merger.
Act on the decision. Once the process is complete and a path selected, implementation should begin. In this case, leaders did not allow the narrow margin to create an excuse for delay; as a result, members could experience the change as real and channel their energies into the productive task of evaluating merger partners. This congregation was wise enough to choose a strong partner; though it may have been more painful in the short-run to relinquish their name and location, members gained a precious sense of stability and hope for years to come.
Mark endings. The dignified and moving service linked a real ending (deconsecration of the church) with a real beginning (procession of the cross, and much of the congregation, to a new home). Such rituals are important components of a healthy transition.
Expect symptoms of bereavement. This pastor’s account helpfully describes a wide range of behavioral responses, including some hostile and selfish gestures. While they do not always occur, such responses are common enough that leaders should prepare themselves to “take some heat.”
Don’t take it personally. Even in situations where there are no personal accusations, conscientious leaders often wonder whether they are doing the right thing. Ask for God’s guidance, do your best, then move on to life-giving activities.
Alice Mann
Senior Consultant, The Alban Institute
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Questions for Reflection:
- Congregations, like people, go through different phases in the life cycle. What is the role of the pastor in helping congregations discern where they are in that cycle?
- What does it mean to preach hope when “the fields yield no food”?
- How do we as pastors/church leaders proclaim resurrection, without seeing it through a predetermined lens?
- How can we balance honest assessment and pastoral sensitivity in working with struggling congregations?
- What is the prophetic role of the pastor in struggling congregations?
Read more from Brett Opalinski »
Faith and Leadership
CONGREGATIONS, GROWTH & RENEWAL, NEW FORMS OF CHURCH, CHRISTIAN LEADERSHIP
Coming together for the kingdom
More than a decade ago, one Seattle church sacrificed itself to another for the benefit of future generations in this remarkable story of trust, generosity and grace.
Daniella Kim, Katey Hage and Jeanie Denman sing at the first service of the merged Quest Church and former Interbay Covenant Church in 2007. Photos courtesy of Quest Church
Seven years ago, one Seattle church sacrificed itself to another for the benefit of future generations in a remarkable story of trust, generosity and grace. In the accompanying Q&A, the Rev. Eugene Cho talks about the details of the merger and how his congregation, Quest Church, incorporated the traditions and gifts of an older church.On a Sunday 10 years ago, the Rev. Ray Bartel stood before his congregation at Interbay Covenant Church to mark its 50th anniversary. But even as Bartel reflected on the past, his mind was on the future.
“It’s humbling to realize that we are standing on holy ground, where important life moments -- great and small, little-remembered and much-remembered -- have been shared and celebrated,” Bartel said.
Then he preached about what it would take to keep the church “alive in 2055.”
“Certainly, this building won’t be here, and the church might have an entirely different name -- these things are all temporal,” Bartel said. “We can continue to have an impact on this community for another 50 years, but we must be open to change. We must be kingdom-minded to do this.”
A decade later, much of Bartel’s prediction has come true. Interbay Covenant Church (ICC), an Evangelical Covenant congregation located along a rail yard north of downtown Seattle, no longer exists. Its buildings have been renovated by a young pastor and congregation. Bartel is no longer the senior pastor of the congregation -- Quest Church -- but rather one of its associate pastors.
The resulting blended congregation -- diverse, multiethnic, focused on mission and social entrepreneurship -- illustrates the kingdom-mindedness that motivated Bartel and Quest Church’s senior pastor, the Rev. Eugene Cho.
“Quest brought us to life in the seriousness of our Christian walk,” said Barbara Lundquist, 80, former chair of the ICC leadership team. As a member of the elder board, she was deeply involved in leading ICC through the merger process and is spiritually satisfied with the way things have evolved.
“This church has become a mirror of the kingdom of God. We have all ethnicities, all ages,” she said. “We’re rich, poor, smart and not so, all shapes and sizes. Everyone is here. Diversity is what America is and always has been, and it simply must be the way the kingdom of God looks.”
The Lord’s purpose
Research indicates that somewhere around 3,500 U.S. churches close their doors every year.
In that atmosphere, many church leaders naturally focus on doing what it takes to keep the doors open.
For Bartel, the focus was on what would be best for the future of the larger church. “When you ask what is right for the kingdom of God,” Bartel said, “you come up with a different answer.”
Bartel’s approach reflects Proverbs 19:21, “Many are the plans in a person’s heart, but it is the Lord’s purpose that prevails” (NIV).
The fact that Quest, founded in 2000 as a nondenominational church plant, was already renting worship space from ICC seemed like divine providence. Not long after the anniversary service, Bartel sat down with Quest’s pastor, Eugene Cho, to share what was in his heart.
“I asked him to pray with me about ICC embracing the new and giving ourselves -- that is the terminology I used -- to Quest Church, to the next generation,” Bartel said. “I told Eugene, ‘I like your energy and your diversity, and I want to see if it is possible for us to be the wind underneath your wings.’”
Bartel recalls Cho “nearly falling out of his chair.”
By the time the two churches ultimately did become joined in 2007, the vision of the larger kingdom truly seemed to be fulfilled.
“There were people in the ICC congregation who were excited for an influx of new life,” said Melinda Anderson, a Quest congregant since 2003, “just like we were excited to gain the history and wisdom of their older perspective. I was amazed at the ICC group’s humility and willingness to change.”
Needs fulfilled
In December 2000, Cho, then 30, and his wife, Minhee, hosted a meeting at their Seattle home to discuss a plan for a nondenominational church plant. Eight people came.
That night led to a weekly Bible study group, which blossomed into regular Sunday evening services held at a church in the city’s University District. Soon, the primarily Asian-American congregation was faced with finding a new location.
The search for a suitable rental space led Cho to ICC, even though he’d never even heard of the Interbay neighborhood and in fact drove right past the church the first time he went to visit.
When Cho returned a second time, Bartel, a former aeronautical engineer, was more than willing to meet with him. Bartel was then in his late 50s, with graying but still-thick hair, a direct gaze and a warm handshake. “We were very open to sharing our space,” he said.
Quest Church is multi-ethnic, multi-racial and
multi-generational.
At first, however, Cho was concerned about the Interbay building; the ICC sanctuary had a high-arching timbered ceiling and rows of dark wooden pews. The young pastor with trendy black eyeglasses and a fashionable flip in his dark hair was reserved as he viewed the traditional space.“My initial thought on showing them the sanctuary was that [Cho and his assistants] were not that impressed,” Bartel said.
But the deal was sealed when Bartel took Cho next door to an empty 4,500-square-foot warehouse owned by the church. Cho noticeably brightened when Bartel unchained the metal doors; the building seemed full of potential for Quest.
“We were kindled by the possibilities of what that space could look like,” Cho said, “if we could somehow resurrect it.”
A church declines, another flourishes
Interbay Covenant Church, established as a self-supporting congregation in 1953, began in 1942 as a youth outreach plant of First Covenant Church in downtown Seattle. It was part of the Evangelical Covenant Church, which has more than 800 congregations in the United States and Canada, and is one of the fastest-growing and most multiethnic denominations in North America.
But in 2001, ICC’s congregation of about 70 people was starting to decline, with members moving or passing away. ICC’s older, mostly white congregation stood in contrast to Quest, with its Korean-born pastor and rapidly growing, young, urban base.
The contrast was not lost on the Interbay members.
“They were not at all territorial. They weren’t at all insecure about it, but I think they began to ask what anybody would ask: ‘Why are they growing -- and why aren’t we growing?’” Cho said of this time.
A new rental agreement set off a flurry of jointly funded renovations that transformed ICC’s empty warehouse into a triple-function building.
About 30 members of the old congregation
joined Quest Church after the merger, including one board member who'd voted against the move.
Under one roof, Quest established a nonprofit coffeehouse called Q Café, a live music venue and a church worship space. Today, a large, iconic lighted “Q” marks the front doors, and interior walls painted in warm, modern earth tones -- mustard, brick, sage -- feature works by local artists and photographers.“They signed a 10-year lease, raised a substantial amount of their own money and did a lot of the work themselves,” said Bartel. “Then they just really grew in that space.”
Once settled into the former warehouse, Quest was able to increase their worship schedule from a single evening service to three Sunday services. A low stage used during the week for coffee shop entertainers also provided room for a large group of praise musicians and singers, whose loud, rocking music inspired the congregation’s 20- and 30-somethings.
In 2002, Quest left their nonaffiliated status behind and became an official Evangelical Covenant church, putting them in denominational synchrony with the Interbay church.
“They saw the value of being affiliated with a denomination,” Bartel said, “and the theology and mission of the ECC reflected the same intentional diversity, justice and compassion that Eugene was championing.”
A friendship blossoms
Bartel had been leading ICC since 2000. Before taking on full-time ministry, he had served for 15 years as a bivocational pastor while working as an engineer at aerospace manufacturer Boeing.
He had received his degree in aeronautical engineering from the University of Washington and earned a master of divinity degree from North Park University in Chicago.
Ray Bartel and Eugene Cho at the commissioning service for the new Quest Church that absorbed Interbay Covenant Church.
Despite the rather large age and cultural differences, and beyond their relationship as landlord and tenant, Bartel and Cho connected as colleagues.The men spent time together, often sharing coffee in Bartel’s office while discussing theological issues, as well as concerns over their respective flocks.
“He was a solo pastor,” said Cho, “and I was a solo church planter. [Our relationship] began out of a deep mutual respect … and this commitment that we were in it for the long haul, for the larger kingdom.”
“And I’m not shy in telling people that he’s been like a pastor to me, someone that I can confide in and go to for collegial support as well.”
The shared vision and mutual respect was the basis for the “radical grace and generosity in this story,” Cho said.
The kingdom vision
For Bartel, broaching the idea of giving away his church to Cho was just the beginning of a long process. “I’ve always been open to letting God do a new or different thing,” Bartel said. “And I knew that it was my job as a pastor to talk about things like this [kind of change] and to lead people forward.”
A shared focus on the kingdom helped two
congregations merge without causing lasting animosity.
After his initial conversation with Cho, Bartel knew he would need to be thoughtful in introducing the idea to his leadership team of nine congregants. He gently brought it up at a regular monthly meeting, sharing a devotion that had to do with how the kingdom of God is so much larger than a local church.The leadership group’s initial response, however, was not encouraging. Bartel did not push, and the idea was quickly shelved.
Quest was continuing to grow, and small changes in the way the two churches interacted opened a path toward unification.
“We got the kids together first,” by merging children’s ministries, Bartel said. “The older folks in the [ICC] congregation just loved having children around, and that started to draw more people together.”
At another leadership team meeting, the tide suddenly seemed to turn in Quest’s favor. An informal show of hands gave Bartel the green light to draft a plan for what a merger would look like.
“I felt like momentum was finally building,” said Bartel, who vowed to the group that he would accept only a unanimous vote to move forward with exploring such a huge change.
But when it came to a vote, the Quest merger outline was rejected 9 to 1. Resigned to the decision, Bartel promised that he would never bring it up again of his own accord.
“Eugene was very disappointed,” Bartel said.
But Cho said he understood the hesitance. “When it became closer to reality, it was really frightening. As [would be] expected. To be in a position to give away everything, to die to yourself, to dissolve the constitution, to no longer be Interbay Covenant Church, to give away the land and building … was a very frightening proposition.”
Time for change
Bartel was hoping to leave the pulpit within a year or two and retire, and he knew he needed to initiate a fresh discussion of ICC’s future options.
He kept his vow not to bring it up again, but at a monthly leadership meeting, a whiteboard at the front of the room displayed a now-dwindling list of alternatives.
Someone spoke up, saying there was one option not listed that needed to be added: merging with Quest.
“That moment is what brought the merger back onto the table,” Bartel said.
The two pastors and the elder board pray during the commissioning service.
The rest of 2005 consisted of many conversations, back and forth, between Bartel and the leadership team, pulpit exchanges, a joint Good Friday worship service and other efforts.“[I] felt like I was going through a round of interviews,” Cho said, “which was absolutely legitimate.”
Their respective leadership teams met on numerous occasions and worshipped at each other’s churches, which were literally just across the parking lot from each other.
Coming together
During more than a year of prayer and discussion, the congregations got to know each other, and began to work out the logistical issues as well. For example, they agreed that selling the property would not be allowed for the first five years and that any future sale would require the approval of the Evangelical Covenant Church; decided what would happen to the pews (they were removed); and even settled on what the church would be called following ICC’s dissolution (Quest Church).
In April 2007, the ICC leadership team voted 9 to 1 in favor of the official ICC Transition Plan, which was then approved by 90 percent of the congregation in a subsequent vote. (Once the church leadership brought up the merger idea, Bartel no longer felt bound to have 100 percent support.)
Cho described the process as organic; for Lundquist, the former board chair, “What eventually turned the whole thing around was time.
“For change to happen, it’s sometimes necessary for the Holy Spirit to have time, to give people time to come to acceptance,” she said.
One of the few dissenting votes -- and the sole dissenting vote on the leadership team --was from a founding member of ICC.
“Carl was literally one of the original members that [First Covenant Church] sent from downtown to start the Interbay church,” Bartel said. Despite the fact that he couldn’t endorse the merger, he and his wife joined the new Quest Church.
The merger brought together 30 ICC members, mostly in their 50s and 60s, with 400 Quest members, average age 27.
Both groups called it a merger, but ICC was the partner who gave it all. The congregation not only generously relinquished their church institution and name but also gave all of their assets to Quest, including property valued at approximately $7 million.
“We really firmly believe that the building, the assets, they don’t ultimately belong to us,” Cho said. “It belongs to the kingdom, and [Ray] wanted to have loose hands with that.”
Bartel gracefully stepped down to become an associate pastor at the new, combined church.
When asked about this ability to so completely put his own ego aside, Bartel credited his first mentor. “Pastor Bob Bennett [at Faith Covenant Church in Renton, Washington] was so humble and deeply caring, he put people before programs -- people before anything. I only ever wanted to be a pastor like him.”
The ICC administrative staff was incorporated into Quest’s staff, and the two leadership teams blended. And Bartel, who had planned to retire years ago, continues to serve the congregation he began envisioning on that Sunday a decade ago.
“Every year I have to let him know, ‘Man, I need you. I need you on our staff. How much stock options can I give you to keep you here?’” Cho said, joking.
Seven years after absorbing ICC, the Quest congregation is diverse in every way -- age included. There has recently been talk of seeking out a new space in which Quest can continue to grow, taking its mix of old and new, traditional and contemporary, along with it.
Sally Hicks contributed to this report.
Questions to consider:
- This willingness of an established congregation to trust that God is doing a new thing and to stay involved is central to this story. How could you engender trust in the midst of change?
- A lay leader of Interbay Covenant Church said that one key to accepting the change was simply time. Are there changes you want to see that might come about if you are patient?
- Ray Bartel proposed radical change, but stepped back when it was not supported. Yet he continued to hold to his vision without forcing it. Could this approach be applied in your context? How do you discern when to push and when to step back?
- Bartel and Cho agree that they should have “loose hands” with assets. Do you have assets that could be given away or repurposed for the benefit of the kingdom?
Read more about Quest Church »
FROM THE ALBAN LIBRARY
Church Mergers offers churches of all sizes and traditions practical advice on how to merge successfully. Authors Thomas G. Bandy and Page M. Brooks draw on decades of experience to illustrate why and how missional mergers are possible.
Church Mergers guides congregational leaders and regional planners through the process of successful mergers. It shares the stories of four churches in the merger process, explaining the steps to assess their situations, build trust, and discern vision. The book offers guidance to assess the potential for merger, explore contextual relevancy and lifestyle compatibility, overcome internal and external obstacles, define strategic priorities, create new boards, build leadership teams, combine assets, and more.
Church Mergers shows that a faithful, healthy, missional merger is possible, and it illustrates that the whole can indeed be greater than the sum of its parts.
Learn more and order the book »
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