"Welcome to the Church of 'Holy Chaos'" by Joanne O'Sullivan
The Rev. Brian Combs, left, and others join hands in prayer during worship services at Haywood Street Congregation in Asheville, North Carolina.
Photos by Matt Rose
Prepare to be blown away by the Spirit at this church in Asheville, North Carolina, where a radical experiment in street ministry is supported by a mainline denomination.On a cold, rainy day in early March, a 30-something man walked into the sanctuary at the Haywood Street Congregation for the Wednesday midday service with a shaggy mixed-breed dog on a leash. Dark-haired and bearded, dressed in a brown T-shirt and army-green painter’s pants, the man looked like a dozen other young guys you might encounter in downtown Asheville, North Carolina.
But he wasn’t just another guy. He was the pastor, the Rev. Brian Combs, and the dog was Penny, the Haywood Street “church dog.” As the two made their rounds, greeting congregants, organist Edward Smith launched into “Nobody Knows the Trouble I’ve Seen.” Moments later, assistant pastor Darryl Dayson -- young, dreadlocked and wearing jeans -- stepped up onto the chancel and welcomed everyone, inviting them to “join in creating community.”
Creatures great and small are welcome at Haywood Street Congregation's Wednesday worship service.
On that day, as on every other Wednesday, the created community at Haywood Street(link is external) was a rare and stunning mix -- many homeless and some “housed,” Christians and Jews, pastors and parishioners from other churches, black and white, young and old, families and single people, gay and straight, sober and … (for a few) maybe not so much. And Penny wasn’t the only dog.Known as a church of “holy chaos,” the Haywood Street Congregation is a United Methodist mission church that was launched in 2009 as a place of welcome and ministry for people who are homeless or otherwise living on the margins in downtown Asheville. In addition to the Wednesday worship service, the church offers a long list of programs, including recovery groups, Bible studies, AA meetings, a clothing closet, a community garden and an eight-bed respite-care unit for homeless people who need a place to recuperate after a hospital stay.
Haywood Street's respite care unit is home for Rob Sampson as he recovers from treatment for lung cancer.
All this is bursting forth in a building that was formerly home to Haywood Street United Methodist Church, a long-struggling congregation that was closed in 2006 and merged into Central UMC a few miles away. At a time when mainline churches and their leaders are searching for new ways to do and be church, Haywood Street is an example of entrepreneurial and innovative ministry happening within a large denomination.
Organist Edward Clarence Smith launches into a hymn as worshippers gather.
“This doesn’t fit any molds,” said the Rev. Larry Goodpaster, the bishop of the UMC’s Western North Carolina Annual Conference. “Brian has demonstrated for the whole church a model -- not the only model, but a model -- of how to be engaged with those whom society has forgotten. We knew early on that this was going to be different.”Taking risks in the name of God
And different it is. Haywood Street Congregation is a church plant that doesn’t look like a typical church plant. It’s a church that doesn’t worship on Sundays. It’s a hybrid of sorts -- part church, part nonprofit, with a full-time executive director who spends much of her time on grant writing and other fundraising efforts. And it is a church that is supported financially and otherwise by other churches and organizations throughout Asheville and, increasingly, all of western North Carolina.
“I look at it now, and it’s a beautiful story of church in the world, inviting everybody in, and it’s fascinating,” said the Rev. John Boggs, the district superintendent for the conference’s Blue Ridge District. “But in the beginning, it wasn’t clear how we would do this.”
The one thing that was clear to Boggs and Goodpaster was Combs’ passion for ministry to people on the margins.
“We didn’t know what it would look like, but we knew there was an opportunity to demonstrate what the Great Commandment was all about,” Goodpaster said. “What caught my attention was Brian’s passion and willingness to take risks in the name of Christ and to experiment.”
Combs, 37, came to ministry following a short and unsatisfying career in industrial design. After receiving his M.Div. at Emory University’s Candler School of Theology, he did chaplaincy training at Grady Memorial Hospital in Atlanta, a large public hospital that serves a significant proportion of the city’s low-income residents. Working in the hospital and on Atlanta’s streets, he ministered to people who were homeless, people who were mentally ill, people who were dying from AIDS, people who were struggling with addictions.
Who is the Jesus that you know? How does that shape your understanding of ministry?
“It was a revelation for me,” Combs said. “I was experiencing Jesus, God incarnate, as Howard Thurman would say. Jesus came as a homeless vagrant. This was a Jesus I had never met, and once I encountered him, I was convicted in a way I had never been before.”
Combs had found his calling.
Returning to his home conference in western North Carolina in 2007, he asked to be assigned to do similar work, but few if any such jobs existed in the mostly rural region.
“The cabinet responded, as most would, ‘We don’t have anything like that,’” Combs said.
It was a poor fit for a pastor called to urban ministry. Before long, Combs felt isolated and became depressed. He considered leaving ministry.
“It was so contrary to everything I was called to,” he said.
In 2008, Combs began calling UMC conference offices in large cities across the country looking for a position in urban ministry, and was about to accept an appointment in Pittsburgh when he heard from Boggs, a pastor whom he had known for years. Formerly the pastor at Combs’ home church in Charlotte, Boggs had just been appointed as the district superintendent in Asheville, and had heard from his counterpart in Waynesville about a young pastor who wanted to do urban ministry. When he realized that the young pastor was Combs, he gave him a call.
“When I told [Boggs] that I was planning to leave for Pittsburgh, he told me to hold on,” Combs said.
Laying the groundwork
Combs and Boggs weren’t the only pastors in Asheville interested in ministry to people on the margins. The Rev. Rob Blackburn was as well.
Blackburn’s church, Central United Methodist, had merged with the declining Haywood Street UMC two years earlier. Central had kept the Haywood building open as a place for ministry, renting space to various nonprofits.
Goodpaster was excited, and agreed to support the proposal.
“The excitement was around Brian’s passion for ministry and the opportunity to be in mission,” Goodpaster said.
How comfortable are you with uncertainity, with not knowing the end result beforehand?
They all felt deeply called and committed to Combs’ vision but had no idea how they would make it a reality. When Boggs pointed out all the uncertainties and issues, from infrastructure to finances, Goodpaster had a ready response.
“Y’all are smart,” he told the pastors. “You’ll figure it out.”
So they forged ahead, not sure exactly where they were going.
“Sometimes, when you’re engaged in ministry, especially on the margins, you have to make it up as you go along,” Goodpaster said. “But you never lose sight of the mission, of loving God and neighbor.”
After Goodpaster appointed Combs to this yet-to-be-determined ministry, Combs spent six months on the streets, meeting people in homeless shelters and under bridges, talking and listening to them, asking them what they needed. What he heard would form much of what Haywood Street Congregation is today.
The Wednesday worship service, for example, came out of those conversations. Plenty of churches have services and meals on Sundays, people on the streets told Combs. But by midweek, things can go off the rails for people who are homeless or struggling from addiction.
“Rob said, ‘Here’s the key to the building; it’s yours,’” Combs said. Though Central still owns the building, Haywood Street pays for the utilities and repairs.
Combs also spent much of that first year -- and every year since -- talking to churches, businesses and social service agencies throughout Asheville, sharing his vision for a ministry to the homeless.
“I knocked on every door I could and talked to anybody who would open it,” Combs said. “I felt a sense of desperation. I couldn’t not do this. There was no other calling for me. It was either this or I’m leaving ministry.”
After the first year, the district and the conference provided a $30,000 start-up grant from the United Methodist Asheville District Trustees and a $280,000 declining-balance grant from the Western North Carolina Conference Office of Congregational Development.
By the very nature of Haywood Street’s ministry, Combs and the others knew that financial sustainability would always be an issue. Unlike other churches, they could not look to members for donations but instead would always have to seek resources elsewhere. From the beginning, the church has essentially operated like a faith-based nonprofit, serving the community, building relationships and scrambling for funds.
Faith-based nonprofit
“It was important to claim our identity as a faith-based nonprofit organization in addition to being a church,” said Laura Kirby, the congregation’s executive director and a UMC deaconess. “What enabled us to be sustainable were our community partnerships and relationships. We have a huge interface with the whole community of Asheville.”
All the relationship building has paid off. Since 2010, Kirby said, the church has been able to cover a growing percentage of the annual budget through its own fundraising efforts -- even as its ministries have expanded. Overall, the budget grew from $155,000 to $589,000 from 2010 to 2014, when the respite care area opened. Although the church continues to receive funds from the conference and district, those monies account for a much smaller percentage of the budget than just a few years ago.
Last year, almost 50 percent of the church budget came from donations from individuals, 15 percent from other churches, and 10 percent from businesses and special events. Conference and district funds, which accounted for 68 percent of the budget in 2010, now cover only about 15 percent.
In effect, the church has been able to reduce its financial dependence on the conference and district, at least in relative terms, Kirby said.
“What’s significant is that we’ve been able to do more without having to go back to the conference and ask for more money,” Kirby said.
Ministry on Wednesdays
All the numbers and dollars represent real ministries that happen every day at Haywood Street. But never, perhaps, are they more visible than on Wednesdays.
The day starts with Story Circle, led by Barbara Bates Smith, a congregant and nationally recognized storyteller. Anyone who comes can share any story they like.
The first of three Welcome Table seatings starts at 10:30 a.m., but beforehand, people can get a haircut or a manicure or shop at the Clothing Closet.
The meals aren’t served soup-kitchen style. Instead, volunteers bring food to the tables, where it’s passed around family style. The food is excellent cuisine donated by some of Asheville’s best restaurants.(link is external)
No one has to attend the service to get a meal; everyone is free to eat and leave. Even so, many stick around.
What would worship be like for you to be "blown away by the Spirit?"
On that day in early March, Combs’ “conversational homily” was about John 2:13-22, Jesus and the moneylenders in the temple. Combs talked about anger and asked the congregation whether anger is a Christian emotion.
As people raised their hands, Combs called on them by name. Many said they had struggled with anger. Eventually, the conversation shifted to the subject of righteous indignation, the kind of anger felt at the experience of injustice.
“Maybe that kind of anger is the kind that moves us to take positive action for change,” Combs said.
After the homily, a man in the front row became agitated, stood up and threw what he mistakenly thought was a Bible (actually a binder containing the bulletin) on the floor.
“We don’t need what’s in here,” the man said.
He talked briefly about how hard it had been to watch his father slip away from Alzheimer’s disease, and after rambling a bit, he stopped.
“We just need to love each other,” he said.
Combs touched his shoulder and leaned in supportively. The man calmed down, but Combs stayed near.
Outbursts aren’t unusual at Haywood Street, Kirby said: “Everyone knows that no matter what they say, it’s going to be accepted.”
People aren’t required to be sober in order to attend the services, which can lead to exchanges that many traditional congregants aren’t used to.
All the better, Combs said.
“Spiritual growth is dependent on being uncomfortable,” he said. “I’m unwilling to water down what we do here to make people of privilege more comfortable. Sometimes when people act out most is when you experience the most love. It’s in those moments of crisis that the Spirit shows up.”
How does your church challenge people and make them uncomfortable? What's the right balance between welcome and challenge?
As the word about Haywood Street has spread, the congregation has become a teaching model for other churches. Pastors, youth groups and church councils from across the region visit frequently, wanting to learn how they too can start such a ministry.
Combs is sometimes surprised by all the interest.
“People always say this is so novel,” he said. “But there is nothing new about what we’re doing. It’s as old as the gospel and Methodism. From day one, John Wesley was on the streets. This is Methodism 101. We’re nothing new. We’re a retread in every way.”
Questions to Consider
Who is the Jesus that you know? How does the answer to that question shape your understanding of ministry?
Is your church or organization willing to “make it up” as it goes along? How comfortable is it with not knowing the result beforehand? Does that help or hurt ministry?
How well does your church or organization listen to others? Whom is it asking, “What do you need?”
What other congregations can your church partner with? What nonprofits and businesses? How would you make an inventory of potential partners?
When have you felt “blown away by the Spirit” in worship? What was that like?
Does your church challenge people and make them uncomfortable? How do you strike a balance between comfort and discomfort, welcome and challenge?
Monday, April 20, 2015
Mobilizing Congregationsis an in-depth look at the power teams bring to congregational work. John Wimberly demonstrates that younger generations in particular are much happier working in a team, rather than a committee environment. Congregations using teams are able to mobilize members across generations for both short and long term tasks.
Buy the book
Ideas that Impact: The Importance of Mission
Everyone is Part of the Mission
An interview with Holly J. Burkhalter, vice president for government relations and advocacy, International Justice Mission
Holly J. Burkhalter: Everyone is part of the mission
The human rights organization International Justice Mission is effective in part because everyone working there understands their role in the Christian institution’s mission, says a senior leader.
Working for human rights can be discouraging -- people in the field come into contact every day with the worst things that human beings do to one another.
But at International Justice Mission(link is external), "we understand ourselves to be just a small part of what God is doing in the world. That is a shared belief, as is the belief that the full burden of violence against poor people is not ours. It is God’s, and we are only a small part of the answer,” said Holly J. Burkhalter, the vice president of government relations and advocacy for the organization.
“I think that is what makes it possible for our investigators and our social workers and our lawyers to do that work. Because without it, you would almost invariably feel great despair.”
Who is the Jesus that you know? How does that shape your understanding of ministry?
“It was a revelation for me,” Combs said. “I was experiencing Jesus, God incarnate, as Howard Thurman would say. Jesus came as a homeless vagrant. This was a Jesus I had never met, and once I encountered him, I was convicted in a way I had never been before.”
Combs had found his calling.
Returning to his home conference in western North Carolina in 2007, he asked to be assigned to do similar work, but few if any such jobs existed in the mostly rural region.
“The cabinet responded, as most would, ‘We don’t have anything like that,’” Combs said.
Warren "Cherokee" Formann gets ready for worship with a free haircut from volunteer Sharon LeDuc.
Instead, Combs was sent to rural Haywood County, just outside Waynesville, to serve as pastor to two small, declining congregations.It was a poor fit for a pastor called to urban ministry. Before long, Combs felt isolated and became depressed. He considered leaving ministry.
“It was so contrary to everything I was called to,” he said.
In 2008, Combs began calling UMC conference offices in large cities across the country looking for a position in urban ministry, and was about to accept an appointment in Pittsburgh when he heard from Boggs, a pastor whom he had known for years. Formerly the pastor at Combs’ home church in Charlotte, Boggs had just been appointed as the district superintendent in Asheville, and had heard from his counterpart in Waynesville about a young pastor who wanted to do urban ministry. When he realized that the young pastor was Combs, he gave him a call.
“When I told [Boggs] that I was planning to leave for Pittsburgh, he told me to hold on,” Combs said.
Laying the groundwork
Combs and Boggs weren’t the only pastors in Asheville interested in ministry to people on the margins. The Rev. Rob Blackburn was as well.
Blackburn’s church, Central United Methodist, had merged with the declining Haywood Street UMC two years earlier. Central had kept the Haywood building open as a place for ministry, renting space to various nonprofits.
New life is bursting forth in the former home of Haywood Street UMC, which closed in 2006 and merged with Central UMC.
But Combs knew that Blackburn wanted to do more, and the two pastors began talking about the possibility of using Haywood’s building as a place for Combs to launch his ministry. In a pivotal meeting, they had lunch with Bishop Goodpaster and talked about Combs’ vision for ministry in Asheville.Goodpaster was excited, and agreed to support the proposal.
“The excitement was around Brian’s passion for ministry and the opportunity to be in mission,” Goodpaster said.
How comfortable are you with uncertainity, with not knowing the end result beforehand?
They all felt deeply called and committed to Combs’ vision but had no idea how they would make it a reality. When Boggs pointed out all the uncertainties and issues, from infrastructure to finances, Goodpaster had a ready response.
“Y’all are smart,” he told the pastors. “You’ll figure it out.”
So they forged ahead, not sure exactly where they were going.
“Sometimes, when you’re engaged in ministry, especially on the margins, you have to make it up as you go along,” Goodpaster said. “But you never lose sight of the mission, of loving God and neighbor.”
Combs welcomes a mom and her baby to the Welcome Table meal.
Take it to the streetsAfter Goodpaster appointed Combs to this yet-to-be-determined ministry, Combs spent six months on the streets, meeting people in homeless shelters and under bridges, talking and listening to them, asking them what they needed. What he heard would form much of what Haywood Street Congregation is today.
The Wednesday worship service, for example, came out of those conversations. Plenty of churches have services and meals on Sundays, people on the streets told Combs. But by midweek, things can go off the rails for people who are homeless or struggling from addiction.
Haywood Street congregants hug as others file in for services at the church of 'holy chaos.'
Blackburn and the congregation at Central UMC also signed on, agreeing to let Combs use the Haywood building.“Rob said, ‘Here’s the key to the building; it’s yours,’” Combs said. Though Central still owns the building, Haywood Street pays for the utilities and repairs.
Combs also spent much of that first year -- and every year since -- talking to churches, businesses and social service agencies throughout Asheville, sharing his vision for a ministry to the homeless.
“I knocked on every door I could and talked to anybody who would open it,” Combs said. “I felt a sense of desperation. I couldn’t not do this. There was no other calling for me. It was either this or I’m leaving ministry.”
After the first year, the district and the conference provided a $30,000 start-up grant from the United Methodist Asheville District Trustees and a $280,000 declining-balance grant from the Western North Carolina Conference Office of Congregational Development.
By the very nature of Haywood Street’s ministry, Combs and the others knew that financial sustainability would always be an issue. Unlike other churches, they could not look to members for donations but instead would always have to seek resources elsewhere. From the beginning, the church has essentially operated like a faith-based nonprofit, serving the community, building relationships and scrambling for funds.
Faith-based nonprofit
“It was important to claim our identity as a faith-based nonprofit organization in addition to being a church,” said Laura Kirby, the congregation’s executive director and a UMC deaconess. “What enabled us to be sustainable were our community partnerships and relationships. We have a huge interface with the whole community of Asheville.”
Combs hugs volunteer Trudy Gordon at the Welcome Table meal. The church serves about 400 free meals every Wednesday.
About three dozen congregations -- from United Methodist to Pentecostal, Catholic and Jewish -- play important roles at Haywood Street, providing financial, in-kind and volunteer support. The church also works with local housing agencies, health care providers, social service organizations, civic clubs, schools, restaurants, businesses and grocery stores.All the relationship building has paid off. Since 2010, Kirby said, the church has been able to cover a growing percentage of the annual budget through its own fundraising efforts -- even as its ministries have expanded. Overall, the budget grew from $155,000 to $589,000 from 2010 to 2014, when the respite care area opened. Although the church continues to receive funds from the conference and district, those monies account for a much smaller percentage of the budget than just a few years ago.
Last year, almost 50 percent of the church budget came from donations from individuals, 15 percent from other churches, and 10 percent from businesses and special events. Conference and district funds, which accounted for 68 percent of the budget in 2010, now cover only about 15 percent.
In effect, the church has been able to reduce its financial dependence on the conference and district, at least in relative terms, Kirby said.
“What’s significant is that we’ve been able to do more without having to go back to the conference and ask for more money,” Kirby said.
Ministry on Wednesdays
All the numbers and dollars represent real ministries that happen every day at Haywood Street. But never, perhaps, are they more visible than on Wednesdays.
One of the day's three Welcome Table seatings begins with grace, led by Combs.
When the church held its first midweek service in November 2009, a handful of people attended. Now, 75 to 100 gather for worship, and 400 are served at the free meal.The day starts with Story Circle, led by Barbara Bates Smith, a congregant and nationally recognized storyteller. Anyone who comes can share any story they like.
The first of three Welcome Table seatings starts at 10:30 a.m., but beforehand, people can get a haircut or a manicure or shop at the Clothing Closet.
The meals aren’t served soup-kitchen style. Instead, volunteers bring food to the tables, where it’s passed around family style. The food is excellent cuisine donated by some of Asheville’s best restaurants.(link is external)
No one has to attend the service to get a meal; everyone is free to eat and leave. Even so, many stick around.
The Welcome Table meal is served family style, with excellent food donated by some of Asheville's best restaurants.
The service has some familiar elements, such as the Prayers of the People and offerings. But as the printed bulletin warns, “Today’s liturgy may be blown away by the Spirit at any moment.”What would worship be like for you to be "blown away by the Spirit?"
On that day in early March, Combs’ “conversational homily” was about John 2:13-22, Jesus and the moneylenders in the temple. Combs talked about anger and asked the congregation whether anger is a Christian emotion.
As people raised their hands, Combs called on them by name. Many said they had struggled with anger. Eventually, the conversation shifted to the subject of righteous indignation, the kind of anger felt at the experience of injustice.
“Maybe that kind of anger is the kind that moves us to take positive action for change,” Combs said.
After the homily, a man in the front row became agitated, stood up and threw what he mistakenly thought was a Bible (actually a binder containing the bulletin) on the floor.
“We don’t need what’s in here,” the man said.
He talked briefly about how hard it had been to watch his father slip away from Alzheimer’s disease, and after rambling a bit, he stopped.
“We just need to love each other,” he said.
Combs touched his shoulder and leaned in supportively. The man calmed down, but Combs stayed near.
A man and his dog join worshippers at Haywood Street Congregation.
Growing uncomfortableOutbursts aren’t unusual at Haywood Street, Kirby said: “Everyone knows that no matter what they say, it’s going to be accepted.”
People aren’t required to be sober in order to attend the services, which can lead to exchanges that many traditional congregants aren’t used to.
All the better, Combs said.
“Spiritual growth is dependent on being uncomfortable,” he said. “I’m unwilling to water down what we do here to make people of privilege more comfortable. Sometimes when people act out most is when you experience the most love. It’s in those moments of crisis that the Spirit shows up.”
How does your church challenge people and make them uncomfortable? What's the right balance between welcome and challenge?
As the word about Haywood Street has spread, the congregation has become a teaching model for other churches. Pastors, youth groups and church councils from across the region visit frequently, wanting to learn how they too can start such a ministry.
Combs is sometimes surprised by all the interest.
“People always say this is so novel,” he said. “But there is nothing new about what we’re doing. It’s as old as the gospel and Methodism. From day one, John Wesley was on the streets. This is Methodism 101. We’re nothing new. We’re a retread in every way.”
Questions to Consider
Who is the Jesus that you know? How does the answer to that question shape your understanding of ministry?
Is your church or organization willing to “make it up” as it goes along? How comfortable is it with not knowing the result beforehand? Does that help or hurt ministry?
How well does your church or organization listen to others? Whom is it asking, “What do you need?”
What other congregations can your church partner with? What nonprofits and businesses? How would you make an inventory of potential partners?
When have you felt “blown away by the Spirit” in worship? What was that like?
Does your church challenge people and make them uncomfortable? How do you strike a balance between comfort and discomfort, welcome and challenge?
Monday, April 20, 2015
Buy the book
Everyone is Part of the Mission
An interview with Holly J. Burkhalter, vice president for government relations and advocacy, International Justice Mission
Holly J. Burkhalter: Everyone is part of the mission
The human rights organization International Justice Mission is effective in part because everyone working there understands their role in the Christian institution’s mission, says a senior leader.
Working for human rights can be discouraging -- people in the field come into contact every day with the worst things that human beings do to one another.
But at International Justice Mission(link is external), "we understand ourselves to be just a small part of what God is doing in the world. That is a shared belief, as is the belief that the full burden of violence against poor people is not ours. It is God’s, and we are only a small part of the answer,” said Holly J. Burkhalter, the vice president of government relations and advocacy for the organization.
“I think that is what makes it possible for our investigators and our social workers and our lawyers to do that work. Because without it, you would almost invariably feel great despair.”
Burkhalter joined IJM seven years ago after many years in human rights advocacy, working for organizations such as Physicians for Human Rights and Human Rights Watch.
She staffed the House Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on Human Rights and International Organizations from 1981 to 1983 and was appointed by President Clinton to be a member of the board of the U.S. Institute for Peace.
Burkhalter spoke with Faith & Leadership while at Duke University for a talk sponsored by the Center for Christianity and Scholarship(link is external) and co-sponsored by the Duke Human Rights Center(link is external).
Q: What difference does it make when an organization, especially a social justice organization, is Christian?
Gary Haugen(link is external), our founder and president, refers to it as a community of spiritual transformation. He thinks that the work of providing justice for victims of violence, poor people in the developing world, comes from transformed people. So every one of us on staff -- and there are hundreds, probably about 550 staff -- all of us are Christians.
We have no faith test whatsoever for those we serve. In all cases, IJM’s work is the expression of our shared Christian faith, so we do not proselytize and evangelize.
I’m 59, and I became a believer in my early 50s and joined IJM about seven years ago, so [previously] I wasn’t a Christian and I wasn’t working for a Christian organization.
There are many, many, many ways that the fact that we share this faith and depend on God for wisdom and for guidance -- there are many ways that that makes a difference. We understand ourselves to be just a small part of what God is doing in the world. That is a shared belief, as is the belief that the full burden of violence against poor people is not ours. It is God’s, and we are only a small part of the answer.
That’s an unusual stance for a human rights organization. I think that is what makes it possible for our investigators and our social workers and our lawyers to do that work. Because without it, you would almost invariably feel great despair.
Q: How does your organization maintain itself at that large scope and scale?
IJM is enormous. We have about 18 overseas offices now. I found when I came to the organization that two things really stood out to me. One is the loving quality of the people that work there and the kindness and the shared faith and the extreme warmth of the staff.
Simultaneously, there is very, very high professionalism. It is all business. Gary, our boss, and everyone in the organization takes extremely seriously the stewardship of the resources which come from our donors and belong to God.
It is so fiercely devoted to its mission and mandate, and highly, highly professional. Every meeting starts on the dot. Everybody comes prepared for a meeting. Everyone wears a suit to work every single day -- every intern, everybody at all levels of the organization -- which I don’t usually see in the NGO world.
You get this combination of extremely effective, almost corporate culture, combined with this kindness and niceness and a lot of humor and a lot of good esprit de corps.
We have spiritual disciplines that we engage in. We’re all Christians, but we’re by no means all the same kind of Christians. I’m a sort of faux Catholic; I go to a Catholic church. I’m not Catholic, but my husband is.
Every morning for a half-hour is what we call “8:30 stillness.” We’re expected to be at work at 8:30. The doors are closed, and you do not start your day job. You spend that time in stillness or whatever spiritual disciplines you want.
Every day at headquarters, we break for prayer at 11 a.m. Everybody drops what they’re doing -- it’s a huge organization, 125 or so at headquarters -- and joins for a half-hour of corporate prayer.
It’s where we bring before God the things we need help on and that we desperately need prayer on: our difficult cases, someone’s family member being ill, all kinds of things. We also raise things that we want to praise God for, because we are witnesses to miracles every day. We do that every single day.
This is all quite deliberate, because Gary does not want to be a Christian organization in name only. He wants it to be a community of believers that lean on each other and that lean on God.
It’s been wonderful for me as a new believer. It took lots of getting used to. I was an atheist my whole adult life, and so this is all pretty much the deep end of the pool. But it is an absolutely wonderful discipline, and my own faith has grown greatly because of the privilege of being a part of it.
I would also mention that we’re overwhelmingly privately funded, and we have very generous donors. This is people’s treasure and their hearts. The vast majority, the bulk of the funding, comes from Christian foundations and Christians of means, and people of small means, too. They believe in us, and we want to be as effective as possible.
That comes from the top, and it saturates the organization. Symbolic things like everybody has to wear a dark suit to work may seem kind of silly, but it does keep you grounded in this serious business.
We know that our colleagues overseas in Guatemala or in India or Cambodia or Kenya -- we know that they’re going to court in their robes and in their business suits on behalf of people who are the poorest of the poor.
Gary Haugen is constantly saying that we wear the uniform of credibility on their behalf.
Q: It’s part of the shared mindset?
It’s a part of the office culture. When IJMers turn up in a meeting, they always look like they’re going to court. We make a lot of jokes about it back at headquarters.
The three aspects of IJM culture are we’re Christian, we’re professional and we’re bridge builders. It’s taught. Every new class of interns and new staff goes through a week of orientation and training, and these values are constantly reiterated.
It’s not just saying them once. It’s living them. It has to be led and learned, and IJM is very good at that.
Q: You’ve seen this institution grow from the beginning. What do you think are the keys to its growth and effectiveness?
The most important is that our president and founder and all of his leadership team have a very clear mission, and it is very well understood.
The mission is to rescue people who are abused and hurting and bring perpetrators to account and show the world that justice is possible for the poor. That’s what we do overseas, and everybody in the organization knows and is a part of that -- whether you’re answering phones on the front desk or whether you’re the vice president for government relations, which is my job.
I don’t go out to the field very often, but I really do feel that my job is contributing, and my team feels like they’re a part of what’s most precious to us, which is rescuing people from violence.
Everybody feels tied to that. Eleven o’clock prayer is a big part of that glue. But also Gary and the senior leadership team are constantly talking about ways that everybody understands their contribution to that mission.
I would say, second of all, it is that the leadership of IJM puts an enormous amount of effort into nourishing staff. There’s extremely good human relations and business practice. There are great HR procedures. We have very, very good leadership, and it’s not accidental.
Q: It sounds like there’s an interesting story about how you became a Christian leader (link is external).
Well, I think everybody’s story of how they came to faith is very precious and important. Mine is just probably odd.
I grew up in a Christian home -- very much so. My grandparents, whom I loved, were Mennonite missionaries in India. I was very close to my grandmother in particular.
I made a decision not to be a believer when my grandmother had a mental breakdown. I was 16 years old. She was in her 70s when my grandfather died, and she lost her faith through that experience. She had catatonic depression for a very long period of time. Then for the rest of her life, she had periodic recurring episodes of very, very deep depression.
I just couldn’t imagine that God could be real if he was not present to my beloved and sainted grandmother when she most needed God’s presence. All I knew was, “Well, enough of that nonsense,” and I just chucked it.
I stumbled into international human rights work in my first real job, which was for a congressman [now senator] from Iowa, Tom Harkin. I got to do [human rights] work with him and never left the field.
But I stayed a nonbeliever. I certainly didn’t want to have anything to do with the church -- none whatsoever. I’m very liberal. What I was seeing of the mainstream church in the Moral Majority era was not attractive to me.
I’m working in the field of the worst things people can do to each other -- genocide and rape and torture and disappearances and murder and cruelties. There was just nothing within my line of sight that gave me any reason to think that there was a good God that gave a damn about the world he had created.
I just didn’t have any reason to believe, but I was continually mentally shaking my fist at God for what I saw in the world.
Not in my own life; I had a nice husband I loved. We adopted two little girls. I was very happy, but I knew that this was just an accident. My prosperity and happiness was just simply nothing that I’d ever done to deserve and simply an accident of where I happened to be born.
Knowing full well that while I was falling in love with my two little adopted girls, moms in every other corner of the world were grieving the loss of theirs just didn’t make any sense to me.
What really started to change that was my association with Gary Haugen. We knew each other for 10 years. Even though he was a Christian and I was not, I really liked his vision of what he wanted to do in the world with his faith. I found him to be a person of great integrity, and I still do, and we had many, many talks over the many years.
He was employee No.1 [at IJM], and I saw his office in the basement of his little townhouse. Now he’s the president of a 550-person organization, and he’s still the same -- total integrity.
He’s funny and full of life, and he has this very strongly rooted belief that God hates injustice and that he has a plan for dealing with it on earth, and that plan is his people.
Gary is going to strain every sinew to do what he can to be part of that plan, but he also knows that it is God’s work to do and that we are just privileged to be a tiny part of it. I’ve come to believe that as well.
Q: Did that experience rekindle your childhood personal faith?
I wouldn’t say so, no. I would say that the example of IJM, which was people who believed in God and took seriously God’s words about injustice and acted on that belief, gave me a new way to think that it could actually be possible that there was a good God in a crappy world.
I heard it said once that you can either believe in a good and a sovereign God or you can believe in the Holocaust, but not both. I was on the Holocaust side of that spectrum.
I really came to see that there might be something, another piece to that terrible, terrible equation -- either God is good or the Holocaust -- and the third choice was that human beings did that, violently, violently contrary to what God wanted for his creation.
Gary would ask the question not, “Where was God during the Rwanda genocide?” for example, but, “Where were God’s people?”
It really started to help me dismantle my intellectual barriers against believing in God. I actually came to see that yes, this could be true. But I suppose the most authentic transformation is when you just feel God’s presence in your own life, which I’d never had before.
I wish I could say it was that Jesus and I had a nice conversation. That did not happen and has never happened. I’d like for it to happen. But I do pray to myself quietly. I’m not a very good pray-out-loud person, but I do pray for the Lord’s assistance and companionship.
When I first prayed, I felt like that prayer was answered, and I still do.
Avoiding Mission Drift
from Peter Steinke's A Door Set Open: Grounding Change in Mission and Hope
A congregation is a group of people who believe that more can be accomplished by joining with others. They come together with a purpose. To create more life, the people create a community of purpose. After many years of being together, though, people may wonder what happened to the purpose, to the vision, to the creativity, and to the meaningful service that once energized them. Again and again, we have to explore why we came together.Visiting a relative who lives on the Great South Bay off the shores of Long Island, several of us joined him for a boat ride. We were on the bay in early afternoon, enjoying the breeze and fast ride. Some dark, scattered clouds cast shadows on the water, but the sky was mostly blue. The weather forecast called for sunshine with scattered showers in the evening. But several of the dark clouds suddenly bonded together. A strong breeze accompanied the darkening sky. Within minutes, everything became gray, concealing any sight of land. The wind-driven rain made visibility even more difficult. Unable to see land, the skipper turned to his boat’s compass to orient himself and the boat. Motoring slowly, he was able to dodge other boats on the bay as we headed for the now-invisible shore. Eventually, we saw partial outlines of beach houses as we approached land. Totally drenched and hyperalert on our own adrenaline, we docked at our destination. Oriented by the boat’s compass, we escaped harm’s way, landing safely.
To be headed in a direction serves people well in life, just as it did for us on the bay. According to Edwin Friedman, a distinctive mark of a mature person is having clear life goals. Guided by personal goals, an individual is less likely to be distracted or detoured by the reactivity of others. Someone else’s behavior does not determine yours. Based on principles and values, you direct your life. Friedman often referred to the analogy of sailing to illustrate his point. Without a destination, a sailor on a lake meanders and drifts. The sailor will not adjust the sails to take advantage of the wind to proceed to the chosen landing place. If this is true on water, what about in life? Is orientation possible without destination?
Considering all of the complexities and challenges facing churches, it is amazing that more of them are not on the brink of oblivion or in harm’s way. Many are not using a compass to navigate the hazy conditions created by cultural shift. When consulting with churches embroiled in conflict or paralyzed by passivity, I always ask the congregation, “Does this congregation have a clear sense of its mission?” Typical responses range from “poor sense of purpose” to “running in circles,” from “lack of vision” to “our mission is not to have a mission.” Questions like, Who are we? What is our primary focus? go begging for answers. Then when I ask individuals what they think the mission is, the answers are rote: “spread the word,” “support the church,” “love everyone,” and “preach the Bible.” No one has ever said, “Our mission is to turn the world upside-down,” or “to join God’s ongoing promise to recreate the world,” or “to let the world know that the resurrection means the world has not seen the last of Jesus Christ.” Some members believed their congregation had a sense of mission because they had a mission statement. Sad to say, few knew what it was.
Limping along without a focus is called mission drift. It is what happens when people come together to support an objective but forget what the objective is. People lose their reason for being, even though they go through the motions. Many things contribute to the sidetracking, such as compromising ideals in succumbing to a pressure group, searching for instant viability or solutions, grasping for saviors, fooling themselves that they are vital or viable simply because they endure, preoccupying themselves with nonessentials, exchanging their core beliefs for more marketable ideas, or failing to attend to what God is calling them to do in their little corner of the world.
If mission is so essential to the congregation’s life and well-being, what exactly does mission mean? There is a movement called “the missional church.” People assign marks or attribute certain actions to a missional church, but I find the term confusing. It is similar to saying “the ruling government” or the “athleticism of the athlete.” Either a church is missional or it is not the church. Mission is the nature and purpose of the church, not some list of qualifiers.
An additional confusion about the word mission comes from assuming mission necessarily results in growth. Distinguishing between congregations in survival mode (not growing) and those in mission (growing) is not honest and certainly not helpful. Every congregation, as a living system, is in the survival business. Thousands of congregations are decreasing in numbers, but some are also alive and sensitive to mission. Who is to condemn them to the category of survival? All things eventually reach their maximum growth. Are they then to be renamed as survival systems? Survival is fundamental to all organic life. Anything can be eliminated, obliterated, or cremated. Survival is not the church’s problem. The threat of it may even be the very stimulus needed for new action and direction.
Countless churches are floundering, trying to understand why they exist. Mission drift is especially problematical for those churches that have experienced a steady decline in membership. A church that once numbered one thousand and now is supported by two hundred is a significantly different church. The mission is the same, but the refocusing needed for directing it escapes their imagination.
Systems theory refers to an individual’s functioning position, a specific way of behaving. Organizations, like people, are emotional systems that also develop ways of functioning. As congregations decline, their functioning position changes, yet many continue to function as if nothing has changed.
A congregation is a group of people who believe that more can be accomplished by joining with others. They come together with a purpose. To create more life, the people create a community of purpose. After many years of being together, though, people may wonder what happened to the purpose, to the vision, to the creativity, and to the meaningful service that once energized them. This is normal. Again and again, we have to explore why we came together. Congregations need to continue to review who they are and how they will respond. What are we trying to be? What is our calling at this time and in this place? Can we make a difference? Is there a purpose for our presence? If we are unaware of the particular view through which we are looking at the world, then we do not have any true choices about what we are going to see and how we are going to respond.
Mission is the expression of the church’s deep, abiding beliefs. Mission provides the major standard against which all activities, services, and decisions are evaluated. Mission is the preserver of congregational integrity. It is about God’s love for the world, not about what I like or don’t like about my church. A major function of the congregation’s stewards is to be the creators and guardians of the mission. They defend the mission against resistant forces that would threaten or destroy it. They oversee the mission’s implementation. They keep the mission alive.
Comment on this article on the Alban Roundtable blog
__________________________________________________________
Adapted from A Door Set Open: Grounding Change in Mission and Hope by Peter L. Steinke, copyright © 2008 by the Alban Institute. All rights reserved.
Articulate Your Institution's Mission then Develop the Financial Model by Dave Odom, executive director, Leadership Education at Duke Divinity
She staffed the House Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on Human Rights and International Organizations from 1981 to 1983 and was appointed by President Clinton to be a member of the board of the U.S. Institute for Peace.
Burkhalter spoke with Faith & Leadership while at Duke University for a talk sponsored by the Center for Christianity and Scholarship(link is external) and co-sponsored by the Duke Human Rights Center(link is external).
Q: What difference does it make when an organization, especially a social justice organization, is Christian?
Gary Haugen(link is external), our founder and president, refers to it as a community of spiritual transformation. He thinks that the work of providing justice for victims of violence, poor people in the developing world, comes from transformed people. So every one of us on staff -- and there are hundreds, probably about 550 staff -- all of us are Christians.
We have no faith test whatsoever for those we serve. In all cases, IJM’s work is the expression of our shared Christian faith, so we do not proselytize and evangelize.
I’m 59, and I became a believer in my early 50s and joined IJM about seven years ago, so [previously] I wasn’t a Christian and I wasn’t working for a Christian organization.
There are many, many, many ways that the fact that we share this faith and depend on God for wisdom and for guidance -- there are many ways that that makes a difference. We understand ourselves to be just a small part of what God is doing in the world. That is a shared belief, as is the belief that the full burden of violence against poor people is not ours. It is God’s, and we are only a small part of the answer.
That’s an unusual stance for a human rights organization. I think that is what makes it possible for our investigators and our social workers and our lawyers to do that work. Because without it, you would almost invariably feel great despair.
Q: How does your organization maintain itself at that large scope and scale?
IJM is enormous. We have about 18 overseas offices now. I found when I came to the organization that two things really stood out to me. One is the loving quality of the people that work there and the kindness and the shared faith and the extreme warmth of the staff.
Simultaneously, there is very, very high professionalism. It is all business. Gary, our boss, and everyone in the organization takes extremely seriously the stewardship of the resources which come from our donors and belong to God.
It is so fiercely devoted to its mission and mandate, and highly, highly professional. Every meeting starts on the dot. Everybody comes prepared for a meeting. Everyone wears a suit to work every single day -- every intern, everybody at all levels of the organization -- which I don’t usually see in the NGO world.
You get this combination of extremely effective, almost corporate culture, combined with this kindness and niceness and a lot of humor and a lot of good esprit de corps.
We have spiritual disciplines that we engage in. We’re all Christians, but we’re by no means all the same kind of Christians. I’m a sort of faux Catholic; I go to a Catholic church. I’m not Catholic, but my husband is.
Every morning for a half-hour is what we call “8:30 stillness.” We’re expected to be at work at 8:30. The doors are closed, and you do not start your day job. You spend that time in stillness or whatever spiritual disciplines you want.
Every day at headquarters, we break for prayer at 11 a.m. Everybody drops what they’re doing -- it’s a huge organization, 125 or so at headquarters -- and joins for a half-hour of corporate prayer.
It’s where we bring before God the things we need help on and that we desperately need prayer on: our difficult cases, someone’s family member being ill, all kinds of things. We also raise things that we want to praise God for, because we are witnesses to miracles every day. We do that every single day.
This is all quite deliberate, because Gary does not want to be a Christian organization in name only. He wants it to be a community of believers that lean on each other and that lean on God.
It’s been wonderful for me as a new believer. It took lots of getting used to. I was an atheist my whole adult life, and so this is all pretty much the deep end of the pool. But it is an absolutely wonderful discipline, and my own faith has grown greatly because of the privilege of being a part of it.
I would also mention that we’re overwhelmingly privately funded, and we have very generous donors. This is people’s treasure and their hearts. The vast majority, the bulk of the funding, comes from Christian foundations and Christians of means, and people of small means, too. They believe in us, and we want to be as effective as possible.
That comes from the top, and it saturates the organization. Symbolic things like everybody has to wear a dark suit to work may seem kind of silly, but it does keep you grounded in this serious business.
We know that our colleagues overseas in Guatemala or in India or Cambodia or Kenya -- we know that they’re going to court in their robes and in their business suits on behalf of people who are the poorest of the poor.
Gary Haugen is constantly saying that we wear the uniform of credibility on their behalf.
Q: It’s part of the shared mindset?
It’s a part of the office culture. When IJMers turn up in a meeting, they always look like they’re going to court. We make a lot of jokes about it back at headquarters.
The three aspects of IJM culture are we’re Christian, we’re professional and we’re bridge builders. It’s taught. Every new class of interns and new staff goes through a week of orientation and training, and these values are constantly reiterated.
It’s not just saying them once. It’s living them. It has to be led and learned, and IJM is very good at that.
Q: You’ve seen this institution grow from the beginning. What do you think are the keys to its growth and effectiveness?
The most important is that our president and founder and all of his leadership team have a very clear mission, and it is very well understood.
The mission is to rescue people who are abused and hurting and bring perpetrators to account and show the world that justice is possible for the poor. That’s what we do overseas, and everybody in the organization knows and is a part of that -- whether you’re answering phones on the front desk or whether you’re the vice president for government relations, which is my job.
I don’t go out to the field very often, but I really do feel that my job is contributing, and my team feels like they’re a part of what’s most precious to us, which is rescuing people from violence.
Everybody feels tied to that. Eleven o’clock prayer is a big part of that glue. But also Gary and the senior leadership team are constantly talking about ways that everybody understands their contribution to that mission.
I would say, second of all, it is that the leadership of IJM puts an enormous amount of effort into nourishing staff. There’s extremely good human relations and business practice. There are great HR procedures. We have very, very good leadership, and it’s not accidental.
Q: It sounds like there’s an interesting story about how you became a Christian leader (link is external).
Well, I think everybody’s story of how they came to faith is very precious and important. Mine is just probably odd.
I grew up in a Christian home -- very much so. My grandparents, whom I loved, were Mennonite missionaries in India. I was very close to my grandmother in particular.
I made a decision not to be a believer when my grandmother had a mental breakdown. I was 16 years old. She was in her 70s when my grandfather died, and she lost her faith through that experience. She had catatonic depression for a very long period of time. Then for the rest of her life, she had periodic recurring episodes of very, very deep depression.
I just couldn’t imagine that God could be real if he was not present to my beloved and sainted grandmother when she most needed God’s presence. All I knew was, “Well, enough of that nonsense,” and I just chucked it.
I stumbled into international human rights work in my first real job, which was for a congressman [now senator] from Iowa, Tom Harkin. I got to do [human rights] work with him and never left the field.
But I stayed a nonbeliever. I certainly didn’t want to have anything to do with the church -- none whatsoever. I’m very liberal. What I was seeing of the mainstream church in the Moral Majority era was not attractive to me.
I’m working in the field of the worst things people can do to each other -- genocide and rape and torture and disappearances and murder and cruelties. There was just nothing within my line of sight that gave me any reason to think that there was a good God that gave a damn about the world he had created.
I just didn’t have any reason to believe, but I was continually mentally shaking my fist at God for what I saw in the world.
Not in my own life; I had a nice husband I loved. We adopted two little girls. I was very happy, but I knew that this was just an accident. My prosperity and happiness was just simply nothing that I’d ever done to deserve and simply an accident of where I happened to be born.
Knowing full well that while I was falling in love with my two little adopted girls, moms in every other corner of the world were grieving the loss of theirs just didn’t make any sense to me.
What really started to change that was my association with Gary Haugen. We knew each other for 10 years. Even though he was a Christian and I was not, I really liked his vision of what he wanted to do in the world with his faith. I found him to be a person of great integrity, and I still do, and we had many, many talks over the many years.
He was employee No.1 [at IJM], and I saw his office in the basement of his little townhouse. Now he’s the president of a 550-person organization, and he’s still the same -- total integrity.
He’s funny and full of life, and he has this very strongly rooted belief that God hates injustice and that he has a plan for dealing with it on earth, and that plan is his people.
Gary is going to strain every sinew to do what he can to be part of that plan, but he also knows that it is God’s work to do and that we are just privileged to be a tiny part of it. I’ve come to believe that as well.
Q: Did that experience rekindle your childhood personal faith?
I wouldn’t say so, no. I would say that the example of IJM, which was people who believed in God and took seriously God’s words about injustice and acted on that belief, gave me a new way to think that it could actually be possible that there was a good God in a crappy world.
I heard it said once that you can either believe in a good and a sovereign God or you can believe in the Holocaust, but not both. I was on the Holocaust side of that spectrum.
I really came to see that there might be something, another piece to that terrible, terrible equation -- either God is good or the Holocaust -- and the third choice was that human beings did that, violently, violently contrary to what God wanted for his creation.
Gary would ask the question not, “Where was God during the Rwanda genocide?” for example, but, “Where were God’s people?”
It really started to help me dismantle my intellectual barriers against believing in God. I actually came to see that yes, this could be true. But I suppose the most authentic transformation is when you just feel God’s presence in your own life, which I’d never had before.
I wish I could say it was that Jesus and I had a nice conversation. That did not happen and has never happened. I’d like for it to happen. But I do pray to myself quietly. I’m not a very good pray-out-loud person, but I do pray for the Lord’s assistance and companionship.
When I first prayed, I felt like that prayer was answered, and I still do.
Avoiding Mission Drift
from Peter Steinke's A Door Set Open: Grounding Change in Mission and Hope
A congregation is a group of people who believe that more can be accomplished by joining with others. They come together with a purpose. To create more life, the people create a community of purpose. After many years of being together, though, people may wonder what happened to the purpose, to the vision, to the creativity, and to the meaningful service that once energized them. Again and again, we have to explore why we came together.Visiting a relative who lives on the Great South Bay off the shores of Long Island, several of us joined him for a boat ride. We were on the bay in early afternoon, enjoying the breeze and fast ride. Some dark, scattered clouds cast shadows on the water, but the sky was mostly blue. The weather forecast called for sunshine with scattered showers in the evening. But several of the dark clouds suddenly bonded together. A strong breeze accompanied the darkening sky. Within minutes, everything became gray, concealing any sight of land. The wind-driven rain made visibility even more difficult. Unable to see land, the skipper turned to his boat’s compass to orient himself and the boat. Motoring slowly, he was able to dodge other boats on the bay as we headed for the now-invisible shore. Eventually, we saw partial outlines of beach houses as we approached land. Totally drenched and hyperalert on our own adrenaline, we docked at our destination. Oriented by the boat’s compass, we escaped harm’s way, landing safely.
To be headed in a direction serves people well in life, just as it did for us on the bay. According to Edwin Friedman, a distinctive mark of a mature person is having clear life goals. Guided by personal goals, an individual is less likely to be distracted or detoured by the reactivity of others. Someone else’s behavior does not determine yours. Based on principles and values, you direct your life. Friedman often referred to the analogy of sailing to illustrate his point. Without a destination, a sailor on a lake meanders and drifts. The sailor will not adjust the sails to take advantage of the wind to proceed to the chosen landing place. If this is true on water, what about in life? Is orientation possible without destination?
Considering all of the complexities and challenges facing churches, it is amazing that more of them are not on the brink of oblivion or in harm’s way. Many are not using a compass to navigate the hazy conditions created by cultural shift. When consulting with churches embroiled in conflict or paralyzed by passivity, I always ask the congregation, “Does this congregation have a clear sense of its mission?” Typical responses range from “poor sense of purpose” to “running in circles,” from “lack of vision” to “our mission is not to have a mission.” Questions like, Who are we? What is our primary focus? go begging for answers. Then when I ask individuals what they think the mission is, the answers are rote: “spread the word,” “support the church,” “love everyone,” and “preach the Bible.” No one has ever said, “Our mission is to turn the world upside-down,” or “to join God’s ongoing promise to recreate the world,” or “to let the world know that the resurrection means the world has not seen the last of Jesus Christ.” Some members believed their congregation had a sense of mission because they had a mission statement. Sad to say, few knew what it was.
Limping along without a focus is called mission drift. It is what happens when people come together to support an objective but forget what the objective is. People lose their reason for being, even though they go through the motions. Many things contribute to the sidetracking, such as compromising ideals in succumbing to a pressure group, searching for instant viability or solutions, grasping for saviors, fooling themselves that they are vital or viable simply because they endure, preoccupying themselves with nonessentials, exchanging their core beliefs for more marketable ideas, or failing to attend to what God is calling them to do in their little corner of the world.
If mission is so essential to the congregation’s life and well-being, what exactly does mission mean? There is a movement called “the missional church.” People assign marks or attribute certain actions to a missional church, but I find the term confusing. It is similar to saying “the ruling government” or the “athleticism of the athlete.” Either a church is missional or it is not the church. Mission is the nature and purpose of the church, not some list of qualifiers.
An additional confusion about the word mission comes from assuming mission necessarily results in growth. Distinguishing between congregations in survival mode (not growing) and those in mission (growing) is not honest and certainly not helpful. Every congregation, as a living system, is in the survival business. Thousands of congregations are decreasing in numbers, but some are also alive and sensitive to mission. Who is to condemn them to the category of survival? All things eventually reach their maximum growth. Are they then to be renamed as survival systems? Survival is fundamental to all organic life. Anything can be eliminated, obliterated, or cremated. Survival is not the church’s problem. The threat of it may even be the very stimulus needed for new action and direction.
Countless churches are floundering, trying to understand why they exist. Mission drift is especially problematical for those churches that have experienced a steady decline in membership. A church that once numbered one thousand and now is supported by two hundred is a significantly different church. The mission is the same, but the refocusing needed for directing it escapes their imagination.
Systems theory refers to an individual’s functioning position, a specific way of behaving. Organizations, like people, are emotional systems that also develop ways of functioning. As congregations decline, their functioning position changes, yet many continue to function as if nothing has changed.
A congregation is a group of people who believe that more can be accomplished by joining with others. They come together with a purpose. To create more life, the people create a community of purpose. After many years of being together, though, people may wonder what happened to the purpose, to the vision, to the creativity, and to the meaningful service that once energized them. This is normal. Again and again, we have to explore why we came together. Congregations need to continue to review who they are and how they will respond. What are we trying to be? What is our calling at this time and in this place? Can we make a difference? Is there a purpose for our presence? If we are unaware of the particular view through which we are looking at the world, then we do not have any true choices about what we are going to see and how we are going to respond.
Mission is the expression of the church’s deep, abiding beliefs. Mission provides the major standard against which all activities, services, and decisions are evaluated. Mission is the preserver of congregational integrity. It is about God’s love for the world, not about what I like or don’t like about my church. A major function of the congregation’s stewards is to be the creators and guardians of the mission. They defend the mission against resistant forces that would threaten or destroy it. They oversee the mission’s implementation. They keep the mission alive.
Comment on this article on the Alban Roundtable blog
__________________________________________________________
Adapted from A Door Set Open: Grounding Change in Mission and Hope by Peter L. Steinke, copyright © 2008 by the Alban Institute. All rights reserved.
Articulate Your Institution's Mission then Develop the Financial Model by Dave Odom, executive director, Leadership Education at Duke Divinity
One of the first steps to explore the financial model is to clearly articulate the mission. Next, establish the programs or services required to accomplish the mission. The staffing, facilities, revenue sources and other practical considerations follow. These are all elements of the financial model.The programs and services you offer must align with your mission, and decisions about staffing, facilities needs and revenue sources follow.
Conversations about money are uncomfortable for many ministers. In the last two weeks, two leaders of Christian institutions confessed to me that they could not use Excel, the basic tool for budgeting in most organizations.
You can imagine that my recent blog posts on finding a sustainable financial model or the importance of virtuous cycles in the economics of Christian institutions have not been very popular because I advocate for leaders to think much more about these issues.
Last week the head of the union for University of California’s 4,000 instructors and librarians published a book on the future of higher education that illustrates what is at stake for discussions about financial models. Bob Samuels argues that public college education should be free (link is external). This would require trimming non-essential functions, redirecting a bunch of money and ending tax breaks that mostly benefit wealthy college-goers’ families.
Even a brief look at Samuels’ proposal illustrates the importance of the financial model. He is advocating for a narrowing of the work of the public university to focus on the classroom experience of undergraduates. He proposes dramatically reducing athletics, research and residential life. The public university he describes looks much like the community college of today.
One of the first steps to explore the financial model is to clearly articulate the mission. Next, establish the programs or services required to accomplish the mission. The staffing, facilities, revenue sources and other practical considerations follow. These are all elements of the financial model. When Samuels defines the mission of the public university in a narrow way, he begins a process that results in changes to every aspect of the university.
Consider what would happen if a congregation defined its mission as “winning the lost” or evangelizing the unchurched. Every worship service, class and activity would be evaluated based on that mission and the metric of new Christians. Those activities that did not contribute to new Christians would be subject to reduction or elimination.
If the mission is more complicated, such as “baptizing the nations” or “loving God and loving neighbor,” a second question becomes helpful: What does success look like? Hopefully, leaders can name several observable signs of success to create metrics. Activities can be reviewed in terms of how they contribute to the various signs of success.
I headed a ministry that was part of a large teaching hospital. My little ministry made a contribution to the character of the larger institution, but not to the mission. Thus my work did not contribute to patient satisfaction, length of stay or other measures by which the institution assessed its mission.
One part of my job was to be vigilant that the ministry’s financial model was contained and profitable. If asked, I wanted to assure leaders of the mother institution that we were not drawing resources away from the primary mission and that we provided some less tangible benefits in terms of services to important constituents.
Mission, services and financial model overlap. A decision about one area impacts the others.
Perhaps ministers would be more comfortable if discussions started with mission and moved to questions about the financial model. In that way the conversation about money might be more grounded in the work rather than worry about scarcity of resources.
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Conversations about money are uncomfortable for many ministers. In the last two weeks, two leaders of Christian institutions confessed to me that they could not use Excel, the basic tool for budgeting in most organizations.
You can imagine that my recent blog posts on finding a sustainable financial model or the importance of virtuous cycles in the economics of Christian institutions have not been very popular because I advocate for leaders to think much more about these issues.
Last week the head of the union for University of California’s 4,000 instructors and librarians published a book on the future of higher education that illustrates what is at stake for discussions about financial models. Bob Samuels argues that public college education should be free (link is external). This would require trimming non-essential functions, redirecting a bunch of money and ending tax breaks that mostly benefit wealthy college-goers’ families.
Even a brief look at Samuels’ proposal illustrates the importance of the financial model. He is advocating for a narrowing of the work of the public university to focus on the classroom experience of undergraduates. He proposes dramatically reducing athletics, research and residential life. The public university he describes looks much like the community college of today.
One of the first steps to explore the financial model is to clearly articulate the mission. Next, establish the programs or services required to accomplish the mission. The staffing, facilities, revenue sources and other practical considerations follow. These are all elements of the financial model. When Samuels defines the mission of the public university in a narrow way, he begins a process that results in changes to every aspect of the university.
Consider what would happen if a congregation defined its mission as “winning the lost” or evangelizing the unchurched. Every worship service, class and activity would be evaluated based on that mission and the metric of new Christians. Those activities that did not contribute to new Christians would be subject to reduction or elimination.
If the mission is more complicated, such as “baptizing the nations” or “loving God and loving neighbor,” a second question becomes helpful: What does success look like? Hopefully, leaders can name several observable signs of success to create metrics. Activities can be reviewed in terms of how they contribute to the various signs of success.
I headed a ministry that was part of a large teaching hospital. My little ministry made a contribution to the character of the larger institution, but not to the mission. Thus my work did not contribute to patient satisfaction, length of stay or other measures by which the institution assessed its mission.
One part of my job was to be vigilant that the ministry’s financial model was contained and profitable. If asked, I wanted to assure leaders of the mother institution that we were not drawing resources away from the primary mission and that we provided some less tangible benefits in terms of services to important constituents.
Mission, services and financial model overlap. A decision about one area impacts the others.
Perhaps ministers would be more comfortable if discussions started with mission and moved to questions about the financial model. In that way the conversation about money might be more grounded in the work rather than worry about scarcity of resources.
Visit Alban.org
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