Alban Weekly from The Duke Divinity School in Durham, North Carolina, United States "PRACTICAL WISDOM FOR LEADING CONGREGATIONS: A Struggling Texas Church is Slowly Rising Again, Becoming Leaven for the Community" for Monday, 28 November 2016
PRACTICAL WISDOM FOR LEADING CONGREGATIONS
A Struggling Texas Church is Slowly Rising Again, Becoming Leaven for the Community
Faith & Leadership
CHRISTIAN LEADERSHIP, PASTORAL LEADERSHIP, CONGREGATIONS, BUILDINGS, GROWTH & RENEWAL
A struggling Texas church is slowly rising again, becoming leaven for the community
Bread Church participants gather ingredients for an evening of baking and spiritual discussion. Photos by Brian Diggs.
Despite years of decline and worries about the future, Austin's Memorial UMC is moving forward in ministry, with bread baking, ESL classes and a decidedly Wesleyan model of church focused not on themselves but on their neighbors.
Kepler-Karrer had become so engaged in a conversation that she accidentally poured several tablespoons of salt -- instead of sugar -- into her mixing bowl.
“You can’t use it?” asked a visitor to Bread Church, Memorial’s monthly gathering where participants bake bread and discuss the spiritual metaphors that arise naturally from the process -- topics like leaven, new life and transformation.
The 45-year-old pastor shook her head and explained that she’d killed the bread’s ability to rise.
“The Gospel says, ‘Have salt in you,’” she joked later. “I think Jesus forgot to say, ‘And not too much.’”
The Rev. Cynthia Kepler-Karrer (center) watches Alex Klein carefully pour a cup of soy milk.
The failed babka didn’t faze Kepler-Karrer, who wore a silver cross and practically bounced with enthusiasm when she talked.
That night felt victorious. She watched connections form around the stainless steel tables in the church’s industrial-size kitchen. Longtime church members mixed ingredients and kneaded dough alongside unaffiliated millennials searching for community, a pair of elderly women who came just to socialize and an associate pastor from Austin’s downtown United Methodist church seeking inspiration.
Bread Church is one of many outreach programs Kepler-Karrer has launched since arriving at Memorial five years ago, one of many small victories for a congregation with an all-too-familiar story. After years of decline, Memorial has the hallmarks of many mainline Protestant churches today -- low attendance, financial struggles, an aging congregation and worries about long-term survival.
But Kepler-Karrer and church members are too busy to plan their funeral. They are baking bread with neighbors, coordinating ESL classes for immigrant parents and inviting an assortment of community groups -- from the Austin Ukulele Society to Meals on Wheels -- into their space.
Dorothy Langson (left) and her daughter, Sheila McFeron, double check the recipe as they make babka. Moving forward despite fear and doubt
For churches grappling with similar challenges, Memorial offers important lessons for moving forward in ministry even in the face of fear and doubt. Under Kepler-Karrer’s guidance, congregants are embracing a decidedly Wesleyan model of church focused not on themselves but on their neighbors.
In this new yet very old mission field, they’re moving toward measuring success not by attendance and donations but by how many people are using the church building and how many neighbors are being served.
How does your church or organization measure success? What new marks of success might it be overlooking?
The surrounding Northeast Austin neighborhood, known as Windsor Park, is currently a blend of Hispanics and African-Americans, immigrants and young white gentrifiers. It’s not exactly fertile ground for a mainline Protestant church in decline, especially one that is mostly white and elderly, with an average Sunday attendance of 65 to 75.
But Kepler-Karrer and the congregation are making inroads by keeping their focus on faithfulness.
“I’m pretty clear that my job is to be faithful every day and to notice God working every day and to keep pointing that out and to keep inviting people in and welcoming people in and introducing people to Jesus, who has a message about a kingdom,” Kepler-Karrer said. “If I’m doing that, then I’m being faithful, and I think I’m called to be faithful, not just to save a church.”
Founded in 1873 by Swedish Methodists, Memorial(link is external) -- first called Swedish Methodist and later Central Methodist -- originally occupied land near the Texas Capitol downtown. In the late 1950s, the church sold its property to the state and moved to Northeast Austin, where developers were transforming farmland into a neighborhood for young families -- ranch-style homes with all the modern conveniences.
Memorial’s move to Windsor Park was perfect timing for young couple Carole and Charles Garner, who had settled in the new neighborhood and were looking for a church home. Their two children were baptized and confirmed at Memorial, and Charles took an active role in building the gymnasium and opening a church school.
Memorial, with its high wood-beamed ceiling and elegant stained-glass windows, thrived in those years, said Carole Garner, now 82. Sunday worship drew 600 to 800 people. The congregation required three services at Easter and fielded dozens of confirmation candidates each year.
Staggering decline
Garner said the church’s subsequent decline has been staggering, as church members have died or moved away and the surrounding neighborhood’s profile has changed, becoming less white and more economically challenged.
Charles died in 2013, and Carole now lives in a townhome nearby. She’s encouraged by Kepler-Karrer’s efforts to engage the neighborhood but worries that Memorial may not survive.
“Truthfully, I can’t say that I see a long-term future,” she said. “I just hope we don’t lose the church.”
The congregation at Memorial UMC listens to the sermon during Sunday worship. On Kepler-Karrer’s first Sunday at Memorial five years ago, the pastor looked out from the pulpit at the gray-haired parishioners sitting on mustard-colored pew cushions and realized that she and her husband were the only people there between the ages of 18 and 40.
Kepler-Karrer wasn’t intimidated. She’d served struggling churches before. At her second appointment after seminary, a tiny congregation in a town called Runge, the church had burned down one Sunday, the result of a faulty thermostat.
Her father, the Rev. Kent Kepler, is a retired United Methodist pastor who served mostly rural Texas churches. She grew up in cramped parsonages and graduated from high school in a county that boasted the highest goat population in the United States.
Church leaders in every denomination have long urged pastors to take on the type of outreach Memorial does regularly -- such as supporting local schools -- but there’s no denying the pressure to demonstrate some kind of measurable success. How would Kepler-Karrer convince people in the conference that Memorial still had life in it?
The key was staying focused on the mission field, which Kepler-Karrer sees as the world just outside the door of the parsonage she shares with her husband, Clayton Karrer, and their dogs and cats.
What is your church's primary mission field?
Fragmented landscape, still evolving
The densely populated Windsor Park, just east of Interstate 35, is a fragmented landscape that is still evolving. Once white, middle-class and suburban, the neighborhood became more racially and economically diverse as original residents moved out, often renting their homes to Hispanic and African-American tenants.
More recently, the area started attracting new investors, as the nearby site of Austin’s former airport was transformed into an upscale development featuring eco-friendly homes, lush parks and trendy restaurants. As a result, home values and property taxes have risen dramatically throughout Windsor Park, putting pressure on many low-income residents.
Sprinkled among the newly renovated houses, adult group homes and low-income apartments add to the neighborhood’s economic mix. And immigrants from Mexico and Central America are now being joined by newcomers from East Asia and Africa, adding to the racial mix.
Kepler-Karrer realized that her church couldn’t possibly do the work of Jesus if they didn’t know their neighbors. So in keeping with her Wesleyan approach to community building, she began a walking tour shortly after her arrival, meeting as many residents as she could and finding out their needs.
“Methodists have been involved in structures of getting food to people and getting education to people and getting health care to people for a very long time,” she said.
Her efforts haven’t always gone exactly as planned. Memorial’s motto -- “Feeding Northeast Austin, body, mind, and spirit in the name of Jesus” -- dovetailed nicely with the monthly bread-making gatherings that the church already was hosting. So Kepler-Karrer suggested that congregants expand the ministry by offering fresh loaves to people in the neighborhood. It would be a symbolic gesture that could lead to conversations and, ultimately, relationships, she thought.
After mixing flour, water, yeast and other ingredients, hands knead the dough that will soon become bread. But the practical implementaion of this idea wasn't easy. Some people they approached were understandably suspicious of strangers giving them food. Kepler-Karrer discovered bread discarded on neighborhood benches.
“If somebody hands you a random loaf of bread at a bus stop, maybe you don’t eat that,” she said with a laugh.
Still, church members kept trying. And eventually some neighbors -- including a street preacher with a megaphone -- began showing up at Sunday services.
‘Strange people’ coming to church
The interactions pushed some members out of their comfort zone, and more than a few noted that some “strange people” were coming to church.
Kepler-Karrer’s response: “Yeah, isn’t it awesome?”
Who does your church consider “strange?” If they attended, would that be "awesome," or just strange?
Not everyone thought so, but for the most part, the congregation welcomed the newcomers. They even agreed to change the name of their annual homecoming service from Roundup Sunday -- which Kepler-Karrer feared would trigger a negative reaction among Hispanic immigrants -- to Y’all Come Sunday.
Kiki Corry, who grew up a mile from the church and was confirmed there in 1970, said she’s always thought of the neighborhood as the “extended family” of Memorial, even as the demographics have changed.
“As a biologist, I appreciate the importance of diversity for resilience,” said Corry, an official with the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department. “I see this neighborhood becoming stronger because of this diversity.”
Three years ago, Kepler-Karrer made a decision. When asked where she served, she would name the mission field first -- Northeast Austin -- and then Memorial UMC. When giving her annual report to Methodist officials, she would begin with an update on the neighborhood and how her congregation was serving the people of Windsor Park.
She also recently began working toward a new metric of success at Memorial: the number of “person-hours” per square foot.
Attendance may be paltry and finances thin, she figured, but the church does not sit empty throughout the week. It fills an assortment of needs. The sprawling complex, which includes a gymnasium, a kitchen, classrooms and meeting rooms, accommodates charities, church organizations, Scout troops, the neighborhood association, artists and others who need space.
The church is still gathering data from the various organizations, but Kepler-Karrer estimates that the groups who use the building weekly, for example, account for nearly 300 person-hours per week. She’s still gathering information from organizations that meet at the church monthly, but as the church compiles more solid and complete data, it hopes to track those benchmarks and see ongoing improvement.
Called to build relationships
Capital District Superintendent Teresa Welborn has been impressed by what she described as Kepler-Karrer’s “theological understanding of the incarnation.”
“As disciples, we are called to build relationships with others in the mission fields we seek to serve, to share resources and learn from one another,” she said.
The Rev. Cynthia Kepler-Karrer spends a moment with the church's children during Sunday worship.Welborn has great hope for Memorial and points to Jeremiah 29:11 as offering an important message for the church: “I know the plans I have in mind for you, declares the LORD; they are plans for peace, not disaster, to give you a future filled with hope” (CEB).
One of Memorial’s most ambitious endeavors is the ESL program for parents of students at Harris Elementary School, located just across the street. The school’s student body is 80 percent Hispanic and 9 percent black, and almost all of its students qualify for free or reduced lunch.
The church launched the ESL classes in January in partnership with Austin Independent School District and Manos de Cristo, a nonprofit that provides assistance to people with low incomes. .
Carol Logan, Memorial’s volunteer coordinator for the program, said the church already had a relationship with the school, supplying pencils to students for standardized tests and bringing casseroles to teachers. When Logan inquired about other ways Memorial might help, school officials told her they desperately needed an ESL program for students’ parents.
How does your church know what people in the surrounding community need and want?
Twelve people, including two women from Sudan, completed the course last spring. Another class is now underway at Memorial. The church also provides child care for the parents. Logan watches a group of 3-year-olds twice a week.
One of the boys asked her recently as they walked into the church, “Is this your house?”
“Yes, well,” she replied, “my house is your house.”
Logan said she gets so much joy from her work with the neighborhood that she almost feels selfish. She didn’t imagine that was possible when she joined Memorial three years ago after moving into a nearby apartment complex. She was concerned that the church might be dying, but Kepler-Karrer’s passion for community engagement made her stay.
‘A center of the community’
“We don’t want the church to be a community center,” she recalled her pastor saying, “but we want it to be a center of the community.”
Patti Marcum greets another church member during the passing of the peace. Sustaining that center is an ongoing challenge. Kepler-Karrer’s mission efforts have won praise from Methodist officials, but the church continues to face practical challenges such as building maintenance. The church has replaced several HVAC units in the past five years, and its budget is lean.
In an effort to find a path forward, the congregation earlier this year assembled a leadership team, which is still defining its work.
“It’s not even a light at the end of the tunnel,” Logan said, “but it’s the best way possible of dealing with this.”
Kepler-Karrer keeps reminding members that as Christians, they don’t fear death and shouldn’t fear their church closing.
“Even if this particular congregation can’t sustain itself, … this space will be in ministry somehow,” she said. “I see all kinds of pathways moving forward for this congregation to sustain itself. I am very confident that whatever happens here will be ministry coming out of our space. And I have a feeling it will be Methodist in character.”
Bread Church participants sift flour at the start of an evening making dough and exploring divine metaphors. The Bread Church gatherings offer Kepler-Karrer a promising glimpse of what the future might look like as she guides people through the process of making dough and exploring divine metaphors. There’s something about mixing the physical and the abstract that draws people who might not otherwise set foot in her church.
Alex Klein, 26, read about Bread Church in Austin’s alternative weekly paper. He attended once by himself and the next month brought along his girlfriend, Tyger Nunez, 25.
The two don’t attend a church, but Nunez said she’s open to hearing spiritual discussions.
“We like to be involved in the community,” she said.
On that September evening, Klein and Nunez joined the others for conversation and prayer in the children’s Bible study room. Meanwhile, in the church kitchen, the dough for their babka and cinnamon rolls made its first rise.
Alex Klein laughs as Tyger Nunez mixes dough. The two attended Bread Church after Klein read about it in a local paper.Questions to consider:
- How does your church or organization measure success? What new marks of success might it be overlooking?
- What is your church’s primary mission field? What does it do to keep from becoming its own mission field, focused primarily on itself?
- What specific steps can your church take to connect more closely with the surrounding neighborhood?
- Who does your church consider “strange?” How welcome would they be at your church? If the stranger attended, would that be awesome, or just strange?
- How and in what ways does your church serve the community?
- What does your church do to find out what people in the surrounding community need and want?
Read more about Memorial United Methodist Church »
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IDEAS THAT IMPACT: GROWTH & RENEWALHow can the design process help churches think creatively and reach young people?
Faith & Leadership
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IDEAS THAT IMPACT: GROWTH & RENEWALHow can the design process help churches think creatively and reach young people?
Faith & Leadership
INNOVATION, CONGREGATIONS, GROWTH & RENEWAL, YOUNG ADULTS
Mihee Kim-Kort: How can the design process help churches think creatively and attract young people?
Bigstock/iconvector
In order for churches to be provocative and compelling spaces for young people to encounter God, it is not enough to repackage traditional programs, writes a PCUSA pastor. But how do churches come up with ideas?Where are all the young people? It’s a question that absorbs the leaders of mainline institutions, as research continues to reveal the millennial generation as one of the least engaged in religious life.
Yet there is a seeming contradiction: research also shows that millennials have a strong sense of faith in God.
So how do Christian institutions connect with that yearning? From my own observations and conversations, it seems that the most effective “programs” combine the traditional with the unconventional.
These range from Theology on Tap gatherings to coffeehouses that host spoken-word artists to urban community gardens -- all creative ways for churches to connect with millennials and digital natives.
But how do churches come up with these plans and ideas?
At a recent weekend workshop, I learned how design methods can offer an exciting way for congregations and institutions to work with their members and prospective members -- including those turned-off young people -- to create churches that are meaningful, beautiful and faithful.
The consultation weekend was led by designer Bethany Stolle(link is external), who described design as being “more about the questions than the products, more about process -- participatory, generative, action-oriented, abductive, empathetic and locally driven.”
It’s a process that she likens to “building the sandbox and defining the borders.” The sandbox sets parameters, but it is not limiting; it is the sand that invites imagination and creativity and possibilities. It invites people to play, experiment and embrace failing and starting over again and again.
This is a shift from the corporate model that has influenced many church structures. The corporate model tends to rely on top-down and linear hierarchies and decision-making processes to organize the work.
It came of age during the early ’80s as megachurches began to sprout up. These organizations sought feedback from members, often relying on automated or paper surveys with limited response options.
By contrast, the design model emphasizes empathy, flattened hierarchies and networked decision making.
Design thinking uses a prototype -- something tangible to look at and work with -- that invites people to the table.
For instance, rather than asking a group multiple-choice questions about worship services, a design-method leader might put up sheets of newsprint labeled with words related to liturgy, such as “contemplative,” “prayer” or “traditional,” and invite participants to stick on images -- anything from a dog in the park to a crying baby -- that they associate with those words. The visuals serve to prompt a fresh conversation about topics that may have become rote.
Visuals, including diagrams and sketches, can supplement or even replace spreadsheets, specifications and other documents, writes the founder and director of Austin Center for Design, Jon Kolko, in the Harvard Business Review(link is external).
The visuals “add a fluid dimension to the exploration of complexity, allowing for nonlinear thought when tackling nonlinear problems,” he writes.
The design approach encourages social risk taking, such as voicing an idea that is not fully formed, and is tolerant of failure, viewing it as a natural part of the creative process, Kolko writes. Without room for failure, there is not much chance for growth or discovery.
Stolle used this kind of process when conducting interviews with young people about their religious experience, she said.
The participants filled out journals, used Rorschach-type images to describe their ideal churches and hosted Stolle in their homes. These activities profoundly connected Stolle to her interviewees, and many of the participants expressed appreciation for being heard and being given the space to reflect deeply on their religious needs and experiences.
What I love about this approach is the potential it offers churches not only to create programs for outreach to young adults but also to shape their communities’ attitudes -- and posture -- toward people’s lived experiences in this cultural landscape.
The process doesn’t mean that anything goes, of course. The sandbox of design-centric methods is wide, offering us many ways to be creative and imaginative while remaining rooted in our traditions, theologies and identities.
At Church of the Pilgrims in Washington, D.C., for example, a design approach encourages improvisation in worship, within the limits of tradition.
“We have stations set up for kids around the sanctuary, which means kids are cruising around all the time. We have time for testimony. We improv the Prayer of Great Thanksgiving. We move around during worship,” writes the Rev. Ashley Goff in her blog God of the Sparrow(link is external).
“But …,” she explains “we sit in our pews. We still sing when the order of worship says to sing. We don’t call and respond to the preacher or liturgist.”
Research shows that millennials are hungry for religious experience that is meaningful and meets them where they are in their lives. For churches to be provocative and compelling spaces for them to encounter God, it is not enough to repackage traditional programs.
Design methods make space for that human connection, both in the final product and in the creative process. It is a way to be faithful, and to be an active part of something much more beautiful.
How can churches implement design thinking? Consider these suggestions:
- Create a focus group or “play session” around a question like, “What new mission could we establish?” or “What do our children need?” or “How can we care for our aging members?” Tangible activities such as role playing, visualization or newsprint mapping can spark conversation and ideas, which staff and leaders can then use to shape new programs.
- Have congregational leaders spend time creating and talking about their ideal church prototype. “The point is to externalize it, and not just use words, which are prone to misunderstanding or assumptions of understanding,” Stolle said. “By externalizing, diagramming, storyboarding and visualizing, I think people make fewer assumptions that they know what the other person thinks. Or those assumptions become apparent as people describe the same picture in different ways. It’s the difference between reading the Bible in text and telling the Bible story through a stained-glass window.”
- Invite others into these conversations -- other churches and even other denominations and faith communities, particularly those that are experimenting -- not for the sake of totally revamping your church, but in order to see the possibilities.
- Invite a design consultant to create a process by which you can discover how your church looks and operates during a Sunday morning worship service.
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Waiting for the words, "We're glad you're here"
Faith & Leadership
CONGREGATIONS, GROWTH & RENEWAL, LAITY
Cherry Crayton: Waiting for the words, 'We're glad you're here'
After visiting multiple churches, a potential congregant found the secret of how to choose her new church home: a congregation made her feel welcome.
When my neighbor invited me to visit her United Methodist church, I dismissed the invitation. At the time, I was a member elsewhere. But that wasn't the only reason. I knew my neighbor's church drew 150 for worship each Sunday, and I had tried smaller congregations before.After visiting multiple churches, a potential congregant found the secret of how to choose her new church home: a congregation made her feel welcome.I had been open to attending a small Methodist church like my neighbor’s when I moved back to my hometown 10 years ago. My criteria were basic: Methodist or Cooperative Baptist, biblically grounded sermons, missions opportunities rooted in the local community, contemporary worship services. I also wanted to feel welcomed -- for someone to shake my hand and say, “We’re glad you’re here” or, “Let me know if you have any questions.” Or just, “Welcome!”
At that time, I visited eight churches, each one at least twice, and one for as long as eight months. Not one person beyond one pastor came up to me before or after a service to greet me. And even though I filled out a visitor’s card each time, not one person from any of the churches followed up with me.
I felt invisible. I was interested in joining a church, but maybe these churches weren’t interested in me.
You may know my kind. I have ambivalent memories of the Baptist church I grew up in, but I have no ambivalence about God. My playlist mixes Brandi Carlile and Ellie Holcomb. My weekly inspirations come from Chelsea Handler and the Rev. Amy Butler. My last reads are “Ms. Marvel” and Henri Nouwen’s “Love, Henri: Letters on the Spiritual Life.” I'm single.
Sometimes it seemed that churches didn't know what to do with me.
I ended up visiting a nondenominational church a 30-minute drive from my house. The nondenominational aspect and its overly produced music didn’t appeal to me. (Though I must admit I liked the idea of wearing jeans.)
But on my first visit, at least 10 greeters stood at the entrance and held the doors open. Everyone got a “Welcome! Good to see you.” Inside, there were more greeters scattered around and stationed at information tables and kiosks.
When I walked through the doors into the auditorium, another greeter handed me a bulletin, smiled and said, “Enjoy the service.”
I felt seen and welcomed. I joined a year later.
Over time, I became a small group leader and ministry leader, and manned an information desk before and after services.
The church enriched my life. I changed there. I found the courage to sing out loud. I got to know God better. I began to heal from the wounds of churches past.
But the church changed, too. Its membership swelled from 900 to over 12,000. People came and went. Ministries popped up and dropped off. Elders changed the church’s mission and vision. The sermons became repeats, some five times over. Pastors moved on, and new ones came on. I wondered: Would anybody even notice if I stopped coming?
Eventually, I had to take stock: Who did God call me to be? And where does God want me?
The desire to be rooted in and invested in my local community came to consume me. I needed to make a change, and to attend a church near home.
I thought about my neighbor’s invitation to visit the small United Methodist congregation five minutes from my house. I had nothing to lose by visiting the church, I told myself. The church could not make me feel any less welcome than others I had visited over the years. As I walked through its front doors, I said a quiet prayer: “God, just put me where you want me to be, and let me be open to wherever that is.”
A couple greeted me. As the man handed me a bulletin, he said, “Welcome! We’re glad you’re here.”
I walked into the sanctuary and sat down. A woman tapped me on the shoulder from behind and asked me my name. “It’s wonderful to meet you,” she said. “If you have any questions, let me know. We’re glad you’re here.”
I filled out a visitor’s card. The pastor emailed me within a few days. I went back the next week. A greeter introduced me to several women around my age and followed up that afternoon with an email.
I had never felt more welcomed. It was a bit surreal. I had found a church that actually felt like a church -- inviting, warm, open and neighborly.
Over the next several months, I came to understand why. The church is intentional in welcoming visitors.
At least four times in as many months, I heard a lay leader or the pastor there say something like, “You can tell a lot about a church by how it treats its visitors.” At least three times they encouraged us to invite at least one other person to a songfest or event.
The pastor peppers his sermons with what it means to be a neighbor, to those both outside the walls of the church and within.
There are also the small gestures that convey warmth.
The pastor let me borrow his copy of the Rev. Adam Hamilton’s “Revival” DVD series after only a handful of visits, and he has invited me to meet with him so I can learn more about the church and he can learn more about me (though I haven’t yet taken him up on the offer). A member gave me a tour of the church and talked me through the different Sunday school options. When none seemed to be the right fit for me, she encouraged me to start my own.
There’s the typical passing of the peace during services and the Wednesday dinners. But there are also luncheons after Sunday services once a month, and be assured, if you’re a visitor, you’ll have members eat with you, ask you questions and answer yours.
There’s a dedicated time during services for members to call out their announcements, prayer requests and joys; but there’s also a near-daily consolidated email from the church office with updated announcements, prayer requests and calls to action.
When Sunday attendance is a bit down, the congregation moves up to fill in the first few rows of pews, and the pastor moves a lectern down to stand level with us as he delivers the message.
At the end of each service, as we sing “A Closing Prayer” after the benediction, singers from the praise team walk up and down the rows shaking our hands or giving us hugs. And the pastor and at least one lay leader typically stand at the back to greet us again as we leave.
At a recent Bible study, several members of the congregation shared how they had ended up at the church and why they had stayed. They were of various ages. Single and married. But their stories all began like mine: they had visited numerous other churches, too, and no one seemed to notice. Once they landed at our church, they immediately felt that they had found a place where they could belong.
“Others were so welcoming to me when I came here,” one woman who is now a greeter told me. “I just want to pass it on.”
“Sometimes you want to go where everybody knows your name / And they’re always glad you came.” The pastor sang those lyrics from the “Cheers” theme song in a recent sermon. If there’s ever a place that should be that to people, he said, it’s the church.
People don’t join a congregation because of the children’s programs or the facilities or the ordained leadership, he said. They join because of how they’re treated by others.
I joined the church in September.
Read more from Cherry Crayton »
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Living out of abundance
Faith & Leadership
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Living out of abundance
Faith & Leadership
CONGREGATIONS, GROWTH & RENEWAL
Living out of abundance
A church learns that when it stops asking about a community’s needs and begins asking about its gifts, people learn that what we need is already here.
The twin themes are rooted both in what we know to be the promise of God’s rich abundance in our lives, callings and places of work and in the reality we know of shrinking budgets, dwindling resources and staff cutbacks.At events I lead and events I attend, I hear the question, “How can I change our institution’s mindset from one of scarcity to one of abundance?” During a cohort of Foundations of Christian Leadership(link is external) this past year, one young denominational leader from a national office asked, “How can I teach our pastors to think in terms of abundance when I don’t have time to do so because our own office staff has been so greatly reduced?”
How many of us are able to actually live out the faithful calling of abundance and confidence in God’s ability to provide, in which our faith asks us to dwell?
At a recent gathering of Christian institutional leaders, Michael Mather, pastor of Broadway United Methodist Church in Indianapolis, told stories of how he lives out of the abundance he professes.
He described how a parishioner at his former church in South Bend once remarked that since the spirit descended on everyone at Pentecost, everyone should have something to give. Mather took that teaching back to the church food pantry, where homeless and other hungry people were being given a survey to see how poor they were, how needy, and how many in their families were unemployed.
With abundance in mind, Mather created a new survey with questions such as, “What three things do you do well enough that you teach someone else?” The results were game-changing.
Adele wrote that she was a good cook. “Prove it!” challenged Mather. “Bake me a dozen of your best cookies and bring them to my office tomorrow morning.” She did, and they were delicious. Mather asked her to cook lunch in the church’s kitchen for the custodian, the secretary and the pastor. She did, again with spectacular results.
After Adele cooked several similar meals for the church, Mather told the Chamber of Commerce that, yes, they could hold their meeting at the church -- if they used the church’s caterer! He spent $20 on 1,000 business cards for Adele, and she cooked such a good lunch for 70 of the business and civic leaders of the community that they all asked for her business cards.
Adele now owns her own restaurant in Indianapolis. “Now, if we had asked her when she showed up, ‘Tell us how poor you are,’ we would have all missed a lot of great food,” Mather says.
Mather is writing a book full of similar stories about what can happen when we actually live out of God’s abundance and into the belief that even people who have no money have gifts to give.
In his poem “What We Need Is Here,” poet and activist Wendell Berry writes, “And we pray, not for new earth or heaven, but to be quiet in heart, and in eye, clear. What we need is here.” Mather has found a way to live out of his belief that what we need is here, provided by an abundant God.by: Gretchen E. Ziegenhals
At a recent gathering of Christian institutional leaders, Michael Mather, pastor of Broadway United Methodist Church in Indianapolis, told stories of how he lives out of the abundance he professes.
He described how a parishioner at his former church in South Bend once remarked that since the spirit descended on everyone at Pentecost, everyone should have something to give. Mather took that teaching back to the church food pantry, where homeless and other hungry people were being given a survey to see how poor they were, how needy, and how many in their families were unemployed.
With abundance in mind, Mather created a new survey with questions such as, “What three things do you do well enough that you teach someone else?” The results were game-changing.
Adele wrote that she was a good cook. “Prove it!” challenged Mather. “Bake me a dozen of your best cookies and bring them to my office tomorrow morning.” She did, and they were delicious. Mather asked her to cook lunch in the church’s kitchen for the custodian, the secretary and the pastor. She did, again with spectacular results.
After Adele cooked several similar meals for the church, Mather told the Chamber of Commerce that, yes, they could hold their meeting at the church -- if they used the church’s caterer! He spent $20 on 1,000 business cards for Adele, and she cooked such a good lunch for 70 of the business and civic leaders of the community that they all asked for her business cards.
Adele now owns her own restaurant in Indianapolis. “Now, if we had asked her when she showed up, ‘Tell us how poor you are,’ we would have all missed a lot of great food,” Mather says.
Mather is writing a book full of similar stories about what can happen when we actually live out of God’s abundance and into the belief that even people who have no money have gifts to give.
In his poem “What We Need Is Here,” poet and activist Wendell Berry writes, “And we pray, not for new earth or heaven, but to be quiet in heart, and in eye, clear. What we need is here.” Mather has found a way to live out of his belief that what we need is here, provided by an abundant God.by: Gretchen E. Ziegenhals
Managing director, Leadership Education at Duke Divinity
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CONGREGATIONS, GROWTH & RENEWALDeath and resurrection of an urban church Read more from Gretchen Ziegenhals »
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UPCOMING ONLINE COURSE: SOURCING INNOVATION
Chances are good that your institution needs to change in some way if it's to thrive (or even survive). You know it. You embrace the idea. But you don't know what to do, or even where to begin.
Join visual anthropologist and filmmaker Marlon Hall and a community of other Christian leaders for this five-week online course as we move step-by-step through the process of learning from a community, which is the foundational step to engage in innovative ministry.
Sourcing Innovation will provide you with the skills to lead innovation to improve the common life. You will learn to examine your community to determine:
Where you want to engage;
With whom you want to engage;
How to develop meaningful partnerships with those people; and
What to do with what you learn. Learn more and register »
NEW IN THE ALBAN LIBRARY
Communication in the Church: A Handbook for Healthier Relationshipsby Thomas G. Kirkpatrick
Communication is integral to the mission of the church, but it can go awry in myriad ways, both obvious and subtle. Communication in the Church helps congregations create healthier ways for their members to relate to one another for greater personal and congregational success. The book offers practical guidelines to help readers become more effective in how they build relationships, lead meetings, experience trust, practice forgiveness, use power, and bridge cultures.
Communication in the Church distills the latest social science research for readers including clergy, lay leaders, continuing education planners, students, scholars, and others. Each chapter includes real-life scenarios, sensible guidelines, practical applications, and suggestions for further learning. This book aims to help readers communicate more effectively-from leading more engaging and productive meetings to preventing or addressing communication breakdowns.
Learn more and order the book »
Alban Weekly from The Duke Divinity School in Durham, North Carolina, United States "PRACTICAL WISDOM FOR LEADING CONGREGATIONS: What is Innovation?" for Monday, 21 November 2016
PRACTICAL WISDOM FOR LEADING CONGREGATIONS
What is innovation?
INNOVATION CAN BE THE SMALL EXPERIMENT, NOT JUST THE "BIG THING"
Faith & Leadership
What is innovation?
INNOVATION CAN BE THE SMALL EXPERIMENT, NOT JUST THE "BIG THING"
Faith & Leadership
INNOVATION
Victoria Atkinson White: What is innovation?
Bigstock / Igor Stevanovic
Innovation doesn’t have to be huge to be worthwhile. It can be a small experiment, a risk that won’t harm your institution but has the potential for measurable gain, writes the managing director of grants at Leadership Education at Duke Divinity.
At the same time, we know we cannot simply accept the glossy pictures of health and wellness splashed across magazines and websites; we know the difference between real and Photoshop. We each have to figure out what “healthy” means for our own age, lifestyle, medical history and goals. There is no “one size fits all” when it comes to health and wellness.
The same is true for innovation and the church. We know we need to innovate, and we don’t have to look far to find a top-10 list or a three-easy-steps webinar promising to change how we lead.
“Innovation” is a buzzword that sounds current and future-oriented, cutting-edge and idealistic, worthy of repetition and scale. We need innovation in the church; too many pews are emptying, and the church is losing (or some would say has lost) its voice in the community.
“We have to innovate!” becomes the battle cry to keep the heavy doors of our large and underutilized buildings open. Those within the walls know that change is needed, yet most hope the change will affect those outside (and not inside) the church.
But just as it is challenging to begin exercising regularly or eating less sugar, the idea of leading innovation sounds overwhelming -- expensive and laborious. The stories we hear and tell ourselves about rejuvenated institutions meeting the needs of those on the margins, filling their pews with new life and energy, are not always helpful. Ordinary leaders, churches and institutions worry that we don’t have the money, talent and scale to succeed.
And yet few innovations begin as big projects or grand ideas. The success stories are often years in the making. The scaled innovations that get recognized are preceded by painful and marvelous failures, seeds that were planted with the best of intentions.
A few weeks ago, a pastor was reflecting on a conference his church had offered. The topic was captivating, current and critical. The location was fantastic. The cost was minimal. The timing was perfect. But the church had experimented with targeting a specific age range of participants -- an innovation that backfired and significantly affected attendance. This small failure will now inform how the church innovates for future events.
Another church had its first Trunk or Treat during Halloween weekend this year. As it always does for community events, the church sent a flier to a local elementary school. But this flier was different in one important respect: it was English on one side and Spanish on the other. The turnout was three times what the church expected. To feed everyone, church members cleaned out the freezers and pantries and sent runners to buy more candy. This simple successful innovation -- communicating in English and Spanish -- will inform the congregation’s future events.
In both of these stories, a church tried something new, tweaked what had been done, looked at its ministries from new angles. That is innovation. It is taking a risk -- a survivable risk -- that, should it fail, would not result in a significant loss to the institution and, should it succeed, could result in real, measurable gain. The churches in the two stories had opposite outcomes, yet both came away with valuable lessons.
These are the kinds of stories I have the privilege of witnessing through the Innovation Grants offered to Leadership Education’s Foundations of Christian Leadership(link is external)participants. Each Foundations participant has the opportunity to apply for an Innovation Grant of up to $5,000 to put into practice what he or she has learned.
Most of the innovations they try will not likely scale or achieve recognition outside the immediate community. What is important is that these emerging leaders are taking risks, trying something new and learning from mistakes. They are changing the conversation they have in their communities, asking new questions, building leadership capacities and shifting mindsets. They are not starting something new just for the sake of change; they are building on the best parts of who they are and what they do.
That is the heart of traditioned innovation -- the very kind of innovation the church most needs.
The church has a solid foundation on which to build. We do not need to abandon the past. We need, rather, to carry the best of our tradition forward and faithfully innovate into new ways of bearing witness to the reign of God.
What is the small innovation your institution can afford to make today? At worst, you may learn a valuable lesson. At best, you may far exceed your expectations.
Read more from Victoria Atkinson White »
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IDEAS THAT IMPACT: TRADITIONED INNOVATIONSeven tips for cultivating traditioned innovation in leadership teams
Faith & Leadership
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IDEAS THAT IMPACT: TRADITIONED INNOVATIONSeven tips for cultivating traditioned innovation in leadership teams
Faith & Leadership
INNOVATION, CHRISTIAN LEADERSHIP
L. Gregory Jones: Seven tips for cultivating traditioned innovation in leadership teams
Bigstock / Macondo
Each of these tips depends on, and points Christian leaders to, the importance of wisdom and growing in intimacy with God, writes the theologian.
“I like the idea of traditioned innovation, and believe it is a biblical way of thinking. But how can I learn to practice it in my leadership, and to help my team of direct reports do so as well?” The friend’s question is as important as it is complex: how can I learn the mindset of traditioned innovation as well as teach it?
The mindset ultimately depends on long-term practices of Christian formation. These practices include learning to read Scripture as a beautiful, complex narrative with inner-biblical conversations; nurturing habits that enable us to develop fluency in seeing the world as God does; and developing a Christian vocabulary so that words like “blessing,” “forgiveness,” “hope” and “hospitality” have deep resonance for how we see the world.
Even if we are committed to such Christian formation, though, we still need to learn how to practice traditioned innovation in our organizational leadership. We often have inherited, embodied and sometimes even created bad practices that undermine the very mindsets to which we want to be committed.
Here are seven tips to help cultivate traditioned innovation in your organization and, especially, among the teams with whom you work.
1. Begin with the end. Remember that “the end is our beginning.” This phrase is designed to keep the main thing the main thing. As Simon Sinek suggests in his TED talk “Start With Why(link is external),” organizations and people that remain focused on core purpose are those most likely to flourish. For Christians, we are to be focused on God and God’s reign. The God who is “making all things new” by the power of the Holy Spirit does so by conforming us to Christ, the one in whom the creation came to be.
Beginning with the end, the purpose, orients us toward the future and shapes us as a people of hope. In so doing, it also keeps returning us to the best of our past. It thus destabilizes the present, keeping before us the gap between what we are called to bear witness to and how we are currently living.
Remembering a phrase like “the end is our beginning” helps us stay focused on the future, on what God is calling us to be, in a way that stirs our imagination and pulls us forward. We begin with a destination toward which we are moving, rather than settling into the status quo or nostalgia for some real or imagined past.
2. Stay open to the Holy Spirit. Western Christians, particularly in the U.S., have developed an allergy to the Holy Spirit. We have done so for a variety of reasons, but two are particularly important. First, Charles Taylor suggests in “A Secular Age” that increasingly even believers operate with a default assumption that God is not active in the world. This “immanent frame” tempts even Christian leaders to think, live and lead as “practical atheists.”
Second, if we’re open to the Holy Spirit, we must acknowledge that we are not in control of our plans or our agenda. Staying open to the Spirit means preparing ourselves to be disrupted by the wild, beautiful, transformational work of God’s Spirit that blows where the Spirit will and leads us places we did not intend -- or often even want -- to go.
For example, a rural congregation in eastern North Carolina began praying that God would send them children to love -- and were surprised when the children God sent were refugees from Myanmar. By staying open to the Holy Spirit, though, they embraced those children, and discovered powerful revitalization and renewal.
When we are tempted to make decisions as if we human beings were the only decision makers, or as if “I” or “we” were in control, we need to remind ourselves to stay open to the Holy Spirit. This reframes decision making as discernment, and it focuses our attention on practices such as prayer and hospitality as means by which we become receptive to the work of the Spirit.
3. Practice storytelling and story listening. Traditioned innovation depends on our capacity to hold past, present and future together in a coherent story. Such engagement with story is central to the formation and sustenance of identity, whether personal, communal, organizational, cultural or even cosmic. Stories shape and articulate our sense of who we are, where we have been and where we are going. These stories are rich and complex, with remarkable twists and turns and reversals and upheavals and surprises, and yet they are coherent.
Most centrally, the practice here involves the story of God as told in Scripture from creation to new creation. We need to rediscover more life-giving ways of telling that story, as well as locating ourselves, and our world, in that story. But this practice involves our stories, too -- learning how to tell the stories of our lives and our communities and organizations, and how to locate those stories in the larger story of God.
This description highlights the importance of “story listening.” Alasdair MacIntyre notes in “After Virtue” that any vibrant tradition exists as an ongoing argument about how best to tell the story of that tradition. It is crucial for us to develop deep and wise skills of listening to one another, both in our contemporary contexts and from the accounts of forebears. We do so in part to challenge our own partial and biased renderings of the stories, and also to enrich our capacities to tell the stories well.
If a team in your organization gets caught in too much data or analysis, be sure to take a step back and see how particular decisions fit within larger and longer narrative contexts.
4. Plant and prune. Beginning with the end, staying open to the Holy Spirit, and storytelling and story listening all invite us to plant seeds and discover fresh new elements in our organizational ecosystems. Planting seeds is a sign of trust in the future -- that God will indeed make things new. We need to ask regularly what new things we are planting.
At the same time, though, we need to prune what already exists. We can embrace living tradition and distinguish it from dead traditionalism only if we regularly discern what needs to be left behind. Why might we do that? Because of sinful brokenness and blindness; because those parts of the past are no longer relevant for the future; because pruning would enable the future to flourish in new ways. This last point is important.
The biblical metaphor of pruning illumines the mysterious truth that good gardeners know: pruning requires cutting away healthy parts of an organism in order that it might flourish even more abundantly. And that is equally true of organizations.
Say “yes, and” rather than “no, but.” “Yes, and” is a central practice of improvisational theater, because it provides a way of keeping a story going even when other actors have turned the action in a bizarre direction. “Yes, and” keeps us focused on possibilities and new ways of telling and listening to the story; “yes, and” can help orient us toward God and the work of the Holy Spirit.
“No, but” tends to block creativity and create division, often causing people to retreat into 2-year-old battles of “me,” “mine” and “no.” Christians are called to bear witness to the resurrected Christ, the one whom St. Paul describes in 2 Corinthians 1:19-20(link is external) as God’s definitive “yes.” Christians improvise by drawing what is best in the past into future possibilities. We are always looking for third ways, for possibilities of what Sam Wells describes in “Improvisation” as “overaccepting.”
A commitment to “yes, and” leads us to think less oppositionally and more opposably. As Roger Martin’s work reveals, that also leads to more effective decision making for leaders and organizations.
I have been surprised at the transformations in the substance of my thinking, my leadership and my emotional life simply through learning to avoid, as much as I can, saying or writing the words “no” and “but.” It is amazing what our language does to us -- and can do for us.
5. Use humor to foster growth. When we are developing new default mindsets and habits of learning, thinking, living and leading, it is helpful to have humorous ways to remind ourselves of our old mindsets and patterns. I thought I was being clever in “instructing” others on my team how to do this -- until they started using my humorous phrases back at me. And then I began to discover how much learning and transformation I needed as well!
Two humorous phrases have proved particularly helpful in our learning to practice traditioned innovation. The first draws on the biblical story in Numbers 13 and 14, where the Israelites in the wilderness become fearful about the obstacles ahead of them in their journey toward the promised land. Rather than trusting God to guide them through the obstacles, they decide they want to “go back to Egypt.”
The past in Egypt was suffering, slavery, oppression -- and it was familiar. This temptation to get stuck in a real or imagined past -- no matter how bad it might have been -- is now described by my colleagues and me as “going back to Egypt.” Imagine my dismay one day when a colleague noted to me that it seemed I was taking up residence in ancient Cairo!
The second humorous phrase points to a tendency to dwell on the negative rather than finding the life-giving potential that lies in traditioned innovation. It is drawn from a joke about the first woman pastor at a church. When the “good ol’ boy” leaders of the church invite her to go fishing, as they did with her male predecessors, she happily accepts. But when they are in the boat in the middle of the lake, they realize that the tackle box is still back on the dock. The woman pastor offers to go and get it, and then steps out of the boat and starts walking on the water toward the dock. At that point, one man turns to another and says, “Bad enough they sent us a woman pastor, but they sent us one who can’t swim!” My colleagues and I will now simply say “she can’t swim” when one of us gets stuck in a negative reading of a person or a situation.
6. Cultivate hope. Traditioned innovation offers a way beyond either optimism or pessimism. It orients us to the future, as with optimism -- but not so much because of who we are as because of who God is and where God is leading us. And it keeps us mindful of our propensity for sin and brokenness, as with pessimism -- but not in a way that gets us stuck either in the present or in some longing to go back to a broken past.
We can be honest about the past and the present because of God’s forgiveness and redemption. We are focused on the virtue of hope, and in so doing, we faithfully engage past, present and future in life-giving ways.
Keeping the words “cultivate hope” in view orients us toward God and what God is doing in the world, in our own lives, and in our communities and institutions. In all of those contexts, we are called to focus on hope in our planning, in our dreaming, and even in our struggles and challenges.
In pursuit of that focus, a prayer that Maggy Barankitse prays each morning perhaps ought to be said at the beginning of each day and each meeting in Christian institutions: “Lord, let your miracles break forth every day, and let me not be an obstacle in any way.” Voicing these words, we can learn to trust that the Lord will grace us with miracles regularly, and we can become more attentive to the importance of minimizing the ways we might be obstacles to those miracles.
These seven tips can help us learn to practice traditioned innovation in organizational leadership. They cannot serve as a replacement for the longer journey of Christian formation; each of them depends on, and points us to, the importance of wisdom and growing in intimacy with God. But these tips can enable us to chart some paths forward and discover new ways of remembering, for the sake of faithful and effective leadership, and organizational renewal and vitality.
Read more from L. Gregory Jones »
-------
The idea in action: A Detroit pastor and her church are building something big with tiny homes
Faith & Leadership
“I like the idea of traditioned innovation, and believe it is a biblical way of thinking. But how can I learn to practice it in my leadership, and to help my team of direct reports do so as well?” The friend’s question is as important as it is complex: how can I learn the mindset of traditioned innovation as well as teach it?
The mindset ultimately depends on long-term practices of Christian formation. These practices include learning to read Scripture as a beautiful, complex narrative with inner-biblical conversations; nurturing habits that enable us to develop fluency in seeing the world as God does; and developing a Christian vocabulary so that words like “blessing,” “forgiveness,” “hope” and “hospitality” have deep resonance for how we see the world.
Even if we are committed to such Christian formation, though, we still need to learn how to practice traditioned innovation in our organizational leadership. We often have inherited, embodied and sometimes even created bad practices that undermine the very mindsets to which we want to be committed.
Here are seven tips to help cultivate traditioned innovation in your organization and, especially, among the teams with whom you work.
1. Begin with the end. Remember that “the end is our beginning.” This phrase is designed to keep the main thing the main thing. As Simon Sinek suggests in his TED talk “Start With Why(link is external),” organizations and people that remain focused on core purpose are those most likely to flourish. For Christians, we are to be focused on God and God’s reign. The God who is “making all things new” by the power of the Holy Spirit does so by conforming us to Christ, the one in whom the creation came to be.
Beginning with the end, the purpose, orients us toward the future and shapes us as a people of hope. In so doing, it also keeps returning us to the best of our past. It thus destabilizes the present, keeping before us the gap between what we are called to bear witness to and how we are currently living.
Remembering a phrase like “the end is our beginning” helps us stay focused on the future, on what God is calling us to be, in a way that stirs our imagination and pulls us forward. We begin with a destination toward which we are moving, rather than settling into the status quo or nostalgia for some real or imagined past.
2. Stay open to the Holy Spirit. Western Christians, particularly in the U.S., have developed an allergy to the Holy Spirit. We have done so for a variety of reasons, but two are particularly important. First, Charles Taylor suggests in “A Secular Age” that increasingly even believers operate with a default assumption that God is not active in the world. This “immanent frame” tempts even Christian leaders to think, live and lead as “practical atheists.”
Second, if we’re open to the Holy Spirit, we must acknowledge that we are not in control of our plans or our agenda. Staying open to the Spirit means preparing ourselves to be disrupted by the wild, beautiful, transformational work of God’s Spirit that blows where the Spirit will and leads us places we did not intend -- or often even want -- to go.
For example, a rural congregation in eastern North Carolina began praying that God would send them children to love -- and were surprised when the children God sent were refugees from Myanmar. By staying open to the Holy Spirit, though, they embraced those children, and discovered powerful revitalization and renewal.
When we are tempted to make decisions as if we human beings were the only decision makers, or as if “I” or “we” were in control, we need to remind ourselves to stay open to the Holy Spirit. This reframes decision making as discernment, and it focuses our attention on practices such as prayer and hospitality as means by which we become receptive to the work of the Spirit.
3. Practice storytelling and story listening. Traditioned innovation depends on our capacity to hold past, present and future together in a coherent story. Such engagement with story is central to the formation and sustenance of identity, whether personal, communal, organizational, cultural or even cosmic. Stories shape and articulate our sense of who we are, where we have been and where we are going. These stories are rich and complex, with remarkable twists and turns and reversals and upheavals and surprises, and yet they are coherent.
Most centrally, the practice here involves the story of God as told in Scripture from creation to new creation. We need to rediscover more life-giving ways of telling that story, as well as locating ourselves, and our world, in that story. But this practice involves our stories, too -- learning how to tell the stories of our lives and our communities and organizations, and how to locate those stories in the larger story of God.
This description highlights the importance of “story listening.” Alasdair MacIntyre notes in “After Virtue” that any vibrant tradition exists as an ongoing argument about how best to tell the story of that tradition. It is crucial for us to develop deep and wise skills of listening to one another, both in our contemporary contexts and from the accounts of forebears. We do so in part to challenge our own partial and biased renderings of the stories, and also to enrich our capacities to tell the stories well.
If a team in your organization gets caught in too much data or analysis, be sure to take a step back and see how particular decisions fit within larger and longer narrative contexts.
4. Plant and prune. Beginning with the end, staying open to the Holy Spirit, and storytelling and story listening all invite us to plant seeds and discover fresh new elements in our organizational ecosystems. Planting seeds is a sign of trust in the future -- that God will indeed make things new. We need to ask regularly what new things we are planting.
At the same time, though, we need to prune what already exists. We can embrace living tradition and distinguish it from dead traditionalism only if we regularly discern what needs to be left behind. Why might we do that? Because of sinful brokenness and blindness; because those parts of the past are no longer relevant for the future; because pruning would enable the future to flourish in new ways. This last point is important.
The biblical metaphor of pruning illumines the mysterious truth that good gardeners know: pruning requires cutting away healthy parts of an organism in order that it might flourish even more abundantly. And that is equally true of organizations.
Say “yes, and” rather than “no, but.” “Yes, and” is a central practice of improvisational theater, because it provides a way of keeping a story going even when other actors have turned the action in a bizarre direction. “Yes, and” keeps us focused on possibilities and new ways of telling and listening to the story; “yes, and” can help orient us toward God and the work of the Holy Spirit.
“No, but” tends to block creativity and create division, often causing people to retreat into 2-year-old battles of “me,” “mine” and “no.” Christians are called to bear witness to the resurrected Christ, the one whom St. Paul describes in 2 Corinthians 1:19-20(link is external) as God’s definitive “yes.” Christians improvise by drawing what is best in the past into future possibilities. We are always looking for third ways, for possibilities of what Sam Wells describes in “Improvisation” as “overaccepting.”
A commitment to “yes, and” leads us to think less oppositionally and more opposably. As Roger Martin’s work reveals, that also leads to more effective decision making for leaders and organizations.
I have been surprised at the transformations in the substance of my thinking, my leadership and my emotional life simply through learning to avoid, as much as I can, saying or writing the words “no” and “but.” It is amazing what our language does to us -- and can do for us.
5. Use humor to foster growth. When we are developing new default mindsets and habits of learning, thinking, living and leading, it is helpful to have humorous ways to remind ourselves of our old mindsets and patterns. I thought I was being clever in “instructing” others on my team how to do this -- until they started using my humorous phrases back at me. And then I began to discover how much learning and transformation I needed as well!
Two humorous phrases have proved particularly helpful in our learning to practice traditioned innovation. The first draws on the biblical story in Numbers 13 and 14, where the Israelites in the wilderness become fearful about the obstacles ahead of them in their journey toward the promised land. Rather than trusting God to guide them through the obstacles, they decide they want to “go back to Egypt.”
The past in Egypt was suffering, slavery, oppression -- and it was familiar. This temptation to get stuck in a real or imagined past -- no matter how bad it might have been -- is now described by my colleagues and me as “going back to Egypt.” Imagine my dismay one day when a colleague noted to me that it seemed I was taking up residence in ancient Cairo!
The second humorous phrase points to a tendency to dwell on the negative rather than finding the life-giving potential that lies in traditioned innovation. It is drawn from a joke about the first woman pastor at a church. When the “good ol’ boy” leaders of the church invite her to go fishing, as they did with her male predecessors, she happily accepts. But when they are in the boat in the middle of the lake, they realize that the tackle box is still back on the dock. The woman pastor offers to go and get it, and then steps out of the boat and starts walking on the water toward the dock. At that point, one man turns to another and says, “Bad enough they sent us a woman pastor, but they sent us one who can’t swim!” My colleagues and I will now simply say “she can’t swim” when one of us gets stuck in a negative reading of a person or a situation.
6. Cultivate hope. Traditioned innovation offers a way beyond either optimism or pessimism. It orients us to the future, as with optimism -- but not so much because of who we are as because of who God is and where God is leading us. And it keeps us mindful of our propensity for sin and brokenness, as with pessimism -- but not in a way that gets us stuck either in the present or in some longing to go back to a broken past.
We can be honest about the past and the present because of God’s forgiveness and redemption. We are focused on the virtue of hope, and in so doing, we faithfully engage past, present and future in life-giving ways.
Keeping the words “cultivate hope” in view orients us toward God and what God is doing in the world, in our own lives, and in our communities and institutions. In all of those contexts, we are called to focus on hope in our planning, in our dreaming, and even in our struggles and challenges.
In pursuit of that focus, a prayer that Maggy Barankitse prays each morning perhaps ought to be said at the beginning of each day and each meeting in Christian institutions: “Lord, let your miracles break forth every day, and let me not be an obstacle in any way.” Voicing these words, we can learn to trust that the Lord will grace us with miracles regularly, and we can become more attentive to the importance of minimizing the ways we might be obstacles to those miracles.
These seven tips can help us learn to practice traditioned innovation in organizational leadership. They cannot serve as a replacement for the longer journey of Christian formation; each of them depends on, and points us to, the importance of wisdom and growing in intimacy with God. But these tips can enable us to chart some paths forward and discover new ways of remembering, for the sake of faithful and effective leadership, and organizational renewal and vitality.
Read more from L. Gregory Jones »
-------
The idea in action: A Detroit pastor and her church are building something big with tiny homes
Faith & Leadership
CHRISTIAN LEADERSHIP, PASTORAL LEADERSHIP, INNOVATION, CONGREGATIONAL INNOVATION, MISSIONS & EVANGELISM
A Detroit pastor and her church are building something big with tiny homes
The Rev. Faith Fowler stands in front of the first of 25 new tiny homes that will be built in Detroit by Cass Community Social Services. Photo by Diane Weiss
As both pastor and nonprofit executive director, the Rev. Faith Fowler is known for her outreach to the poor. Her latest effort: a village of tiny homes that will allow people to become stakeholders in their neighborhood and in their city.
In Detroit’s urban core -- ravaged by depopulation, unemployment and abandonment -- the Rev. Faith Fowler is building something big with tiny homes.
The pastor of Cass Community United Methodist Church, known for her innovative, entrepreneurial outreach to the poor, has conceived and captained a project to build a village of 25 very small houses that the working poor or formerly homeless can rent to own.
“People will come here to see these tiny homes; they will become a destination,” said Fowler, 57, as she stood before the first Cass house, a neat 300-square-foot stucco Tudor with a stone faux chimney.
But the homes are about more than a place to live, Fowler said. More importantly, they will be a foundation for the low-income poor to grow and hold an asset, to become stakeholders, literally and figuratively, in their neighborhood and in Detroit.
“When the community is completed,” Fowler said, “there will be 25 new taxpayers on what was once vacant land.”
What does it mean to be a stakeholder? To what extent is your church a stakeholder in its neighborhood?
The tiny homes are just the latest in a long string of creative initiatives by Fowler and her church to fight poverty in Detroit, using an asset-based approach to community development. Founded in 1883, Cass Community UMC is the third-oldest United Methodist Church in Detroit. The church today may be small -- only about 100 or so attend worship in the historic Romanesque building on Cass Avenue -- but it makes a very big impact through its nonprofit, Cass Community Social Services(link is external).
Like all the Cass programs, the Tiny Homes project is the result of much planning and thought. These are not cookie-cutter fabrications, mobile trailers or recycled shipping containers; the homes are designed to be not only efficient but eye-catching. Even darling.
Different styles of the houses are displayed on a cork board in the Rev. Faith Fowler's office. Photo by Diane WeissRanging from 250 to 400 square feet, they will have unique exteriors, evoking styles from mountain-lodge rustic to midcentury modern to New Orleans French Quarter. They will have decks and front porches and be built on individual lots.
The Tudor house -- in effect, the development’s model -- has a good-sized bathroom plus a single main room that features a sleeping nook, a living area, a washer-dryer and a full kitchen with donated granite countertops.
Seven years to home ownership
By year’s end, Fowler aims to have seven homes built and occupied. So far, more than 600 people have requested applications, hoping to meet the project’s financial qualifications to rent to own. Rent will be based on square footage, generally $1 a square foot -- $300 a month for the Tudor home. If residents keep up rent payments for the first three years, they’ll qualify to make monthly payments on a subsequent four-year land contract, offering them full ownership in a total of seven years.
Sitting in the Tudor model, Dewayne Hooper, 26, fills out an application for his own tiny home. Photo by Diane WeissTiny homes have enchanted segments of popular culture, with cable network shows appealing to those who want to downsize, economize and live simply. And communities across the country are turning to them as a solution to the problem of homelessness.
An effort for the homeless in Austin, Texas, has created a village of pint-size individual shelters(link is external) much smaller than the Cass homes. And San Jose, California, recently enacted measures(link is external) permitting individual structures as small as 70 square feet for housing the homeless.
But the Cass development is not intended to be a glorified homeless shelter. Fowler says she’s aiming for a diverse group of inhabitants “so people won’t drive by and say, ‘That’s where the homeless live.’”
In fact, the homes are not necessarily for the homeless. Residents will need to have a source of monthly income. Cass envisions a mix of young and old, low-income workers, seniors on fixed incomes, people receiving disability benefits and students.
Some residents will likely be employees of Cass Community Social Services -- many of them once homeless or former addicts who’ve remade their lives through various Cass Community programs. The nonprofit agency, which Fowler heads as executive director, grew out of her ministry at the church, which for decades has been a haven for the addicted, disabled and homeless of Detroit’s now-gentrifying skid row.
The church’s history
For its first 40 years or so, Cass Community UMC served a mostly well-to-do congregation, traces of which can still be seen in the sanctuary’s Tiffany windows and Johnson tracker pipe organ. Just north of downtown Detroit, the neighborhood was originally a fashionable upper-class enclave, but as residents began moving farther north in the 1920s, it began a long decline.
Founded in 1883, Cass Community UMC has a long history of ministry, mission and advocacy. Photo by Rebecca CookFor much of the past 60-plus years, the area has been known as the Cass Corridor. But today, positioned on the edge of Wayne State University and Detroit’s cultural institutions, it is a hip, millennial magnet rebranded as Midtown.
Despite the gentrification, Fowler and the church still deal mostly with folks more emblematic of Detroit’s 40 percent poverty rate and big-city struggles.
“Every Sunday service, you see her stand at the front of the church, and there’s at least one person there who asks for help,” said head usher Keith Hill. “They’re homeless, or they’re about to be homeless, or they need assistance.”
Fowler’s first Sunday preaching before the congregation, a woman with developmental disabilities -- a frequent Cass usher -- yelled from the back of the church mid-sermon: “Hey lady! We’re out of toilet paper!” Fowler stopped to get her a roll.
“From prayers to giving you the resources or the connections to make everything better, she tries to help,” Hill said. “Some people have passion in this world. She has fire.”
Standing on her tiptoes, a shoeless Faith Fowler leads Sunday worship at Cass Community UMC. Photo by Rebecca CookHill knows it to his core. When he was a teenager, Fowler helped him escape an abusive home and gave him a place to live. His mother’s boyfriend, having forced Hill to drop out of school to work, had pointed a gun at the teen’s head when he refused to turn over a paycheck.
Now 38, Hill works at the Cass Activity Center, assisting with training and work for adults with developmental disabilities.
Fowler describes Hill’s story, and the toilet paper sermon, in her book “This Far by Faith,” which was produced through another of Fowler’s innovations, Cass Community Publishing House(link is external).
CCSS, a $6 million nonprofit
As the executive director of Cass Community Social Services, Fowler manages a $6 million nonprofit that has created programs to aid people dealing with homelessness, hunger, addiction, HIV/AIDS, disabilities and job preparedness.
Cri Cri Snead plays the tambourine as the choir sings at the Warehouse Worship service at Cass Community Social Service on a Wednesday night. Photo by Diane WeissAmong CCSS enterprises are programs that put people to work recycling tires -- 45,000 picked up from city streets -- into mud mats and flip-flops, available for purchase on the nonprofit’s website(link is external). Reclaimed wood from abandoned Detroit houses is crafted into holders for coasters, which depict vintage Detroit landmarks. A shredding business is also flourishing. And the CCSS kitchen dishes out 1 million meals a year, seven days a week.
The Tiny Homes project will cost about $1.5 million, more than half of which Fowler has already raised from private donations and grants. Each house will cost about $40,000 to $50,000 to build, and volunteer groups, including United Methodist teams, will help with finishing touches, such as drywalling, painting and sodding lawns.
“What makes Cass Community unique -- and Faith, in particular -- is they’re working on transformative projects that break the cycle of poverty,” said Jim Vella, the president of the Ford Motor Co. Fund, which donated $400,000 to the enterprise.
“They take people who are unemployable and don’t have skills and really make a difference in their lives,” said Vella, who also sits on the CCSS board.
Vella describes Fowler as a visionary who gets things done -- “a combination of CEO, COO, CFO and Mother Teresa all rolled into one.”
Fowler’s impact has drawn widespread accolades, both in church circles and in the Detroit area. She recently was honored with an annual Shining Light Award, sponsored by the Detroit Free Press and the Metropolitan Affairs Coalition to recognize outstanding community contributions. Last month, she had to skip the church’s weekly Wednesday night service to attend her induction ceremony into the Michigan Women’s Hall of Fame.
And she’s a premier teacher and preacher for UMC events. Next spring, for the third year in a row, Fowler and Cass Community will host about 40 pastors and lay staff in Detroit for a UMC training event entitled “Ministry with the Poor.” Drawing upon Fowler’s approach to ministry, the sessions are about service “with” and not “to” people and communities in need, said the Rev. Nora Colmenares, community engagement leader with the UMC General Board of Global Ministries.
Chosen Bishop, 13, reads along with his grandmother Esther Bishop-Files during Sunday worship at Cass Community UMC. Photo by Rebecca CookAsset-based perspective
“Most churches and others do ministries with the poor as a charity, and from a needs-based perspective,” Colmenares said. “We’re intentionally trying to lead the church away from a needs-based perspective.”
Colmenares said Fowler approaches ministry from an asset-based perspective, drawing upon the talents and labor of people in the community.
What are the needs and assets in your community and how might your church or organization respond?
“She sees that those who have disabilities have assets,” Colmenares said. “Those who were in jail have assets. Those who were addicted and homeless -- they have assets.”
Cass Community UMC has a long history of outreach, dating back to the Great Depression. In 2002, Fowler spun off the church’s social services efforts into the CCSS nonprofit agency when the various programs and ministries began to overwhelm the church’s capacity.
“Every room, every wall was filled with food and medical supplies; people were everywhere,” Fowler said. “My office was used as an examining room for the medical clinic. And the associate’s office was floor-to-ceiling macaroni and cheese.”
What is the relationship between innovation, evolution and sustainability?
Now, the nonprofit provides food, housing, health care, jobs and job training from a campus of buildings about four miles north of the church. It receives funding through government grants, fees for service, foundation and corporate giving, and donations from other churches and individuals. Fundraisers provide about $1 million annually, including an upcoming “Roastin’ the Rev” dinner.
The Cass congregation is supported by offerings, donations and fundraisers. The church pays its own bills, “including my salary and housing, which wasn’t the case when I arrived,” Fowler said. It’s also paid its UMC apportionments in full for 20 years.
The Rev. Faith Fowler leads Sunday worship at Cass Community UMC, where she has served as pastor since 1994. Photo by Rebecca CookNavigating her roles as pastor and CCSS executive director can be tricky. Some parishioners receive services through Cass or work at the nonprofit. To minimize conflicts, Fowler relies on the nonprofit’s staff to make decisions about employment or who receives assistance. (Fowler herself hires only executive-level personnel.)
“Occasionally, a church member gets fired or a member of the congregation might feel they deserve preferential treatment,” she said. “I try to allow agency staff members to deal with most situations. Nevertheless, it gets complicated at times.”
A daughter of Detroit
Fowler grew up in the Detroit suburb of Royal Oak, with three brothers, a schoolteacher father, and a mother who was an active union rep at the chain grocery where she worked. She lives in a historic 1864 Victorian a 1.5-mile bike ride from the church.
“I had a safety net,” Fowler said. “Poor people don’t. If I screwed up, my family might give me a lecture -- but also give me a check.”
The services provided by CCSS make a difference in the lives of hundreds every day. But when clients are ready to move on, they often have few places where they can go. That’s what the Tiny Homes project seeks to address.
When Fowler wanted to explore building tiny homes, she turned to CCSS aide and development coordinator Stacy Conwell-Leigh to do the research.
“She could be the billionaire CEO, but she’s got the heart of a minister,” said Conwell-Leigh, who shows the Tudor model to potential applicants -- and the simply curious -- each Wednesday afternoon.
How can you and your organization nurture people with innovative, theologically robust imaginations?
At a recent open house, one visitor asked Conwell-Leigh why the houses aren’t designed to accommodate several individuals in shared living space. Conwell-Leigh explained that many poor people live communally out of necessity -- in shelters, or with relatives and eating their meals at soup kitchens.
“Faith wants our folks to have what she had and so many of us have -- a backyard, a place of our own,” she said. “Faith had a happy life and wants to pass it on.”
But whoever lives in the Cass tiny homes won’t be alone. They can get help and community services just across the street.
“They can earn a GED, learn job training, use the gym facilities and get a free daily meal in our programs across the street,” Fowler said.
The Tiny Homes project is on the CCSS campus in central Detroit -- not a current hotspot in Detroit’s comeback. The neighborhood has 500 blighted buildings and 300 vacant lots, and the CCSS buildings and services provide a harbor of stability.
A construction worker excavates the foundations for the next phase of Cass Community Social Services' project. Photo by Diane WeissMark Linton, 54, who lives in the low-rent apartments that CCSS renovated adjacent to the project, recently toured the showcase tiny home.
He’s on disability. He likes the Tudor’s curb appeal and the 300 square feet of efficient living space, “but it’s smaller than what I’ve got now,” he said.
When he hears about plans for three streets full of similar houses, Linton’s eyes widen, and he smiles.
“We need it around here. We have all these eyesores,” Linton said. “This will be beautiful.”
Questions to consider:
ONLINE COURSE: SOURCING INNOVATION
Sourcing Innovation: Capturing True Need through Listening & Observation
Chances are good that your institution needs to change in some way if it's to thrive (or even survive). You know it. You embrace the idea. But you don't know what to do, or even where to begin.
Join visual anthropologist and filmmaker Marlon Hall and a community of other Christian leaders for this five-week online course as we move step-by-step through the process of learning from a community, which is the foundational step to engage in innovative ministry.
Sourcing Innovation will provide you with the skills to lead innovation to improve the common life. You will learn to examine your community to determine:
Where you want to engage;
With whom you want to engage;
How to develop meaningful partnerships with those people; and
What to do with what you learn. Learn more and register »
FROM THE ALBAN LIBRARY
In Detroit’s urban core -- ravaged by depopulation, unemployment and abandonment -- the Rev. Faith Fowler is building something big with tiny homes.
The pastor of Cass Community United Methodist Church, known for her innovative, entrepreneurial outreach to the poor, has conceived and captained a project to build a village of 25 very small houses that the working poor or formerly homeless can rent to own.
“People will come here to see these tiny homes; they will become a destination,” said Fowler, 57, as she stood before the first Cass house, a neat 300-square-foot stucco Tudor with a stone faux chimney.
But the homes are about more than a place to live, Fowler said. More importantly, they will be a foundation for the low-income poor to grow and hold an asset, to become stakeholders, literally and figuratively, in their neighborhood and in Detroit.
“When the community is completed,” Fowler said, “there will be 25 new taxpayers on what was once vacant land.”
What does it mean to be a stakeholder? To what extent is your church a stakeholder in its neighborhood?
The tiny homes are just the latest in a long string of creative initiatives by Fowler and her church to fight poverty in Detroit, using an asset-based approach to community development. Founded in 1883, Cass Community UMC is the third-oldest United Methodist Church in Detroit. The church today may be small -- only about 100 or so attend worship in the historic Romanesque building on Cass Avenue -- but it makes a very big impact through its nonprofit, Cass Community Social Services(link is external).
Like all the Cass programs, the Tiny Homes project is the result of much planning and thought. These are not cookie-cutter fabrications, mobile trailers or recycled shipping containers; the homes are designed to be not only efficient but eye-catching. Even darling.
Different styles of the houses are displayed on a cork board in the Rev. Faith Fowler's office. Photo by Diane WeissRanging from 250 to 400 square feet, they will have unique exteriors, evoking styles from mountain-lodge rustic to midcentury modern to New Orleans French Quarter. They will have decks and front porches and be built on individual lots.
The Tudor house -- in effect, the development’s model -- has a good-sized bathroom plus a single main room that features a sleeping nook, a living area, a washer-dryer and a full kitchen with donated granite countertops.
Seven years to home ownership
By year’s end, Fowler aims to have seven homes built and occupied. So far, more than 600 people have requested applications, hoping to meet the project’s financial qualifications to rent to own. Rent will be based on square footage, generally $1 a square foot -- $300 a month for the Tudor home. If residents keep up rent payments for the first three years, they’ll qualify to make monthly payments on a subsequent four-year land contract, offering them full ownership in a total of seven years.
Sitting in the Tudor model, Dewayne Hooper, 26, fills out an application for his own tiny home. Photo by Diane WeissTiny homes have enchanted segments of popular culture, with cable network shows appealing to those who want to downsize, economize and live simply. And communities across the country are turning to them as a solution to the problem of homelessness.
An effort for the homeless in Austin, Texas, has created a village of pint-size individual shelters(link is external) much smaller than the Cass homes. And San Jose, California, recently enacted measures(link is external) permitting individual structures as small as 70 square feet for housing the homeless.
But the Cass development is not intended to be a glorified homeless shelter. Fowler says she’s aiming for a diverse group of inhabitants “so people won’t drive by and say, ‘That’s where the homeless live.’”
In fact, the homes are not necessarily for the homeless. Residents will need to have a source of monthly income. Cass envisions a mix of young and old, low-income workers, seniors on fixed incomes, people receiving disability benefits and students.
Some residents will likely be employees of Cass Community Social Services -- many of them once homeless or former addicts who’ve remade their lives through various Cass Community programs. The nonprofit agency, which Fowler heads as executive director, grew out of her ministry at the church, which for decades has been a haven for the addicted, disabled and homeless of Detroit’s now-gentrifying skid row.
The church’s history
For its first 40 years or so, Cass Community UMC served a mostly well-to-do congregation, traces of which can still be seen in the sanctuary’s Tiffany windows and Johnson tracker pipe organ. Just north of downtown Detroit, the neighborhood was originally a fashionable upper-class enclave, but as residents began moving farther north in the 1920s, it began a long decline.
Founded in 1883, Cass Community UMC has a long history of ministry, mission and advocacy. Photo by Rebecca CookFor much of the past 60-plus years, the area has been known as the Cass Corridor. But today, positioned on the edge of Wayne State University and Detroit’s cultural institutions, it is a hip, millennial magnet rebranded as Midtown.
Despite the gentrification, Fowler and the church still deal mostly with folks more emblematic of Detroit’s 40 percent poverty rate and big-city struggles.
“Every Sunday service, you see her stand at the front of the church, and there’s at least one person there who asks for help,” said head usher Keith Hill. “They’re homeless, or they’re about to be homeless, or they need assistance.”
Fowler’s first Sunday preaching before the congregation, a woman with developmental disabilities -- a frequent Cass usher -- yelled from the back of the church mid-sermon: “Hey lady! We’re out of toilet paper!” Fowler stopped to get her a roll.
“From prayers to giving you the resources or the connections to make everything better, she tries to help,” Hill said. “Some people have passion in this world. She has fire.”
Standing on her tiptoes, a shoeless Faith Fowler leads Sunday worship at Cass Community UMC. Photo by Rebecca CookHill knows it to his core. When he was a teenager, Fowler helped him escape an abusive home and gave him a place to live. His mother’s boyfriend, having forced Hill to drop out of school to work, had pointed a gun at the teen’s head when he refused to turn over a paycheck.
Now 38, Hill works at the Cass Activity Center, assisting with training and work for adults with developmental disabilities.
Fowler describes Hill’s story, and the toilet paper sermon, in her book “This Far by Faith,” which was produced through another of Fowler’s innovations, Cass Community Publishing House(link is external).
CCSS, a $6 million nonprofit
As the executive director of Cass Community Social Services, Fowler manages a $6 million nonprofit that has created programs to aid people dealing with homelessness, hunger, addiction, HIV/AIDS, disabilities and job preparedness.
Cri Cri Snead plays the tambourine as the choir sings at the Warehouse Worship service at Cass Community Social Service on a Wednesday night. Photo by Diane WeissAmong CCSS enterprises are programs that put people to work recycling tires -- 45,000 picked up from city streets -- into mud mats and flip-flops, available for purchase on the nonprofit’s website(link is external). Reclaimed wood from abandoned Detroit houses is crafted into holders for coasters, which depict vintage Detroit landmarks. A shredding business is also flourishing. And the CCSS kitchen dishes out 1 million meals a year, seven days a week.
The Tiny Homes project will cost about $1.5 million, more than half of which Fowler has already raised from private donations and grants. Each house will cost about $40,000 to $50,000 to build, and volunteer groups, including United Methodist teams, will help with finishing touches, such as drywalling, painting and sodding lawns.
“What makes Cass Community unique -- and Faith, in particular -- is they’re working on transformative projects that break the cycle of poverty,” said Jim Vella, the president of the Ford Motor Co. Fund, which donated $400,000 to the enterprise.
“They take people who are unemployable and don’t have skills and really make a difference in their lives,” said Vella, who also sits on the CCSS board.
Vella describes Fowler as a visionary who gets things done -- “a combination of CEO, COO, CFO and Mother Teresa all rolled into one.”
Fowler’s impact has drawn widespread accolades, both in church circles and in the Detroit area. She recently was honored with an annual Shining Light Award, sponsored by the Detroit Free Press and the Metropolitan Affairs Coalition to recognize outstanding community contributions. Last month, she had to skip the church’s weekly Wednesday night service to attend her induction ceremony into the Michigan Women’s Hall of Fame.
And she’s a premier teacher and preacher for UMC events. Next spring, for the third year in a row, Fowler and Cass Community will host about 40 pastors and lay staff in Detroit for a UMC training event entitled “Ministry with the Poor.” Drawing upon Fowler’s approach to ministry, the sessions are about service “with” and not “to” people and communities in need, said the Rev. Nora Colmenares, community engagement leader with the UMC General Board of Global Ministries.
Chosen Bishop, 13, reads along with his grandmother Esther Bishop-Files during Sunday worship at Cass Community UMC. Photo by Rebecca CookAsset-based perspective
“Most churches and others do ministries with the poor as a charity, and from a needs-based perspective,” Colmenares said. “We’re intentionally trying to lead the church away from a needs-based perspective.”
Colmenares said Fowler approaches ministry from an asset-based perspective, drawing upon the talents and labor of people in the community.
What are the needs and assets in your community and how might your church or organization respond?
“She sees that those who have disabilities have assets,” Colmenares said. “Those who were in jail have assets. Those who were addicted and homeless -- they have assets.”
Cass Community UMC has a long history of outreach, dating back to the Great Depression. In 2002, Fowler spun off the church’s social services efforts into the CCSS nonprofit agency when the various programs and ministries began to overwhelm the church’s capacity.
“Every room, every wall was filled with food and medical supplies; people were everywhere,” Fowler said. “My office was used as an examining room for the medical clinic. And the associate’s office was floor-to-ceiling macaroni and cheese.”
What is the relationship between innovation, evolution and sustainability?
Now, the nonprofit provides food, housing, health care, jobs and job training from a campus of buildings about four miles north of the church. It receives funding through government grants, fees for service, foundation and corporate giving, and donations from other churches and individuals. Fundraisers provide about $1 million annually, including an upcoming “Roastin’ the Rev” dinner.
The Cass congregation is supported by offerings, donations and fundraisers. The church pays its own bills, “including my salary and housing, which wasn’t the case when I arrived,” Fowler said. It’s also paid its UMC apportionments in full for 20 years.
The Rev. Faith Fowler leads Sunday worship at Cass Community UMC, where she has served as pastor since 1994. Photo by Rebecca CookNavigating her roles as pastor and CCSS executive director can be tricky. Some parishioners receive services through Cass or work at the nonprofit. To minimize conflicts, Fowler relies on the nonprofit’s staff to make decisions about employment or who receives assistance. (Fowler herself hires only executive-level personnel.)
“Occasionally, a church member gets fired or a member of the congregation might feel they deserve preferential treatment,” she said. “I try to allow agency staff members to deal with most situations. Nevertheless, it gets complicated at times.”
A daughter of Detroit
Fowler grew up in the Detroit suburb of Royal Oak, with three brothers, a schoolteacher father, and a mother who was an active union rep at the chain grocery where she worked. She lives in a historic 1864 Victorian a 1.5-mile bike ride from the church.
“I had a safety net,” Fowler said. “Poor people don’t. If I screwed up, my family might give me a lecture -- but also give me a check.”
The services provided by CCSS make a difference in the lives of hundreds every day. But when clients are ready to move on, they often have few places where they can go. That’s what the Tiny Homes project seeks to address.
When Fowler wanted to explore building tiny homes, she turned to CCSS aide and development coordinator Stacy Conwell-Leigh to do the research.
“She could be the billionaire CEO, but she’s got the heart of a minister,” said Conwell-Leigh, who shows the Tudor model to potential applicants -- and the simply curious -- each Wednesday afternoon.
How can you and your organization nurture people with innovative, theologically robust imaginations?
At a recent open house, one visitor asked Conwell-Leigh why the houses aren’t designed to accommodate several individuals in shared living space. Conwell-Leigh explained that many poor people live communally out of necessity -- in shelters, or with relatives and eating their meals at soup kitchens.
“Faith wants our folks to have what she had and so many of us have -- a backyard, a place of our own,” she said. “Faith had a happy life and wants to pass it on.”
But whoever lives in the Cass tiny homes won’t be alone. They can get help and community services just across the street.
“They can earn a GED, learn job training, use the gym facilities and get a free daily meal in our programs across the street,” Fowler said.
The Tiny Homes project is on the CCSS campus in central Detroit -- not a current hotspot in Detroit’s comeback. The neighborhood has 500 blighted buildings and 300 vacant lots, and the CCSS buildings and services provide a harbor of stability.
A construction worker excavates the foundations for the next phase of Cass Community Social Services' project. Photo by Diane WeissMark Linton, 54, who lives in the low-rent apartments that CCSS renovated adjacent to the project, recently toured the showcase tiny home.
He’s on disability. He likes the Tudor’s curb appeal and the 300 square feet of efficient living space, “but it’s smaller than what I’ve got now,” he said.
When he hears about plans for three streets full of similar houses, Linton’s eyes widen, and he smiles.
“We need it around here. We have all these eyesores,” Linton said. “This will be beautiful.”
Questions to consider:
- Faith Fowler paid attention to the needs -- and assets -- of her community and then responded in creative, innovative ways. What are the needs and assets in your community and how might your church or organization respond?
- Cass Community leveraged their available land for the Tiny Homes project. What assets do you have that are underutilized that could be put in service of ministry?
- Part of the story of Cass Community is the evolution of the nonprofit independent from the church. In your own experience, what is the relationship between innovation, evolution and sustainability?
- How can you and your organization nurture people like Faith Fowler, with innovative, theologically robust imaginations?
- To what extent is your church a stakeholder in its own neighborhood and community?
ONLINE COURSE: SOURCING INNOVATION
Sourcing Innovation: Capturing True Need through Listening & Observation
Chances are good that your institution needs to change in some way if it's to thrive (or even survive). You know it. You embrace the idea. But you don't know what to do, or even where to begin.
Join visual anthropologist and filmmaker Marlon Hall and a community of other Christian leaders for this five-week online course as we move step-by-step through the process of learning from a community, which is the foundational step to engage in innovative ministry.
Sourcing Innovation will provide you with the skills to lead innovation to improve the common life. You will learn to examine your community to determine:
Where you want to engage;
With whom you want to engage;
How to develop meaningful partnerships with those people; and
What to do with what you learn. Learn more and register »
FROM THE ALBAN LIBRARY
Church Mergers: A Guidebook for Missional Change by Thomas G. Bandy and Page M. BrooksChurch 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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