What follows is from the final chapter of my Wesley Theological
Seminary, Doctor of Ministry “Project” looking at New Church Starts in the
Rocky Mountain Conference of the United Methodist Church. I am mindful that parts of this will read
like the 3rd act of a three act play, but I think the flow, drift
will help with the context. I wrote these words between 2010 and
2012. Elements apply today. Three Faiths were three closed United
Methodist churches in Cheyenne, Denver and Pueblo who had choices to make. They made three different ones but the choice
was theirs.
What Does All of This Mean?
Proverbs 4: 23
“The Road Not Taken” -- Robert Frost, 1916
Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth ...
I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I--
I took the one less traveled by,
Frost’s iconic poem suggests we only understand the paths we travel later in our life journey. We stand in time and look at what lies before us. Looking indefinitely is not a viable option; we must choose. Both paths appear to be good, but with a “sigh,” we understand the significance of a life altering choice only later.
We need to aware of this in our analysis of new
churches and how they fared. We stand in
our own time and listen to stories and say most assuredly they chose the right
path or the wrong path when they made this
particular choice. Were it only so
clear.
How does one know whether saying “no” to a SonRise, a
Frontier, or a Mountain Vista will spur them on to success or whether saying
“no” to another will dispirit them, lead them to quit and embitter them? When
the choice is made, one does not know.
Conversely, Cornerstone, Spirit of Hope, Genesis, and Green River
experienced forks requiring choices: three
encountered darkness and one has struggled.
With this understood, there are universal truths we can gather from
these success and failures.
Having a connection with another church, be it an
Antioch or an Elijah produces fruit. Repeatedly
in the birthing stories of Sunrise, SonRise and others, resources and people
were critical in the delivery and nurture of a healthy church.
People matter. When you have the right people in the right
seat on the bus, “great” things happen.
“Great things” requires both the
right lay and clergy leadership. Both
are necessary. Quality clergy with
“entitled” laity leads to problems.
Quality laity with dysfunctional clergy leads to problems. There are not two leadership buses, one for
laity and one for clergy; it is the same bus.
Further, when the system is started by a dysfunctional leader, clergy or
lay, that dysfunction spreads organically through the family it creates. A functional,
healthy team is necessary. When the team
becomes one as in 1 Corinthians 12 and treats their respective gifts as
building up the corporate body, success is achieved.
People have roles. An idea that permeates the story is that there
is a time for a leader to accomplish specific tasks and then move on. This is an issue of great delicacy on the
part of conference leaders. How do you
know when is the right time? In the case
of Cowell (Sunrise) and McArthur (Smoky Hill) it appears the timing was
perfect. Second pastor Harris (Heritage)
offers that his predecessor would have been remembered more favorably if he had
left once Heritage got into the building.
Show appreciation of founding pastors. Building a new church is hard work and is
often underappreciated both at the local church and at the conference. A number of those interviewed mentioned
this. The hurt was described in
different ways, but the absence of corporate gratitude for the difficult
challenge was a common lament. Lillie in
his post Spirit of Hope assessment
labels this as essential. The conference
can provide support and encouragement, and genuine gratitude is
inexpensive: the return on our
investment is infinite.
Further, they said support of clergy colleagues is
invaluable. For example, Mead posits
when Janet Forbes arrived at Cheyenne First, the climate changed. The other UM churches there began to see Frontier
in a different way.
Conference Money. Dave Lillie labels the perception of the
conference as an inexhaustible well of money as “insidious.” We survey the corpse and conclude “it didn’t
have enough nurture by the conference.”
To suggest the lack of conference funding is the cause for failure
implies in success conference funding was present. That
was not the case. In fact, the
cessation of conference funding actually led to choosing the path that “made
all the difference.”
Extension societies. The story of the extension societies is a
story unto itself. They were a vital
part of preparing the field for the eventual arrival of those who would
cultivate in order to produce fruit.
They no longer exist in this conference and their role was vital to
portions of this story. Heritage, Smoky
Hill and St. Luke’s all moved to land initially acquired by, if not completely
paid for, as part of a planned development by an extension society. This
baton needs to be picked up. The
Saints of Hebrews 12 have run their race and are ready to hand off the baton to
the next generation, and no Saints are there to take up the functionality of
this baton, if not the name Extension Society.
As the Weems Organizational Life Cycle plays itself out over the next
ten to twenty years and churches currently at their individual tipping points
collapse into death, some of them most assuredly have the potential to be
Elijah’s. Others can be used by the
conference to purchase land where people are not, but are expected to be. Sunrise, SonRise, Mountain Vista, Heritage,
St. Luke’s and Smoky Hill were all visionary projects providing a Methodist
presence where people were building homes.
An organic, bottom-up approach. Most of the successes we have had, be they Acts
to an Antioch, Elisha to an Elijah, or a different model, have emerged
organically from a bottom-up, local mentality, rather than a top-down, conference-directed
model. We need to adapt our systems to
reward churches for starting new local churches. It is easier and consistent with the Kotter
idea of generating small wins, to create small coalitions of one, two, three,
or four churches that have their world views adapted to plant a new
congregation, rather than to force a change across the conference. Linsky and Heifetz write: “Indeed, the single most common source of
leadership failures we’ve been able to identify … is that people, especially
those in positions of authority, treat adaptive challenges like technical
problems.”[3]
I have avoided with great intentionality describing models
for growth post germination. All
discussion about worship models within the Linsky and Heifetz paradigm is about
a technical solution. Even though the type
of worship model chosen has an impact on whether the overall project will work,
it is a step we take after we have achieved
the harder adaptive work with a church that will be an Elijah or Antioch.
When we hear “you must do this,” we are hearing technical solutions. Paraphrasing Frontier founding pastor Gary
Goettel – ‘I attended classes to help me understand how to start Frontier and most were good and they gave me some ideas on what to do next, but the
most important core value I held was the
situation at Frontier was unique.’
The solutions he selected were for Frontier. Goettel was exercising adaptive thinking. Others in this story also led adaptively.
Top-down
solutions are generally technical solutions and perceived to be “cookie cutter,”
not relevant to local implementation. The vastness and diversity of the conference mitigates
against “one-size-fits-all” solutions. What works in Pueblo West may or may not
work in Cheyenne. To impose it without
regard to the conditions on the ground in Cheyenne is a technical
solution. It is for the conference
leaders to adaptively capitalize on local creativity using a biblical framework
of 2 Kings 2 (Elijah) and Acts 13 (Antioch) and to identify conference systems that
can empower local churches to be the headwaters for a stream of new local
churches.
Kotter Major Change Process
John Kotter’s “Eight-Stage
Process of Creating Major Change” [4]
provides us a
potential template for change. It offers
a technical framework we can use adaptively to deal with our particular
context. His eight stages are:
1. Establish
a Sense of Urgency.
2. Create
the Guiding Coalition.
3. Develop
a Vision and a Strategy.
4. Communicating
the Change Vision.
5. Empowering
Broad-Based Action.
6. Generating
Short-Term Wins.
7. Consolidating
Gains and Producing More Change.
8. Anchoring
New Approaches in the Culture.
To cover all eight of these
in great detail would be to create a technical solution to an adaptive
problem. However, starting with some idea
of what to do next is necessary for potential discussion.
Establish
a Sense of Urgency. [5] The RMC is not in crisis. We have many thriving and strong
churches. We experienced in 2009 and
2010 a small increase in worship attendance. We resolved a number of major financial issues
between 2008 and 2011 while in the midst of the most significant economic
downturn in seventy years. We do need to
approach the task before us with urgency.
The conference leadership is identifying potential
Elijah’s, but without an Elijah imprimatur.
In 2010 and 2011, The Reverend Stephanie Munoz on behalf of the
conference visited fifteen “legacy” churches.
Her goal: to invite prayerful
consideration as to where they were in their life cycle and where they thought
they might be in the foreseeable future.
By all accounts this encounter was handled gently in love and bore
immediate fruit: Boulder Bethel decided to
close in response to that invitation. Bethel simply closed, it was not an
Elijah. Words were said in Boulder
and at Annual Conference that Bethel “did not die,” but we made the integration
of their story into another church story almost impossible. The nature of the closing and sale of the
property does not lend itself to the ascendant Bethel making a spiritual and
biblical connection to an Elisha church.
Applauding the work of Munoz, we should invite other congregations to
see the potential for their mantle to be passed explicitly by pointing to the
stories of Colorado Springs Aldersgate and Pueblo Faith. Those
stories have power. To see the mantle
passed from one church with a story to a new church with a potential new story
is inspiring, whereas seeing property sold and divided into piece parts going
to ten or fifteen other churches diminishes the impact of the departure. Instead, give resource transfers a biblical
and theologically based name.
Create
the Guiding Coalition. The guiding
coalition at the conference level starts with the Bishop, the District
Superintendents, the Director of Connectional Ministry, and the Treasurer. Agreement on a need for strategic change witnessing
the Elijah/Antioch historical success is the issue for that guiding
coalition. Local fields need to be
plowed and prepared for potential seeding, and here the large church pastors
and their lay leadership are the logical initial “go to” creators and
implementers of a local guiding
coalition. The Colorado Springs First
success between 1978 and 1987 in starting three churches needs to be
celebrated, and a return to continuing that history needs to be made part of
their vision for the next decade.
Communicating
the Change Vision. Kotter writes:
“a
gallon of information is dumped into a river of routine communication, where it
is quickly diluted, lost and forgotten.”[6] Kotter suggests in order to effectively bring
about change every opportunity to communicate the idea of change must be
used. Starting new churches, Antioch or Elijah-like,
needs to be a key discussion topic at every gathering of conference leaders and
in conference news and stories. This will be a challenge. Our progressive ethos will lead us to discuss
only what we should be doing as the church about those on the margin (social
justice) rather than what we should be doing for “evangelism.”[7]
This should be “both/and” rather than
“either/or.”
Empowering
Broad-Based Action. The migration
of the emphasis from a conference initiative to a local one is about
empowerment. Local implementation and
adaption often lead to success.
Anchoring
New Approaches in the Culture. We must rediscover
within ourselves our denominational DNA that includes starting new faith
communities. Our successes from 1945 to
1985 are forgotten: we have no memory
within the conference that starting local churches was something we successfully
accomplished.
Linsky-Heifetz suggest true leaders are willing to
engage in the dance on the floor but also journey to the balcony to observe the
dance as it plays itself out on the floor from that level of
disengagement. This is a Linsky-Heifetz
balcony opportunity.
Studying the successes of those in the Antioch-Acts or
Elijah-Elisha models is a component part of a journey of rediscovery. It has
been eight years since our last
charter. Many reasons exist, not the
least of which is our shaken confidence.
We have retreated into the safety of our own local enclaves and adopted
the words Diamond uses in Collapse: ‘it’s somebody else’s problem’ – ISEP. Within a connectional system, it isn’t
somebody else’s problem; it is, in fact, a problem for all of us to deal with
and all of us are invited¸ if not compelled, to be part of the solution. We lack
vision and faith.
Currently, church planting is not a core value of the
conference. Several key leaders quietly
believe it is not a core value because, in part, the most recent strategy laid
out in 2004 was hopelessly naïve in scope and was not made important within the
conference. Collins in Good to Great suggests a “big hairy
audacious goal” (B-HAG) is good. [8] But the goal does
need to be attainable. To accomplish the
stated goal of starting thirty-six churches or ministries in eight years would
have required a success that exceeded
the post-World War II church growth explosion.
Here, an unattainable goal is tantamount to having no goal. Even if not attainable, following Kotter, it needs
to be part of our everyday discourse within the conference. This B-HAG should have been, but was not, an
emphasized goal. It was treated as any other. It is said when everything is important,
nothing is important.
The explanations for our failure lies in
a jumbled mix of individualism run amok, no strategic priorities from conference
leadership that would rise to the level of importance to local churches, and no
communication strategy. Our current new
local church strategy combines a nonexistent theology, naïveté, weakness, lack
of leadership, and a near-religious faith in diversity for the sake of
diversity. (Color, italics and bold not in the original and added in 2015 for
emphasis.)
Starting churches is high-risk work. In a world of risk/reward tradeoffs it is
seen as too much risk for too little reward.
We operate from a logic of tomorrow’s problems will occupy me tomorrow
and I will deal with today’s, today.
Thus, our local church leaders rarely move their leadership gaze to the
horizon to see the possibilities of new local churches. Part of the cause for this is we just do not
see the starting of new local churches with the same enthusiasm as our denominational
forebears. Additionally, we do not see
the opportunity for fruitfulness in challenging a dying church to be an Elijah
or in a creating a coalition of churches together to act as an Antioch in their
local setting.
We are content to live in Pharaoh’s kingdom making
more bricks. To journey out into the
wilderness toward the common good requires we have faith God will provide while
we are wandering -- simultaneously refined and tested -- before we get to our
Promised Land. Our efforts require the
adaptive leadership of a Moses.
The Weems Organizational Life Cycle model grinds
on: in the next decade we could have ten
to fifteen churches that are candidates in to be Elijah Churches. Are we ready to facilitate the passing of their
mantles?
The story of the three Faiths is there for us. For those near the end of their life cycle, we
can have the story of Pueblo Faith or we can have the story of Denver
Faith. For those still thriving and
fully alive, we have the story of Cheyenne Faith and their statement of hope
and sharing. The choice is ours.
Selah.
[1]
Proverbs 4: 23.
[2]
Robert Frost, “The Road Not Taken” http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/the-road-not-taken/ (accessed January 23, 2012.)
[3]
Heifetz and Linsky, 14.
[4] Kotter.
[6]
Kotter, 88.
[7] Kotter, 88-94. From page 94: "Each of the firm's
twenty-five executives pledges to find four opportunities per day to tie
conversations back to the big picture" Kotter compares version A which is
an article, four announcements and something else with this version B and he
gets 12,000 repeats.
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