Of Carts and Horses

It doesn't matter which Church of which denomination I serve as an Intentional Interim Minister there seems to be some constants in their thinking. When asked what their goals are this is usually the order:
1. To pay our bills for light and heat and building upkeep, etc.
2. To pay for our staff, building, programs, etc - usually meaning they have insufficient income to sustain their present level of costs.
3. To keep the doors open thus expressing their fear of the trends.
4. To increase the size of the congregation to pay for this.
My response is: "So you want other people to come and to pay for what you like but can't afford!" It doesn't seem to dawn upon such churches that if the other people liked what they liked they would most likely be there already paying for it.
But it is the philosophy or theology behind this that is most worrying. Such thinking no longer sees our mission as reaching out with a message of hope and peace to others, but rather maintaining what is and trying to involve others, not to bring them to share in a vital faith, but to get them to shoulder the burden of our costs.
Often the burden we are asking people to shoulder is a legacy of the past and our failure to be adaptable. We have kept the size mentality of the past - holding on to citadels and staffing levels that were a product of the boom in attendance in the 60s. [NB Statistics show that around 1967 churches hit their high point of involvement.]
I often wonder if the first century Church had acted as we do whether we would even be in this position to discuss this at all. Or would they have experienced the same decline as people outside the faith refused to join until the church disappeared into the annals of ancient history.
I am not a raving evangelical, yet I find myself over and over having to draw on that tradition to challenge this back-to-front thinking of the church.
Why do we exist? Is it to make our church more financially viable? Is it to be able to afford that which makes us feel good?
One man who came to a Church to advise their Search Committee said: "If this church didn't exist, what reason would God have to create it?" A very thoughtful question.
One woman spoke to me as I left a Parish many years ago in Australia and told me she had come to believe that the Church should never own buildings. She said we should just lease them according to our needs at the time. If we grow - lease larger; if we shrink - lease smaller; if our mission changes, lease to suit those needs.
We have become attached to almighty boat anchors which will take the church to the grave as they crumble and become unsustainable. I find that even smaller churches are mainly store rooms for a plethora of decorations and museum information most of the week with an occasional meeting (usually administrative) and the Sunday service. On a cost per month basis it works out to be very costly storage.
Our spiraling costs for plant will bankrupt the church not longer after it has strangled the church's mission.
The saddest thing is that those who sit on the balcony and watch over churches in denominational positions seem to be also unable to speak the necessary word. There seems to exist at that level the same mentality about survival of denominational structure as there is at local church level about survival of building.
One woman at another church told me that their mission was to keep the doors of the church open so they could be buried from it. I thought it was a long funeral service that had already started! An irony when most funerals are held in funeral parlors in this society!
It's time - perhaps way past time - to get a new, fresh understanding of what it means to be church. And let our strategy about physical and other needs flow from that. If we are here to serve others, then our priorities of money and physical plant should express that.
I suspect that the churches that survive and thrive as centers of hope for 21st century people will be less attached to what was than to what could be. Like society around us it will move and shape its physical existence according to its circumstances. Like a person who trades in the old clunker that has served its purpose or the vehicle that no longer meets their family needs, we should be willing to trade in the buildings and forms of structure that have been the vehicle of our faith in time past for that which will serve the mission of the church better now.
I'd like to be part of such a creative thinking community; and in my case, one with open minds to theological enquiry and discussion and forms of worship and to the sharing of faith in real language.

Ron Cook
The Bloke