Themes that were used were: “dirt-soil”– what it is in relationship to your church experience; “Successful crops” — what brings pride; what you won’t plant again; what St. Thomas’ soil, crops, and produce are; what we need to prepare the soil for something else to grow. All this was explored by groups working and listening together. At the end of the workshop, participants had identified some crops that might be raised at St. Thomas and what kind of soil would be needed for the crops to grow. What might the harvest look like?

The workshop started with Morning Prayer and then proceeded to a morning exploration of Matthew 13: 1-9. The workshop started at 9:00am and ended at 3:00pm with communion. Lunch was provided by St. Thomas. Bishop Mary is willing to come to any church that wants to explore future direction, pending her schedule. To request your church’s visioning with Bishop Mary, call the Diocese office at 831-394-4465 or email marybeth@edecr.org..

Q: How do we (or can we? should we?) separate political views from the pulpit? I go to worship to learn more about my faith, not to be swayed by my pastor’s (or the church’s) political leanings.
A: You have asked an important question. Our tendency in mainline churches has been to discourage any political content in teaching and preaching. That has succeeded only in denying progressive Christianity a much needed voice in society and in denying all members the ethical guidance they deserve.

Politics, you see, is about more than partisanship — candidates for office, political parties, votes on Election Day. Politics is about power and wealth, the topics that occupied Jesus more than any other. Politics is about justice and mercy, the great Old Testament themes. Politics is about ethics, a matter — to judge by rates of stealing, plagiarism, corruption, shady business dealings, shabby personal values and intolerance – on which many people need significant guidance. Politics is about social trends, like suburbanization and two-income families. Politics is about immigration, integration, technology, income gaps, employment.

To say No to politics in church is to say No to God in church. There is hardly a Gospel reading that isn’t about politics. Great hymns are about power, wealth, justice, mission. If our faith doesn’t include a strong political component, we are selling ourselves short. If our faith doesn’t wrestle with questions of fairness, human travail, use of power, decisions about wealth, who is our neighbor, how to love our enemies, what is the right thing to do — then our faith is too small, too shallow, too convenient.

I think we should be begging our preachers for political guidance. The recent budget wrangling in Washington cried out for Christian witness. If you don’t agree with your pastor’s views, argue back, ask for clarification, seek other views. But for heaven’s sake, don’t muzzle your preacher. Especially if you are doing so to avoid any feelings of discomfort. Where did we get the idea that faith should be comfortable?

I don’t think preachers should start telling people how to vote or naming one partisan viewpoint as true to God and all others as evil. But people’s lives are at stake here: their jobs, their financial well-being, their sense of place and worth, their love or distrust of others, their values, their commitment to justice.

Those are topics that God cares deeply about – far more than God probably cares about our facilities, doctrines or traditions. Our preachers have a solemn obligation to bring the Gospel to bear on important matters.

First, every garden was different, reflecting both the unique style of its designer and an awareness that guests are different. Some want Zen meditation, some want a celebration of Mexican farm workers, some want water and some want a deep hole offering silence. Churches need to diversify, too. Not everyone wants the same “menu” of Sunday offerings.

Second, every garden had a lengthy sign that told who had done the work, using what materials and with what purpose in mind. The owners understood that visitors need to be brought in. No “insiders” and “outsiders, ” or “guests” and “proprietors.” The signs took us all seriously as friends who deserved to understand.

The point wasn’t signs as such or lengthy explanations, but the owners’ even-handed attention to openness. I got no sense of boundaries that only a select few insiders could cross.

Churches, you see, struggle with insider language and insider thinking. By insider language, I mean the code language often used in liturgy, assertions that are assumed but not explained, invitations to places but no addresses, “Call Dottie” without a phone number, and a clear sense that only a few people know how things work. By insider thinking, I mean the distinctions we tend to make between us and them: Presbyterians and non-Presbyterians, “churched” and “unchurched,” “members” and “non-members,” “regulars” and “newcomers.” On any given occasion when the doors are open, all should be welcomed as guests, even those “paying the bills,” as they like to be known.

I think we hope our distinctions will encourage people to seek affiliation, so that they, too, can receive the benefits of belonging. In fact, our distinctions have made us seem elitist and judgmental, and have contributed to our steep declines in participation. We also hope that insider status will encourage people to give generously. But it doesn’t. Gratitude to God is the foundation of good stewardship, not being an insider. I suggest we stop referring to people as “unchurched,” but as “un-Sunday-ed” (not interested in Sunday worship), or better yet, as friends we haven’t yet made. We aren’t welcoming “them” to “our” house; we are sharing a moment in “God’s house.” I suggest we consider “accessibility” as a category larger than ramps and restroom stalls. Worship itself needs to be accessible, as do music and preaching. That doesn’t mean “dumb it down.” It means understanding people’s needs and addressing them. If people walk in the door with hearts broken by life, why would we preach a save-the-denomination or balance-the-budget sermon? Or offer them hymns that defend classical tradition but don’t encourage singing?

Clergy and longtime members can lead the way in affirming openness. They need to let go of that special delight which comes from knowing the hidden doors.

For the last 52 years on the first Sunday in May, St. Luke’s has a BBQ to raise money for outreach and scholarships.  The outreach goes to various local charities, and the scholarships go to King City High School seniors that live in the Jolon/Lockwood area.  We usually give two or three scholarships each year for a minimum of $500.00 each.  The money is distributed by the High School District upon successful enrollment in a college program.

St. Luke’s is a very small congregation with approximately 20 active people.  A chairman is in charge of organization, and each member has one or more jobs.  Most of the participants have done the same job for a number of years, so it is fairly straight forward as to what you are expected to accomplish.  A couple of outside groups help us serve and cleanup at the BBQ.   The day before the BBQ everyone meets at the church and does the setup and general cleanup of the area.  The Day of the BBQ Mass with communion is at 10:00AM and the serving of food and drinks is from 12:00 to 4:00 PM.  A silent auction, and several raffles are also held during the BBQ. Cleanup takes place after 4:00 PM.

The church raises about $3000.00 for outreach and scholarships.  People from all over the Diocese attend.

Yes, yes, I know, mid-summer, vacation time, slowing down, being kind to yourself and your family. Important work. Do it. While you are gazing out to sea and fall startup hasn’t begun, here is a “Check List of Best Practices” to have ready by fall. You can’t do everything. Just make sure your congregation is doing these seven things. Why seven? We believe “seven key factors” determine congregational health. (Hint: doctrine, denomination, size, socioeconomics and location aren’t among them.) Why “best practices”? In our opinion, certain practices are proven to work. Proceeding down the same-old path with anything less than best practices is irresponsible, especially if the same-old path isn’t working. “Check list” means seven essentials that should be in place by September. They aren’t magical, but they are essential.

Membership Development

You need a plan, a process and appropriate technology to gather email addresses for all “touches” (people whom your congregation touches, not just Sunday visitors and members), and to turn those into a complete data system with Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn connections. Social media are no longer optional.

In every setting, ask for email addresses. Feed them into an application like Connected (http://connectedhq.com/) and use its Missing Connections app to add Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn connections.

Leadership Development

Recruit young adults for leadership teams in key ministries, including your top lay council. If you’re hiring professional staff, hire young adults. Middle-agers and older are wonderful people, but we need to give way to younger generations – now. If we want to serve people in their 20s, we need to do it right, serve actual needs, and not assume our onetime-25 is their today-25. We need vision, energy, enthusiasm.

Communications Strategy

Don’t just dabble in Facebook. Get smart, get active, get aggressive. Social media are critical tools for promoting your ministries, communicating with touches, hearing multiple voices, and getting necessary feedback. We’re way beyond standing up a nice Facebook page and hoping people go to it. We’re seriously beyond expecting a web site to be anything more than a passive repository of helpful information. If you personally feel at sea in social media, recruit or hire a guide.

Spiritual Development

Add online resources for spiritual growth, such as online classes, webinars, videos, links to helpful third-party resources. Focus on interactive resources, where people can participate and you can learn more about their needs.

Young Adult Ministries

In addition to recruiting young adults for leadership and staff, make sure you have a diverse lineup of ministries focused on young adults: small groups, workplace gatherings, social networks. Don’t expect them to create them for you. You do the creating, and let them own and modify them.

Listening Church

Get out of your offices and committee meetings, and go into the public square. I’m not sure church leaders realize how much the world around them is changing. It’s like the 1960s and 1970s all over again – different changes, of course. I think this should be your lay council’s sole job. Managing the budget is easy work. Catching external waves, listening to actual voices, seeing the trends that will reshape your congregation’s calling, and then reporting back what they hear and seeing how you need to adapt congregational life – that’s the hard work.

Metrics

Unless we measure the outcomes of our work, we are flying blind. Unless we agree to be guided by those outcomes, we are flying stupid. You need a comprehensive set of measurements that you take every week or month. You need to define them, figure out who will gather the data, how and when, who will manage the data, who will do reporting on the data, and whose head will roll if the data is junk.

These aren’t magic pills. They are the minimum you need to be doing right now if you want to have a future.

There was a time when passivity worked for churches.

Moravian settlements of the 18th Century, for example, had one of each trade – one smith, one candlemaker, one bootmaker, one butcher, and so on — as well as one church.

No competition, no need to market one’s services, no business expansion plans, no doubt about who did what. It was a simple life centered around work done in community and a church whose bell drew everyone to chapel.

When I first visited Bethabara, North Carolina, now a living museum, I tried to imagine its ethos of cooperation and mutual dependency and a spiritual life grounded in certainty of place and prospect, one set of approved beliefs and practices, and required attendance.

It was charming, but clearly a museum. For in our modern world, industrialization, commerce, free-market capitalism, travel, urbanization and rising aspirations long ago changed everything.

Nowadays, passivity is a recipe for failure. Whatever your line of work, you can’t just open a door and wait for business to come in. You can’t just wait for an employer to find you, or a publisher to ask for your manuscript, or the telephone to ring. Nor can you expect consensus on anything, not even on beliefs.

How, then, do churches move beyond the passivity that is deeply ingrained in our religious practices? How do we win the victory over what management consultant Seth Godin calls the “tyranny of being picked.” (His answer: “No one is going to pick you. Pick yourself.”)

Here are four critical ways to go from passive to active:

Recruit new constituents

Don’t just wait for them to show up. Use every tool available, from signage to social media, to establish your brand and your presence, and then “drive” people in your door. Get aggressive about invitations. Give people good reasons to come to you. Demonstrate benefits. Be strategic about pursuing age cohorts and intentional diversity. Then follow up aggressively when prospects do come.

Recruit the right leaders

Don’t just ask for volunteers. Recruit people who can do the job. Train them to do the work the way you want it done. Say a loving but firm No to inappropriate candidates for leadership. Give leaders a stake in a constantly rising level of leadership performance.

When hiring clergy, don’t wait for the judicatory executive to send you someone. Task your outgoing clergy with recruiting a promising successor. When raising up candidates for ordination, seek out the best possible candidates. Don’t wait for people to present themselves.

Change lives

Develop a clear path for transformation of life, and make it normative for all constituents to be on it. You will always have placeholders and half-hearted pew-sitters, but set a higher standard as your community norm. Act on it in stewardship: stop waffling about the tithe. “It’s the Law!” Act on it in mission work, small-group participation, community life. No more apologies for meddling. It’s your job to meddle.

Risk courageously and fail gloriously

A culture that avoids risk and punishes failure will die. Instead, imagine possibilities, test them out, learn from the duds, and plow more resources into the hits. People will imagine amazing things if you give them permission to imagine.

Passivity feels safe, it might even feel holy. But God expects more. Jesus, after all, set his own course, chose his own leaders, went where he wanted to go, shunned all shoulds, and kept the initiative. Even when he submitted, it wasn’t in wan defeat, it was in bold obedience and active pursuit.

St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church in Saratoga has created their summer brochure to keep their members informed about the programs and opportunities for discipleship, fellowship  and outreach.

The brochure, Walking in the Way,  is accessible in various places around the church and it is integrated into their website. The brochure is bright, full of white space for easier reading and great opportunities. The Rev. Peggy Bryan who designed the brochure serves as the Outreach Associate at the church. The brochure she created evokes emotion and invites peoples’ participation with the opening line… “Jesus, bold, fearless, pioneer of civil rights, social agitator, visionary….consider a summer of adventure and exploration walking his way.” The brochure lists nine programs with brief, powerful, compassionate and common language.

Jesus moved among the outcasts and the needy, those dwelling on the fringe of society. He confronted spirits. He went out of his way to seek restoration and healing. Jesus was in solidarity with the ostracized and marginalized. We are called to follow him in his ministry. Saint Andrew’s 2011 Summer of Grace offers extraordinary opportunities to challenge assumptions and foster understanding, awareness, and empathy. Walk with us. 

Having bright, attractive and up-to-date information and invitational materials is important to the ongoing engagement and formation of church members and goes it helps to attract the attention and participation of visitors and new members.  If your church is not currently producing seasonal brochures, consider linking the theme into the liturgical or common US geographic seasons using similar colors, themes and content that will resonate with the spirit of the times and the yearning of the soul.

Last week, I named “Six Surefire Ways to Grow Your Church.” I wanted to add a seventh, but I decided to save it for a separate article. “Stop fighting.” Yes, that’s the seventh key to building a church: stop fighting. Or conversely, a surefire way to kill a church is: “Keep on fighting.” Conflict is destroying our churches. Conflict between clergy and lay councils. Conflict within lay leadership groups. Conflict between generations, between fundamentalists and progressives. Conflict over things large and things trivial. We’ve been at it so long that we take such conflict as normal. And there is a certain creative energy that conflict releases. But on the whole, conflict ranks right up with laziness as causes of our downfall. Prospective members, especially the younger generations that we need to be reaching in order to have a future, run for the doors when they sense conflict. So do longtime constituents. Besides, such conflict isn’t normal. It might be common, but it doesn’t square with any norm that Jesus set. Jesus called us to “be one.” How do we stop fighting? Here are five steps, mainly having to do with letting go of self- defeating conceptions of what a faith community is.

1. Let go of the marriage metaphor Clergy and lay leaders like to see themselves in a marriage. They use the language and practices of courtship during searches. They like the til-death-do-us-part sense of mutual commitment, and the parental sense of teamwork in “raising the children.” They become emotionally entangled, setting up an intimacy that can feel like seduction. None of this is real. Clergy and lay leaders aren’t husband and wife, no matter how bitterly they fight for control of the marriage. They aren’t parents, and their constituents aren’t children. They don’t end each day together, with time and occasion for working through the rough patches.

2. Let go of the ownership metaphor Too often, I hear lay leaders, especially longtimers and large donors, saying to everyone else, “This is our church!” They pay the bills and provide continuity. Clergy are perceived as transients. None of that is real. It is God’s church, not theirs. They own nothing. And they certainly shouldn’t expect their tenure or donations to earn extra benefits. If anything, the church “belongs” to the next stranger through the door.

3. Let go of the charitable institution metaphor Museums and other charitable institutions seek out large donors, treat them with special favor, invite the deepest pockets to serve on their boards, and network extensively among the well-to-do. Many churches fall into that same dance, and it kills them. Catering to the wealthy rarely brings in more funds, but it does offend the non-wealthy, especially those who are actually doing the work of ministry.

4. Accept the corporate metaphor, with conditions Corporate practices have much to teach us about accountability, customer service, quality control, branding, marketing and decision-making. We are foolish to dismiss them as too worldly. Take out the profit motive, and what you have is people working at a high level of expectation, performance and accountability. Churches shouldn’t think themselves exempt from high standards.

5. Claim the body metaphor As outlined by Paul, the body of Christ has many members, each contributing to the work of the body, each having specific functions or roles, working in harmony to fulfill the body’s overarching purposes. The eye sees but does not hear. The work of the body requires sight but isn’t limited to seeing. No part can declare another unnecessary. No part is unduly rewarded for doing its job. Besides, while some are called to lead, the head of the body remains Jesus Christ. Any human community will have friction. Our task is to:

• stop fighting and start resolving
• stop fighting and start compromising
• stop fighting and start sharing
• stop fighting and start putting the good of the whole first
• stop fighting and let God be in charge.

I have had many requests for my article, “Six Surefire Ways to Grow Your Church.” In fact, one more request hit my inbox while I was typing that sentence.

I sense a hunger for growth – to survive, to attain critical mass so that every year isn’t a budgeting and staffing nightmare, to fulfill a gospel commandment, or to enjoy what growth brings, namely, new people, new activities, more children, more excitement, more sense of purpose. Whatever the impetus, a pro-growth mood seems to have emerged. I think a great window of opportunity is opening for mainline churches. I am happy to send out copies of the article. But I wonder what happens when the recipient opens it up and discovers what my first two prescriptions are:

• Step 1: Work on “lead generation” by developing a following on Facebook and Twitter and e-mail
• Step 2: Pastor must blog

I can hear a collective “Huh?” Followed by, “That doesn’t make any sense.” But it does make sense. Not the usual growth recipe, I’ll admit, but necessary. Here’s why. For many decades, our primary growth strategy was to open the doors on Sunday and wait passively for whoever walked in. That hasn’t worked for fifty years. Now, two generations have stopped seeing church as something they do on Sunday. Most, in fact, have stopped seeing church altogether. We have become invisible.

We need to get in people’s faces, as it were, tell them about faith community, ask for their yearnings and needs, make connections that are deeper than “come rescue our church” and more promising than “in business, unchanged, for 100 years.”  To connect, we need to go where people are. That meeting place isn’t a newspaper, curbside mailbox, or church sign. We need to make ourselves known on social media (Facebook and Twitter, especially) and by e-mail marketing, still the most direct, most effective and least expensive way to get a message out.

These venues each have their unique ways. Posting a typical church announcement on Facebook would be pointless. We have to learn what works in social media and what makes people open an e-mail. For example, an announcement from the church office will get nowhere; but 100 members posting about the great experience they had at a Gospel Festival or a mission trip will have impact.

E-marketing is virtually cost-free, once you have invested in a decent web site and e-mail system. It requires some skills that are quite learn-able. The key is visibility. Get out there, meet people where they are, convey a simple message that is oriented toward the recipient, and keep doing it, day in and day out.

A key player in any growth scenario will be the pastor. For better or worse, prospects judge a congregation by its pastor. Key criteria will vary, but generally will touch on authentic, approachable, made me think, spoke about God, stirred me. A 60-minute glimpse on Sunday morning isn’t enough. The pastor needs other venues to communicate a message, to display authenticity, to be a “thought leader,” to promote the congregation’s “brand.” The venue being used most effectively now by leaders is the blog. Straight from me to you, short, to the point, in your inbox, and filled with links to items of interest (photos, videos, articles).

The pastor needs to take the lead, be assertive, get out there, become the face of the congregation, sell the brand, convey excitement, convey personal authenticity and convey the community’s worth.

So, yes, not your usual recipe for cornbread, but it’s what will work today.