Hoops & Hurdles

One of the frustrating things on the road to achieving our goals is that there always seems to be some sort of requirement that needs to be fulfilled to satisfy someone else. While these requirements are often put in place with the best of intentions they can easily become bureaucratic hoops that take more time and energy to jump through than they are worth.

The report from the chair of the Evangelism Committee took less than a minute of the council’s time. “Most of the people in the neighborhood are either black or Indian, and they have their own churches they like to go to, so there isn’t much for the Evangelism Committee to do.”

I sat up in my seat, ready to take the chair of the Evangelism Committee to task for missing the whole point of evangelism. Besides, there was a less-than-subtle hint of racism buried in his observations. The pastor of the congregation, who was sitting next to me at the table, pressed his hand against my leg to get my attention. He silently mouthed the words, “Not now,” and shook his head ever so slightly. Reluctantly, I held my tongue.

For my Contextual Education class I had been assigned to an urban church on the north side of Minneapolis. It had thrived in the city expansion of the post-war 1950’s. But in the 1960’s and 70’s an exodus of people to the suburbs started a steady congregational decline. The people who moved into the neighborhood didn’t look or live like the affluent suburbanites that returned to their home church every Sunday morning. By the time I was assigned to the church in 1989, the beautiful sanctuary that was capable of seating over 400 people, regularly hosted about 60 every week. Most of the Sunday school rooms had been repurposed for special groups since only four of them were used for their intended purpose. The gymnasium echoed with emptiness every time I passed by in the hallway.

The point of contextual education is similar to teaching practicums for people who are studying to become teachers. Even though everyone has been in a classroom as a student, being the teacher is quite a different experience. Sitting in a pew every week and teaching a Sunday school class is different than being a pastor. Since the seminary is responsible for training qualified pastors, making sure that people know exactly what they are getting into is important. Contextual Education is the way to do that.

But Contextual Ed assumes that a person has never been on the business side of the church. For many people this is true. But some people came to seminary with years of experience in congregations. They were aware of the behind-the-scenes squabbles, the infighting and the politics of local congregations. They had years of teaching and leading experience. Yet they too were required to work with a church.

I was probably somewhere in between. I had experience with the inner workings of a congregations having spent so much time in churches. What I needed was experience leading the leaders. Leaving someone unchallenged when they were so clearly in the wrong about the church and about the people who lived in the neighborhood was not the kind of training I needed. This was a teaching moment for everyone at the table. It demonstrated the kind of thinking to which so many churches adhere. Unfortunately, the chance to inspect the speck in our own eye, so to speak, silently slipped by.

With any experience in life there is an opportunity to learn. I met some wonderful people in that congregation who were genuinely loving and worked in unofficial ways to reach out to the surrounding community. But there were some in my class who didn’t need Contextual Ed experience because they had it before they came to the seminary.

I will admit that some requirements for certification or graduation that felt like hoops at the time ended up being valuable learning experiences. I don’t always know what’s best for me at the time. But creating one-size-fits-all models of education can waste a lot of valuable time and energy as people find themselves jumping through hoops and fulfilling requirements that don’t teach what they are meant to teach. It’s simply a way of making it fair to everyone. Creating individual learning programs for students is more work for the educators but it is not impossible.

Maybe it’s time to stop putting hoops and hurdles in front of people and calling it faith development. Maybe we, as a church, need to find ways to let life teach its own lessons if we are willing to learn.

Recruiting for Christ

This is the third post in a series about ways that I have missed the mark as a pastor. It is a response to several articles about why young adults are leaving the church. You can begin here if you want some background to this current article.

I’m sorry for the way I deceive myself and others about the real reasons for evangelism. Honestly, my evangelism has a lot to do with recruiting people to share the burden of ministry with their time, talent and treasures.

I am an introverted Lutheran of Scandinavian and German descent. Evangelism is not something I do eagerly. Or often. I just can’t seem to engage a stranger in a discussion about something as deeply personal as faith. And yet Jesus commands his disciples to go and make more disciples. (Matthew 28)

The way that I’ve done this over the years is to adopt a Field of Dreams approach to evangelism: Build it and they will come. I have focused my time on developing inspiring worship, engaging classes and programs, and fun fellowship activities. Then I employ “bridge events” that encourage congregation members to invite friends to “come and see” in the hope that they will want to become a part of the congregation.

I have begun to see that this type of evangelism is all about recruiting people to become members of the congregation (see yesterday’s post When Faithful Looks Like Me). The true reasons for my congregation’s evangelical efforts are revealed when we speak with muted hope about prospective new people who will help us do the work and support the congregation’s programs with financial gifts. Now there is nothing wrong with inviting people to invest their time and treasures in ministry. The underlying hope, however,  is that someone will take my place, do my work and pay my share. We want more people involved so we don’t have to do as much.

It’s taken me 20 years to see it but my approach to evangelism creates an addictive cycle: I create programs and worship designed to get people to join the church. More people in the pews equals more money in the offering plate. More money the plate means more resources to hire staff and create new programs and better worship. Investing in programs and worship draws more people. It just keeps going.

  If another organization invited me to join them with thinly-veiled promises of fellowship and fun and then expected me to joyfully hand over two or more hours every week and a percentage of my paycheck for the rest of my life I would be very suspicious. Yet here I am doing that very thing.

So how do I keep Jesus’ command to make disciples without selfish, ulterior motives? What does evangelism look like in a church that isn’t trying to fill the pews and offering plates? Is it even possible?

My gut instinct is that evangelism has to do with showing people, with my words and actions, how close the kingdom of God is to this life. It’s about caring for people without regard to getting something in return. It’s more about the way I live than about where I belong. In fact, it actually begins to look like ministry and service, not recruiting.