Connections with people within and without our church walls is vital for the life of our church. Has our inability to connect with the world around us sealed the death nail in our church coffin?
How do we ministry with rather than for people
In preacher school, we learn about missiology or the academic study of Christian mission history and methodology. My study was taught by an amazing woman preacher by the name of (Dr.) Diane Lobody and she had us look at the history of our church (The United Methodist Church at the time) through the lens of women preachers who were sent out to “spread the word”. While we may not think much of it now with our multi point charges within driving distance, these early women especially in the 19th century had to take some fairly significant risks to their lives to establish church missions in places like Ohio and all points West, which in the late 18th and all of the 19th centuries were relatively unsettled by white settlers and largely populated by the native tribes of those lands.
Prior to preacher school, I went to Gannon University, in Erie Pa. Every spring, summer and sometimes fall breaks, there were mission opportunities. But these were not the kind of opportunities where you show up and so stuff for people. One year, we went to New York City and lived with the homeless for 10 days. For several years I went to Appalachia and lived with the Appalachian people in the community that the mission there served. Sure, we did work in these places, but most of the days in New York City were spent either in the shelter doing shelter things or out in the streets engaging with the homeless there or engaging in peace and justice events like a demonstration at the city hall. In Applachia, we went to several places and worked on small projects, but largely again socialized with the locals and took in the culture. One evening we went to a musical event where a Kentucky Colonel gave a speech and I experienced my first real Pentecostal type of service (As a Catholic boy at the time, it was a bit weird).
What these experiences in college taught me about mission was about doing mission work or engaging with our communities outside our church walls with folks rather than for folks. When we do mission work for folks, we presume an air of superiority and this is the leftover residue of an Imperial and Colonial church system that no longer is relevant to modern church goers, especially our youngest.
Spirituality of Connections
I have written recently on the relevancy of the Wesleyan movement today and a need to reclaim the Jesus movement today. I see a lot of dying churches these days. A statistic I once heard now about five years ago said that 80% of our churches will be gone in fifteen years.
You can go and read lots of information on how Churches can address this growing loss. I would like to add my own. You can read my thoughts on the Wesleyan movement and the Jesus movement above. Here, I want to focus on the spiritual practice of making connections.
I am a mental health therapist. I can see up to thirty clients a week. Thirty conversations that range from depression and anxiety to more complex stuff like traumas, behavioral issues, addictions and bipolar disorder. I take the relationships with these clients very seriously. I spend a lot of time as a clinician fostering and refostering connections with my clients. I never take a relationship with a client for granted. I am trying to establish that rapport daily.
Every day is a contemplative practice of always asking myself, “what do my clients need and how do I need that too?” The first lesson we need to learn about creating better connections with our congregants is that what we need, so do others. The second lesson comes from the point of all those frontier churches outside of the Imperial/Colonial attitude: bring people together and offer a sacred space for a community to explore their faith. Young people already know what so many older people cling to, that separateness is an illusion. In a time where we battle politically who is a better liar than the other, young people seem to want people to leave them alone and let them live. They are also asking for spiritual direction.
When we as a church begin to cultivate that everything is interconnected, our winged, furred, four legged and other domesticated siblings to our LGBTQ+, women, children, Democrat, Republican, Sith, then we truly become a church of open doors, open hearts and open minds.
The “practice of connections reinforces holistic thinking and our awareness of how the spiritual, emotional, and mental aspects of our being interpenetrate and nourish each other.”
It is not what we do, it what we are becoming?
The opportunities are all around us. I talk to young people all the time who feel alienated by the traditional church. It is not that they do not want to come to church, it just is not relevant to them. I was invited to a church once to give an assessment of what they could do to invite more young people. This was an older Wesleyan style church. They had a booth in the back for parents and they had taken the liberty to remove the glass, but that was it. I gave them my assessment regarding accessibility, layout restructuring of the worship space, music ideas, training in Mental Health First Aid, and a space reserved for children and adults with stimulation issues. I never heard from them again.
Another church I worked with desperately wanted a youth program like they had in 70’s. The youth there were largely not interested, and the congregation fit the statistic I offered earlier. When I pointed that they already had a vibrant youth program with backpack ministries, scouting and a successful nursery program, they dug their heels in further and I left.
We are asked in philosophy, “what are we becoming?” To the churches, are we becoming a graveyard of memories? Or can we re-imagine our ministries, if needed, consolidate with other churches and intentionally ask the question, “does what I need in my life (comfort, food and safety) what the people outside the walls of our church need? To be clear, the mission statement needs to say that the church does ministry for the poor but embeds itself in the community to be a focal point of hope, openness and understanding, love and support. We are not doing anything that can’t be provided by some other social support agency.
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