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Conference gives tips on ministry in tough times Bill Fentum, Apr 17, 2009
UMR PHOTOS BY BILL FENTUM
The Rev. Jessica Moffatt Seay, senior pastor of First UMC in Bixby, Okla., shared tips on how to discern God’s will for a congregation.
By Bill Fentum Staff Writer
ARLINGTON, Texas—Until the late 20th century, most churches in the U.S. were built for parishioners who kept close to home in tightly knit communities. But as social structures broke down and populations became more transient, that model stopped working.
What’s now left are thousands of dwindling congregations only a few miles apart, in buildings they can hardly afford to maintain.
“These are good people trapped in a system that needs to adapt,” the Rev. Jack Stephenson, senior pastor at Anona United Methodist Church in Largo, Fla., told participants at a three-day conference on church leadership.
The event sponsored by Oklahoma-based Leadership Nexus drew 150 clergy and lay leaders from across the country. Speakers, panels and workshops focused on pastoral care and effective church management.
“Churches are living organisms, not organizations,” Dr. Stephenson said. “When their environments change, they either evolve or slowly die.”
He began in 2007 what he calls a “collaborative, multi-site laboratory” among 10 small-to-mid-size congregations—including his own—near Florida’s Tampa Bay. They partner in outreach ministries while Dr. Stephenson trains them in growth strategies based on the book Natural Church Development (ChurchSmart Resources).
Like human brains, he said, church leadership teams function in three modes: fearful, emotional or rational. When churches drift into decline, it’s easy for individual leaders to fall into the first two modes, focusing on self-preservation (fear) or on blaming others (emotion).
“Rational, adaptive thinking is the only way we can look outward to see what’s good for a whole community and start new ministries to meet those needs,” Dr. Stephenson said. “That’s when churches start to grow again.”
St. Luke’s UMC in Indianapolis was drawing some 2,300 people on Sundays in the mid-1990s, when it added four off-site contemporary services at a local dinner theater and a vacant mansion. Now 700 more worshippers attend off-campus, many of them formerly unchurched.
The Rev. Kent Millard, senior pastor, urges members to volunteer at least 90 minutes to community service every 90 days. In one project, mentors and tutors from the church work with children at an inner-city elementary school. Though the school’s principal had no church background, she started coming to St. Luke’s because “she saw that we cared for her students,” Dr. Millard said.
A similar realization shaped Dr. Millard’s own life, at age 5. He accidentally ran into a church window while playing a game in Vacation Bible School and felt sure the teachers would scold him. Instead they bandaged his wounds, gave him milk and cookies, and calmed him down.
“That was my first impression of Methodist church teachers,” he recalled. “They were more concerned about me than the church property. I knew I wanted to be in a place like that.”
The first task of a church is always to heal the hurts of people outside its doors, said the Rev. Bob Pierson, founder of Leadership Nexus and author of Needs-Based Evangelism: Becoming a Good Samaritan Church (Abingdon Press).
Dr. Pierson, now retired, served from 1969 to 2006 as senior pastor of Christ UMC in Tulsa, Okla. Early on, he persuaded the members to sign a covenant, pledging never to make decisions for the church until they had prayed over a now-familiar question: “What would Jesus do?”
The answers led to prison ministries, divorce recovery groups and spreading the gospel through missions at home and abroad. “Everything we did was just a gimmick,” Dr. Pierson told attendees, “until we made a clear commitment to Christ, to find real needs and share our faith in the course of helping.”
Discerning God’s will for a church takes time and practice, said the Rev. Jessica Moffatt Seay, pastor of First UMC in Bixby, Okla. Appointed there in 1997, she found a congregation that was growing rapidly but had limited space for worship and Sunday school classes—and no one could agree on solutions.
So Ms. Seay urged the church council members to pray together in silence before each meeting, and to meditate on the pros and cons of all options. She wasn’t surprised when their talks started leading to ideas, not arguments.
“Instead of opinions, surveys and feasibility studies, we got quiet to listen to God and looked for God’s voice in others,” said Ms. Seay, who also led a workshop at the conference. “We practiced church by discernment and learned to wait on God’s timing.”
That’s especially good advice in a tough economy, according to Dr. Millard. He taught a workshop on church management in the current recession, and shared some of the struggles going on at St. Luke’s.
Stewardship pledges for 2009 dropped about $300,000 from the previous year, while 350 members couldn’t commit at all. The church staff has agreed to cuts in benefits and will work without pay in July if things don’t improve.
And yet when Dr. Millard recently challenged the members to increase support for a local homeless shelter, they donated almost $10,000.
“Even in hard times,” he said, “we’re counting our blessings and discovering that we still have abundance.
“I just ask people to believe that with God, all things are possible. We should be people who stand on faith, while the rest of the world is standing on fear.”
UMR PHOTOS BY BILL FENTUM
The Rev. Kent Millard, senior pastor, urges members to volunteer at least 90 minutes to community service every 90 days. In one project, mentors and tutors from the church work with children at an inner-city elementary school. Though the school’s principal had no church background, she started coming to St. Luke’s because “she saw that we cared for her students,” Dr. Millard said. 
