Category: Church development

Earlier, I listed the first ten good things a church member would say about our new church. Here’s the second set.

1. My parents and children both feel welcome here.
2. My church helps me make friends.
3. My church lets me develop sexual ethics in an environment of trust and accountability.
4. There are people here who know when I’m missing.
5. My church is clear that my friends aren’t damned for being who they are.
6. At my church, I can talk about how much I miss my dead pet without being treated like a fool.
7. My church supports my monogamous relationship with prayer and practical help.
8. There’s so much energy here that we’re already planning a new church across town.
9. My church gives me tools and food for thought about murky and conflicting social issues.
10. We reach out to other Universalists across the world. I really feel like I’m part of something special and important

As I worked on my vision, I realized the that the core constituencies (others may come, but these are who the work of the church are directed towards; dubbed “ministry focus group”) have one thing in common: these are people who have given up on Christian faith because they feel (often with good reason) that Christians have given up on them.

Rather than “pre-Christians” – a precious and often presumptuously insular term – as often seen in church planning resources, I suspect that the people I ought to reach are really “re-Christians.” For the moment, I’ve identified three sets of them.

• Twenty- and thirty-somethings who dropped out of mainline churches in their teens. These adults (no cloying “young adult” speak, please) were bored to tears by their mainline upbringings. Even today, their parents’ church is dying because it has failed to make the generational transition effectively. Still, they have the consciousness that “rock n’ roll” Evangelicalism and “hands-up, eyes-closed, brain-stopped” charismatic Protestantism and Pentecostalism isn’t for them. They want Christianity something like they think they remember: participatory with cultivating narcissism, current without being “corporate” (think “suits” not “common prayer”), and deep without being moldy.
• Gay and lesbian persons who have gotten on with their lives: are out, may have a successful spousal relationship and children, and aren’t “into the scene.” At least, not anymore. (Who has the time? The patience? The abs?) Yes: there’s a lot of anger about the church and none of the options seem worth the bother of returning. They don’t want the be drowned in rainbow flags (how gays could be associated with such a tacky color scheme remains a mystery) and be pigeon-holed accordingly, forced to be closeted, thrown into a church-as-meat-market, or go to the most peculiar house of worship because it is the only one that would take them. No “you’re depraved and sick” from the Right; no kid gloves “you’re O.K.” and infantalizing pandering from the Left will do. (For the latter, yes, lesbians and gay men have some real and nagging issues as a community. There’s no use in whitewashing them.) This church will have to deal with some righteous anger with grace (in both meanings of the word) and dignity, and at the same time get past “Gay Bible 101.”
• Family members, and especially spouses, of active Unitarian Universalists who are Christian, and though they want to support their kin, find “garden variety UU-ism” to be shallow, weird, or pointless. They may have been insulted or snubbed because of their faith by Unitarian Universalists who don’t believe they really belong in their congregation. They’re also not keen on becoming Episcopalians or some other mainline Protestant, in part because (at least on paper) the Unitarian Universalists look like they ought to be the right choice, or because the worship is way too high or way too low.

would love your commentary.

Something I have to work on is a name for this church, and I welcome your suggestions in the comments section. This is where being too close to the material can be limiting. A theological name will almost certainly send a misfired message. There are the twin risks of being too cute (an alliterating name?) or too severe (St. Anything, perhaps). I like names of the Church of the Mediator – Church of the Advocate – Church of the Messiah school. But I might be alone there, and unchurched people may vote with the feet.

Ideally (according to Robert E. Logan again) the name should best exemplify to unchurched people the church’s key descriptor. Thus if the church values friendliness very highly, the name alone should radiate friendliness. Also, it should have an available none-too-long Internet domain, since that will help deliver the outreach message, and in no way should its acronym spell out something embarrassing.

Universalist (in the name) could scarcely have more meanings than it has, and for the last two generations, its “advocates” have deliberately de-Christianized it. On the other hand, people are attracted to the name, and it does say something. I know I’m usually suspicious of “no name” churches, including anything with the word community in it, the latter having been hijacked as a feel-good buzzword by church planters of all denominations.

Since I intend to plant this church on the parish-church model (over which I have written much) I should note that the parish can either be numbered (that is, the Second Universalist Parish in the City of Washington) or simple be the Parish of x, where x is the name of the church.

One of the things I’m doing preparing for the new start church is coming up with fifty affirmative statements someone might make to describe this church, as is it were already up and running. If you can’t do this, then you probably don’t have a good enough idea of what the implementation will be like.

Some of you out there will recognize this from Robert E. Logan and Steven L. Ogne’s Church Planter’s Toolkit. Which I would recommend, by the way. It may be the fastest, most direct immersions into another philosophy of ministry I’ve ever seen.

Here are the first ten:

1. Worship isn’t wishy-washy.
2. I can meet with other church members in my neighborhood.
3. (Other) gay people don’t have to second guess being out.
4. The parenting classes help me anticipate my child’s developing faith.
5. I’ve can learn many different kinds of prayer here.
6. Women and men share in leadership decisions on an equal and open basis.
7. The lessons learned here apply directly to my life.
8. The church doesn’t pander to (other) young people, but treats them (us) as interested persons.
9. I can try on new ways to be spiritual without judgment.
10. We take trips together to enriching destinations.

I tend to work by fits and starts, and so putting together identity and vision statements for this new church is going to be especially hard work. I thought it might be better to write some, add it to the blog, ask for comments, and repeat. Better to do that than get discouraged. Here’s part one:

Christian faith is transmitted through communities; every Christian alive today is thus an heir, even though the inheritance is a mixture of the Gospel, those traditions that explain and explore it, and miserable additions that have hurt the faithful and others in the world. Missionary despoiling of American peoples and church-harbored violence against Jews are two obvious examples. The work of a reformer, in faithfulness to the Gospel, is to make the best of a decidedly mixed situation.

Many people have tried to overcome the miseries and the divisions among Christians by attempting to restore the church to a New Testament state. We tend to think of storefront churches here with grand names, but Unitarianism shared in this pursuit, though this later morphed into a quest for “pure religion.” Universalism’s chief proponant for a “restored Christianity” – Adin Ballou – saw his plans fall in his own lifetime. Religion, we have learned, is not pure or ideal; to be real, it must mingle in the messiness of real human experience, and must express itself in those experiences, not remembered ones. Still, human beings don’t change much from generation to generation, and so long as we are careful, the rich treasure of Christian tradition remains open to us.

Thus, the vocation of a Christian is not to vacate everything that happened after Good Friday, after Pentecost, or after the last word written in the received library of the New Testament. Looking for Jesus’ faith without the church’s faith is a futile quest. It misunderstands his mission and ours. It allows romantic falsehood to flourish and tramples our consciousness of history and culture. Though well-meaning, the church cannot be “first century” because we are in the twenty-first century.

The identity of this new church has to be faithful to the Gospel, compassionate to those who feel estranged from it (especially to those whose estrangement comes from prior experience with Christianity), receptive to the full range of Christian tradition, and selective in its application to this time and place. With some of the task marked out, we can proceed.

before, please comment.

I know that I am going to need the prayerful support of many people, and this is something I will need particularly of those people who care about this project but do not live in the area.

Please pray for the success of this new church start, and for the people whose lives it will touch.

I like Vineyard websites. Simple, full of positive expression of who they are, and riddled with practical, ready-to-download resources.

Look at these sites: don’t you get a sense of warmth and vitality? There’s a lesson in all that.

Vineyard USA
They stay on message. You find the sentences “Our Web site can connect you to these churches as well as helpful on-line resources that advance the Kingdom of God.” all over their site. You know where you stand.

Vineyard UK and Eire

Vineyard Aotearoa (New Zealand)