Author Archives: MaryAnn McKibben Dana

Jun 17, 2013

Why Congregations Are Stuck

We can… but will we?

I had an “aha” this weekend about why many of our congregations seem so stuck.

I attended a “Building and Empowering Communities” leadership training sponsored by VOICE, a group of congregations and institutions in northern Virginia that are doing community organizing around issues of affordable housing, immigration, and other issues.

The tools of community organizing are not just for engagement in the wider community; they are also helpful within the congregation, as you seek out leaders and discern a vision.

The crux of the training centered on the one-on-one “relational” meeting, in which you try to identify potential leaders through getting to know people and learning their stories—their histories, their passions, and what “keeps them up at night.”

To give us a taste of this, each presenter offered a bit of personal history before launching into his/her topic, and it was easy to connect the dots between the person’s past experiences and his or her life’s work. One person’s aunt and uncle was the victim of a predatory loan. Another saw her single working mother face discrimination and sexism and was driven to empower herself and other women in her community as a result. You get the idea.

Then we practiced one-on-one meetings, and I was struck with how many stories (mine included) were some variation of “I had a pretty comfortable life… and now I just want to give back and make the world a better place.”

Now, admittedly, many of us were brand new at this relational meeting stuff. The organizers who trained us (and whose dots were so easy to connect) have been telling their stories for a long time. And granted, it was an artificial exercise, taking place in a fishbowl, and we could only go 8-10 minutes long instead of the 30-40 minutes that is suggested.

But these rather bland, generic responses revealed to me how we find leaders and volunteers in the church, and how we talk about service. And how it’s killing us.

Here are three realizations I had:

1. We do discernment primarily around gifts rather than stories. We need to stop doing that.

Whether we’re the nominating committee trying to put forth a slate of officers, or a youth director trying to find confirmation sponsors, we think predominantly about a person’s skills and gifts. “This person is a teacher, so I bet he’d be a great Christian Education elder.” “She’s chief operating officer of her company; maybe she’d serve on the stewardship team.”

It’s not that gifts are unimportant. After all, spiritual gifts language has been with us from the very beginning. But one of the tenets of community organizing is that good leaders are made, not born. As a pastor, I can teach skills. But I cannot teach passion. Getting in touch with a person’s history allows you to find those deep hungers that will motivate and drive them even when the going gets tough. No wonder so many of our congregations are boring and lethargic—we’ve been talking about the wrong things!

2. We need to get way more concrete in our language about service.

“I want to help people because Jesus tells us to love our neighbor” doesn’t get us anywhere. Yet it’s our default response when people ask us what drives us. The content of a relational meeting is why and how. “Why do you want to help people? Why does that matter to you? How have you seen that impulse lived out? How do you see that not being lived out in your community?”

Just as we’ve relied on gifts as the primary mode of discernment, we have not taken the time to drill down past our surface responses about service. Many of the overworked pastors there (myself included) were searching for shortcuts—Can’t you do this work in group settings? Does it have to be one on one? What do you suppose the response was?

3. Anger is not the enemy. It is a resource.

Maybe you’re one of those who had a genuinely untroubled childhood. You didn’t see your aunt and uncle’s devastation at almost losing their home because of that predatory loan. But I bet there is an injustice that makes you furious. We don’t like to talk about anger, especially in the Church of Nice that so many of us belong to. Anger is bad, we tell ourselves—something to suppress. But anger, properly contextualized, is also energy. Anger is fuel for action. And there is plenty of holy anger in scripture. One of my favorite benedictions has the line, “May God bless you with anger—at injustice, oppression, and the exploitation of people, so you will work for justice, freedom and peace.”

There are plenty of injustices in the world that I worry about. But when I look back on my personal history, the key issue for me has been women and girls, again and again. The specifics of that have played out in different ways over the years, and the pivotal events that sparked that anger are for another post. But yeah. Women and girls.

My favorite quote these days is this one by Howard Thurman:

But how do we know what makes people come alive unless we ask them?

Jun 14, 2013

Smartphones at the Breakfast Table?

16 Replies

Here’s something I wonder, as I think about faithful uses of technology.

I agree with Sherry Turkle (author of Alone Together) that there should be certain zones that are smartphone-free. Sacred spaces, if you will, such as the carpool line or the dinner table. Places where we are focusing on the people we are sharing physical spaces with. Places where children or other loved ones may to be able to look us in the eye.

But what about the breakfast table?

I grew up with parents who read the newspaper during breakfast. For some people, this remains an essential morning practice. Newspapers invite browsing—flipping from item to item, sharing an interesting tidbit with someone else.

How is reading on a smartphone the same or different than browsing the morning paper? You could argue that a phone is even less problematic, since you don’t have this big wall of newsprint between you and your breakfast companions.

When newspapers first came out, was there a hue and cry that reading them in the presence of other people was “taking people out of the moment,” or “distancing them from the people around them”?

Discuss…

Jun 13, 2013

Marathon!

19 Replies

So I’m registered for my first marathon—the Walt Disney World in January—and am starting to freak out about it.

I’m also very excited. Disney is supposed to be a great beginners’ marathon. The course is flat, the weather is usually mild, and it’s Disney, which means it will be well-run and entertaining. You have to finish in under 7 hours, which is very doable. My brother will run with me, and our whole family will be there for the biennial Florida sibling reunion, which will be great.

But it’s going to be hard.

It’s going to be hard physically. I did a half marathon in March and finished fine, but there’s quite a leap from 13.1 to 26.2. The half marathon was hard, but while I was doing it I never had the sense that I might not make it. By contrast, I remember seeing the course split around mile 12 and thinking, Oh heck no.

I’m also getting antsy. The training program I’m using doesn’t start until fall, so my goal for the summer is simply not to lose too much ground. But I don’t love the treadmill, and it’s hot outside. And I get headaches after I run in hot weather. (Which frankly is a potential problem on race day. It’s Florida.)

It’s going to be hard emotionally. I have many decades of self-talk to overcome about being the brainy one, not the athlete. My inner harpy tells me I’m slow and should’ve stayed with shorter distances. I remember the time I did the Turkey Trot with my mother while I was in junior high and came in last. Last.

Part of the emotional baggage is having a friend who was my age who dropped dead while on a run. I think about him often while I’m running. By all outward appearances, he was in excellent physical condition, not to mention naturally athletic (which I am not, and please don’t argue that point with me).

And there’s also Dad, who died suddenly of cardiac arrest. Unlike me, he did not exercise regularly, but still—I have half his genetics. (And yes, in terms of physical maladies, I’m much more likely to blow out a knee than to keel over. But hey, if you’re gonna catastrophize, do it RIGHT.)

And it’s going to be a logistical challenge. Honestly, carving out the time to train will be the biggest issue. Remember when I ran the half, my favorite sign along the course was “trust your training.” Well, you have to do the training in order to trust the training. By the time January 12 rolls around, if I follow the program, I will have run 500 miles.

Remember “factorial” in math class? It’s represented with an exclamation point and involves multiplying the number by all the other whole numbers less than it. So 5 “factorial” is:

5! = 5 x 4 x 3 x 2 x 1 = 120.

Well, Marathon! = 500.

That’s some intimidating math right there.

But that’s the math of life, isn’t it? Whether it’s changing careers, sticking with your marriage, raising kids, finishing grad school, relocating to a new city, the worthwhile stuff is hard. The worthwhile stuff is a grand mashup of physical endurance, emotional labor, logistics, and dumb luck… or grace if you prefer to call it that, and I do.

And of course there’s this:

So off I go.

Would love to hear your own stories of Life, factorial!

P.S. That Turkey Trot in which I came in last? I was the only one in my age group, so I got a blue ribbon. Importance of showing up? OK, universe, I get it.

Jun 11, 2013

I’m Not Married to My Church, Are You?

20 Replies

Does it? Why and how much?

I was with a group of folk from another congregation recently, introducing them to NEXT Church and talking about my involvement as co-chair. We got to talking about generational differences when it comes to membership in an institution, particularly a church. Millenials are way less wired toward joining a group in the sense of signing on the dotted line. In many cases they are committed to the organization and will support it through time and money, but they do not see the point of being a member.

I made an offhand comment about churches that have people re-commit to church membership every year. Rather than having someone join and be a member of a church “forever,” there is an annual discernment process. The church leadership re-introduces folks to what it means to be a member (and presumably, the expectations are high), and asks people to consider whether they are willing to devote the time and energy toward that endeavor. As always, non-members are welcome to worship and serve in the community, to receive pastoral care, etc.

There was some predictable backlash to this idea, some of which I can understand. There are times in a church’s life when things just aren’t that much fun. A beloved pastor leaves and the energy declines. There are conflicts and crises. Are we saying it’s OK for people to bail just because things get hard, or because the church is not suiting their needs?

And yes, our culture is one in which ties to institutions and communities are more tenuous than ever. So people are right to ask whether a yearly church membership drive feeds that lack of commitment. OR, does it simply acknowledge the world as it is, not as we want it to be? People can carp all they want about “kids today,” but how does that work as an evangelism strategy?

One comment really grabbed me: What, are people going to get married year by year now? I didn’t have the presence of mind at the time to question that analogy. But now, a few days later… No. Just no.

Church membership is not like a marriage. It’s just not. Don’t believe me? Consider this: when a person relocates because of a job, there is often grief over leaving one’s church. But rarely does someone pass up that job because they have made a commitment to their worshiping community. But I know plenty of people who have done that because a move would be bad for their spouse or family.

We use the marriage analogy all the time in the church. Pastors seeking another call feel like they’re “cheating on their church,” like they’re “running around behind people’s backs.” I can relate to the sentiment—there is a zone of secrecy that must be present in these situations, and it can feel inauthentic and sneaky. Still, I find these kinds of metaphors very unhelpful. Pastors are not called to a church until death do they part. They are called for a season of the church’s life. And in the Presbyterian Church (USA), there is at least a minimal sense of re-upping each year, in the sense of negotiating and re-approving terms of call.

Why would we not at least consider giving church members the same freedom to reaffirm their commitment to a congregation that pastors themselves have? Why do we get to leave whenever we feel the winds of the Spirit blowing, but church members are on the hook for the rest of their lives?

The real crux of this membership stuff is not people’s lack of commitment. It’s that the church has done a poor job of teaching discernment and discipleship.

Discernment: sensing the presence and leading of God, which goes beyond what makes me happy in the moment.

And discipleship: commitment to following the Way of Jesus, even when it’s hard, even when it means being in a community with people who are sometimes a pain to deal with.

A church that does a good job of this doesn’t need to worry about a mass exodus of people if the interim’s a boring preacher.

And a church that does a poor job of this wants to keep warm bodies (or not-so-warm ones) on the rolls any way they can.

Jun 6, 2013

What Happens in the Upper Room: A Case in Point

2 Replies

A short follow-up to yesterday’s post about bidding farewell to children’s Sunday School at Tiny Church, in favor of the Upper Room and other activities.

For several weeks in late April/early May we adapted the “ribbon ritual” that took place at the NEXT Conference in Charlotte in March. At Tiny Church, the ritual built over a series of weeks and ended on Pentecost. The previous week, people had written their names on ribbons with different prayer words they selected. Then on Pentecost, we handed out the ribbons and folks were invited to take those home and pray for that person over the coming weeks.

We had the children hand out the ribbons before going to the Upper Room. One of the children spent the rest of the service creating a sort of “cocoon” in which to put the prayer ribbon she received. This was not an assignment. This was her own initiative, using nothing but paper and tape.

I especially love the lid that tapes shut for safekeeping. And of course, the heart.

Children do listen, process and respond.

Speaking of heart, I am off this afternoon to one of my heart places, Mo-Ranch in the Texas Hill Country, where I will lead the good folks of St. Philip Presbyterian Church in a Sabbath retreat. My piece is minimal: a few presentations and a sermon on Sunday. The real Sabbath comes from walks under the grape arbor and across the catwalk, BBQ by the river, and long hours in God’s hot tub, the rapids of the Guadalupe River.

St. Philip is where Robert and I married almost 19 years ago, where I first felt called to ministry, and where I was ordained as a Minister of Word and Sacrament 10 years ago. It will be lovely to go home to those great folks, many of whom I remember, some of whom are friends I haven’t met yet.

The Blue Room

MaryAnn McKibben Dana