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These are times of high-velocity intense change in our denomination. John Detterick and the many now-departed members of our national staff have been a blessing to our church in this time of change. The General Assembly has just ended a challenging meeting. Linda Valentine, the new executive director of the General Assembly Council, along with the rest of the national staff and the GAC, have much to contend with. All of us are eager for a new and transformational chapter in the life of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.). The church is doing many things that matter. The thing that matters most to a great many of us is the design of transformational, missional, and innovative congregations who worship God while passionately engaging their communities to make disciples and to meet human need -- which is in some contrast to our present reality.
These are times of high-velocity intense change in our denomination. John Detterick and the many now-departed members of our national staff have been a blessing to our church in this time of change. The General Assembly has just ended a challenging meeting. Linda Valentine, the new executive director of the General Assembly Council, along with the rest of the national staff and the GAC, have much to contend with. All of us are eager for a new and transformational chapter in the life of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.). The church is doing many things that matter. The thing that matters most to a great many of us is the design of transformational, missional, and innovative congregations who worship God while passionately engaging their communities to make disciples and to meet human need -- which is in some contrast to our present reality. We know the place from which we start. In the next four years we are projected to lose ten percent of our members. The majority of our congregations are on a numerical plateau or are declining. When Clifton Kirkpatrick said the loss of 50,000 members last year was a call to action, I took his words quite seriously. We are like an armada of tall sailing ships whose captains and admirals are debating standards for captaincy and other issues while the majority of our ships are in the "doldrums," wallowing without wind. What is at stake? The future of the whole church rests on its vitality at the grassroots level. The life of the local church must become our first priority if we want to continue to address the many other issues of our day that matter. In my own work leading presbyteries and congregations in missional transformation, I see people everywhere in the church hungry and eager for a new thing. I do not buy the idea that the mainline has no future. I see turnaround churches everywhere and we, by God's grace, can be a "turnaround denomination." There are a number of matters to consider in getting the ship under sail, all of which require the grace and energy of the Spirit of God. The National Staff and the General Assembly Council Our staff in Louisville has been through the torturous experience of downsizing with some 75 people experiencing all that goes with the loss of employment and the understandable companion issues of staff morale and work redistribution. At the same time, the GAC has moved to downsize itself and has committed to four major goals with eight major objectives over the next years. Adjusting the national staff team to address those objectives, establishing a direct relationship with General Presbyters and other key leaders, while attending to a variety of other issues will consume the next few years for Linda Valentine and the team that develops around her. At the same time, this transition is a tremendous opportunity to align our national staff with a vision for a turnaround denomination and transformational future. Following the transitional theory of John Kotter, successful change requires establishing a sense of urgency, a guiding coalition, a transitional strategy, a communication strategy, short-term wins, and so on. Clearly the challenge is to orient the downsizing of the staff and GAC, the implementation of their four goals, and our grassroots ministries around a common sense of vision and urgency. To actually stabilize our denominational decline will require a critical mass in effort. Otherwise, four goals, eight objectives and the multitude of individual efforts will feel like simple busyness. Our present reality involves the lack of any sense of a denominational visionary center at the grassroots level. Most pastors and middle judicatory leaders have minimal experience of direct connection with the national church offices and many pastors are coalescing in groups centered on various common interests. What is at stake? In this time of intense change we have the opportunity to re-claim a denominational visionary center around a life-defining vision and our life-changing Lord that isn't separate from what is happening at the grassroots level. Such a visionary center can also discover and embrace the ministries and programs that are bearing fruit and find ways to share them with the whole church. Downsizing is the responsible response to loss of funding; however, downsizing is not a motivational vision. At stake is the fit between the new staffing patterns and the critical needs we face in the majority of our congregations. The GAC has an excellent vision statement that says, in part, "We pray that all will be drawn irresistibly into ministries reflecting the love and justice of Jesus, with immediate neighborhoods and the whole of the world as arenas in which the gospel is to be proclaimed and lived." The vision is great. It's time we made such vision "the" vision. A unifying vision offers hope -- that we will be a turnaround denomination of transformational congregations engaging their communities. A great many people within our denomination are fixated on past glory and the diminishing numbers of the present. When members of a congregation say to me, "Oh, if we could only be the way we were," I reply, "The past is not your future. It's time to shift from your present level of expectation (or lack thereof) to the much higher anticipation that God has a great future for your congregation." The same can be said to us of our denomination. Our culture is very hungry for the word of the Gospel but we have to approach people with a spirit of enthusiasm about our faith and not a fixation on the loss of energy in the mainline. People speak of the twilight of the mainline church. It may be so but does not have to be so. I remember when visiting Tokyo some years ago discovering two kinds of congregations in that primarily non-Christian culture. There were the "enclave" churches that saw themselves as the faithful remnant huddled from the culture and the "missional" churches that were passionately engaged in reaching their culture. When a presbytery such as New Covenant Presbytery in Houston comes up with a vision statement such as the following, it is a sign of hope: "The Presbytery of New Covenant grows congregations that passionately engage their community to make disciples." It would be easy to just assert that congregational transformation is primarily the responsibility of the presbyteries. Well, it is very true that every General Presbyter feels the weight of how to sustain and turn around congregations whose numbers have been falling for years. At the same time, for a denominational turnaround, those presbyters and presbyteries need all the support they can get from both the national church and the local church. We need to legitimize risk and change at the local level and we need to link people with all the help being offered by teaching congregations, congregational consultants, and seminaries. Again there is an opportunity for a denominational center to offer vision and support. This is not at odds with the general diffusion of like-minded networks we see emerging throughout the denomination. Strong organizations have often balanced a visionary center with the initiative and network of relationships at the grassroots level. Change In our high-velocity, white-water society, change may be the biggest issue we are facing. Just think how blogs and podcasts that surfaced on the Internet in just the last two years will hugely affect how we communicate. Recently a reporter from the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette called me to talk about churches and iPODS! In this time of incredible change, church consultant Carl George has said that the traditional congregation paradigm is failing because it is not prepared to cope with the quality of turmoil in most people's lives. What is at stake? The ability of our congregations to care for people in turmoil, grow them as disciples while engaging their communities. Most traditional congregations do not fit the description of an organization popularly called "the learning organization." We have to find a way to show love, dignity, and respect to the long-term and highly traditional members of our congregations and honor our Reformed tradition while learning how to reach "missionally" those in our communities at the same time. This means finding ways of replacing advocacy for the old ways of doing things with inquiry that asks, "How do we actually reach the people of our day who live in our communities?" Congregational transformation Given rapid societal change, it is no surprise that much is changing in congregational life. There are so many "movements' in church life that it can be a challenge to track all of them. When you read about what I call the "transformational church" movement, or look into the missional church movement or turnaround church movement or emergent church movement, you quickly discover that all of them are speaking about the same issues with slightly different language. In various ways, all of them speak of inspiring worship, deliberate discipleship, authentic community, and missional engagement with the community. The typical mainline church has essentially "run last year's program over again" for over thirty years. While such programs effectively addressed worship, discipleship, fellowship, and missional concerns when they began, they have since slowly grown out of touch with the people of our high-velocity culture. Among the staff members lost in the national staff reductions of this spring was our national office of congregational transformation. A number of larger congregations are doing very well but for mid-sized and smaller congregations the task of sustaining ministry and the challenge of moving toward transformation can be overwhelming. I see a tremendous hunger on the part of pastors across the theological spectrum for the counsel and encouragement that enables congregational transformation. New church developments A study of the history of New Church Developments (NCDs) in our denomination conducted by Charles Denison, former Associate for New Church Development, reveals a major focus on new church starts in our denominational past. For example, between 1890 and 1900 we started some 2000 congregations and in the 1950s some 1,345 new congregations were begun. When the authority to launch NCDs passed from the General Assembly to the presbytery level in the 1960s, Denison's study reveals a sharp decline in new church starts -- due to issues of funding, "turf," and the like. Last year we launched 40. The annual hemorrhage of members we are experiencing will not be arrested solely by the transformation of our current congregations into turnaround, community-engaging, transformational, missional fellowships. We need at least 200 NCDs a year every year for a decade, which averages only four per state per year. It is perfectly do-able but it will require a much higher level of commitment from every level of the church. Seminaries We are blessed with seminaries whose faculty and staff are genuinely committed to excellent theological education. Their challenge is the same as that of the congregations they serve. Our culture is in a time of high-velocity change, and an unchanging curriculum, like an unchanging church program, grows out of step with people in our congregations and communities we want to grow as disciples. A friend of mine once asked the outstanding president of Princeton Theological Seminary, James I. McCord, "When during my three years will I learn to 'do ministry?'" McCord replied, in essence, "Learning how to do ministry is not why you are here. Here you will learn biblical and theological foundations for your coming work. When you get into the church it is there that you will learn to do ministry." And he was right. During the last half of the twentieth century, all pastors had to do was preach well, offer pastoral care, and administrate the programs they inherited. Today, they must also learn the new skill of how to design ministry because running last year's programs over again no longer cuts it. Movements such as the transformational, emergent and missional church movements are all about design, but few of the graduates of our seminaries know how to introduce such ideas into the lives of thoroughly traditional and frequently declining established congregations. Without such design skills and significant leadership competencies, pastors will continue to struggle with how to lead congregations whose programs remain rooted in the 1950s. What is at stake? Our future. With the vast majority of our congregations in a numerical or declining plateau led by pastors developed by the seminary system of the last half of the twentieth century, clearly we need pastors who can honor the traditions of the past, and who know how to design ministry that actually engages the people of their communities. Teaching theologically sound approaches to the design of ministry is a new field of endeavor for the church and is little addressed in the seminary environment. Seminaries in partnership with teaching pastors and teaching congregations can certainly develop theologically rooted leaders with expertise in the design of ministries that are transformational and missional. A final word The General Assembly's actions surely blessed and annoyed virtually everyone. While we all have convictions about the various issues that surface in our denominational conversations and the prophetic voice of our denomination to the world, much of our daily lives is consumed with the leadership and pastoral issues of our congregations. How could it be otherwise as there are so many issues that matter and so many ways of viewing them? At the same time, we are on the brink of a new era, an era in which we have the opportunity to become a Spirit-driven, turnaround denomination powerfully engaging its culture with turnaround congregations, turnaround pastors, and a turnaround people. Unless the LORD builds the house, its builders labor in vain, (Psalm 127:1 NIV). The place to begin and the place to stay is on our knees. Our God invites us to take the adventure laid out before us with faith, enthusiasm and vision. E. Stanley Ott (estanleyott@VitalChurchesInstitute.com ) is president of the Vital Churches Institute, specializing in congregational transformation with presbyteries, and pastor of the Pleasant Hills Community Presbyterian Church in Pittsburgh, Pa.
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