A NEW DAY IN THE CITY

In all the years that I have written this monthly column, I have never before pitched another pastor's book.  But I have run across one so outstanding that I am going to break that tradition.

A New Day in the City by Donna Sokol and Roger Owens is the most accessible and helpful book on church leadership that I have read in a while.  Donna is pastor of Mount Vernon Place UMC in DC (where I office) and about which I said (after worship on a Sunday in 2007)... "This is one of the most dysfunctional churches that I have ever experienced in worship."  I can be a painfully honest guy, but that may have been the hardest words I have ever shared with a colleague about HER OWN church!  I said this because I saw what she was trying to do, and I wanted her to know that I saw how great the challenge she was carrying. 

Ten years later, Mount Vernon Place is a totally new congregation.  And yet, at no point in this journey did Donna write off the old-timers.  She embraced them and invited them on a discipleship journey, as she has invited scores of others across the years.  If there anything really distinguishes Mt Vernon Place it would be that worship is not a show, and that there is clear intentionality of the faith journey, both collectively and individually.  Here is a church that actually, yes, "makes disciples of Jesus Christ for the transformation of the world."  ...to the point that if Donna and the staff all got caught in a snow storm at a winter staff retreat, the church would still gather, shovel the steps, open up the doors, make the coffee, worship well, with any number of the members stepping in to preach.  When we examine the recent Christian revival in China, it came specifically when the clergy all were rounded up and sent off to work camps.  The laity rose to the moment.  At Mt Vernon Place, the leaders have found a way to lead that enables the members to develop to their potential, without anyone having to go off to work camp.

Back to the book: it is supposed to be about urban church revival: center city churches where once they had hundreds and today only an aging fraction of yesterday.  It is a perfect read for leaders in such churches - but as I think about my client churches, it is a book that could relate  to any church, urban, suburban or small town, where, two or three decades ago, the place was packed and where today we are looking at 50 or 70 people on Sunday.  This book is for such a church, any church where the decline has been significant and the good ole days recent enough that it is tempting to day dream backwards rather than to vision forward and outward.

I will be using A New Day in the City with many of the churches where I consult.   I will encourage pastors to get the book to their key leaders, for everyone to read, and then ask the pastor to facilitate a half day conversation (or a series of shorter conversations) based on the outstanding questions sprinkled throughout the book.  This will provoke helpful thinking and discernment, readying the church for my work with them onsite as a consultant. Such conversations can help plow the field. readying a group of leaders for a season of planting new ideas, new strategies and new possibilities.

In the past few years, we at Epicenter have leaned heavily upon the Upper Room resource The Way of Discernment as a good study/conversation guide for church leaders getting ready for onsite consultation.  Now we will add A New Day in the City as an additional recommended resource.  

Way to go, Donna and Roger!  Thanks for this helpful contribution to the work of helping churches choose life and resurrection, even as they come to the place which (to the naked eye) would appear to be the end of their run!