THE CHANGING MATRIX FOR CHURCH VISIBILITY

When I was ordained in the 1980s, church visibility was highly connected to these criteria:

AMAZING THINGS GOING ON FAR SOUTH OF THE USA

Latin American Experience with Changing Culture and Churches is Similar to the USA.

Last two weeks I have been working with Uruguayan Methodists, facilitating a national gathering of leaders for clarification of core values and discernment of ministry vision. The Uruguayan church is small, only 11 churches, plus an array of social outreach ministries:

+ 9 residential communities mostly for addiction recovery plus a couple specialty communities for special populations.

+ Three group homes (10 families each) to help migrants from troubled lands get settled into society.

+ a major center for serving the homeless population in Montevideo.

+ a solid history of human rights and justice witness, so that a very secular Uruguayan government trusts the Methodist Church as a valued partner.

There are lay and clergy serving as pastors, hailing from Uruguay, Argentina, Colombia and Cuba!  So their sensibilities represent places beyond Uruguay.

And their challenges are very similar to ours: a busy public with limited time and attention span, rising secularism, the need to reboot children’s and family ministries, the need for lay-led Fresh Expressions to relate to a fast changing and diversifying population, and a need for a new generation of discipleship practice/training.  Not to mention they have expensive aging buildings that need diversification of use in order to cover costs of maintenance and renewal.

Just like here.

Central Methodist in downtown Montevideo is launching a theater company in a subterranean space just like what First UMC Chicago does.

Because of the amazing parallels, I am enlarging the folks I watch in ministry to include South America.  Pentecostalism and Catholicism are in decline across the continent.  It’s a new day there as in the North.

And there are some smart ministry practitioners who are teaching me lots!

Stay tuned. And please pray for our spiritual siblings to the south !!

Paul drinks Uruguay's national beverage Mate. 

WHAT TO DO WHEN SOMEONE IN YOUR COMMUNITY DECIDES TO TAKE YOU DOWN!!

Yes, you read the title correctly.  Increasingly my coaching clients are running into people in their communities - sometimes in the church, other times in the wider community, in one case in one of the Fresh Expression groups - who are just hostile towards them.  Some (usually slight) thing sets them off, and as often as not, it is nothing the pastor did.  But once they go onto their holy tear, they may not wish to reason and  they may easily turn on anyone (pastor included) who tries to help them take down their anger.

YOUR CHURCH NEEDS AN APP

For the last decade, cutting edge congregations have been adding mobile apps to their ministry communications plans.  These early adopters have tended to be very large and/or to serve a good volume of young adults.

YOUR CHURCH PROBABLY NEEDS A COMMUNICATIONS DIRECTOR!

 “I never can find out what’s going on around here.”

(Pastor responding), “ We send a newsletter by email every week.  The gall of people to say they don’t have access to information!”

“The website still has stuff on it inviting us to Christmas Eve services. And it’s almost May!  There hasn’t been a Facebook post in a month.”

(From an across the street neighbor) “Is that church still even open?  The posted message on their sign hasn’t changed in months.”

PLAYING THE LONG GAME

 

There is a perennial debate about how a leader, director, supervisor, line manager, coach or pastor should best spend their time: working more with their A players or their B players.

UP YOUR HOSPITALITY GAME!

Last month we talked about several best practices for growing churches in the 2020s. Today we drill down on one of them: building relationships with worship guests.

All over the world, we see amazing worship experiences with helpful preaching and inspirational music. And yet, more often than not, these excellent worship services are not growing!

FORGET THE EXCUSES. YOU CAN GROW A CHURCH IN 2026! Here is how…

1. Get your act together on visitor follow up.  Make a plan for welcoming, name tags, and follow up after each of a person's first four visits. This can double your rate of people retention. In some cases, this alone can tip you into net gains.

THE BIGGEST SHIFT IN MINISTRY STRATEGY WORK IN THIS CENTURY

As a young(er) church consultant around the turn of this century, one of the throw-away lines that I used to hear was that the days of long-range planning were over.  The world was moving too fast, we were told.  All of us had seen the long-range planning reports and posters of imagined facility development hidden away in old file cabinets and church closets - plans that never came to fruition.  It was assumed that future-oriented planning was, therefore, no longer a valid enterprise.  About that time, the congregation which I now belong to was creating future plans based on its recent past, assuming ever new generations of families with young children were its future.  Now, we look at the renderings of the giant, 1000-seat sanctuary envisioned for the street corner and we thank God that that thing never got built.

GETTING AROUND TO THE HARD STUFF

I don’t know what the vegetable was at your house growing up that your mother told you to eat before you could leave the dinner table. For our son, I remember the stickler being green English peas. We created a system in which he had to eat at least as many as his accumulated years on earth. So in fourth grade (age 9), he had to eat nine peas before being dismissed from the dinner table. I recall one night where he sat and pushed those nine little peas round and round for an hour after dinner was done. The dishwasher was running and he was still staring at the peas. In retrospect we probably should have negotiated a substitute veggie if they offended him that much.

LET'S TALK ABOUT MANCHESTER

Manchester, England lays claim to being the birthplace of the industrial revolution.  It is also the birthplace of fully-inclusive democracy, workers’ unionization, and with those movements, the emergence of middle-class prosperity globally. Manchester was an early hotbed for activism for the abolition of slavery, women’s rights, and more recently, the rights of migrants and the battle against global warming.

WHISKEY AND A PIG

Coaching conversations across many miles and time zones often happen in my life before and after the local 9-5 work window.  Many days I am ready to go at 6 am Pacific Time, especially if a client is in Glasgow, where it is already 2!  I had a 4:30 am session one day this week as I shifted my body clock to work across the Atlantic for a bit. Then, once I am in London, there’s this Pennsylvania church that needs to meet one evening after work. Start time: 11:30 pm British Time.

THE VIEW FROM THE PULPIT

Kids are back in school this week in a lot of American communities.  Do you recall the little essay at the beginning of the school year, when we were nine years old: What did you do this summer?  You remember that one?  Just a little kick start to get us writing again.

So for my Fourth Grade Teacher, Barbara Matulich, wherever she is in this world or the next: here goes (my 2025 summer essay):

YES, SOME CHURCHES ARE STILL GROWING, EVEN IN 2025!

In my 63 years on the planet, I have belonged to and/or served as pastor to 20 congregations.  Sometimes, early in ministry, I had two churches at a time.  I was part of one church for 9 years, but I count it as two because the church planted a new campus in 1999 where I served as pastor.

ON DOING NO HARM

Among the endless lies coming from the White House is this persistent trope about undocumented people as criminals. Fact is that immigrants have a lower propensity to commit crime than homeborn people. And it is logical - they do not want to draw attention to themselves and get deported.

I STILL HAVE FAITH IN YOU

 

This is the title of the opening track of the album Abba Voyage.  Abba Voyage is a collection of ten songs from a 70s band, that reunited a few years back and produced a fresh album: their first in over forty years!  Because these are new songs, none of them turn up in any Greatest Hits collections. None of them are featured in the popular musical Mama Mia.  The music feels more seasoned than their earlier body of work.

IT'S EASTER IN A VERY WEIRD YEAR

For those of us who have taken pride across the decades at the human rights ideals of our country, the United States of America, this has been the darkest Lent of our lives. The present government’s interest in creating an American gulag in El Salvador is just the cherry on the cake.

But it is Easter. And so I look for hope.

THE GOOD SAMARITAN STORY - LENT 2025 EDITION

A man in a red MAGA hat went walking in Central Park, far beyond the crowds into the woods and there he was mugged and left for dead.  A young Trans college student was jogging in the park and came up on the wounded man.  They stopped and called 911 and waited patiently and kindly until help arrived, even at some risk that the thugs would come around and mug them too!

A WORLD BEYOND BEST PRACTICES

Several years ago, I worked with a congregation in a very upscale community, in which one of the leaders was a retired airline executive in his late 70s.  In every meeting, he made clear that he was hoping for a document that gave the church a set of Best Practices on all sorts of tasks and subjects.  Best Practices is a common business term, where industry consensus has formed around certain protocols which may be different than protocols a generation earlier.  Often these practices relate to customer service, to corporate organization or to a changing legal landscape.

THANK YOU, BISHOP MARIANN!

 

 

By now, the sermon has been heard around the world.  It is possibly the most listened-to sermon of the century, thus far.  Mostly on YouTube and assorted sites.  When we go to seminary, do we not dream of hitting that one home run, clear out of the park?