LOOKING DOWN FROM 40K FEET UPON 40K SQUARE FEET

American Airlines, my typical air carrier, is doing markedly better than some of its competitors this fall - after a very bumpy early summer.  And I am flying again, a lot, this fall.  To Chicago, San Francisco, Raleigh, Dallas, Southern Cal.  It has begun again, where we left off in spring of 2020 - but in so many ways, not at all where we left off eighteen months ago.

POP UP CHURCH IS BACK

When Rae Jackson in Washington DC announced (pre-Covid) that his new planting project (The Well) would be “pop-up,“ moving to different venues in its gathering, I immediately thought of the recent movement among cool bakeries, food trucks, shows and museums, where the fun travels.

SO WHAT'S THE STORY?

 

One of the themes in my work this year is teasing out the story of what God is up to in particular congregations.  "Tell me about the story you are in the middle of." This is what Gospel writers did way back when: they looked at the varied incidents and anecdotes and cobbled together a narrative that was true to their faith understanding.

THE FOUR HORSES OF THE CURRENT CHURCH APOCALYPSE

Typically, I work with leaders and churches who are motivated to strive toward new realities.  This creates something of an illusion for me in terms of how bad the crisis is in most churches.  However, in the last year, I started working more with judicatories, where churches are assigned or suggested to Epicenter Group.  In these experiences I come to see things more the way the average Methodist superintendent sees things: where the vast majority of churches are late life cycle with a closing window of opportunity for renewal.

THE (ALMOST) LOST ART OF HOLY CONFERENCING

Earlier this week, I was on a Zoom with a church council meeting from a different time zone - meaning that it started at 10 pm at night (from where I was).  In addition, I was visiting family with very sketchy wifi - so it is a miracle that I heard anything at all of the meeting. People froze and unfroze the whole time.  Further, it was a meeting that ran out of its intended 75 minute bounds, pushing to nearly 2 hours.  If all of that doesn’t sound bad enough, the major agenda item was a debate on what to do about the church’s mask policy as the pandemic slowly subsides locally.

TO ZOOM OR NOT TO ZOOM

In these waning pandemic days in America, many churches are keeping an online worship option going even as they reopen sanctuaries.  All good.

But Zoom worship is already drawing a median age similar to what we had in the building pre-Covid.  Most young adults are no more drawn to a Zoom church experience than they were to the services we had inside. In both cases, a particular paradigm of gathering easily gets conflated with what it means to be active in a church.

WHERE DID 25 YEARS GO?

Twenty-five years ago this spring, I entered into contract to lead a ministry consultation with St. Jude Episcopal Church in Valparaiso, Florida.  I was a 33-year old executive pastor of a nearby growing Florida congregation, interested in applying best practices (for that time and context) in a variety of churches.  More than one thousand such churches later (and eleven books later), certain themes have emerged in my work.  In the space below, I lift up a few of these themes and connect them to some of the resources I have developed along the way (often with help from partners):