Hi all,
Got a question for you this week to chew on.
How are you approaching "belonging" in your faith communities?
We belong to a tradition that extends belonging through "membership" and promotes it overtly and covertly. We celebrate churches whose scorecards include adding "whatever" number of new Nazarenes. The statistics we report talk about new Nazarenes around the world. I wonder if this underlying thing cripples us from "Kingdom" work. Not that connecting people to the Nazarene church is subversive to the advancement of the Kingdom in and of itself, but I feel like when that is my "primary" focus, I miss the point yet this is what I am asked to continuously respond to as a Nazarene pastor.
So, how do you view membership and how do you view its role in the church today? How are you extending a sense of belonging to folks in your tribes? By having Nazarene membership prioritized, does it create a sense of "in" and "out" people? Are there any "scorecard" elements of being a Nazarene pastor that bother you?
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This is a scary thing to comment on, which may be the reason I am the first. I think the motivation behind creating a membership structure was to create a sense of belonging. I think that perhaps in previous generations maybe it did that. My generation and the certainly the ones coming behind me have an ingrained distrust of institutions. We have watched as the government, big business and recently, many churches abuse their power. So it shouldn't surprise us that joining the mother ship and having a name on a list somewhere is not how they get their sense of belonging. That is not to say that denominations are bad. They have great value. I just think we need to be flexible and create a structure that defines connectedness, belonging and family in a way that is relevant and meaningful to the faith group we find ourselves a part.
ReplyDeleteAt some point I'm hoping to reply to this in greater detail but I had no idea that it would cause me to "chew" as much as it has. For now the most honest answer is I have no clue how we approach "belonging." I do think it has happened very naturally in spite of our various structured efforts to create community. The sense of an open belonging is obvious at Story Point but I don't think it in any way is correlated with "membership," "volunteer staff," or any of the other efforts we've pushed. It's more of a "Hi my name's Larry and I'm an alcoholic...oh wait, wrong meeting... hosanna!"
ReplyDeleteNo joke, we've become convinced that the taverns, drug circles, and gangs at least in part are successful because they've tapped into the sense of belonging that people are designed to encounter. It's a cheap substitute for Christian fellowship but if we're not going to get it right folks will find it someplace. Church On!
What a great questions. Here is what I think. Membership happens, formaly and informaly. The classic, formal membership is what we have to report, it is what it is on paper. When you are a member informaly of any group, you just belong. A very real member of the group you are with, on paper or not, you just belong.
ReplyDeleteHave you ever had to interpret for someone? I'll bet you have. This happens very often with me, usualy with someone who does not speak English/Spanish and they need to convey an idea. One of the first rules of interpreting is you interpret the idea, not words. You are in the middle and you must convey from one to someone else and back again. "We" are interpreters. We take what we do in ministry among individuals informaly and transalate into a "formal report" so it can be understood by someone that may not have an idea of what we do or how. The best way they can know is by the idea we convey in "numbers". This has been a struggle for me when I report. We do not meet on Sundays, no Sunday School numbers or a number for worship in worship service. Do we accomplish what the traditionl Sunday School accomplishes? I sure believe we do. Do we worship? Oh yea, just not on Sunday. I have to transalate from what we do among people/friends and on paper report numbers. It is a challange, I sure do not want to mislead anyone in any report. But I can choose to enfasice the formal or the informal, I go with the informal. We work with people, not numbers. Numbers is the way a report says "people".
I guess it is a poor example but in John 15:15 Jesus says He no longer calls his servants (His disciples), servents. Instead he calls them "friends". There was a diffrent relationship between them. For me the relationship was less formal. That is what "friends" implys to me. However, just a little while later in chapter 17, Jesus reports and calls them "them", "they" and "those". Like I say, it's a poor example but I think we see Jesus as the "in between guy" reporting/"transalating" what he does at the personal level with his freinds.
So, it is with me, reporting is not top in my list of fun things to do (thank God for our church secretary). We do belong to a large and wonderful church. This is the way they see and understand what/how/when we do what we do with our frieds. Is it a drag? Is it accurate? Is it fun? I don't know. What I do know is that we are to have a relationship, a friedship with those we serve and minister to. That is what is important, that is my focus. Someone wants to know what we are doing, I'll report it as long as Jesus is lifted up. I believe he is.
Gotta go, I'm late.
I hate stats... I think many pastors - at least old-school types - feel the need to puff up their numbers in order to look better in front of their peers... kind of the eternal optimist idea. But at The River we tend to minimize our numbers, and quite frankly, we don't yet have any formal "membership" for our church body. Probably an organizational weakness on our part, but I just don't see church membership (or attendance) stats as anything more than a very rough, very subjective indicator of community life. That said, I know we can't count the number of lives transformed, or minds renewed or the dozens of other discipleship intangibles... so I guess counting bodies and quantifying commitment is a necessary... if not wholly inefficient evil that helps us monitor "progress." Hmmmm.... what was the question again???
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