Transforming Church

I arrived in 1991 with the realization that area growth amounted to only 325-350 home starts per year, a rate that remained steady for the decade. That was a small number to grow the 18 churches in the area. It was obvious from the start our growth would have to come from unchurched families already living in the area. I spent the first year heavily preparing the existing families for transformation into the Postmodern Age, a change which most of the total Church still does not recognize even today.

Beginning with the second year we started to take apart the traditional mechanical organization of an ELCA congregation, and then organically put it back together again. About this time a new concern arose for me, the realization that all of this was going to take longer than I would still be around. I entered this challenge with only ten years remaining. It was fortunate about this time that I met Bill Easum, who counseled me without hesitation to continue with the vision and take it as far as I could. I would have done that anyway, but it was good to have support.

I had already begun a weekly emphasis on intentional need to move from membership to discipleship, and to move from committees to teams to empower spiritually gifted people to assume responsibility for their own ministries of passion. The synonym for passion that began to come more and more into use was excitement. Excitement began to empower all the ministries of the congregation.

Worship at the beginning of the second year added a second service, contemporary praise in style. While most transforming congregations were focusing at the time on seeker services later in the morning, we appealed to families at a mid-morning hour. Almost immediately this service had greater attendance than the later traditional service. Though I pushed worshippers absolutely every week to invite others to come to either service, excitement was running so high that if I had told them like Jesus not to tell anyone, it would have done no good.

One of the larger generators of excitement came from our spiritual gift discovery program. It took us three attempts with two flat-out failures to get this ministry going. The key was when we realized that most profiles will have only modest mountain-top-experience value if they do not stick to and concentrate on the “full” twenty biblically identified spiritual gifts. Moreover such a profile should NOT be supplemented with any talents or abilities. That is a very different and less consequential part of stewardship. For us mentoring was also a huge part of this ministry.

In the third year we were in a new permanent location, and by the fourth year experienced the 80%-filled-seats-rule and needed to add another service. I checked the advertising rates local radio stations were able to garner and found that way out in front were the country-western stations. What was I going to do? I come from Wisconsin and the only two types of music I cannot stand are polkas and country-western.

We hit upon the more palatable country gospel, accompanied by a guitar playing vocalist who performed a number of years in Nashville, and fairly often a high school music teacher who played soprano sax. We would tell people we were trying to pull Nashville a little closer to New Orleans. But we had to place this new service at 8:00 in the morning. In spite of that, from day one we never had less than 100 in attendance and the parking lot was filled with pick-up trucks and an occasional bike. I was glad I didn’t have to wear boots and a hat.

I’m not sure prayer is often thought of in terms of excitement, but for us it was, and prayer was a huge factor. The Holy Spirit led to us developing leaders with a clear discernment of spirituality to in turn lead this ministry. While many congregations have prayer lists and prayer chains, we experienced eight dimensions to our prayer ministry.

All this growing excitement fed evangelism at the same time. We did calling; I won’t say we didn’t. But we leaned heavily on the fact that nearly 80% of the people who affiliate with a congregation do so because they are invited by an acquaintance, friend or relative. This impacted our realized growth much more than all the other noble reasons that make the list.

With stewardship, I regret that it took until the last few years of my ministry to appreciate that this discipleship growth comes much more with a personal and congregation consciousness of spiritual growth than it does with theological understanding of proportionate giving.

With education we struggled with the ever dwindling effectiveness of traditional Sunday School programs. No one questions that the family unit is in deep trouble today. We cannot impact that with 45-55 minutes of sometimes even sporadic focus per week on Sunday morning. I had always been impressed with families of the Jewish faith. Most of them don’t even go to synagogue, but faith formation is huge in their homes because of family rituals that build this formation. We let go of age-graded Sunday School and went in that direction.

Structurally, organizationally, we shut down our eight standing committees and identified nine organic networks of related ministry teams. Granted the congregation was much smaller in the earlier years, but where we had trouble staffing 8 standing committees, at the time I retired we had absolutely no difficulty staffing 78 ministry teams. In fact, the phrase “volunteer enlistment” was never heard in the congregation. Click here to another article with download links at the end of it for many of our tools.

Though money was still budgeted for some ongoing teams, mainly in worship and education, we found that most teams, like they enlisted their own passionate members, also found their own resources to accomplish their ministry. Ministry was never placed on a waiting block until it could happen. Largest part of the annual budget continued for staff and property administration.

We diminished the privileges of active, baptized, confirmed and voting members, took ministry decisions out of the hands of the council and put them back in the hands of the Holy Spirit. We used the God provided mission, vision, core values and beliefs to measure permission and accountability as we went. Permission-giving and trust filled the air.

Through the ten years that all this happened, this was the most rapidly growing congregation in the Florida-Bahamas Synod of the ELCA, most of its growth coming from previous or never churched people. At the ten year point the average attendance was nearly 400 disciples per Sunday. Excitement, generated by the Holy Spirit and encouraged by organic teams of disciples, had grown this congregation.