Millstone of Ministry

I attended a budget hearing on Saturday. The combination of being surrounded by numbers and the chai that I was drinking set my mind spinning down numeric roads. Now, granted that these were all rough estimates, but based on the current, and actually statistically very good, giving levels of the congregation, we would need to grow to double our current size in order to sustain our current budget. Now, there are a coupe of giant stones that are placed on our budgetary backs. One of these is my salary ... not that I make a lot, but even at half time it is a significant part of the budget. The other large expense howevecr is the loan payments on our mortgage and the assessments owed to the city for recent improvements. The church has been caught between a rock and a hard place. Without a building the church was struggling for identity and a space to call home. But now that they have a building they are facing the intense pressure of paying for it. While its numbers might be slightly more oppressing than some churches, because of the assessments on top of the mortgage, from what I can tell the story is the same in many other churches that are starting out.
So what is a congregation to do? Should it struggle with rent payments and shared space until it is large enough to sustain itself? Does this mean that in today's economy of churches, small congregations are simply not viable in the long term? More and more churches in rural Minnesota are faced with the possiblity of closure because the combined weight of maintaining pastor and building is to great to bear. These are not new questions or challenges, but the need is growing for increased brainstorming of creative new solutions to these problems. The more time I spend struggling with these issues the more I feel that small churches need to look at new and different ways of living out our Great Commission.

Declining Churches or Refining Faith?

Over the last four years I have read too many books, blogs, and articles which rail against the mainline churches, their decline, and how this is proof of their failures and a terrible thing. As I start my ministry it creates a great deal of pressure for me. I was born and raised in a mainline church and I believe my home church and my denomination are not failures but still do good ministry. Unfortunately the way to measure success is often placed in terms of membership numbers. For this reason I feel intense pressure as a new pastor to have new members joining my churches. If only United Methodist churches were growing then we would know that we are doing something right. Now, I certainly agree that churches doing something right can be seen as growing, but I also do not see the loss of membership in mainline churches as necessarily negative. In the 1950's and 60's the church was the social gathering spot. Church membership was not necessarily about devotion to God, but also about climbing the social ladder. For this reason I do not think it is necessarily bad if membership is down. I would hope that it can be a way for mainline churches to work on refining their members faithes. Church membership can easily become a measure of trendiness, rather than faithfulness of members. For this reason I think that every church of every type should be looking not just at how many people are sitting in the pews, but how the church is helping to grow their faith. Looking at myself, and relaixing how I am shaped by the culture around me, I wish the pressure was more on developing the faith of people instead of just getting more people. The conversation about the decline of churches does not focus on the staunch faith of a 80 year old, life long Methodist, it just focuses on the lack of Methodists. I think we need to change the conversation from what to do about declining membership to what we need to do about refining people's faith.