February 14 topic

OK—I fouled up. We meet on the second and fourth Friday, and my previous post thought we were meeting yesterday.

Here's a great little article I ran into this morning. It's a bit out of date (24 years old) and rooted in the deep South, but his points are still worth listening to. He asks the question, "Is Episcopal Evangelism an oxymoron?"

Evangelism: How to Do It, How to Stifle It

I don't think we are quite so closed off from our community as the worst of his examples, but he's worth listening to. And he has some great ideas anyhow.

February 7 Topic

So here's our discussion topic for this Friday. St. Matthew's has been given a tidy sum of money to spend on "Outreach," but we need to at least come up with some viable suggestions by the end of the month. If we don't at least produce a couple of do-able daydreams, we don't get the money.

This isn't hypothetical: it's a real grant with a deadline.

So our task will be to brainstorm what we might want to spend some outreach money on.

Note 1: It's not that much money. We don't have enough to propose building a radio station or buying a blimp.

Note 2: I'm still not that much into Episcopalian jargon, so when we say "outreach," we need to make sure we're talking about the same thing. There are at least three different kinds of "reaching" we can do as a church (and they kind of overlap):

1. Inreach is the way we take care of one another and the way we promote unity. Such things as the weekly Bible study count as inreach. This money isn't for inreach.
2. Outreach (in the Episcopalian dictionary) is charitable services to people whom we do not necessarily expect to join our church. The Food Pantry would count as this sort of outreach. I guess the money could be used for this, but it's apparently intended for the third kind of "reaching"
3. Church growth (I don't know why we fear the concept of evangelism so much) is finding people who are not yet part of our church, and helping them make that transition. These last two kind of blur together, for example when Grace in Mansfield did the Jazz Evensong and had a free picnic, it sort of did both of these.

Another Voice

I ran into this comment on another forum board, and it seemed to fit into our discussion:

I have had a variety of experiences with Episcopal churches. My favorite church ever was Episcopal which was charismatic and had a generally contemporary worship service. Everything was written out on the bulletin or displayed on a screen. It was one of the most visitor friendly churches I have ever been in.

However, I must say that some of the most visitor unfriendly churches I have ever been in have also been Episcopal. You have multiple song books, plus the book of common prayer and a bulletin full of cryptic page references with only abbreviations indicating which book the page is in. And then on top of it all no direction is given by leadership to give the poor visitor any indication of what to do when or what book to grab next. The result is a distracted, awkward and sometimes embarrassing church experience for the unchurched visitor. Many Episcopal churches are so tradition bound and so inward and past oriented that they give absolutely no thought to building bridges to those outside the tradition who come for a visit.

In my view Episcopalians would do well to pay at least a little attention to the church growth movement and learn how to market themselves and be a little bit more visitor sensitive before their aging congregations all die, and the churches close down. Every single Episcopal church I have ever visited that is like what I described above is full of people with gray hair and very few with hair any other color.

It does no good to be gay friendly and welcoming if no gay person knows you exist and can't figure out what the heck you are talking about or doing if they happen to stumble into your church.

The hymn book user friendliness is a huge issue and is more important to how a visitor perceives a church than the style or quality of the music. People don't like feeling embarrassed and out of place, and not being able to follow the music or the service will make them feel that way almost as quickly as an insensitive sermon. No matter how enchanting the music is, if the visitor feels constantly embarrassed and singled out because he's constantly doing the wrong thing, he will not enjoy the service and will very likely never visit your church or any other church again.

Exit Interview

Over the weekend, I heard that yet another long-time member of my former church is thinking of leaving. I remember what the church did about it when I left—nothing.

Of course, people leave churches for a lot of reasons. They move out of town. They get sick and stop attending. They get bored. They die. And I'm not too concerned when someone attends three or four times and never comes back. (Well, I am, but that's a different story.) But when someone who has been there for years and is active in several aspects of the church's program simply stops attending, it would help everyone to find out the reason.

Years ago, I was in a church in St. Louis that had, as a binding part of the by-laws, a requirement that an elder visit any full church member who had missed six consecutive Sunday mornings. That actually seems like a high number to trigger a visit, but consider what could happen at such a visit. If the issue is personal health or some other issue (enough gas for the car, etc.), the church gets to step in and help. If the issue is a battle with some church member or a disagreement with some policy of the church, there's a high-level opportunity to address the issue. At the very least, there's a recognition that being a member of a church is more like being in a family than like joining the YMCA. If someone is gone, we miss them. A relation has been set up that needs to be honored.

I suspect that when this wanderer leaves that church and starts attending another, he'll get the same reaction I did. The church mailings will continue for a year, then stop. And that will be it.

High Threshold

I'm sitting here on a snowy Sunday morning (At 9:00 I was thinking it was foolish to cancel church; watching the snow fall at 11:00 makes me wonder if I'll be able to go to work tomorrow.) and thinking about the TOTE meeting last Friday. I've taken several of those courses on how to do evangelism, and the one thing I remember is the extremely high level of discomfort on both sides—presenter and listener. There's an extremely high threshold that a newcomer has to climb to enter ANY church.

I was in one of those Praise Band churches for years, and I always thought that one reason for the format was to be more "user friendly" to visitors. The truth, is, though, that the culture of that sort of church is just as alien to the average non-attender as the culture of an Episcopal church. The music isn't what they would listen to at home; people say things and do things (like waving their arms in the praise band church or crossing themselves in our church) according to some memorized script; and the visitor feels like an absolute geek.

One reason Episcopalians fear the "E-Word" so much is that we've all been on the receiving end of the aggressive sales pitch (not much more subtle than Sally hitting the kid over the head with her lunch box). A knock comes at the door. We open and there's a pair of strangers with some literature, oily smiles on their faces, and an invitation to go to some strange place. Maybe they want to come in (even though the apartment is a mess and I just got out of the shower). An interesting fact (I think it was from the Gabe Lyons book, The New Christians.) is that aggressive, impersonal evangelism never works. The statistical effectiveness of door-knocking, tract-passing, revival-service outreach is close to zero.

What does work is the personal invitation. That way, the visitor comes with a friend who can help navigate through the intricacies of the Prayer Book, be there when everyone at Coffee Hour has someone else to talk with, etc.

One more bit
Those folk who knock on our doors do have one advantage over us: they know what they are talking about. Perhaps "The Four Spiritual Laws" is reductionist and legalistic, but at least the presenters know what they want to say. I suspect many folk (not just in our churches) are afraid to be questioned because they haven't a clue what to say to an outsider. Where to begin? Church history? Liturgy? Answering awkward questions? Maybe the Bible, but it has 66 books—where to begin? This might be material for a future TOTE meeting.

What's so special?

Outreach (that jargon word for bringing folks into our church) was the topic last night and, in a larger sense, it's the topic for our parishes and the Episcopal Church as a whole. It doesn't take much insight to see why this is an important topic either: the ECUSA as a whole is shrinking and getting older, and our parishes (St. Matthew's and Grace) are part of that trend.

We've got an allergy to the "E-word" (evangelism), largely because we've been on the receiving end of so much abusive preaching.

It doesn't have to be that way. Here are several basic propositions that I have in the back of my mind as I think of bringing folks in:

• Whatever we do must be true to who we are. I've been in a church where the newcomer experience was an incredibly warm, inviting social potluck kind of thing, but once people were actually part of things, that small group vanished and the ongoing experience was cold, isolated, and distant. We can't do that. We can't bait-and-switch, and we can't try to turn into something alien.
• If we try to copy other local churches, we will fail. There are certainly enough praise band churches and enough churches where the only point is the social gathering. If someone wants that sort of thing, we cannot do a better job than the ones who are already out there. And we'll hate ourselves for trying.
• Someone out there is looking for a church just like us. Several of our most recent additions have said, in one way or another, "I was looking for a church like you and I'm glad I found you."
• If we figure out who we are, it's worth the trouble to become better at it. In the words of the Mad Hatter from the Johnny Depp version of Alice in Wonderland, we can work on our much-ness. We can become muchier.

Last night's brainstorm tried to answer the question, "What is unique about us? What do we do better than other churches?" (If I were trying to start a new hamburger stand, the bank would ask, before granting a loan, "Why should customers come to you instead of going to McDonald's or Wendy's?" That's the sort of emphasis we were working on.) Here, in no particular order, is what we came up with:

• Tradition: We've been around a LONG time. We were in this country before it was a country and at that point we were already a church with a long history. Outsiders who don't really know us tend to say, "Oh! You're Roman Catholics without a pope!" But we've been evolving along a separate path for more than 400 years and there are a lot of things about us that don't resemble the Roman Catholic church. We've got our own very rich tradition, and it's a lot older than 1972.
  • Music: I'm sitting here on a very snowy Saturday, listening again to Christmas music (Yes, I know I'm in the wrong season.) and most of those old traditional songs come from the world of English hymnody. We have a lot of variety and it's an intense part of our worship.
  • Liturgy: Surprisingly, many of the people who come to the Episcopal Church are attracted by our form of worship. We don't see it as dry and formalized; we see it as reverent, varied, and appropriate. It's got a depth that is hard to find elsewhere.
  • Prayers: The Prayer Book (and indeed the whole church year cycle) is actually a very welcome structure for many of us.
  • Reverence: We appreciate the idea that one doesn't always buddy up to God; some things really are holy and deserve our reverence.
• Celtic Roots: There are three great streams of Christian spirituality: Roman, Eastern, and Celtic. The Greek Orthodox Church is an example of the Eastern stream. Almost everyone else in town somehow came out of the Roman/Latin tradition. The Celtic background is unique to us.
  • Narrative: As we proceed through the church year, it's an ongoing story. We love that. We're soaked in Scripture, but it's worth noticing how often the prescribed readings for a day are narratives. We wouldn't be as happy with the 196 questions and answers from the Westminster Larger Catechism of the Presbyterians, and the concept of presenting newcomers with the Four Spiritual Laws just doesn't feel comfortable to us.
  • Environment: We frequently pray for environmental issues. We recycle and use energy-saving light bulbs as a matter of spiritual discipline and obedience, not just an attempt to be trendy or prudent.
  • Animals, children, etc.: (No, I'm not saying that children are animals.) We see God's world as a big, joyous place that deserves our care and should be welcome in our church. Because we're Celts, we think it's appropriate to bring our animals in for blessing.
• Art is very important to us. It's important to make church buildings and our homes into sacred, beautiful spaces.
• Intellectual life: As my "Top Ten Reasons For Being An Episcopalian" coffee mug says, "You don't have to check your brain at the door."
• Gay Welcome: It's actually difficult to get Episcopalians talking about this one. Welcoming gay people is such an ordinary, unremarkable part of our life that it's a boring topic—like practicing good dental hygiene or something. This one is, though, revolutionary to outsiders. An amazing number of gay Christians would love to simply go to church and not be an issue or a discussion point or a sermon topic.

There's our brainstormed "this is us" list. I don't see a lot of little bullet points though. I see a coherent picture. Now the question is how to let others, the ones who would like to find us, know who we are and how to find us.

Three Books that Changed Me

I began this journey quite a while back, so a couple of these books are part of a wistful "gee, I wish it were possible" journey at my former church. Church folk (Protestant, Catholic, etc.) have a tendency to talk to one another but not to outsiders (and we don't listen very well either). The authors of these books are attempting to start the listening process by replacing a seat-of-the-pants set of guesses with some genuine statistics. They are products of The Barna Group, a well-respected organization that does statistical surveys. Barna's main focus is the Evangelical Protestant wing of the church, but they are worth listening to.

unChristian: What a New Generation Really Thinks about Christianity...and Why It Matters
by David Kinnaman and Gabe Lyons
We church folk see vivid differences between Baptists, Episcopalians and Catholics. Outsiders don't catch the nuances very well. When Billy Graham or Pat Robertson makes a public announcement, modern secular people tend to think they have heard the authoritative word from THE CHURCH. And the picture they get is intolerant, anti-intellectual, gay-bashing, and totally in love with right-wing politics.

The Next Christians: Seven Ways You Can Live the Gospel and Restore the World
by Gabe Lyons
To tell the truth, this book frustrated me because I was in a congregation that opposed change and was very satisfied with a Tea Party approach to the faith. I realized that I couldn't move them at all, so this excellent, transformative book simply made me sad. I need to go back and read it again.

You Lost Me: Why Young Christians Are Leaving Church...and Rethinking Faith
by David Kinnaman
An incredibly high percentage of USA 15-year-olds have not only heard the Gospel, but have a very positive reaction to it. Something like 80% say their faith is extremely important to them. Something like 80% of USA 20-year-olds have left Christianity and describe themselves as "spiritual but not religious." What's going on? (Hint: it has to do with feeding the teenagers on exciting experiences but no solid content.)