When I was Professor of Administrative Sciences, I taught the senior capstone course Strategic Management. I still read the Wall Street Journal and Business Week to stay up with how corporations are changing their strategies for keeping up with the fast-paced changes in technology. For example, it is amazing how much impact Amazon has had on its competitors. It is following a disruptive strategy that is forcing big changes in other retailers. Many retailing jobs are already gone, and more will disappear as stores close and chains retrench.
A similar reorganization is happening in churches.
Strategy comes from the Greek word strategos, the general in charge of an army. The general determines when and where to fight the battle and then positions his troops to the best advantage. That’s strategy. Tactics are how the various units then achieve their assignments.
It has been very frustrating for me over the last 30 years to observe how few pastors and church leaders have any inkling that so many traditional church bodies today are carrying out a strategy developed centuries earlier. Most churches that still value their European heritage are implementing a village strategy. We really need to move on to a suburban strategy for ministry among people who do not know each other and judge congregations by what they experience there.
Ask anyone who has lived in a small town, and they will describe a social culture very different from the suburbs. In a small town every- one knows everyone. To summarize village culture, there is strong pressure for conformity. In a village, the head that sticks up is likely to be hammered down into conformity. The pastor is under strong pressure to avoid conflict in the village. A church member getting excited about his or her faith would stand out and make the others uncomfortable. Hence keep your prayers to yourself. In my father’s day, a pastor was not even supposed to socialize with members of the congregation, lest he show favoritism.
One vestige of a village church mentality in my church body is that we are supposed to expect guests visiting the congregation to check with the pastor before participating in communion. In a congregation with an attendance of 900 with 600 receiving the Lord’s Supper, there’s no way all pastors can know all the people who show up at the communion rail. We still keep an official roster of baptisms. Until and even into the 20th century, that was the official record of birth that established citizenship. Members going to another congregation are supposed to ask for a transfer, as if a congregation is a club and can transfer your membership to a different branch of the same organization.
Slow-paced village ministry had its place when people lived in rural areas. Half the congregations in old established church bodies still are in small towns. The cities had many close-knit ethnic communities where a village strategy still made sense until recent decades.
Effective suburban churches need to have energetic outreach. Guilt is not a good motivator. Suburbanites expect ministries to be done competently with many program alternatives. They also feel little social pressure, and guilt is not nearly as good a motivator as in village churches. They value their personal time highly and don’t want it wasted.
Strategies are expressed in the way church life together gets organized and what is emphasized. All that together can be described as a congregation’s culture. Changing strategies amounts to fine-tuning the existing culture to be more effective.
A big topic in business schools today is changing a corporation’s culture. Businesses are under immense pressure to figure out how to produce a better product with less cost. Most of this is driven by changes in technology that never seem to end. In my book Your Encounters with the Holy Spirit (2014) I present a chapter on basic business school principles for how to implement organizational changes.
The large growing community churches are putting competitive pressure on traditional congregations. Many mainline churches will stay faithful to their traditional culture, and many likely will die. Those that retain a strong sense of mission will need to focus much more on their unique source of energy—the Holy Spirit.
You say to eloquently what I have been saying for years. I was in a LCMS church through the 90’s that broke with tradition. I watched that church reach the lost and grow from around 400 to almost one thousand before I went to the seminary. Thank you for spreading the word.
Thanks for the affirmation. Glad to know that you broke the barrier. What are you doing now? I encourage you to share your experience. I have a suggestion. The LCMS now has two Best Practices for Ministry conferences. The major one is in Phoenix in February. There will be lots of attendees who would like to hear about your challenges and how you met them. If you are in the Midwest there is such a conference in Indianapolis in October. They take the name BPM Heartland. Let me know how I can help.
This is GOLD. Last week I gave a presentation to our congregation which was commemorating its first year of Interim ministry, and spoke of the adverse effects of viewing a congregation as “family,” rather than “body.” I see parallels in what you describe, and will incorporate your points into my next presentation (which, as you can imagine, had mixed reviews!)
The key problem you face with the family model is they assume the lowest common denominator of personal faith, which villagers do not talk much about because of the pressures for conformity. You need to focus on personal faith expressions so that members actually do talk about their relationship with Christ (through the HS). Newcomers may want to talk about their spiritual journey and the family needs to listen and affirm. I have some blogs coming up about personal spiritual journeys. I know your email address, so i will try to send them to you.
Also, start talking about a congregation as a fellowship of the Holy Spirit. We are comfortable talking about a body of Christ. Paul stresses the fellowship of the Spirit. This should open up a lot of discussion.
I think you cast village culture in a very bad light. In a true small village everyone knew the others, warts and all. People rallied to help their neighbors in time of need. From birth to death people had a place to belong. Not every village, but village life at its best. People in my suburb don’t need more programs, they need authentic community and deep abiding relationships. This is where true transformation happens
I agree with you Thomas. I have served many rural churches and especially see this happening today. They need each other and the church is the place to be – doesn’t matter what denomination these days. Leaders will definitely screw things up by adding to the Gospel their social agenda, but the truth will always correct those errors in the end. So, the small church though small in number has a fellowship and community like none other – a self correcting body.
Yes, there is a lot of value in village culture. I know that first hand from the villages my uncles and aunts lived in and I would spend the summer on their farms. You are known. But there are two disadvantages, both related to the strong pressure for conformity. One is you have limited opportunities for personal development. The other is that spiritual life is stunted. Why do I say that? Because villagers don’t like someone having a peak religious experience that makes them feel inferior. Villagers seldom talk about their own heart experiences. The norm is that they do “closet” prayer, as taught in the old King James: When you pray, do it in your closet on your own.
Closing the gap between Pastor and church folk is a common problem as you observed in the last discussion David.
How can we make a move in the right direction, so that everyday Christian folk can see that clergy are followers and leaders? As someone said, “Every good leader was first a good follower.” We need to be good followers of Jesus and in humility, emphasize to our congregations somehow that we are still good followers first, and hone our skills to be good leaders.
How can we bridge the gap, so to speak?
Not sure if this is the conversation still, since we have a new a important email today about leaving the village culture behind and becoming a Spirit-filled church.
How to close the gap. Yes, that is the central issue. I address this as stages of faith development. Our churches have a lot of confirmed believers and we need to help them move on to convicted believers seeking more of what God offers. I have several blogs about that coming in the second set of blogs. If you send me your email address, I will send them to you. Mine is dsluecke@royred.org. Ultimately it is the Spirit who brings that about. We can do a better job of providing opportunities.
Thanks Pastor Luecke for sharing your keen insight. Our church is in the throes of these exact challenges.
Glad to help. Your congregation is among hundreds of others that need to change. Most won’t. With good pastoral guidance, your church may make it.
I appreciate what I’m sure was thorough research and experience in dealing with this subject. However, what I find missing in your expression is any mention of Christ, the Holy Bible, or until the very end of the article, The Holy Spirit. In this forum of well thought out arguments, I wonder if we have stopped to consider the original intent for Christ’s Church. The Acts Chapter 2 body of believers that was birthed out of Pentecost. It was a literal community of people with a common Christ and common care for each other. Your essay ignores the call of Christ to come and die with Him. You argue that suburbanites don’t want a church experience that costs too much. Well, the reality is, being a disciple IS costly. It as designed to be that way. It’s supposed to cause us to wrestle with our loyalties and reorganize our priorities. My premise is that we need MORE village values incorporated into the church experience. I am not saying that we should model everything we do after an antiquated model. However, in our attempt to be more seeker-friendly and “convenient” to our members, we just guard ourselves against business models and pew research that steer us far away from the Biblical mandate and the Christ-centered intentions for His church. Discipleship IS confrontational. It IS uncomfortable. It DOES require us to push back against a culture that is void of absolutes and concrete expectations. These are my thoughts, sparked by your essay. Thank you for the space to contribute to the dialogue.
I am a pastor of a thriving Baptist congregation in the state of Florida.
Thanks for your necessary corrective. I can only cover so much in a single 600-word essay. Yes, the call to follow Christ involves sacrifice.
The central issue is how do you get believers to hear this call. It is easy to stress duty. But I don’t think that accomplishes much in our culture today. Movement to that higher level of faith comes only from the Holy Spirit changing motivations. One-way lectures don’t accomplish much. Modeling that higher level is basic. The Spirit’s workplace is believers sharing God’s Word and their response. Perhaps even more than the preacher, fellow believers sharing their experience with the Word and daily life are probably the most persuasive. That involves testimonials.
This kind of fellowship is new to mainline churches, so I stress Luther’s listing of mutual conversation and encouragement as an important means of grace, right up there with the sacraments.
There is much about Baptists to admire. I don’t know that culture well. What I don’t understand is continuing the Calvinist lack of emphasis on the Spirit. The Spirit is clearly working among Baptists. What more could be done if Baptist leaders would emphasize openness to the Spirit and how to let him draw believers closer.
Enlightening as always. David, I’m introducing you to a friend, Kelly Duo from California. Kelly is the principal of Captivating Pathways and a Human Performance Improvement Knowledge Intervention Specialist with a Masters Degree in Organizational Management. He is being introduced to you at this time. As we move forward, he and you (me listening in) can share insights that are borne from expertise, experiences and knowledge. I’ll share his email offline and register him to receive your blasts.
Philip Meinzen for Kelly Duro.
Thanks. I hope to hear from Kelly Duro. How do you know Philip Meinzen? He and I are working on an idea for discussion among LCMS on “motivation for church life.” That should open up a lot of discussion.
The Bible shows us in Acts that the early church was an authentic community of believers who had everything in common. Whether your church is rural, urban or suburban one needs to structure it to facilitate “the mutual conversation and consolation of brothers and sisters in Christ.” Life groups. Until people can share their joys and pains and sins and come along each other in prayer and forgiveness, it is questionable what kind of club or organization you really have. Our social media society is moving rapidly toward inauthentic relationships. The Church can be the antidote. But, it requires people to spend time with each other (best face-to-face) and to really listen. The more social media has connected us the more disconnected we have become.
I agree 100%. But I think there is a role for online communities of people from the same congregation. That is what I am developing with Virtual Church Fellowship. It’s in Version 4 right now. All I can say is available soon.
This will be an online community of participants in the same congregation, who can get to know each other in a deeper way as they share insights into faith, Spiritual experiences and reactions to weekly themes. Too often, in my experience, when face to face fellowship happens on Sundays, it stays superficial. I pray this will be a way by which “people can share their joys and pains and sins and come along each other in prayer and forgiveness.” The effectiveness of the virtual fellowship will depend on the discussion moderator selected by the pastor and other leaders.
I will let you know when the Virtual Church Fellowship program is available.
We are working through this as well out here in our congregation in California. Thank you for these insights, Dear Pastor Luecke. Both you AND your dad have had an impact on my own life and ministry life. Thanks for that as well.
When I taught Strategic Management I had my students do SWOT (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats) analysis on noted businesses. I think churches need to do that analysis as well. What are we noted for doing well? What do we need to shore up? What are the opportunities in the community that God has wired us to serve? What forces and factors threaten our ministry? I guess fundamental questions in life for individuals and organizations are “Who am I and why am I here?”
Good to hear from you, Krista. It’s neat that you grew up in my home congregation and experienced my father’s ministry.