“Growing Smaller To Do Bigger Things:
Size and The Future of the Church”
Rev. Ron Robinson
Houston Unitarian Fellowship
Sunday,
Mar. 15, 2015
Readings
From Shane Claiborne, The Irresistible
Revolution:
Usually when things grow fast and large,
they also grow homogeneously. Whether it’s the crowds in the streets during the
Republican National Convention or the folks flocking into the megachurches, we
like to be around people who look and think like us. Our big visions for
multiculturalism and reconciliation will make their way into the church only
when they are first lived out in real relationships, out of our homes and
around our dinner tables and in our living rooms. Perhaps this is why Jesus
begins it all by sitting around a table with a Roman tax collector, a Zealot
revolutionary, a fisherman, a Pharisee, and a prostitute. As we build our
buildings, human temples are being destroyed by hunger and homelessness. The
early prophets would say that a church that spends millions of dollars on
buildings while her children are starving is guilty of murder. Imagine the
scene in a biological family: a father building a mansion while his children
are going hungry. He’d be institutionalized or jailed. How much more
preposterous should this be in our family of rebirth, in which we have been
given new eyes to see others as brothers and sisters?
From Bill Easum and Tom Bandy in Robin
Trebilcock’s book The Small Church At Large:
There is a future for small churches…but
no future at all for small visions. Small churches can multiply mission beyond
imagination…provided that small church leaders can imagine multiplying
mission….The competition that challenges the future of the small church is not
the influence of other major religions; nor is it the influence of deified
cultural forms of sports, success, profit, or politics. The real competition
comes from within the small church itself. It is the smallness of its vision,
the smallness of its inclusivity, and the smallness of its heart.
Sermon:
I.
Given my age, and the
culture I grew up in, I should be here inspiring you to become bigger, more
numerous, instead of standing here, I hope, inspiring you to become, in many
senses, smaller in number as a key to growing more love and justice in the
world.
I was born in 1954 into
the rise of the Big in culture; a mid baby boomer, we were receipients of big
schools, of the bigger and fewer grocery stores, big parks, the big rock concerts
and outside huge festivals, the mass movements for rights and peace, and one of
the biggest influences on all that was the proliferation of mass communication
and the era of broadcasting, with bigger shares of audience, the three Big
Networks of News that created a bigger sense of Us even if not a deeper sense
of We; I came of age in the rise of big business corporations, and the new subdivisions
for their employees, and big box stores, in the bigger suburbs for it all,
holding bigger homes containing increasingly bigger televisions and appliances,
people driving to work over larger distances on increasingly bigger roads,
flying in bigger planes, and all along the way eating bigger meals. As a
reflection of all this, as a creation of all this, feeding into all this, our
churches have become bigger too, in large part as a result of what was called
the Church Growth Movement, creating church as consumer driven. Supersize Me
Spiritually.
Along with the Rise of
Big came the Rise of Faster and Faster to maintain Big and Bigger, and with it,
as Shane Claiborne wrote in our reading, also the Rise of Uniformity, even in
one’s sense of Place as well as Neighbor, and the demise of particularity in
neighborhoods, the resegregation of where people live and with whom based on
both race and class, all with a simultaneous destruction of specific ecologies
and our overall environment.
That is the culture
that fed me. And because I wanted our churches to be influences in that
culture, I bought into the Church Growth Movement also. I did want us to start,
as I had, churches in many more places than we had done so, and I still want
that, but I wanted them to be churches like churches had been before in my
experience and that structured themselves to grow bigger and bigger, to be more
visible to others as a way of being more powerful in our communities. I wanted
our numbers bigger, of buildings and members and ministers. Act bigger than you
are in order to become bigger. Who cares about the anxiety in the system that
produces or how it makes the be all and end all about ourselves. And not
realizing that the culture itself was and is changing underneath and around us
the more we tried to act like it.
I am here to Repent.
Now I am here to say that
Small is the new Big. Small Church is In. Just as is Slow Church, the name of a
good book and movement that is paired with the Slow Food movement, the Slow
Money movement. Small church is also paired with the Localism movement, and the
rise of what is called the new monastic and new friars movement, with Tribal
Church. Look and you will find all kinds of new books reclaiming the power of
growing smaller to make a bigger difference in the world. And there have of
course always been reforming movements within the church to go smaller, more
relational, more radical, such as Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker movement
and the Koinonia multi racial community in Georgia during segregation. The more
truly counter cultural you are the fewer resources you need to create change in
that culture.
Small is the New
Big…That is If, If, it is a healthy small, an externally focused small, one
with a strong sense of both mission for turning itself inside out in order to
impact lives and neighborhoods AND a sense of how it is already, just as it is,
not so small to begin with, but is part already of a larger Whole. Grow Smaller
because you have a Bigger Vision for Deeper Impact.
Most churches in
America today are small churches; and while that is defined as under 120 in
worship attendance, know that a majority of those are actually very small with
an average of around 20 in worship, an average, which means many are in the
single digits. But most have not become this way intentionally and in order to
realize a big vision, but because they have not been able to do what all
churches need to do to have a sustaining impact on changing lives and neighborhood,
and that is to cultivate radical discontinuity with the past as a method for
carrying out their mission. But while most churches are small churches,
remember that most people are in very large churches.
In fact, the very large
and the very small, when both healthy, often respond in similar ways; the very
large have constructed themselves as multiple small cells, and leadership
itself is like a small micro-church coordinating others. Because of this, both
very large and very small can be quick to respond, to make decisions, to have
lots of trust in leadership, to operate in a permission giving culture, and
foster an attitude of abundance and non-anxiety that itself fosters the risk needed
to have that discontinuity with the past, to be able to fail their way to
success, especially if they redefine their measure of success to be about
faithfulness to their mission of going deep and going wide to impact people
with Love, and especially going into places like ours where the big churches
have seldom gone before in a meaningful transformative way.
II.
Which is our story in
The Welcome Table church.
When the Unitarian
Universalist World magazine did its cover story on our tiny micro-church in North
Tulsa four years ago, it titled the article “Ministry in Abandoned Places.” Its
focus was on the way we had transformed ourselves from a primarily inwardly
focused group hoping to grow larger like most churches, grow as an organization
of people of like minds and values, and turn ourselves inside out, growing
smaller, becoming an externally focused group working on partnering with others
to grow the spirit of our high poverty place, to start new services and
programs with and for people in our low life expectancy community from which so
much of business and government and civic life, including church, has fled.
The story chronicled
some of how we, starting from a group of 7 all volunteer leaders and about a
dozen in worship each week, how we started a library, computer center, free
food store, health clinic, clothing room, community art room, how we bought a
block of rundown burned out trashed out houses and yards and since have made an
award-winning gardenpark and orchard where a week ago we hosted 150 college students helping us and
learning about poverty, how we have become the main neighborhood organizers and
the leaders in seeking to turn blight to beauty, and are the community festival
planners for holiday times, and have helped to reopen a closed school across
from us and support other area schools, and be a major partner on projects with
a new health department office that has been built since the article was
published. And now we are working toward being a major housing partner in our
area where 40 percent of the vacant houses are abandoned and not for sale or
rent. And we still have three to twelve usually in our worship services.
In the missional church
movement we say that no longer is it, in our emerging culture today, a sense of
a church needing to create its mission, but instead it is finding The Mission
that creates the church, church which will take many different manifestations
to fulfill its mission. Many different sizes in many different places in many
different styles in order to bring our radical sense of Love into the many
different places and people, around us and among us, that are hurting.
We talk about church,
our movement of faith today, not so much in terms of “a church” here or “a
church” there, of this or that size, but as the church being incarnated in
whatever forms are needed to make a deep impact on such suffering. We need a
“bigger bandwidth” of church today, including the ancient way of where,
literally, two or more are gathered. Our UU Association is recognizing this in
its recent focus on congregations and beyond, and in fostering entrepreneurial
ministries, in community ministries, and in a new category called Recognized
Communities for the outside the box church like ours
When we originally planted our local faith community 12 years
ago, starting in a fast growing suburb, we first met with nine people in our
living room, and then in the homes of others. One of the first mistakes we made
on our road to success was leaving that manifestation of church too soon;
thinking that it was not right then and there REAL church, but only a
preparation for the REAL thing. We had not yet learned the deepest spiritual
theological lesson of Enough. We are always Enough to make a difference, in one
another’s lives and in the lives of those we do not yet know. We no longer
think---oh if we can’t get x number of people to come to this or that then it
isn’t worth doing; it is either a part of our mission or it isn’t, and time and
time again when remember this and when we have had smaller than we thought
numbers show up for something, some transformative relationship emerges,
connections are made, love arises in ways that would probably have been
overlooked before.
Now in the past twelve years we have inhabited many different
places; we rented 8 different places and used more than that, and we have
adopted four different names in this time. Radical discontinuity with our past
is not our problem. Numbers that come in worship remain a dozen or less, but
then worship, as vital as it is, is not the numbers and the event we are most
concerned about. Our priorities start with Missional relationships and service
with and to our neighbors; then focus on communal relationships among us in
order to carry out the service with more sustainability; then focus on
individual growth as a way to be better in community in order to do the
service; and finally focus on worship in order to refesh and restore both the
individual and the community for the service throughout the rest of the week.
Back when we started our intent was not to become what we
have in fact so far become, but to become an established church that would look
and feel pretty much like other churches and like what churches both ours and
otherwise have looked and felt like since the 1950s and even the 1850s and even
before then. One of my take-away lessons is that as we failed at what we
thought we wanted to be, we became what our place needed us to be. After a year
and a half in the fast growing suburb, we moved to our current community on the
north edge of Tulsa, my family and the church and my office with the national
UU Christian Fellowship all moving there into one of the poorest zipcodes in
the whole region. But for two years we still tried to be that attractional
church just relocated to the poor community. A funny thing happened, though,
along with my own growth as a minister reading the signs of the culture and
times, and living amidst poverty and sickness; in our now slower paced
economically declining place, as we connected with more of our neighbors, as
the people who started coming to worship were the poor and the sick right
around us rather than those coming to be with us still from the suburbs, it
became clear to us that we needed to be able to respond better to the lives of
our neighbors, and that what they were saying they needed was not more sermons
and programs from us trying to get them to become us. And what we needed too
wasn’t for there to be more people calling themselves Unitarian Universalist,
or in our case also calling themselves even Christian, but more people who were
living and embodying those seven principles of ours in our area where so much
suffering is and so much scarcity mentality that causes people to circle their
wagons and wall themselves and their families off, more people who were living
out Jesus’ mission to be good news to the poor whether they ever came or not to
worship with us in what our covenant calls his loving and liberating spirit.
We believed that churches or any groups should not get
healthier and wealthier while the communities around them become poorer and
sicker. And so Across from our 1800 square foot rented space was a 4000 square
foot vacant commercial space. Following the guideline that we wanted to be the
best church not IN the community but FOR the community, we decided to move into
the bigger space, not knowing how we would pay for it, knowing though that we
wanted it to not be billed as a church but as what we called A Third Place
Community Center. The name A Third Place came from the global third places
movement, traced back for many to a seminal book by sociologist Ray Oldenberg
about the need for these free diverse places for people who were different to
be able to meet and share and make a difference. Your first place is your home;
your second place is your work or church or affinity group all where you are
with people who share some common interest, but that life is lived in more
abundance and community is nurtured, and change effected, by the presence of
third places or spaces.
We became church more deeply as we focused not on the number
worshipping with us (we never say “ONLY two or three or seven or twelve) but as
we focused on that number that really counts, that the people in our zipcode
die 14 years sooner than they do those just six miles away along the very same
street. We became church as we, two or three here and two or three there,
planted wildflower beds in public, and for businesses, as we gardened with school
children and created beds for them where they could meet, as we have been
instrumental in helping get old rundown structures torn down so that newer
green and open spaces are more inviting to get people outside, as we have
sought to reclaim streets and trails from stray dogs and from criminal
activity, and most readily as we soon created the non-profit organization A
Third Place Community Foundation to help us continue to expand outward into our
community, to form partnerships with others, and to tear down a block of
abandoned structures and transform it into the GardenPark and Orchard where
many community festivals and events and simple one on one relationships happen
now in a space that many couldn’t bear to even look at before, and eventually
to leave that 4,000 square foot rented space and create a larger community
center of 11,000 square feet in which our worshipping community might have
three to a dozen or so when we worship there but we often worship other places
than our places, and with other churches as well, but that the size of the
building or the number in worship are not as important to us as the 200 at the
free Christmas Party, or the 300 at the Halloween Party, events we throw for
the community at large, at which almost every time a child experiencing this kind
of event she’s never experienced before, finds one of us and tells us this is
the happiest day of her life.
III
Church is now Place and People turned inside out. No longer
here is the church; here is the steeple; look inside and see All the People.
All The People are all around us. The church is At Large in the world around
it. We should only Feel Small if we cut ourselves off from the world and all
its potential partners for our mission. Instead of pulling from the community
into the church, in the old model; we are constantly looking for ways to create
church out in the community. You see, To be sent is the mark of the missional church
(a phrase that should be redundant), especially to places where others are
fleeing away from. (To be sent. That is where the word missional comes from,
out of the Greek word missio. We are to be not members of a religious club, not
even ultimately bearers of a religious message with our elevator speeches, but
to be sent as living missives of them ourselves, embodiments of what we find
Sacred, and incarnating that in the places and peoples deemed profane by the
Powers of Bigness.
Church in this new and ancient way doesn’t require it to be a
501c3 organization, with a building of its own, bylaws, boards, budgets, and a
certain magical size, where all the energy is spent trying to get new people to
come in and replace other people, like cogs in a machine, numbers on a ledger.
Those things like organization and buildings, etc. may be deemed helpful, but
they aren’t what makes a church a church; they aren’t the starting point; that
is what calls it into being, and in the newly emerging culture what calls it
into being is more than proclaiming a message and getting people to think what
we think; and more even than just being a community of support for people who
think like us; places for that will be popping up all around us in much more
convenient and inexpensive ways than the traditional congregation, in both
online life and in personal relationships and various affinity groups.
So Now
what calls church into being, what will really be the liberation of the church
is becoming its connection to others who have been disconnected, in a real and
symbolic sense those who have been disconnected in a host of ways from Life
Support itself. The church finds its own life in helping support life in
others. And this can be Church done by anyone anywhere anytime, and is best
done in covenanted communities of two or three or more.
It is why many new church communities are being very targeted
in their focus of why they exist to impact the world, connecting with one
school, one neighborhood, one apartment complex, one park or one underpass
where those without houses gather, one day laborer waiting zone, one struggling
nursing home, one jail, one sex offender mobile home park, one abuse shelter.
The places of need right within most of our places are unfortunately almost
endless, and we also have to acknowledge that they are growing and that the
public resources that used to be marshalled for them have been slashed and we
need church to happen in all the upstream work too, witnessing for our radical
sense of love and justice in places of business and government to get them to
fulfill their responsibilities of being partners in society.
The church form, be it of worship or architecture or
organization, is the transient. That is borrowing the words of Unitarian
minister Theodore Parker who reminded us in his 1841 sermon on The Transient
and Permanent in Christianity that the church of the first century did not do
for the fifth century, and the church of the fifth century did not do for the
fifteenth century, and the church of the fifteenth century did not do for his 19th century;
and we can update him to say that the church of the late 20th century
even will not do entirely for the 21st.
For example in his book on Organic Church, Neil Cole writes
about how his place of church has been networked with base groups of four
people meeting together weekly, with one of them looking for ways to grow
another group of four people, and then when there is a network of 20 to at most
40 people they will gather too monthly or so for worship and storytelling and
inspiration.
And I was told a story by a United Methodist minister in
Oklahoma about the small church in a rural area that couldn’t any longer
support a minister so they closed their church and held no more worship
services, but the older members continued to meet once a week during the week
for a potluck and conversations and as they did so they noticed the school
buses from the consolidated school, the now bigger school but one cut off from
the places where the children lived, going by their church building sometimes
delivering children to home after a few hours on the bus. So they got to
thinking, what if they offered a place for kids to go after school until
parents could come get them; a way to put the needs of the most vulnerable first.
And so they did and the parents came and the parents met them and began to
relate with them and to ask them when the church met? Oh it doesn’t meet
anymore, they were told, but of course it was, and some of the parents
eventually talked them into reopening worship, into becoming a part of the
church. Now would it have been considered a success story if the worship hadn’t
started up again? I don’t think so. We don’t do missional in order to help get
people into worship. But even then it was worship that grew out of mission, out
of community relationships.
In his book Exiles, about faith in a post-christian age,
missional church activist Michael Frost tells the story of the young man,
Shawn, who had fidgeted in worship throughout his life and finally after
turning 18 realized he didn’t have to keep doing so and so he accepted his
friends long standing invitation to go party at the lake on Sunday, except when
he was there the first time his instincts kicked in and he asked finally out in
the boat if he could take just a minute and say a prayer and asked if anyone
wanted to include anyone in it; they humored him and the day went on. Next
Sunday same thing; gradually on shore they were taking a little time from beer
and party to talk about a bible story and to start cleaning up the park in
sites not their own, and looking for how they could tow or help boats in
trouble, always still partying, and even sit up bread and wine and juice on
picnic tables for any who wanted to participate in communion. Did they continue?
I don’t know. They never took a name, never incorporated, never paid a
minister’s salary. And all the while Shawn’s family kept pestering him to come
back to church, not realizing that it was happening in deep meaningful
transformative ways right where he was, having fun.
IV.
It is not that our traditional understanding of church and
congregational life is not needed, does not do tremendous good, and won’t
continue; it is just that it will not have the central privileged place that it
had even at the turn of this century as the place for people to find spiritual
community. One projection for ten years from now has the congregation meeting
the spiritual community needs of just 30-35 percent of people in North America compared
to the 70 percent in 2000; alternative faith communities such as home churches
and missional communities and workplace and entrepreneurial ministries and
recovery and health groups will account for an equal percentage, up from the
five percent they served in 2000, and so rising will be spiritual communities
formed around popular culture arts and media, and the family. Just as we are
seeing this bigger bandwidth occur in many areas of society such as education.
The real survival of our faith tradition might not be so much
in how much better we can be at doing what we have been doing, not in how many
we can attract, but in how well we can diversify our various incarnations of
our deepest truths, how many we can send out, how many connect beyond our walls
and organizational life. Not how many can sign the book but how many can we
help to read at grade level. Not only do we need a “bigger bandwidth” of church
manifestations throughout our Association, but even within a congregation there
needs to be a “bigger bandwidth” of ways that congregation impacts its place.
The future of the church ultimately, however, is not to be
concerned with the future of the church, but to be committed to the future of
the world, particular pieces and peoples of the world that are being left
behind in a kind of earthly Rapture. The future of the church I believe will
not be so much in how many members can be made and kept in our own distinct places
(we have much greater aims than that) and not even in what we think and believe
about the Great Mysteries, all that came out of church done in a churched
culture with little competition for spiritual community beyond other churches,
but in our unchurched, dechurched, post-modern,
post-denominational, post-congregational culture,
in how many people are becoming more loving, generous,
justice seeking people whose lives are showing signs of being able to give more
of themselves to others, and in smallness that is easier to start and see,
and in how many multitudes of ways can we relate with people
and places of great suffering, and in smallness that creativity of
experimentation can be nurtured,
and finally in how much we are guided not by gods of fear and
deprivation and greed, but by the Spirit of Love that can’t be contained,
sustained by our Stories of Faithfulness to deeds above creeds,
all for the creation of that Beloved Community that prophets through the ages and in many
different cultures have pointed out to us comes most readily and deeply and
everlastingly in simple ways that restore the soul,
in ordinary things that extraordinarily turn the world upside
down,
and in small acts of justice done with Great Love.
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