Play the Cards You Hold

For Reflection Roundup each week, we gather news stories, notable pieces, and other important items for Christian leaders today. As always, listening broadly draws together differing perspectives from which we can learn but may not concur. Here are 10 things worth sharing this week.

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If we began our congregational ministry by assessing what we have to offer, we’d likely find it’s a lot.

1. Faith Communities Today offers a comprehensive, ecumenically compiled report describing economic trends in churches over the past 20 years, based on recent data. “FACTs on Finance” (PDF) examines several aspects including “how faith communities receive, manage, and spend resources. The report looks at finances in relationship to congregational size and religious tradition.”

2. In “Little Church, Big Faith,” Megan Fowler, writing for Christianity Today, puts feet and faces on the FACT survey results above. Fowler describes the objective truth of shrinking numbers, due to pandemic and other factors, with heartening vitality. Those smaller churches have more consistent attendance, greater per capita giving, and a stronger sense of the needs pulsing in the community, needs which they are quick to meet. They often share ministers with other small churches, which divides both a minister’s attention and a minister’s compensation, aspects which bring both relief and tension to the minister and the congregations. Fowler offers a heartening look into the pragmatisms of the life of a small body of believers.

3. Many congregations have creatively begun new ministries or expanded existing efforts based on the constantly vacillating needs that the pandemic has presented to us. “Congregational Response to the Pandemic: Extraordinary Social Outreach in a Time of Crisis” (PDF) is a study offered by Faith Communities Today and partners collaborating with the Hartford Institute for Religion Research. Conducted in November 2021, this report compiles nine different aspects of outreach, ranging from social action and mental health to building use and food distribution. There’s strength and inspiration to be found in becoming aware of what others are doing.

4. Wendy Griffith, for CBN News, reports the experience of the Blackwater Baptist Church in Virginia Beach, a church whose attendance has dropped around 30% over the course of the pandemic. In “Small Is the New ‘Big’ When It Comes to Churches,” many of us will find common ground. Senior pastor Lynn Hardaway confesses the strengths of a smaller worshiping body. Griffith reports the faith and determination that the pandemic has surfaced, qualities that have kept more than one small church alive. While some are choosing to remain isolated due to health concerns, Hardaway feels that the smaller congregational body will be a less threatening place where those with concerns will be comfortable gathering when they are ready.

5. Some churches have reached the conclusion that their buildings are no longer vital to house the ministries of their congregations, while others have simply shrunk. Maybe churches have taken on new ministry life outside the building, leaving leaders wondering what to do with the space. For Religion News Service, Bob Smietana addresses the question of building stewardship in “Thousands of churches close every year. What will happen to their buildings?” Many churches have found fruitful community partnerships that benefit both the remaining church members and the surrounding neighborhood. Smietana shares Rev. Albert Hung’s perspective on rethinking ways both doing ministry and utilizing a building: “Many churches still cling to old ways of doing ministry, which often involve waiting for people to show up on Sunday. In the future, churches will have to find ways to get out into the community.” What might be the kindest way we can re-envision the use of our buildings?

6. Writing for Christianity Today, Kelly M. Kapic encourages us all to play with the hand we’ve got in “Love Your Church Within Its Limits.” Shortly summarizing Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s work in Life Together, Kapic admonishes churchgoers not to overly romanticize their communal life to its destruction. We can never have it all, but the reality is that we’ve all got some of it! Secondly, Kapic advises churches to observe how they are “uniquely equipped” before entering into ministry. This amounts to turning around the question, “What does our community need?” and asking, “What do our church people have to offer?” Lastly, Kapic asks churches to recall what we know. All ministry is God’s. We are drawn together by the gift of the kingdom’s advance here on earth as it is in heaven, through the powerful ministry of the living Spirit of the Lord Jesus Christ. That’s good news for our churches!

7. In “Why We Love ‘The Chosen’ So Much,” Luke Burgis shares with the readership of Christianity Today what I myself have found to be true. The writing expresses sensitivity toward the stories of each disciple’s transformation, even of Jesus’s own awakening to his divine mission. In seeing each apostle awaken to God’s priority for the world, we too find our own part in Jesus’s mission. In scenes such as Jesus collaborating with Matthew to develop his great Sermon on the Mount, we see God working in and through him in ways to which we, as ministers, ascribe. These writers do seem to have successfully reproduced a living, active, continually unfolding story, at least as much as is humanly possible.

8. For the University of Notre Dame’s Flourishing in Ministry project, Matt Bloom shares “Research: The “stages” of ministry.” Bloom’s metaphor contains literal stages as he writes, “The more authentic a person can be in their roles, the more stirring and proficient will be their performances. Their wellbeing will also be higher.” Bloom continues his metaphor, saying “backstage” spaces are key in ministry life, as they are safe places where activities are reviewed and unpacked and where those “performing” find nurture and support. Bloom quotes researcher Peggy Thoits’s remarks on the necessity of “similar others.” Thoits says, “significant others can sympathize, similar others can empathize.” These “ventilating and validating” relationships “reduce experiences of stress and restore wellbeing.”

9. Find partners here for your Lenten prayers.

10. We all need this today. Find other stress reducers in Ann Voscamp’s “Multivitamins for Your Weekend.”