Sunday, September 2, 2012

A Volley from the Canon, Number 125--The Silver Bullet

THE SILVER BULLET “What I’d like to know,” said the Senior Warden, “is ‘What is the silver bullet, if you will, the best plan for growing the church nowadays?’” This is not the first time of asking, by various people around the diocese. It seems this is what pretty much everyone wants to know. I wish it were that easy. The answer is, there is no silver bullet for growing a church congregation. What works well one place, one time, might not another place, another time. Frankly, I think a lot of things can be helpful, and several things together, programmatically speaking, are probably the best hope—and there are no guarantees for success at growth! Ironically, however, I can offer a silver-bullet, guaranteed method for destroying a church congregation—for church shrinkage and loss of members! (How sad that the negative is so much easier to accomplish than the positive!) The key to church LOSS is negativism. Tip the balance to the negative in your congregation, and you WILL kill it. I guarantee. Find fault with everything and everyone. Undermine all projects with carping and nay-saying. Go to events, if it suits you, but complain about how they were done, especially behind the scenes. Have nothing good to say about your congregational leadership, and stymie them at every turn. Launch a campaign to overthrow your rector or priest-in-charge. Show your anger. Make unpleasant scenes, especially around any newcomers. Be sarcastic, bitter, and rude. Coordinate your attacks with others. You’ll see the results in no time. Then, you get to complain about the membership and financial losses, as if you had nothing to do with them, thus accelerating the decline. If this is the negative silver bullet, I wonder if the flip-side of it might be a positive one, albeit more difficult to achieve. Go positive! Cultivate hopefulness and positive expectations. Practice listening compassionately to others’ hurt, while avoiding getting sucked into their sphere of negativity (which is a form of emotional indigestion, not to be shared). Get immersed in ministry rather than power struggles. Resolve to live joyfully, faithful to the conviction that God is, after all, in charge, so you don’t need to be. Speak your convictions appropriately, but support the congregational leadership without trying to control the direction of it—the congregation cannot succeed unless the rector or priest-in-charge succeeds! Advocate for success, live in expectation of good things, and accentuate the positive. I truly believe that, if the scale of energy in a congregation is tipped toward the positive—hopefulness, celebration, encouragement, compassion, joy—that church will grow. And even if it did not, it would be a much, much nicer place to hang out, praise God, and do God’s work!

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