What Can Churches Share Besides a Pastor? – Transcript

Jim Latimer
Welcome to Coaching for Interims. We are about empowerment for interim ministers: best practices and quick help from interims for interims – wisdom from the field. I’m your host, Jim Latimer, and I have the joy and pleasure of having with us today Reverend Gail Irwin. Gail is a longtime experienced interim minister. I used her excellent book in a class I facilitated. It’s called Toward a Better Country: Church Closure and Resurrection. She thinks deeply and wisely about when churches get to this point of declining vitality and resources – What do we do now? Well, you can close, but there are all kinds of other options. And she has thought a lot about it. And she’s lived through it, and led churches through these. So I really wanted her to speak to that. So in this particular conversation – just by way of introduction – we all know that churches tend to be declining in size, and some are having trouble adjusting their ministry accordingly. And so the interim time may be a time to introduce new models of doing ministry at a smaller size. Gail has thought a lot about ideas to inspire the imaginations of these interim ministers in the congregations. Some ideas around perhaps sharing resources with other organizations. She’s thought a lot about that. And I wanted her to speak to that. If you could, Gail, we’d love to hear you.

Gail Irwin
Okay. Thank you for having me, Jim. Yes. So in another podcast you and I did, I was talking about how I worked with two churches that realized they could not go it alone with full-time ministers. So they ended up teaming up to share a pastor. And they started that while they were in an interim to experiment with it before they called a shared settled pastor. But that is a pretty big idea to put on a church – sharing a pastor. Another big idea is: do you want to share your building with another church? Those are all kind of scary new ideas for churches that are used to being on their own. And that might not be the goal, that might not be where they’re headed. So as an interim, I’m always looking for what the trajectory is. Is it that they are getting smaller? Is that looking like what’s going to happen in the future? And if it is, I might start not by, “Well, who do you want to share pastor with?” But “Who are your partners? Who are your partners in ministry that you can help and they can help you?” And so that might be a question I would ask as I go into an interim ministry, “Who are your ministry partners right now?” They might be other churches. They might be nonprofits. For example, does the church have a member on the board of a local food pantry that you have a partnership with? Or do you participate in a big fundraiser for the local shelter? Or do we share Lenten services with another church? And then you can point those sharing experiences out as being good and nurturing for your church. Most churches have some kind of partnerships with somebody else in the community. And then you can explore how you can build on those and build on the positive benefits of them. Remember that churches are asked these questions on their profiles. So they’re going to be working on a profile, and the profile is going to be pressing them on how are you engaged in your community. So they’re going to have to think about this anyway. And then I like to encourage churches to think about – when we did it with the two churches I put it as: this other church is your friend. You get to be friends with each other. You don’t have to merge. You don’t have to close anything. You just get to be friends. And try to build on those friendship relationships to add vitality to maybe both systems. So here are some examples that I found in some of my interims where there was some positive sharing going on. I had a church that shared with the Presbyterian Church, they did Martin Luther King Day event every year. And I was thinking to myself, boy, I wonder if they could have built on that after George Floyd was killed. They could have gotten those groups together and maybe done some other education or programming. I knew of two churches that shared the choir. Their two choirs got together. And that was part of a gradual movement to a time when those two churches did actually merge much later down the road. They started by developing this friendship through their choir. Sharing space with a nonprofit organizations is something a lot of churches do. You can build on that by educating your congregation about what that nonprofit does, maybe helping them with fundraisers, or sending volunteers to them. Sharing space in your building with another church. I had a wonderful experience where we shared our building with a hmong church, and we ended up finding ways to actually worship together. They invited us to their hmong New Year. There are all kinds of things you can grow in a partnership and just see where God leads you.

Jim Latimer
Let me just pause you for a minute if I can. This is so rich. So “hmong” – you’re talking about Southeast Asia, right?

Gail Irwin
Yes. In Wisconsin. Right.

Jim Latimer
I just love how at the beginning of this, rather than talking about, “Oh, let’s share our building or pastor,” which is immediately kind of threatening, you got at that same issue, but you did it in a very non threatening way by saying, “So who are some of your partners in ministry right now?” which is not only a non threatening way to kind of get into that general line of thinking, but it’s almost like an Appreciative Inquiry approach: “What are some great things that you’re doing now?” Right? which is, “Oh, yeah, we do have some successes happening!” So now they’re engaged from a place of feeling good about themselves, rather than a place of lack, feeling bad about themselves, so fear goes up, and then creativity shuts down. I just want to flag the brilliance of your approach with that.

Gail Irwin
Yeah. It’s not all about your budget in that threatening kind of way. On the other hand, there might be churches where you ask this question, and you’re not hearing much. They’re not partnering with anybody, especially if they’ve been in a decline mode. And the only thing I could say about this is that you come in as an interim. You don’t know the community. But you are the newcomer, and so you can investigate. On their behalf, you can drop by the food pantry and find out what are their hours now? Or, are they in disarray? Or are they really growing? Or you can drop in on the AA meeting and find out how many people actually come to that. You can call up the area clergy and find out if they’re still meeting. So by the nature of being new, you can go out and investigate what is really happening now. And a lot of times, your congregation might have lost sight of that, and needs to be told, “This is what I’m finding out there.” So when I had these two churches that were exploring sharing a pastor, we did decide to go beyond just the logistics of sharing. You know, when we were going to have worship, and how we were going to split the salary and the office hours and all of that. Those were the basic building blocks of sharing a pastor. But we knew we had to do more than that. And so we found other ways to build a friendship between those two churches. One thing they did is they both had traditional summer picnics. And so they both agreed that on the day of the summer picnic, the other church would not worship together at the other site, and they would come over and join the picnic. So we got to have two picnics in two towns! Just fun, you know. We shared adult study. And in doing that people from both churches really got to know each other more intimately. And that was very significant. One of the most exciting things we did was sharing a Confirmation class. It was my biggest class ever. I had 10 kids from both churches. And that class at the end of the year, said very clearly to their congregations, “We are two churches, but we are one class.” And even now, it gives me goosebumps that they understood that they were from two churches, but they were one class. They were together. And what a great testament to their churches. In this shared ministry experiment too, I was skeptical at the beginning about whether this was going to work and the workload and everything. But here’s what I noticed: When we would get people from each church in the room together – whether it was for a meeting, or a class or a special worship service or something – whenever we had both groups together in the room, the Holy Spirit lit up. The energy got much more lively. People were on their best behavior. They were curious about each other. The group was a little bigger. It was exciting. And when I saw that, I gave in. I decided this is going to work. God is going to make work because the excitement in the room was not about me or the idea. It was it was just happening. That really did win me over.

Jim Latimer
Wow.

Gail Irwin
So I will say for interims, maybe some questions you can ask coming in and looking at sharing and partnership. As I said before, Who are you partnering with now in your community? Who could you initiate a new friendship with – a neighbor organization – understanding that this isn’t necessarily about your financial situation. It may not help with your membership. It’s really not about that. It’s more about vitality – having a greater reach and presence in your community. And honestly, it’s about having more fun. I think when people realize they can get out of their own little circle that may be depressed or sad about whatever happened before the interim came, and they can meet other people, it’s just more fun to be together. The last thing I want to say though about this is that you are the interim. And so whatever happens after you lay the seeds out – you know if you give people ideas – whatever happens, it is not within your control. It’s something you have to let go of and step away from and hope that the new called pastor hears or picks up energy about partnership. But it’s not going to be up to you. So that’s the humble part of it. You’re just there to plant the seeds.

Jim Latimer
Wow. Well my heart was singing this whole time as you were speaking. And as you said the Confirmation class where they said we’re two churches but one class, I just think of that verse, “And little child shall lead them.” There’s the wisdom of kids. That don’t see boundaries that we adults create. Or they can see where a boundary is not adding anything, it’s kind of subtracting. And then the other thing – well, two things. One, you said about fun.

I mean that should be kind of a red flag for any church, in terms of assessing its vitality. Are we are we having fun? If we’re not having fun…Joy, if we’re not smiling – if that doesn’t happen regularly, something’s going south. We need to look at this. No matter how much money you have, or how many people, there needs to be some of that joy. And when you mentioned how when these two groups came together, I can just see it. I mean, part of it is, “Oh, we’ve got to be on our best behavior because now we have some guests here. And then part of it is also being curious! Oh, yeah. It seeds all kinds of interesting conversations about things that they both do, but they both do a little differently. I see the Holy Spirit was probably having a hay day – a field day on that one!

Gail Irwin
Exactly.

Jim Latimer
Well, Gail, thank you so very much for this. And I know there’s a lot else in your heart and mind maybe for future Bits of Wisdom, but I so much appreciate this one and the other one that we did as well. Thank you.

Gail Irwin
Thank you for having me.

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