Assessing the Long-term Health Prospects of a Congregation from the Legacy Perspective – Transcript
Jim Latimer
I am your host Reverend Jim Latimer, and today we have the pleasure of having Charlie Kuchenbrod with us. Charlie is a Church Legacy Specialist. He serves as a resource to all United Church of Christ congregations that are transitioning to the legacy stage of their lifecycle. Prior to this role, he served various leadership roles with the Southern New England Conference of the UCC, in stewardship and investment management roles, for example, for many years. Prior to that, Charlie had lots of practical business experience in the corporate world. And so, he is savvy around the practical business aspects of organizations in general, and congregations in particular, and is able to guide them in ways of faithful resource management. And for someone with an MBA rather than an MDiv, I’m impressed by his well thought out theology that undergirds his ideas and his consulting. This helps faithful people find the living God in this confusing and sometimes painful legacy process, and lean into the guidance of the Holy Spirit. So, Charlie, for this next podcast segment, as an interim minister, when I arrive at a new congregation, what guidance or counsel would you have for me in terms of assessing the health and long-term prospects of a congregation from the legacy perspective?
Charlie Kuchenbrod
Thank you, Jim. A lot of my corporate management experience was in the healthcare sector. And so, I’m thinking about how a physician or a statistician might look at someone and assess what their health was and their life expectancy. And I’d go through a process. First, I look for particular acute illnesses, particularly life-threatening illnesses. They’re going to be pretty obvious. So, if you get to a congregation, and they’re clearly at the edge of financial viability, if they clearly lack critical mass and membership, you know that that’s a church that is approaching the end of its life rapidly.
But if you don’t see that, then you might look for the kind of chronic illnesses that might jeopardize health, maybe need to be managed, or treated, not immediately life threatening, but they could accelerate the demise of somebody. And we can name or think of what that might be in people, but in congregations, I think about inability to manage conflict in healthy ways. Healthy conflict helps churches be creative and identify new solutions to problems. Unhealthy conflict leads to broken relationships and distance between people. That’s a kind of chronic problem that keeps churches from moving forward. And maybe related to that, some churches have the misfortune of having clearly toxic people in their midst who express their unhappiness with themselves or the world in ways that are unproductive for helping the church move forward.
So, these are things that might be observed. But if you don’t see that, then I’m going to draw parallels, because what we’d look at in people, we’d look at things like diet, exercise, social connection, sleep or rest, family history, mental health. So those are things and that are pretty easy to list or remember, I hope, that would help people coming in. So, let me suggest how each of those might have a parallel in church life. Diet. How does the congregation feed the spirit of the people in the congregation? Is worship alive and vital? Is it energizing people? Or are people just going through the motions? Do they have a junk food diet because they’re sticking to the same old things that are comfortable to them, but not necessarily helping them to grow? So, diet focuses on the kind of the connection between people and God and what’s being done to keep that healthy.
We look at exercise too. How are people practicing their faith? And how are they expressing that in their relationships with other people? And not just within the four walls of the congregation, but after they leave church on Sunday, and they go out into the world, how are they practicing their faith? And how is that impacting their lives and the world? And again, do you have a congregation where people show up on Sunday, but don’t seem really engaged in discipleship for the rest of the week? Or do you have people out there intentional about practicing their faith, being disciples, and engaging with the world?
For people, we might look at social engagement. What are your connections with other people? For churches, I would say community engagement. And as opposed to individuals in their relationships throughout the week, I would look at a congregation and say, what partnerships do you have with other community organizations? How are you as a congregation engaged with other community organizations? Find where you have common interests where you can align your purposes, and where you can support each other going ahead. Especially as churches decline, we’re no longer in a space where many churches can launch and maintain their own initiatives in any program or ministry area. We need to look for partners in the community that we can align with.
With an individual, we would look at rest habits or sleep. So, for a congregation, I would say how do people practice Sabbath and restoration? Particularly among the leaders in the congregation, if the church has had the same people in leadership positions forever, and they feel like they can’t step down because no one else will step up, and they are becoming exhausted with the responsibilities, how can the church move forward with energy? We need new leaders, and we need to give leaders an opportunity to rest and restore so they can bring the best of themselves to the church leadership positions.
I mentioned family history. We all have in healthcare, the DNA that we inherited, and some of us were fortunate enough to pick good parents, and have a better blessing in terms of that. You can look at your congregational DNA. What’s your history? What’s your genesis story? What’s the impact you have had? This might be linked to some of the kinds of chronic illness analogies I made earlier on. But how does our past inform our future? And is that a positive or a negative? So, if for instance, we’re holding on too tightly to our past history, or unable to let go of our past way of doing church or specific approaches, it’s going to keep us from moving forward. It’s going to limit options for the future.
And the last thing that I would name is mental health, which is looking at the quality of the relationships that people have with each other and with God in the congregation. And what renewal practices? There’s a lot of intersections between these six things I think that are enabling people to move forward.
So, to kind of sum up, you’re an interim, you’re walking in, you’re kind of assessing things. You don’t see any immediate threats to the health of the congregation, but you’re looking longer term. Look at diet, think about relationships, spiritual renewal relationships with God. Think about exercise, how people are practicing their faith and acting out their discipleship. Think about social engagement. What kind of community partnerships does the congregation have with other organizations in the community? Think about rest. Think about Sabbath time, particularly renewal time for leaders. Family history, DNA, what have we inherited from our past? And how’s that informing our future and how we move ahead? And mental health? What’s the quality of our relationships? How do we manage conflict, for instance?
Some of the things that influence our life expectancy as people, we can modify. Some of them we can’t. Our genetic inheritance is fixed. We can’t change that. We can’t change the past. We may be able to change how we interpret that. But if we’ve got past health issues, that remains a part of our history. But there are things that we can do with diet and exercise and social engagement that can have an impact on our life expectancy.
So, I’ve said a lot. I hope that it’s thought provoking, and might help an interim as they’re kind of walking in and thinking about how to frame things, and maybe even how to present some things to a congregation.
Jim Latimer
Charlie, this is eloquent and beautiful. And as you well know, for human beings, how we accept difficult news, if you will, depends a lot on how it’s framed. And if it’s framed with regard to something else, or connected to something else that is in our world that we understand, it helps. And I think it’s brilliant that you offer us as a frame to look at congregations’ health, and how they are doing as if they were an individual. Certain things just come right off the bat. Well, individuals have a beginning and they have an end. They have a life cycle. We know that. So that’s helpful to bring in. And you know, diet, exercise, mental health. It’s quite fun and right on. You’re giving us interim ministers language, as well as a framework to think about this. So, Charlie, thank you so much for your generosity with your ideas and your thoughts. It’s been a joy! This will help a lot of interim ministers and lay leaders. Thank you for this.
Charlie Kuchenbrod
Thank you for having me, Jim.