Category: Managing Expectations

Posted in Assessments and Evaluations, Buildings and Property, Change Management, Church Decline, Church Growth & Vitality, External Relations, Faith Formation, Healing / Grief Work, Legacy Churches / Church Closing, Managing Expectations, Mission and Vision, Stewardship Tagged with

16 min 07 s

Rev. Dr. Rochelle (Shelly) Stackhouse

  • Does your church have more property than it needs? Is much of your building unused most of the time? If so, you have lots of company! Many churches have significant real estate that’s fallow – unused – and yet they continue to pay for its upkeep. Of course, no one likes this situation or planned for this reality, yet churches often have difficulty moving forward. Put differently, churches often struggle to incorporate their property into a realistic understanding of their current mission and purpose as a faith community. Rev. Dr. Shelly Stackhouse, a long-experienced interim minister and now the Senior Director of Programs for the non-profit, “Partners for Sacred Places,” offers some key questions and a process to help such churches move forward in this episode titled, “Your Church Property Has a Mission Too.”

Does Your Church Have a Mission Statement for Its Property?

Interim ministers have the opportunity (obligation?) to help a congregation begin to assess their situation with their property;

  • How is our property being used?
  • How often?
  • Who’s using it?
  • What spaces could be used more fully?
  • What property should we offload? How and to whom?

Developing a mission statement for your property;

Understanding property as part of your mission – start by going room to room…

There are people in the wider community who are stakeholders in your property;

Honoring the grief in letting go of unused property;

It’s in the telling of stories that people come to feel the past has been honored, and then are open to a different future;

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Posted in Boundaries, Conflict Management, Healing / Grief Work, Managing Expectations, Self-Care, Staff Tagged with

12min 41 s

Rev. Anna Tew

As pastor, does it sometimes feel like everyone in the congregation is your boss? Are you struggling to get back more time for yourself and feeling pretty exhausted? If so, you are not alone. Listen here as Rev. Anna Tew tells how she recovered from such a place by using the flexibility of pastoral ministry to her advantage.

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Posted in Church Growth & Vitality, Coaching and Counseling, Managing Expectations, Self-Care Tagged with

11min 29 s

Rev. Anna Tew

As a pastor, having a part-time secular job on the side can bring added joy and satisfaction to your life. It can also provide an economic buffer in a changing church world. But where to start looking? What skills does a pastor have that would be valued in a secular job? In this episode, ELCA pastor Rev. Anna Tew tells how she came into a part-time coaching job at her CrossFit gym that is blessing her, and them, on multiple fronts!

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Posted in Change Management, Church Decline, Faith Formation, Healing / Grief Work, Leadership Development, Managing Expectations, Mission and Vision, Pastoral Care, Staff, Worship Tagged with

15 min 50s

It’s not about “saving” the congregation, per se, but about buying the time for serious thinking about what the cong. wants for its future.

Discerning what form of ministry is faithful to the basic values & resources that you have now?

Guidance for how lay leaders can work productively with a very part-time pastor;

A targeted approach that equips and empowers the laity can do themselves:

Specific recommendations for how the laity can create and lead worship, for congregational care, etc.

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Posted in Buildings and Property, Change Management, Church Decline, Faith Formation, Healing / Grief Work, Legacy Churches / Church Closing, Managing Expectations, Mission and Vision, Pastoral Care Tagged with

12 min 19s

The four paths are: revitalization, transformation, legacy building and ministry completion (that’s one option), and road closed ahead.

Description of each path and what is involved;

Why 1 path is much harder (a mirage really) than it may seem and why;

Why another path is the one congregations in denial often fall into (and I wish didn’t exist!);

The process of shaping and narrowing down options and focusing on transformation, and legacy building and ministry completion, and discerning which is right for that congregation.

Metaphor of the church as a ship coming into harbor and completing it voyage.

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Posted in Buildings and Property, Change Management, Church Decline, Faith Formation, Healing / Grief Work, Legacy Churches / Church Closing, Managing Expectations, Mission and Vision, Pastoral Care Tagged with

13 min 42s

The power of metaphors for helping church navigate their lifecycle;

Imagining the wider church as a forest, and individual congregations as trees helps churches see how they fit into something larger than themselves;

Reframing this last phase of ministry not simply as decline, which is often interpreted as failure, but as a natural part of a process that’s tied to a larger system of the wider church;

Questions to aid the struggle of balancing autonomy at the congregational level with covenant at the wider church level;

How resurrection language can help; A resurrected church, like the resurrected Jesus, has some features of what it was before, but it’s not the same thing – some new “benefits” too;

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Posted in Buildings and Property, Change Management, Church Decline, Faith Formation, Healing / Grief Work, Legacy Churches / Church Closing, Managing Expectations, Mission and Vision, Pastoral Care Tagged with

15 min 25s

How a physician or a statistician might look at someone and assess what their health was and their life expectancy – parallels with a congregation;

Examples for churches: Acute, life-threatening illnesses,

Chronic illnesses;

Toxic behavior by members;

Parallels for churches of what we’d look for in people such as diet, exercise, social connection, sleep or rest, family history, mental health;

Like people, some of the things that influence life expectancy can be changed, some cannot & which is which;

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