Know your options for a future with hope – 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. My name is Reverend Jim Latimer. I’m your host today. We have the pleasure of having with us Reverend Dr. Todd Yonkman. Todd is a savvy and experienced transitional minister. He’s also served as a settled minister in his 20 some years of pastoral ministry. And in those 20 years he has seen lots of congregations in many phases of their lifecycle, including from the very beginning to closing. And so, I wanted him to speak a little bit about what are your options when vitality in your congregation gets low. What are your options for a future – a future with hope? He said he would speak to us about that. And so, thought I’d love to hear some of your thoughts.
Todd Yonkman
Thanks so much, Jim. I am really honored to have this opportunity to chat with you. I love talking about congregations and hope and vitality. So, first of all, I would say a few statistics. I’d love to see some updated numbers, but one of the numbers I’m familiar with about church vitality is that only 10% of congregations in the United States of all kinds, on the entire theological spectrum, only 10% are growing. That means 90% of our congregations are either plateaued, or declining. So, if you’re in a congregation that finds themselves in that plateaued or declining place, you’re in good company. Someone asked me once, What is the big barrier toward church vitality? I would say that one of the big barriers that I would notice is a sense of shame and blame. Many churches who find themselves on the decline side of the church lifecycle – and we’ll talk about that in a second – they recognize that they aren’t the church that they once were. They tell stories about when the Sunday school was full, and when we had to set up chairs in the aisle, and they look around and they see that that’s not the case anymore. And sometimes a barrier to vitality is just a difficulty in facing the facts – just owning it. So, one of the things that I will do in vitality work is to do the church lifecycle exercise.
Todd Yonkman
All churches have a life cycle of birth, maturing – which is the growth, the upside of the bell curve – then decline, and then death is at the end. So, part of that work is just identifying where you are on the lifecycle. And where you are will determine what sort of interventions or moves or options you would make. And one of the things that I tell congregations, any chance that I get is: the further you get down the decline side of the life cycle, the fewer options you have. You still have options, but they are fewer, and more extreme. So, I would encourage every single church to always be in a process of revitalization, renewal, and evaluation, so that you can keep going,
Jim Latimer
Being honest about the current state of affairs.
Todd Yonkman
Yeah. Just own it and face it. And the quicker you can do that, the less likely you will need big changes. My wife’s Church, which is not as far down the decline side, had this huge fight a couple of years ago about putting screens up in the church. And the church I’m currently serving is in a merger process, and I would hear parishioners in other churches tell these stories like, Oh, my God, we had to have this huge conversation about putting screens up in the sanctuary! And what I would be glad to do is to have my church people come to talk to your church people and say, You’re fighting about screens? We’re talking about dissolving our church and merging. If you need to put up screens to keep the vitality, that is small potatoes. But too often churches get stuck on these relatively smaller changes.
Todd Yonkman
So anyway, to go on, Thom Rainer has a book called, Autopsy of a Deceased Church. He outlines a number of reasons that he found in his research as to why churches closed. And one of them, which has stuck with me, is that churches don’t know that there are other options. And so, that is really the encouragement that I’d like to share: there are always options! Resurrection is always possible. Now, there’s a Good Friday too. We tend to want to skip the Good Friday part. And maybe your Good Friday is, Oh, we have screens in the front of the church, and I preferred to have the church look a different way! But again, that is a different kind of Good Friday. It’s a loss, right? It’s a change. And as we said, Change always involves some sort of loss. But that’s a different Good Friday than church consolidation, selling a building, or even closing.
Todd Yonkman
And again, I would say that, if your congregation finds itself further down on the decline side, consolidation might be an option for you. My recommendation is to check out the book, “Better Together: Making Church Mergers Work,” by Jim Tomberlin and Warren Bird, because that will help you get in your mind some models for church consolidation. The models for church consolidation, that tend to have the most success are ones in which a vital growing church either adapts or absorbs a declining church. That is a good Friday moment for that adopted or declining church. Or what we call a merger restart, which is what we’re trying to do in Granby.
Todd Yonkman
Now, that’s really, really difficult. What we’re trying to do is to avoid a more common model, which tends not to lead to a sustainable future. And that is what Tomberlin and Bird called the ICU model, or I call it the twin Titanic model. So, if the congregations are Titanics and one is going down, and then they see another ship going down nearby, and the idea is to throw a rope from one sinking ship to another sinking ship. Where are you going? You’re all going to the bottom. And so, if that is your only option, my encouragement would be just to focus on either redevelopment / revitalization – one of these adoption models. Or, there is always the hospice option. I haven’t met a congregation that will explicitly choose that option. But sometimes, it turns out that that is where the congregation is – that they’d rather just keep things the same. But even then, there is an option to leave a legacy. The UCC has some ways that you can fund starting new ministries, or sometimes a new ministry will be birthed in the building, where this dying congregation has been, and there’s a way to share the building while this new ministry, this new church, is being born in it. So those are all options. I want to encourage congregations to explore their options, because we serve a God of hope. And there is always hope.
Jim Latimer
Thank you for that. I appreciate your enumerating the various types of options for the future when vitality gets low. And part of what I heard you say – part of being able to do that and look at the options – is first of all, to be honest about where we are on the church lifecycle. I appreciate that you say that, because all organizations are born and die. All the churches that St. Paul started, they’re all dead, right? And dead doesn’t mean bad, it just means it’s a lifecycle. So first of all, be honest with where you are on the lifecycle. And then if you do that, the degree to which you do that is the degree to which you’ll see clearly, Oh, these are the various options that we have that we couldn’t see before, because we were denying our reality. And the second thing that I heard that stuck in my mind was, if you’re looking for a merger of bringing two congregations together, don’t bring together two equals. One’s got to be stronger than the other in some way.
Todd Yonkman
So, what we’re trying to do in in Granby – which we’ll let you know how it goes – but, we’re actually breaking the rules. Both churches are on the decline side. And so, what we’re trying to do is the consolidation work with the revitalization work at the same time. And so, the way that I’ve tried to articulate it is to help these two congregations learn to love Granby together. One of the sayings that that has stuck with me is, If you want a marriage to last, learn to love other things together. That’s my vision. We’ll see if it works. I will say at this point, it is a lot to try to do vitality work and consolidation work at the same time.
Jim Latimer
This is the time – this is an era – for taking risks. And not dumb risks, but risks that we’ve assessed and believe God’s calling us into. So, go for it! I love that image of “learning to love Granby together,” because that’s an image that allows you to assess, Are we doing this or not? What does loving behavior look like? And, Are we doing this together? And, Are we loving Granby? So, there’s at least three points there where you can create a metric or an assessment of, How well are we doing? It’s visible. You can see, Are we moving toward that or not? Which is all part of helping congregations have a sustainable future, and which is what you told me earlier that your ministry is about. I applaud that.
Thank you, Todd for sharing your wisdom here and your stories. And maybe a listener is going to call you, if you don’t mind, and say, Tell me, how’s it going with this merger? Because you’re right in the lab right now.
Todd Yonkman
Yes. I’d be happy to.
Jim Latimer
Thank you so much, Todd. This is great.
Todd Yonkman
You’re welcome.
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