Helping a Congregation Expand its Notion of Faithfulness During the Interim Time – 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 am your host Reverend Jim Latimer. Today I have with me Reverend Dr. Jonathan New. Jonathan has led many a congregation through the intentional interim process and has much wisdom to share about it. I wanted him to speak about helping the congregation expand their notion of faithfulness during the interim time, which sounds kind of fuzzy, but it’s pretty bedrock if you’re a community of faith. So Jonathan, anything you can share would be great.

Jonathan New
Thank you, Jim. I think this is more and more relevant, in particular as various kinds of pressures come to bear on congregations in a way that’s frankly threatening their survival – their ability to continue to exist. And I do think about this issue of a congregation expanding its notion of faithfulness, specifically in the context of what I call “threshold churches,” those churches at a crossroads where their next step, or their inability to make that next step, will be existentially consequential.

Jim Latimer
“Existentially consequential” – what do you mean by that?

Jonathan New
I mean that there are some churches that aren’t going to make it too far beyond the present day. And there are some churches that reach, let’s call it a low of one kind or another, and are able to remake themselves. So threshold churches are churches where the next steps that they make will be particularly consequential in terms of whether or not they’re able to remake themselves in a way that is sustainable and allows them to continue and to be and do church, or not. So one of the things that I think is important for all churches to keep in mind is that like every living thing, churches have a beginning a middle, and an end to their lives.

Jim Latimer
Like every living thing – thank you! – individuals, organizations, they all do.

Jonathan New
None of those first churches that were established exist today. I think that’s useful to remember. Churches come into being – they live, and they die. That is the normal state of things for churches. And yet we are in deep denial about that fact. So it seems to me that if we start from that fact, then our faithfulness isn’t just about doing what we can to continue to exist. There must be more for us as church. So faithfulness has to be more than just trying to continue to exist. Unfortunately, in my experience, some churches have seemingly reduced their reason for being to just that – just doing whatever they can to keep it looking like they’re still going. So I think that helping our churches accept all of this is important so we can attend to the sense of loss, and grief, and guilt, and shame that some church members feel, especially if they’re those people who have remained to keep things going – those people who have a heart for this church, those people who care about what it has meant, those people who recognize the importance of the church in their lives, in the lives of their parents, and who want the church to have an important place maybe in their children’s lives.

But the ability to attend to the loss, the grief, the guilt, the shame is critical. Otherwise, we can’t move beyond those things to something that might be possible next, of different kinds. I also think it’s important to help a congregation put their faithfulness in the context of what it means to be church. And one lens through which we could look at this is the historic marks of the church that we find in the book of Acts. So I’m thinking here about those really fundamental things: Koinonia, fellowship, liturgia, worship, diancania, service, and kerygma, proclamation – those key marks of the church. Engaging a congregation in an exploration of where they are expressing those things or not, or the degree to which they’re doing that is important foundational work. Because we can spend time remembering where we have fully lived into those things, or not. And we can also ask the question of whether or not those are being expressed to any degree any longer.

What I’ve seen with churches that become extremely low functioning is that one of the first things to go will be service. Another that will go fairly quickly is proclamation – how we proclaim in word and deed. And then eventually worship will go and then the primary mark of that congregation will be fellowship. I don’t want to privilege any one of these things over the others. I think they’re all important in order to be church, but to the extent that any of them is missing, or greatly reduced raises a question of faithfulness and is worthy of exploring with a congregation so that they can acknowledge what is happening in their church’s life. The point here is that being freed of those things – freed of the idea that churches are supposed to exist forever, for example – it can be possible to think about what’s faithful now. What’s faithful now for this day? What can we do to be the church best in this new context? Can we live into those marks of the church in a way that’s really thoroughgoing and good? Is it not possible for us to do that? If that is the case then what would it mean to be the church at the time of its life cycle where we’re coming to an end? If we don’t have a future as a congregation, how yet might we bless the world with people resources, with money resources, with building resources, in order for other instances of church to have powerful mission and ministry in the world?

Jim Latimer
That’s profound, Jonathan, and what I’m hearing you say is that being at a threshold point, and then recognizing from that threshold point that, yes, our current mode of doing ministry is no longer sustainable is coming to an end fairly soon, right? This is often the next step after threshold – not always, but often. And that there is no need for shame. There will be a sense of loss, absolutely. A sense of pain, and all those things, but there’s no sense of shame, unless we’ve just – you didn’t say this but I would – we completely ignored these four marks of the church, right? Luke lays out in Acts – proclamation, koinonia, service…and what was it?

Jonathan New
Fellowship, worship, service and proclamation.

Jim Latimer
So those four things. That’s very helpful for me as an interim minister too, about what is it that helps us to see where we are on the bell curve of vitality as a congregation. What kind of questions to engage the congregation and what are the most helpful questions.

Jonathan New
Right. And most churches have moments in their life cycles where they will be lower than others in some of these categories. So I’m not saying that it means the end. In fact, I’m saying just the opposite. What I’m saying is that our attention to doing and being church and our good awareness of what that means, can help us flag those things that are coming up in church life that we need to attend to in order to take some steps to live in new ways into the future that God is calling us into. Some of those faithful features, however, will mean the end of our church as a congregation, and I would hope for them the ability to use remaining people resources, money resources, and building resources to yet bless the world and not just burn those things up to no good end.

Jim Latimer
Wow. Thank you so much, Jonathan. That was really rich. I appreciate your sharing that – important and very timely for right now.

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