The leaders of my denomination have provided us with a helpful vision of four areas of focus for the next few years. One of those areas of focus is “Creating New Places for New People and Renewing Existing Congregations.” My own annual conference wanted a more rhyming focus and seemed less interested in the second half, so this year they changed the language to “New Places for New Faces.” So far so good, but people kept stumbling over the rhyme and saying, “New Places for New Spaces.”
Was the stumble a salutary one? I wonder if the average congregation is willing to make the changes needed to provide a new place for new people or whether we’ll just end up adding new empty spaces to the current half-empty places we’ve already got.
I’ve been contemplating this because the church I’m serving is a ten-year-old church plant birthed from another church, and we’ve got a vision for planting another church sometime in the next ten years. What exactly does it take to plant a church? The idea seems overwhelming even though I’m currently in a church that was the fruit of exactly this kind of vision and work. We’re very close to being a new place for new people, and that vision is fresh for us. How much more overwhelming must it feel to a church that was planted ten decades ago?
And yet as my District Superintendent likes to say, “We must look backward in order to see forward.” The United Methodist Church was a huge church planting mission when it hit the soil of North America. The cost to those early leaders was heavy. Many of them wore out their bodies in order to spread the gospel as far and wide as they could. I wonder if we have not become too comfortable in these bodies. It shows in the results of the Clergy Health Initiative. Churches are getting smaller and smaller while pastors are getting bigger and bigger. We seem more interested in feeding ourselves than reaching out to feed the community.
So what kinds of risks does a church have to take in order to create new places for new people? A couple that I’d suggest are:
- Wearing the servants’ clothes of the culture we’re in. In our case that would be jeans and t-shirts (that’s what albs were in medieval Europe).
- Incarnating music with instruments that are familiar to the broader culture rather than relying on instruments that are only familiar to the church.
- Doing the extra work of not only interpreting the text but also interpreting the community to know what kinds of needs need to be spoken to and what kinds of metaphors that will communicate to this culture.
Naturally there are risks in doing all of these things. There’s the risk that we’ll lose some people. There’s the risk that we’ll bring in some of the cultural message we don’t want with the cultural medium we do.
It’s a risk that those whose shoulders we stand on were willing to take, or we wouldn’t be in this place today. Ours is a long story of the risks of incarnating the gospel in order to make space for new places and new faces.
Tom Arthur is pastor of Sycamore Creek United Methodist Church in Lansing, Michigan.
