Are we growing?

Pandemic aside, was this Sunday any bigger than last Sunday? Where there more plates out at the spaghetti dinner than last year, or less? Is the choir getting bigger? Or just louder?

I’ve seen or heard-tell of three ways that churches have grown (or not) over the past 70 years or so.

The first is through the charisma of the leader. That term can have some baggage, but let’s state the obvious: from clergy to musicians to youth ministers, a winsome leader is going to help a community stay lively and grow…at least for a little while. Here be serious dragons, mind you, if the charisma masks a character flaw or a deeper insecurity, or if long-term vitality is sacrificed in favor of what someone thinks is the hot ticket today. But when grounded in authenticity and insight, the charisma of the leader can help things to grow nicely.

The second way I’ve seen growth happen is when we ride the cultural waves that flow in our favor. There’s less of this nowadays. The first church I led had posted big numbers in the 1950’s and 60’s and we couldn’t help but wonder why that wasn’t happening anymore. But heavens, consider the cultural momentum from that era: historically high rates of marriage, jobs that created single earners (meaning more church volunteers), and church attendance as a cultural assumption.

There are still places where the cultural tides break our way, and wonderful things can happen there. It was in churches like this where I learned about faith and where I discerned that ministry might be for me. These are also places where faithful people work hard to go deeper, to lead beyond where those cultural tailwinds take them.

But we can also put on blinders about what’s driving the growth: our sermons may be chef’s-kiss-fantastic, but we may well be getting a bigger boost than we think if our city or neighborhood is thriving, or when we’re in a community that still does the church thing on a regular basis.

The third type is a bit less flashy, is a different kind of hard work, and can take a really long time…especially if the prevailing winds aren’t in our favor. (And sometimes it simply doesn’t work, at least not according to the standards of 1 and 2). Yet growth can also come from slow, steady, faithful work where we show up every day, get help from some faithful people, and are open to some surprises from the Holy Spirit. This is flywheel work: slowly, prayerfully, a little bit every day. Gratefully taking some cultural wins along the way but also thinking about that somewhat critically. Not avoiding charisma, but not relying on it either.

All three ways can grow a congregation. Growth is generative and lasting, though, when it’s grounded not in ego but in authenticity. We get trapped when we grow because of the first two – charisma and culture – without realizing what’s lifting us up. We miss out then on the really good growth, the stuff that has little to do with headcounts and raffle tickets, growth that that emerges from humility and patience and a faith that we’re not the ones who are really in charge.

Sometimes we let most anxious person in the room decide the agenda and the tone. When we do, the work that we need to be doing do often goes undone.

This week’s experience with Florence reminded me of the hurricane that accompanied my early days at my first church gig. A gulf-coast storm had disrupted gas supplies for the entire Southeast, and though it was just an inconvenience North Carolina had become seized with anxiety about the possibility that we’d all run out of gas and have to leave our minivans stranded by the side of the road.

Thus the stage was set for my first-ever-church-committee-meeting. We’d worked for just a few minutes when someone barrelled in late, blurting “everybody’s out of gas! The stations are dry!”  In a polite panic everyone speed-walked to their cars to commence the hunt for fuel. Meeting adjourned.

Every storm and every disruption is different, but in this case there was little need to worry. News reports told us this was coming and would probably last a few days, and with some foresight there was no reason to panic. But panic we did, and now we’d lost an important meeting with mere weeks to go before a fall program was to begin. It made a fairly straightforward committee job a lot harder.

It was a lesson to me, right there in my the very first of many hundreds of committee meetings:  if there’s anxiety in the room, it will want the floor. And without effort to diffuse or redirect it, that anxiety will likely derail the actual work that needs to be done.

It’s helpful, when it surfaces, to see anxiety for what it is.   That doesn’t mean we get to dismiss it or ignore something we don’t want to hear as “anxiety.”  Sometimes the most anxious person in the room is telling us exactly what we need to hear. And there are times that each of us becomes the most anxious person in the room…we all take our turns. But seeing anxiety as something pulls our focus away from the work at hand, and puts us instead on shakier ground, is a first step in unwinding it.

The deeper lesson over the years, though, is that anxiety isn’t a given. It took me a little while to realize that, especially after that first capsized committee meeting: the great  majority of groups and team meetings I’ve been in over the years have actually been pretty productive, and folk usually show up to get it done and go home.  Anxiety will always be there, of course, gets better over time, if we can learn to be attentive to headaches before they become crises, if we can stay focused and practice some discernment along the way.

There’s a deeper story than the ones we tell ourselves, but that story often stays hidden.  Bishop Porter Taylor once said at a clergy retreat that as leaders we really have no idea what the Holy Spirit is doing in our churches. If it’s of God, then it will unfold in mystery and a bit outside the light. Yet we speak as if we know exactly what’s going on beneath the topsoil.

Many of the stories we tell favor the thematic ruts of church growth and decline. Those are patterns are important but the story itself becomes addictive. A church is an incredibly complex organism, yet we struggle to find vocabulary beyond big or small, conservative or progressive, healthy or stuck, so those become the plumb-lines against which we measure ourselves…and the enclosures into which we settle.

If our church happens to be growing, we paw at that story like it’s catnip. We can’t put it down: we market it, we put in on a resume and we set our hopes and dreams upon it. We bust it out at clergy conferences and flash it on Instagram. This kind of storytelling has its place, but too much isn’t good for our souls. We get hooked on it.   It’s a fine line, the one between marketing and ego.

But when our church is struggling we get stuck in the underbelly of the same story.  Somehow the bitter herb is just as addictive. The stories we tell about growth and decline are often more about being enmeshed with the culture than about being authentic communities.

Yet when we listen for deeper stories – the ones that reveal themselves in contours and shadows but never quite in linear fashion – we might not quite see the Spirit work with perfect clarity but at least we get to put the meta-story down and take a breather. In that moment of exhale, can we catch a glimpse of the Holy?

Bishop Taylor’s words from a few years back have stayed with me. We have no idea what the Holy Spirit is doing.  A church isn’t one story; it’s many hundreds or even thousands of stories that could never be captured with a simple metric or even an overarching story line.

What’s your real story? Perhaps if  you can look past the noise of the present church anxiety, you might catch a restorative glimpse of the Holy Spirit, doing her thing, not thinking about church metrics and not caring overmuch, either.

Sometimes the news isn’t good.   Sometimes negative trends that seem anomalous at first harden with time.  When that happens, how do we learn from bad bad news without  being crushed by it?

Feedback loops are vital to healthy churches. Changes in things like attendance and giving have something to teach us, if we listen.  But those lessons are often layered and opaque, and if we file them too quickly into hard categories we might drain the bad news of its potential for transformation.

Last week the Episcopal Church’s statistics for 2017 revealed that as a church we continue a numerical decline. Though every church is different, last year ECUSA saw about 2.5% overall decline in attendance. Over 10 years the drop has been about 25%. Ouch.

How do we take news like that seriously without being crushed by it?  Does acknowledging bad news foreclose on the possibility of something new happening?

I think we have to take bad news seriously, but do so without panicking. Deficits and empty pews can be painful but they can also be great teachers. Without question, cultural and demographic changes beyond our doors loom large. But our current contraction speaks also of our own reluctance, over generations, to receive mildly painful feedback and to do something about it in a timely manner.

Now the snowball has grown and we want to melt the ice, but we can’t do it all at once. It took several generations to get to this place. I expect it will take us a good number of years to get back out of it. It will take patience, but also a bit more practice in finding the medicine at the heart of bad news.

We can start by learning how to absorb painful feedback without getting into blame, defensiveness or denial.  I like what Pema Chodran says about dealing with hard things: when faced with uncertainty, don’t indulge your fears and anxieties but don’t repress them either. Somewhere in between those paths are a productive way to start anew.

The changes are real, and in many ways have been painful. The temptation to wish them away has probably accelerated the loss; it is simply not true to suggest that “we are doing fine.” Yet it’s not true that “we are dying” either. Neither story is the whole story,  yet each has something to teach.

Even the grimmest read of these statistics tells us that the 75% of us who are still here (actually, many of those are newly here and pretty excited about it) can be the foundation of renewed church, if we can have the courage to hear and respond to some difficult news along the way.