By Pastor Devlyn Brooks
How would you measure the vitality of a church?
Would it be by its financial outlook? Whether it’s meeting its monthly bottom line? Or would you measure a church’s vitality by the number of people who attend worship services? … Or yet again, maybe you’d measure the vitality by the number of students in the church’s Sunday school!
The truth is, depending upon who you ask, there could be any number of ways to measure the vitality of a church. … But, what shouldn’t be debatable is that it is important to stop and regularly gauge every church’s vitality.
And that is exactly what our Faith Lutheran Church council members have been doing over the past month: Reaching out to members to talk about the current state of our church’s vitality, and their dreams about our future.
Maybe you’ve already been approached by a member of our council who reached out to you. But if not, I would encourage you to personally reach out to one of our current council members and share your thoughts! … Now that’s being proactive!
OK, maybe I should back up a little, because if you didn’t hear me talk about this council effort in church earlier this month, then you might be in the dark.
Earlier in October I attended a pastoral retreat for first call pastors. During the retreat, there was a church vitality consultant that presented, and he led us through an exercise that measured our own personal perceived “satisfaction” and “energy” levels of the churches we serve. There were just shy of 30 parish pastors in the room, and I was shocked at the number of pastors who perceived their church’s “satisfaction” and “energy” levels as low. Some were even in the negative digits!
On my drive home from the retreat, the exercise got me wondering how our own council would score our congregation’s perceived “satisfaction” and “energy” levels. And so I led them through the same exercise. This sparked a 90-minute conversation among our council leaders at our October council meeting, and ultimately to a commitment by our council to engage our larger congregation to check in how people feel.
So, the council members committed to dividing up our contact lists of members, and then having conversations with our members about their feelings regarding their “satisfaction” and “energy” levels with our church. But our aim was to perform this task in a more conversational manner versus asking members to go through a similar workshop exercise like we did. I mean, after all, what fun is that when you can have a conversation with someone instead!
The goal of this initiative is to try to talk to as many of our members as possible before the Faith Lutheran Annual Meeting on Sunday, Dec. 11. It is our commitment as church leaders to present the data given to us by you members at the annual meeting so that it’s transparent for everyone to see. This is very important if we are going to be honest about our future at Faith Lutheran.
That’s why I encourage you to honestly open up to a council member. Because if we don’t know how the congregation is feeling, then it’s pretty difficult to plan for our future.
So, if a council member hasn’t contacted you yet, please reach out to one. Their contact information is included in this email. Or you can ask at church. It shouldn’t be hard to connect with a council member.
Faith Family, this is an important initiative. It’s no secret that the church experience is different across all mainline denominations, rural or urban, since the pre-pandemic days, and we here at Faith Lutheran are no exception. We see fewer in attendance at worship; there are fewer students in Sunday school; our committees could use some more volunteers. And so it’s important that we take this time to take inventory of our overall “satisfaction” and “energy” levels in our church.
We all love our Faith Lutheran! That is a given!
But it’s also important to have an open and honest conversation about where we are at at this given time in our history. After all, we can’t write the next chapter if we don’t know our members’ wishes! So please, take the time to talk with one of our council members! This might be the most important thing you do for our beloved Faith Lutheran this month!
Blessings to you!
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