What Do We Have to Let Go of When We Want to Hold Hands?

I will admit that I don’t know if this story is true, and I’ll confess that I didn’t try to find out because it’s such a good story. So let me just say that this is what I’ve heard.  There was an experiment done in which some fish were put into a small tank that was then put within a larger tank.  The fish could see the larger space around them, yet were confined to a much more limited existence.  They were left this way for a while and, as far as we can know what fish are thinking, they grew used to it.  And then the scientists removed the smaller tank so that the fish now had unlimited access to the entirety of their environment.  And yet – again, so I’ve heard – the fish never did swim beyond what had been the boundaries of their smaller tank.  They had, apparently, internalized the limitations that they had learned and simply were not able to move beyond them.

We just recognized and honored the choice of several members of our community to formalize their membership.  I, personally, struggle with the right words here, because I believe that a person can absolutely be a member of this community as soon as they walk through those doors and decide to come back again.  From this perspective, being a member (lower case “m”) has to do with involvement, engagement, connection.  From this perspective there are lots of folks who are members of TJMC even though they’ve never signed the membership book. 

At the same time, though, there is something important in taking the step to formalize that membership.  That’s the reason I generally discourage people from doing so right away.  I think it should be the response to our involvement and not the doorway to it.  And I think it’s a decision not to be made lightly, because afterward things will be different in some perhaps imperceptible yet really important ways. 

I remember my mother telling my older brother on his wedding day that there would be something different after the wedding – maybe even only subtly different – even though he’d already lived with his bride-to-be for several years.  Pat pooh poohed it, of course, but during the reception he came up to her and told her that she’d been right.  He couldn’t quite put his finger on it, but something was different now that they’d formalized their relationship in this way.

I remember, too, the phone call I got – years ago now – from a woman who’d just signed the membership book that morning.  She called because she wanted to tell me right away about something strange that she’d noticed.  This was a woman who’d been a part of that congregation for a while and who was almost evangelical in her sharing of the wonderful community she’d found.  She’d tell her friends, “at the church I go to we’re doing this …,” or, “at the church I go to we’re doing that …”  She was always telling someone something our congregation was up to.  She called me that day to say that she’d been talking with someone about the church and realized that she had said, “at my church …”.  Something subtle had shifted in her when she took the step of formalizing her membership.  It was no longer simply “the church I go to;” it had become, for her, “my church.”

So, to those we recognize today for taking this step I want to say the two things I’ve always said when people make this choice.  First, congratulations – you’re joining yourself to a really wonderful community.  And second, thank you – because your presence here makes it more wonderful still.

And that’s really what I want to reflect on this morning:  the way new members – formal or more informal – change this community.  In one of our newcomer orientation sessions someone said that at the last congregation she’d attended the ordained minister would say that as soon as someone made the choice to become a regular attendee and participant it was as if they were handed a metaphoric paintbrush so that they, too, could add their colors and shapes to the mural that was constantly being created and recreated.  That’s a lovely image, isn’t it?  Yet there’s a dimension to it that most of us most likely would rather not think about.

I don’t know how many of you have ever worked with others on a free-form mural.  I know that when I’ve done this there are times when someone comes along after I’ve created some wonderful thing and they dare to change it.  My tree becomes their rocket; my sun becomes their flower.  Or I’ve got in my mind how to use a blank space over here, and someone else comes along and does their own thing in it.  And depending on my mood – especially depending on how seriously I’m taking it all – this can be really annoying.  Upsetting, even.  And, in keeping with this month’s theme, I’d have to say that it can be hard to … let go … of the plans I’d had when someone comes along with plans of their own.

This happens when we invite new members to grab a paintbrush and add their own artistic vision to our ongoing mural.  At least, it should.  It should change things if we who are already here are serious about really inviting new people to bring themselves, and be themselves, and offer themselves to this beloved community.  We who are already here are already doing the things, and doing them in the ways, that we’re already doing them.  One of the gifts, we say, of expanding our circle – as the choir so movingly sang last week – is that our common life becomes infused with the inspiration of “the new.”

And this will be especially true when we who are already here welcome in a greater diversity of people, which we say that we want to do.  Diversity speaks to difference, so the more diverse we become the more different we become.  At least, of course, if we really do mean it when we invite people to bring themselves, and be themselves, and share themselves.  Welcoming “diversity” means welcoming people who are in some way or other different than the majority of the people who are already here or, at least, the people who set the tone and establish the norms of how we behave toward one another.  And these different people will have – do have – different ways of seeing things, and doing things, and envisioning what ought to be done.

Speaking in generalities for a moment, the Eurocentric culture – which informs most of the world around us and, let’s face it, the world in here, too – tends to focus on the individual and our own personal growth.  Consciously or unconsciously, explicitly or implicitly, the question most commonly asked is, “What do I get out of this?  How will this assist me in reaching my own full potential?”  Bluntly said, “What’s in it for me?”

Communities of color – again, speaking in generalities – are more often focused on the community and the health and wellbeing of the whole.  “What do we need?  How can this build us up?  What’s in it for us?”  I’ve heard this described succinctly as the difference between an I culture and a we culture.

So as long as our community here is built around largely homogeneous Eurocentric norms, we’ll tend to focus on doing things, defining “success” by how well our own particular needs are being met, and essentially maintaining the status quo so that we, ourselves, can remain comfortable and feel “at home among like-minded people” (as is so often said). 

To the extent we’re serious about becoming a more multicultural place, to the extent we mean it when we say we’d like to see TJMC become more diverse, to the extent our talk about a wide and welcoming invitation to all people is genuine, there will be challenges to that comfort.  If this vision of a more diverse, more multicultural congregation begins to take hold, the “we” of this place will be increasingly comprised of people who come from cultures that are more interested in the being in relationship than the doing of things, who define success by how the whole community is being supported and strengthened rather than the individual, and who will want to see us being flexible and fluid so that we can readily change as the “we” of this place continues to  change.

Let’s look at another example of the potential clash of different cultures, this one more generational than racial.  We who are already here – we who have been here for a while, and know how things work because we’ve been the ones doing the work to keep things working –  we know that there is a natural progression which folks are expected to follow:   you come for a while and then get involved on one or another of our committees; you volunteer your time to a fundraiser or, as we sometimes call them, a funraiser; you eventually become a chair of a committee (or two), gradually increasing the level of your responsibility until you find yourself on the Leadership Development Committee, the Committee on the Ministry, or the Board – levels of leadership and service that have traditionally been reserved for those who have “put in their time” and have gained the respect, or are at least fairly well known by, the congregation as a whole.  And, of course, along with this is the expectation that we will support the church financially – through the weekly offering and our annual pledge – and that we will increase that support the longer we’re here and the more we get involved.

That’s the way things work.  Or at least, that’s the way things are supposed to work, and it’s darned frustrating that it doesn’t seem to be working that way anymore.  Frustrating and a little scary, because that’s the way things work and if things aren’t working that way any longer it won’t be too long until our whole church isn’t working any longer.

Yet more and more often there are people joining this community who don’t have these expectations, and not simply because they “haven’t learned how to do church yet,” as is sometimes said.  They don’t have these expectations because that isn’t the way they see the world.  I know I’m speaking in generalities again but folks who make up what’s called Generation X and the Millennial Generation usually have no interest in climbing the committee ladder like us Baby Boomers and Traditionalists. 

In fact, they have no interest in sitting on a committee in the first place.  They want to be up and moving and making a difference.  Committees?  Not so much.  Active task forces focusing on doing something real?  Much better.  Especially if their work can be done largely asynchronously so it can fit into an already tremendously full life.  Maybe even most shocking, they’re not all that interested in making sure that they’re doing things in accordance with the way things have been done before.  They’d rather do things in the ways that work best for the task at hand and the people who are doing it.  In fact, they tend not to be all that devoted to “the church,” per se – the church as a concept – and are really more motivated by the real relationships they form than they are by some abstraction like a mission statement or sense of “church identity.”

A truly multicultural community – the kind we who are already here keep saying that we want – is full of all kinds of diversity.  Generational diversity.  Racial and cultural diversity.  Economic diversity and diversity of educational background.  Diversity in mental health status, and physical ability.  Gender identity and expression.  Political and theological diversity.  Each of these, and so many others we could think of, require of all of us a letting go of our own expectations of who we are and how we are so that we can listen across and through the differences to see the world – and our part in it – in new ways.

It was so easy – if you’ll forgive my anthropomorphizing – for those fish to remain content to swim within the comfortable confines of what they’d always known.  And it is easy for we who are already here to want to be comfortable in what we’ve known – the in-jokes, the shared history that goes unspoken (except through glances and knowing smiles), the assumptions we make about the new person we meet (because we expect that they’ll be more or less like we are in terms of educational background and the experiences a certain economic status provide).  It is easy – and natural –  to want to be surrounded by “like-minded” people who reinforce our own world-view and who validate our experiences as normative.

It’s easy, but our Unitarian Universalist faith calls us to be people of letting go, and that means letting go of all these things, too.  As a monocultural institution – which, let’s be honest, this is – becomes a multicultural one, people with different world-views and different experiences become part of the mix and no single one can think of itself as normative anymore.  Yet letting go of these things doesn’t mean throwing them away, but simply letting go of our death grip on them so that, as we said earlier, our hands might be truly open to receiving, our minds truly open to learning, and our hearts truly open to loving. 


I will tell you this, when I reach out my hand to welcome a newcomer, I don’t want to be holding on to anything that will get in the way of my completely clasping theirs.  And in that spirit, and with that conviction, I want to welcome again those we honored earlier for their decision to formalize their membership here and say once more:  congratulations – you’re joining yourself to a really wonderful community, and thank you – because your presence here will make it more wonderful still.  I don’t know quite how yet; I can’t know quite how yet; but I can’t tell you how excited I am to find out.  So me it be of for us all.

Pax tecum,

RevWik

This is the sermon delivered in worship with the people of the Thomas Jefferson Memorial Church - Unitarian Universalist on Sunday, October 25th.  You can also listen to it, if you prefer.

The Member-less Church, part three

It is my understanding that my Viking ancestors had a two-fold concept of time. That Which Has Been included everything from the beginning of time up until this very moment. That Which Is Yet To Be included everything from this moment until the very end of time. This moment, then, could be viewed as either the culmination of everything that came before, or the jumping off point of everything that is to come. It’s with this later perspective that I began the discussion of “the member-less church.” It’s important to recognize that it is about the church that is and might yet be more than the church that was.

I’m guided by two other thoughts. In the business world there’s a saying that there are really only two questions: “What business are you in?” and “How’s business?” And then, of course, there’s the old aphorism, “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” Of course, the corollary to that, which usually remains unspoken, is, “If it is broke, do what you can to figure out why and then do whatever is needed to fix it.”

So . . . with that foundation . . . let’s look at the church today. (And by this I mean especially the liberal/progressive church and, perhaps most specifically, Unitarian Universalism.) By virtually every measure you can imagine the church, today, is broke. Attendance is down. Membership is down. Pledging is down. The number of people who say that the church is a major influence in their lives is down. In every major pole the fastest growing religious affiliation is, “none.”

Those of us who care about the church today – both our own individual congregation but also the greater concept of “church” – need to look at The Church Which Has Been and try to see what’s “broken” about it. We also need to imagine The Church Which Is Yet To Be and see what we have to do to get there.

Perhaps those two questions from the business world can help here. What “business” is the church in? Contrary to much of its appearance, the church is not in the “business” of maintaining and growing the church! The church is really in the transformation “business” – the transformation of individual lives and of society as a whole. To be more specific, a Unitarian Universalist church – and the movement writ large – is not in the “business” of building up Unitarian Universalist churches. It’s in the “business” of building up Unitarian Universalists – people who live out a Unitarian Universalist expression of the human impulse. The fact that so few of us have any idea what this means is proof enough that “business” is not all that good.

I’m the first one to admit that I don’t know – in any kind of definitive way – what is “broke” about the church today. I would certainly not claim to have The Answer about how to fix it. This will take, I think, a whole lot of experimentation on the part of actual congregations willing to try some new things, willing to try to behave like The Church Which Is Yet To Be (or how they imagine this church will behave). If enough of us do this, and compare notes on our experiences, we will, together, create this Future Church.

One thing I do believe – based on my own personal and professional experiences and observations – is that the Church Which Has Been is far too focused on institutional things. To be sure, an institution needs to pay some attention to institutional things, but without conscious and intentional choices to the contrary, the default emphasis will over time increasingly be on maintenance and, perhaps also, growth of the institution. If the church were a business, or a non-profit aid agency, or a school of some kind this might be alright. (Although even for these the question of “What is your business . . . really?” would come into play.) But for a church to be too focused on itself is . . . well . . . missing the point of church.

I wrote earlier about how we need to free ourselves from the idea of church as something that we go to to that of church as something that we are. This means that the church is not the institution; rather it is the relationships and activities of the people the institution exists to serve. I think that this is one of the key transitions needed to move from the Church Which Has Been to the Church Which Is Yet To Be.

And part of this transition – I think – will be doing away with the conceptual category of “member.”

What role does this concept of “member” play in the Church Which Has Been? As we’ve seen,

• It allows the congregation to measure its size (which assists in the figuring of its relationship with, and responsibility to, the wider movement);
• It creates clarity on who “owns” the church and, so, is vested with the responsibilities of leadership, voting, etc.;
• It provides a means of demonstrating one’s commitment to the institution.

And for the Church Which Has Been it has fulfilled these roles fairly well. The fact that there is often confusion between “official” members who are uninvolved and highly involved persons who are not members shows that it doesn’t fulfill these roles perfectly. But in the Church Which Is Yet To Be these will not be such important considerations.

This concept of membership begs the question – members of what? The institution! But in the Church Which Is Yet To Be the role of the institution will be much more clearly the support of individuals in community who are transforming their lives and the world. (Rather than the role of the individuals being the support of the institution as it, at least, so often feels today.)

• It won’t really matter how many “members” are in the institution but, rather, how involved people are in its transformative work (so we’ll count attendance and participation rather than “members”);
• It won’t really matter who “owns” the institution but, rather, who is “owned” by its mission (so we’ll rewrite our bylaws to say that decisions will be made by those most involved);
• It won’t really matter who is “in” and who is “out” but, rather, who’s lives are being transformed and who are active in transforming the world (so we’ll find other ways to mark people’s passage into deeper and deeper relationship with one another.)

This last points to one of the great gifts of doing away with “membership” as a category. When “becoming a member” is the ultimate expression of your relationship with the church, what comes next? “Membership” is a static category, unless you create a variety of permutations – “active member,” “inactive member,” “pledging friend,” etc. – and this variety dilutes the very attributes people ascribe to “membership.” If there need to be so many nuanced sub-categories, just what does “membership” mean, anyway? But if we do away with “membership” we are freed to be even more creative in identifying and celebrating the myriad of ways that people can be – and let’s face it, are – in relationship with the community. Each person can be honored for where she or he is, and people are free to move both into more deep and less deep relationship as the realities of their lives dictate. The Church Which Is Yet To Be recognizes and honors this natural ebb and flow in a way that’s just not possible in the Church Which Has Been.

As I’ve said, I don’t believe for a moment that I have all the answers. I don’t even claim with certainty that what I’ve written here is “true,” by which I mean that it will work as I think it will. But I do know that in order to survive the Church Which Has Been must transform into the Church Which Is Yet To Be. To do that will take courage, and creativity, and a willingness to experiment and see what happens. And I do believe that great things can come from this.

In Gassho,

RevWik

The Member-less Church, part two

So . . . I'm playing with this idea of "doing away with membership" in the church.  Let me be clear, though, before going on -- I am only talking about doing away with "membership" as a conceptual category.  I'm not suggesting that we somehow stop caring about whether or not people feel connected to the church, or have a sense of belonging.  I'm not even suggesting that we stop counting folks and trying to keep track of the "size" of the church.  I'm really only talking about how we think about things; the conceptual categories we use to identify and organize things.

That said, I promised on Monday to write today about some of the hurdles that would have to be overcome to move forward with this idea.  (On Friday I'll write about some of what I think would be the positives that would come from doing so.)  Whenever/wherever I've talked or written about this idea, the majority of the responses include one or more of the following objections.  Here's my attempt to address them:

The Unitarian Universalist Association assesses each congregation on a per-member basis when figuring out its "fair share" contribution to the work of the wider movement.  Seriously?  This is the reason that we should have the conceptual concept of "members" in our congregations?  Because the UUA uses this number as the basis of their formual for assesing "fair share" contributions?

How many congregations today play with their membership numbers in order to keep their APF -- that's Annual Program Fund -- contribution affordable?  (More than you'd imagine!)  And how many congregations that are trying to keep accurate records aren't able to pay the full APF amount?  (A lot!)  In essence, that means that they're not paying on a per-member basis anyway!

It has been suggested in the past -- in multiple venues -- that the UUA should move to a percentage-of-budget based formula for figuring APF contributions.  Suppose we asked all congregations to pay 4% of the budget to the UUA as their annual offering.  (Note, as an aside, that I've avoided calling these "dues."  They're not, really, or shouldn't be.  Just as our individual congregant's pledges aren't "dues."  But all of this is another post, I think.)  Or, to be more accurate, what if we asked congregations to figure out what percentage their current APF contribution is of their total budget and then they pay that from now on?  The UUA would still get its funds and we wouldn't be stuck with this "membership" category just so that it's easy on the institution.

Without "membership" even more people would slip throught he cracks than already do!  Again, seriously?  That seems like such an empty arguement.  If we agree that with the concept of membership we lose track of people and others drift away on their own, why do we assume that it'd be any different (better or worse?) without such a concept?  As has been noted elsewhere, in every congregation there are long-time participants who are not "members," and "members" who in no real way participate.  This arguement seems to me to suggest that we should be focusing our attention on "members" -- whether or not they participate -- because it's the "membership" category that matters most.

What if -- and I'm just throwing this out here -- it is the very concept of "members" and "non-members" that leads the institution to allow folks to fall through the cracks?  What if some new way of assessing a person's involvement with the congregation -- and vice versa -- is needed?

How would we know how successful we are?  I've never heard it put exactly this way, I'll admit, but I have heard it wondered how we would measure our growth if we do away with "membership."  I'll say again -- I'm not against keeping track of things, but "membership" is an extremely inefficient category to use for measuring things.  (Note the common experience mentioned above.)  Many congregations are moving to counting attendance at worship.  Some are discovering ways of measuring all involvement in all programs.  Doesn't this seem a more dynamic -- and accurate -- way of measuring the health and vitality of a congregation?

Congregations are legal entities and, so, must be able to show membership to retain their status.  Okay.  I'll buy this.  But I wonder what the minimum requirements are.  Would it be possible, for instance, to so-write your bylaws that anyone who is an officer of the church is, for legal purposes, a "member"?  The category -- which I maintain is truly problematic for a number of reasons I'll get to on Friday -- would be retained purely for legal reasons.  I'd imagine that each congregation would have to look into its own state's requirements, but I'm willing to bet that this seems like more a hurdle than it really is.

If we did away with membership, anyone could vote!  Well, yes.  That's true.  And I suppose that in some situations that might be problematic.  But I'd wager that in the vast majority of congregations the vast majority of the time it wouldn't matter at all.  Except, perhaps, it might increase the percentage of active participants in the community who are also involved in deciding matters related to that community.  Think of it, as it is today, in most of our congregations, only "members" can vote.  And how many of them turn out?  In most of our congregations it's a shamefully low percentage.  And then there are all those people who are active in the congregation but who, for one reason or another, have chosen not to "sign the membership book."  These folks are held inelegible to vote.  Why hold them back?  Really.  (Other than the fact that it's always been this way!) 

I mentioned in Monday's post a congregant in one of the churches I served who had been so deeply embedded in the life of the congregation that the vote for him to be President was unanimous and enthusiastic.  But he'd never joined the church as a "member"!  So he became a "member" for the duration of his term and, then, recinded his "membership" when his term was over.  And before and after this time he was not allowed to vote in congregational meetings while a great many people who had far, far less involvement with the congregation were, technically, permitted to do so.  Does this situation make any sense?

Membership is a reflection of an individual's commitment to the church.  Of all of the reasons I've heard that "we can't do away with membership" this is the only one that isn't instituionally based.  (Think about that for a minute.  Let it sink in.)  I have, myself, used this idea when talking to people about membership.  I've used the analogy of the difference between getting married and "just" living together -- it's an outward and visible symbol of that commitment, and one shared within the context of a community.  I get all that.  But is it the only way to show such commitment?  It is, certainly, the one with which we're most familiar, but as a ritual, as a symbol, does it really do what we think it's doing?  Again, if one can be an active participant in the community and not be a "member" and be a "member" with actively participating, what does "membership" actually mean?  (As opposed to what we think it means or say to one another that it means.)

Some of the Christian traditions use adult baptism as a way of marking a person's movement into deeper commitment and identity.  (Membership is recognized as merely an institutional necessity.)  What if we added adult naming ceremonies -- or some other ritual -- as a way of celebrating someone who wants to say "this is my community"?

I'm sure some of you can come up with other objections to the idea of "doing away with 'membership'," and some can come up with other responses to the objections I've explored here.  Please.  Let's get a conversation started.  I'll be back Friday.

In Gassho,

RevWik

The Member-less Church

I've found myself recently playing around and around in my head with an idea.  It's one that makes immense sense to me, yet I seem to be having a really hard time getting this idea out of my head and into others'! When I talk about it face to face with people -- or write about it here or on FaceBook -- the way people respond seems to me to suggest that I haven't sufficiently communicated the idea as it is in my mind.  Language -- especially when there's no body language or vocal inflection to help -- can be so difficult!!!


I'm looking at the "concept" of membership, the term itself, and noting that many, if not most, of our congregations pay a great deal of attention to it. How many members do we have? How can we get more members? How do we classify our membership (e.g., "members in good standing," and "friends," and "friends who pledge," and . . .)?

Along with this, of course, we all know that there are problems -- some very active, long-time participants in our congregations are not "members" while some "members" are hardly ever, if at all, involved. Some congregations try to keep down the number of "members" they have to keep their dues to the Association affordable. And many of today's post-modern folk are turned off to churches because of what they perceive to be the church's focus on "numbers" (i.e., how many members do we have/can we get?) Etc., etc.

What I'm doing is simply asking us to look at all of this with fresh eyes. What if we did away with the conceptual category of "membership"? Stopped using that word -- and all of the assumptions that go with it.  What if we stop asking "who's a member" and its corollary "who is not"? What if , instead, we focused on "involvement" or "participation"? This might be "only" a semantic or symbolic shift, but I think it'd be quite powerful.

We would now ask people to join our movement and get involved in ministries (to and with one another and the wider world). We would stop asking them to become "members" of a particular church. We'd put our energy into courting transformation, not counting people who've gone through a "new member" course.

What I'm trying to get at here is a shift from emphasizing the preservation and development of the institution to a focus on doing the work the institution was created to do.

Ironically, I think doing this would actually increase that which right now is called "membership."  Because now it wouldn't only be people who had achieved some institutionally sanctioned threshold who could think of themselves as "members."  The people who "only" attend the weekly meditation group could rightly think of themselves as belonging to the community.  (How many "members" attend worship each week?!?!?)  The people who "only" work in one of the social justice programs, or "only" attend Lifespan Faith Development programs could now be counted.  In fact, anyone who was involved in any way -- and this, by the way, could include people who were at a place where all they could do is receive from the church -- and who considered themselves to be part of the community would, indeed, be just that.

This would be different, all right, offering both gifts and challenges.  On Wednesday I'll take a look at some of the challenges.  On Friday I'll take a shot at explaining the gifts.
 
In Gassho,
 
RevWik

It Is Us

The church is not something that we go to;

It is something that we are.

As I wrote on Friday, most people would say that, on a conscious level at least, they realize that "the church" is not the same as "the church building."  There is a song that we used to sing at summer camp -- "I am the church.  You are the church.  We are the church together."  [(c) Avery & Marsh, 1972]  Most people would understand this to mean, "the church is the people," and would agree.

And yet, as I also noted on Friday, every time we say, "I'm going to church" we are unconsciously reinforcing this misunderstanding -- that church is a place to which we go.  Even if we're not actually talking about the building but, instead, the programs that're happening in that building, whenever we talking about "going to church" we reinforce the idea that church is something that we attend.

Yet if, as most people would agree, "the church" is "the people," then it's not something that they are doing and that we are attending.  It's us.  Together.  In community.  Church isn't someplace that we go; it's something that we are.

And it's important to note that it's something that we are.  You cannot be a church in isolation.  It takes community because, simply put, it is community.  A very special kind of community.  It's often called "the beloved community."  South African Archbishop Desmuod Tutu once said that church should be, "an audiovisual aid for the sake of the world,” showing how the world should be.  We are the church together.

And who is it, then, who makes up this church?  Actual institutional congregations often spend a fair amount of time and energy trying to quantify who is, and who is not, a member.  Sometimes this is for doctrinal reasons (they want to keep the heretics out); sometimes its for financial reasons (the denominational headquarters assesses annual dues on a per-person basis); and sometimes its for reasons of pride and self-identity (wanting to know if we're a "large church" or a "mid-sized church" or a "large mid-sized church.").  There may be a committee or even a paid staff person to keep track of the numbers.  There may be new member classes, or a workshop, or a special initiatory worship service.  There's often some kind of "membership book" in which are enscribed the names of the members.

Yet even with all of this attention congregations still wrestle with questions about membership.  Do we count the people who come to worship on (most) Sundays?  How about those who come but don't pledge financial support?  How about those who pledge financial support but don't come?  How about people who serve on lots of committees?  How about people who don't serve on any committees yet who seem to embody the spirit of the community in the way they live their daily lives?

In one of the congregations I served there was a bit of a kerfluffle at one of our annual meetings.  The vote had just been taken on our next president, and it was unanimous -- this guy was deeply embedded in the life of the church, he'd done so much, everyone knew him and respected him, he'd been there for years.  Yet it turned out that he wasn't a member.  He'd never "signed the book" in all of those years of active involvement.

Now, from my perspective, he was much more a true "member" of the church than some of the folks who were on the membership roles yet who rarely (if ever) darkened the door of the building in any way, shape, or form.  And it wasn't just that he came to church; it's that he was church.  His engagement -- it's quality -- was what identified him, signature in the book or not.

So . . . would it be possible for us to stop worrying so much about numbers and "categories of membership" and start focusing on active engagement?  The questions would become, then, instead of "who is a member?" -- who is actively involved in the ministries of our congregation, and who is being touched by them?

I would note, tieing this in to my last post, that it seems to me that the focus on "membership" (as we currently do it) stems from our focus on institutional conservation.  To let go of that would be to open ourselves to risk.  After all, without membership criteria anyone could show up and vote!  (Not really too big a worry when you consider the small percentage of members who actually show up to participate in annual meetings!)

A deeper issue is raised when you put this conversation in juxtaposition with those who want to create higher levels of expectation for members . . . essentially making it more challenging to become "a member" so as to deepen the meaning and significance a person attaches to her or his membership.  Yet if we define "member" as someone who is actively engaged in the ministries of the church -- or, perhaps even, being touched by them -- haven't we already done that?

And, too, there are those who say that we need to identify members so that we can take good care of them and keep track of them (especially as a congregation grows).  Yet again, it seems to me, that this focus on "members" will mean that we're counting some people who hardly belong, really, and not counting (perhaps) many who are deeply involved.  I suggest that we still keep track . . . of the actively involved.  (And I do believe that those who are in a place in which they can only receive are also actively involved -- they're involved in receiving!  That's why, above, I asked, "Who is involved in our ministries and who is being touched by them!"

I believe that if we begin to think this way we'll soon find that our congregations are actually much larger than we currently think they are.  We'll be more attractive to the "post-modern" crowd who are wary of joining things, wary of institutions, and wary, specifically, of the church in part because they think the church is only interested in increasing its members!

I've noted elsewhere that Jesus did not ask people to join his church; he asked them to follow.  An action.  And the early Jesus movement was called, simply, The Way.  Suggesting movement -- again, action.  The predominating view of membership -- conscious or not -- is that it is something that one attains or achieves.  It might well be time, again, for the church to remember that it's about engaging a Way, of being community together in the world, not just signing a book.

I look forward to the conversation that I hope this will engender.

In Gassho,

revWik