I can't stand to listen to the news these days. I read Letters from an American, and a few news articles that come to my email, but in the car I've started listening to podcasts. My work is about an hour a way, so I get to hear a wide variety of things! It was an episode of Hidden Brain that got me thinking about today's blog. (Link to Hidden Brain is below.)
Pivot Point
Is your church at a pivot point? This is when the world is clearly different than it was, and you choose to change your approach. I've personally had several pivot points in my ministry--when I served my first parish and realized that many churches need to close, when I served my present parish and realized that many very tiny churches need to do what they can to stay open. They are needed to be the voice of progressive Christianity in an otherwise conservative town.
Your church may have reached a pivot point during covid. You added online worship or started sending print bulletins to some parishioners or used a radio-system for parking lot worship. If those new things are now part of your ordinary ways of being, you pivoted! Congratulations.
Not all pivot points are dramatic. The slow decline of white mainline churches has progressed over decades. Some congregations recognized this and have pivoted to a more externally focused ministry. The turn to lay-lead congregations, the use of yoked, collaborating, and merged congregations is sometimes a result of recognizing the need to pivot. But most congregations continue the same as they were in 1956 (to pick a completely random year.)
We are at a pivot point, and your church can choose to turn, or not. The large majority of German churches chose unity and safety by staying the same during World War II; some suggest that is why there is very little church in Europe now. The large majority of white U.S. congregations chose unity and safety rather than take a stand during the civil rights movement; perhaps that is why we remain so segregated on Sunday mornings.
Sometime in the future people will look back and ask why more churches didn't pivot during this period. Some of it is anxiety, fear, an unwillingness to take risks. I think that experts will underestimate how much of our inaction is because we don't know what to do. I think the reality is that pivoting can save us, but it can kill us, also. We want to figure out a new path that is successful.
Unfortunately, that is not a choice. We can't know before we get there whether a new path head to new life or to the end of ministry.
All we can know is whether we are doing, and will do, Christ's work in the world. In Frozen II the message is to always do the next right thing. When faced with impossible odds, do the small step that seems to do the most good. The podcast Hidden Brain identifies that the most important thing is to focus on the problem at hand more than on your particular solutions. For example, if you have a food pantry, remember the goal isn't to have a food pantry -- it is to get food to people who need it. With federal workers and contractors losing their jobs, you may need to find a new way to solve that problem.
The image of pivot seems to imply a turn-around of 180º, or even 270º, and often that is exactly what it means. But in this time of cultural chaos, our pivot might be to focus more intentionally on a ministry we are already doing. To simply be a place that people can talk about their fears. To be more public in a welcome that we have always cared about. We might be making a turn of 15º or 30º. The next right thing might be to show up at a protest someone else has organized. To hang a pride flag at our food pantry. To organize an evening making phone calls to elected leadership. To deliver food or household goods or words of support to immigrants.
As you consider big changes or small, the question is not, how can we survive, rather it is how can we proclaim good news. The pivot is from good news to good news. A different form, a changed platform, new priorities, and yet always that the Kingdom of God is at hand. We are forgiven. Love our enemies and our neighbors. Trust God. Care for the least of these, for they are our savior and our brother, Jesus, the Christ.
What is your church doing, or thinking about doing these days? What is hard about where you are now? What is keeping your congregation from pivoting?
Just reply to this email to let me know what's happening.
Hidden Brain is an NPR podcast and just did an episode on business pivoting--or not. It isn't about church, but is an interesting discussion of how to know when it is time to adapt to a new environment.
Here is a Lenten Study about White Christian Nationalism, offered on Zoom. Our congregation's need to understand this theology well enough to reject it.
We camped next to Naked Pastor, a pastor turned artist, at the last Wild Goose Festival. His cartoons always make me stop and think and then they hit the spot. He seems to have pivoted to be more forceful in his support of trans people and I appreciate that.
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