Some sobering words from Tom Bandy of Easum Bandy & Associates. Bandy was over here in July last year, at conferences organised by the Uniting Church in Australia.
Judicatory Decline
A long time ago I wrote about the “tornado of church decline” (Kicking Habits, Coming Clean). I think it is not hard to extrapolate a “tornado of denominational judicatory decline”.
a) It starts with a sudden recognition that something is “wrong” (membership is down, median age is high, whatever). A lot of money and time is spent surveying the members and looking inward.
b) The judicatory immediately leaps to the conclusion that more information and better internal communication is necessary … so the mailings triple and the meetings increase.
c) Everyone decides that youth and children’s ministries will be the solution .. so the judicatory hires staff, sponsors workshops, develops curriculae, and saves the camping ministry. It doesn’t work. So they lay off staff, cancel the workshops, sell the camps.
d) Controlling factions move into the declining leadership pool, claiming that their particular agenda will save the church and the world … and the politics of the judicatory gets heats up.
e) The judicatory decides that evangelism is the answer and form a task group … but it really is about membership recruitment and not evangelism. This is usually the point where the judicatory gets a new marketing slogan.
f) By this time, healthy people have begun to bail out, and the dysfunctional leaders emerge. They try to shape the judicatory and congregational life around their personal lifestyles, tastes, and doctrinal perspectives. The politics of the judicatory gets vicious. Staff are now fired and escorted to the door by security.
g) The dysfunctional leaders clamp down on chaos “for the good of the church”. They ban controversial debate from meetings, hire more personnel officers, madly do conflict resolution, and multiply the oversight of the denomination over clergy and lay leaders. Categories for certification for church leadership mushroom. By this time, it will be almost impossible to get out of the tornado.
h) Financial contributions to support the judicatory budget plunge. Staff are required to make five year budgets, but financial predictions never last a year. Programs are cut. The old networks for communicating and resourcing churches and clergy of the region break down. Congregations become isolated and begin to realize they are on their own.
i) Image is now everything. Slogans and logos become common. The judicatory hires a media coordinator. Annual meetings now become little more than fellowship gatherings for mutual support.
j) Burnout becomes rampant. Clergy leave. Laity leave. Churches are closed and merged. The judicatory is merged with a bigger one. The denomination tries to camouflage decline by redefining membership, and by naming the acquisition of ethnic minority churches as “church planting”.
It’s a sad story, the tornado of decline.
Response
Well what do you do after reading that? I work for a ‘judicatory’ – the Queensland Synod of the Uniting Church. There are times when I feel like giving up, going back into congregational ministry or perhaps just getting out of the whole thing and retraining in something else. And then there are times when it seems as though key denominational leaders start to show some sanity and clarity.
What’s clear to me is that vitality and growth are most likely to occur from the ground up, when encouraged by coaching and networking rather than control and red tape.
I’ve been in a church where something similar to this took place. It’s completely draining and sucks all joy out of the ministry. My personal observation is that these things start declining when people put their opinions and desires before those of others and become self-centered in “their” church. We must remember that the church has never belonged to us — it is entrusted to us by God, the rightful head of the church. If a chuch staff can honestly and sincerely seek the Lord’s direction and be willing to give up their preferences for the sake of His ministry, churches would be a lot better off. But of course, that assumes a certian level of spiritual maturity, which is an entirely different issue.
Thanks for the thoughts man!
That’s a fairly lucid description that I’ve seen happen before and to a certain extent at the moment. Not just denominations or individual churches but also things like theological colleges and service clubs.
It’s also pretty “dangerous” to stand up and say the Emperor’s wearing no clothes too.