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The Future of The United Methodist Church

Seven Vision Pathways

Abingdon Press

Focus Area 1: People

Creating New Places for New People by Starting Congregations and Renewing Existing Ones

The United Methodist Church in the United States has more than thirty-four thousand congregations. An additional twelve thousand congregations are in Africa, Europe, and Asia. While many of these are missionally fruitful and growing in membership and service, others are stagnant or dying. The decline of United Methodism in the United States may be in part because of a lack of focus on our mission of making disciples of Jesus Christ for the transformation of the world. It may also mean that we need to respond more nimbly and effectively to changing population trends. Our church and its leaders are engaging in serious conversations about transforming existing congregations and starting new ones. One of the mantras bishops often repeat to one another is that we need MP3: more people, more young people, and more diverse people.

A team of leaders with the shared vision of starting new congregations has been named "Path 1." The work of this general church team can be engaged at http://www.path1.org/. Path 1 is working to start churches for all ethnic groups in the United States. They have set ambitious goals.

The work of starting new congregations takes place primarily at the annual conference and district level. This path will lead to a new culture in our church where neighboring local churches celebrate new congregations, where talented pastors volunteer to be considered as new church start pastors, and where pastors of large churches are committed to leading their congregations to become parents of new churches. We have made enormous progress already in knowing how best to start new churches. The strengthening network of annual conference new church development staff persons, the use of New Church Leadership Institutes, the recruiting of new church-start pastors, and a growing knowledge base of best practices all have helped us do a better job of reaching unchurched people.

We are also committed to strengthening the ministry of our existing congregations. We have tremendous assets—there are United Methodist congregations in more than 95 percent of the counties in the United States. Many of them have great facilities, wonderful people, and a powerful history of witness to the reign of God. Some of these churches are growing and have vibrant, missionary cultures. But too many of them are declining. In some conferences, almost half of the churches receive no persons by profession of faith in a given year. For each of those local churches, that probably means there is not even a confirmation class held! In many of our churches, members are of an average age far higher than the average age of those individuals in the communities in which the churches are located. In a time of changing demographics, many of our churches fail to reach or provide ministry to persons of different ethnic groups that are now in the neighborhood or community.

Transformation of an existing church is hard work that is only done with committed lay and clergy leadership willing to change. Why would anyone go through that difficult process? They do it because they are committed to the mission of making disciples of Jesus Christ for the transformation of the world, and they know that fruitful ministry in a changed situation means a different kind of ministry from the one done in 1970.

The chapters by Bishops Lindsey Davis and Robert Schnase exemplify the kinds of conversations taking place within our church about these matters.

PATH 1

Planting New Congregations

G. Lindsey Davis

On an early spring Sunday morning, my wife and I attended worship at one of the recently planted churches in the North Georgia Conference. The church was meeting at a school in the suburbs of Atlanta. I was overdressed in my coat and tie. When we entered the school cafeteria, which had been converted temporarily into sacred worship space, a young couple enthusiastically greeted us and asked if we wanted earplugs. They confided that the music was high energy and high volume. We declined (which we later regretted) and soon the service began. There were more than two hundred worshipers in a congregation not yet one year old. I was deeply encouraged that morning for a variety of reasons.

• Most of the people in worship were under forty. In fact, at least 75 percent were under forty—just the opposite of what I usually see in our United Methodist churches. Children and teenagers were everywhere. Young adults were leading and serving.

• Many of the people did not look like me. The crowd was culturally and racially diverse and mingled naturally with one another.

• The preaching was engaging, biblical, thoughtful, and Wesleyan. The sermon touched my heart and my head. My heart was warmed and my mind was stretched.

• The mission outreach of the church was highlighted. Without a building of its own, the church had already organized itself in a way that would hopefully affect and transform its community and the world.

• The church was a hospitable place—signs of encouragement were everywhere. It was clearly a church where people could be accepted the way they were, yet challenged to change and grow spiritually. Two new Christians were baptized that morning and welcomed with great joy into the community of faith.

This experience is being repeated over and over again in new United Methodist churches across America. It is exactly what the Council of Bishops intended when we began to focus on new church development. Subsequently, "creating new places for new people" became one of the Four Areas of Focus celebrated and affirmed by the 2008 General Conference. Clearly reaching out to the more than 195 million unchurched people in the United States must be a priority again for us. In fact, many of us believe it is the number one priority.

In 2005, the Council of Bishops asked me to convene a group of persons who had a passion for planting new churches. The invitation went to a broad cross section of leaders in our church. At the same time, the Network of Annual Conference Church Developers had been working on a plan for a national strategy to plant new churches. From these humble beginnings evolved a group called Path 1. Path 1 is a unique collaboration of church planters, directors of congregational development, bishops, and staff of our general agencies. Its purpose is to provide leadership and to develop creative partnerships across the church, focusing on reevangelizing the United States by developing a national plan for training and supporting new church planters. With significant start-up funding now provided by the General Conference, Path 1 has established an ambitious goal for 2012: to recruit, train, and provide resources for one thousand new church planters to start 650 churches in partnership with annual conferences in the United States, targeting 50 percent of those churches to be racially and ethnically diverse congregations.

A complementary emphasis for planting four hundred new churches outside the United States is being led by the General Board of Global Ministries. The "400 Program" has already received a $400,000 special gift and is moving forward.

The General Board of Discipleship has supported Path 1 administratively, and much progress has already been made by the Path 1 team with significant participation of many skilled persons throughout our denomination.

In order for the Path 1 team to achieve its goals, we must establish a culture of starting new churches. This new culture will gradually replace our current culture of maintenance and decline. Such a culture does exist in many conferences outside the United States. For example, the United Methodist Church in the Philippines has experienced rapid growth in the past three decades in large part because of the vision cast by Bishop Emerito Nacpil. He decided that all pastors should plant a new church. And so over the past twenty-five years more than seven hundred new congregations have been started, resulting in thousands of new Christians plus the establishment of five new annual conferences.

In the 1980s, Bishop Ernest Fitzgerald of North Georgia established an office of church development and launched a comprehensive new church planting program. Since 1990, the North Georgia Conference has started more than one hundred new churches, resulting in a net growth of more than sixty thousand people. The newly formed churches accounted directly for eighteen thousand of those new members and indirectly influenced surrounding congregations to adopt strategies that would invite, welcome, and nurture the unchurched into the body of Christ. In North Georgia, half of the new churches were designed to reach ethnic minority and new immigrant groups, mainly Hispanic and Korean.

Other annual conferences in the United States have had similar results. The North Carolina, Alabama-West Florida, and Arkansas areas have been noteworthy in creating a culture where planting new churches has become the number one priority. The Path 1 team seeks to build on the effective experience and best practices of these areas to develop a national strategy and culture.

Although these conference examples provide us some encouragement, the current reality of our church is not positive. We are losing fifteen hundred members each week in the United States. Our decline contributes directly to the growing unchurched population in this nation. The United States is now the third largest mission field in the English-speaking world.

One of our fundamental mistakes is that we have stopped following the people. Since World War II, the population of the United States has been shifting to places where our churches have not been established. Although all five regional jurisdictions of our church will experience some population growth in the next twenty-five years, most of the growth will occur in the Southeast, South Central, and Western Jurisdictions. Some states will grow more than 50 percent above the national rate—Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Nevada, North Carolina, Oregon, Alaska, Texas, Utah, Washington, and Wyoming. Others will be above the national rate—California, Colorado, Tennessee, South Carolina, Virginia, and Maryland. These are the places where we must concentrate much of our church-planting effort.

Our other basic mistake has been to focus on reaching new people by concentrating on renewing existing congregations. Trying to reach unchurched people only by improving the outreach ministries of existing congregations has not worked and actually has been devastating for United Methodism. The only way we will reach the unchurched is by planting new churches where the people are.

There was a time in our denominational history when we planted an average of one new church each day. In recent decades we have started fewer than one hundred a year. There are other disturbing facts.

• In the five hundred fastest growing counties of the United States, total United Methodist membership has declined. As people have moved to urban areas, we have not moved with them, choosing to depend on the churches already established in those cities rather than plant new ones.

• Our church membership is aging rapidly, and the average age of our clergy is now fifty-six. Young people are not being attracted to our churches or to the ordained ministry.

• Our churches generally lack the cultural and racial diversity so common in the population. We have allowed our church to become middle- and upper-middle class, and the working poor are not well represented in our congregations.

In short, we have been neglecting our call to make disciples for the transformation of the world. But we can change, and a key part of that change will be the planting of new churches. We must reclaim the evangelistic commitment of our Wesleyan heritage. Lovett H. Weems Jr. says it well: "The Wesleyan movement became a powerful spiritual force in America by going where the people were. The movement did not exist to serve churches.... The movement did not exist to serve the ordained.... It was a passion and urgency for all to know God's love revealed in Jesus Christ that propelled this movement of God, against all odds, to every corner of a vast nation" (Lovett H. Weems Jr., Leadership in the Wesleyan Spirit [Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1999], 32–33).

So as Path 1 has been leading this pathway as one of the Four Areas of Focus, what have we been learning together? Here are six vital lessons.

First, we must invest in leadership. The most important factor in successful church planting is a leader who can mobilize people into a vital, new faith community. Leadership is more important than money or property. The United Methodist Church must develop a new generation of church planters. The work of Jim Griffith of the Griffith Coaching Network has guided Path 1 in seeing the need for recruiting, assessing, training, and deploying high-quality leaders for our new church plants. He cautions us that "most of the prospective planters with whom we have worked have been nice people who wanted to serve God in a meaningful way—people of seemingly good character who were serious about their faith.... [But] church planting requires behaviors and skills that are different from those needed by pastors of existing churches" (Jim Griffith and Don Nations, "Recruitment, Assessment, Training, and Deployment of Church Planters" in The Congregational Development Manual [Nashville: General Board of Discipleship], 22). What are these characteristics?

A church planter is

• a person with a deep, abiding faith in Jesus Christ made manifest in a passion for evangelism. An effective church planter understands that evangelism is not just one among many functions of the church. It is the core—the heart of what we are called to be and do. Evangelism is the essence of Christianity because our faith is intended to be given away. Our sole purpose is to embrace the lost and love them into the kingdom of God. In fact, actually believing that people without an intimate relationship with Jesus Christ are lost is foundational for church planters.

A church planter is

• a flexible, creative person who is not afraid to take risks—a vision caster who is not fearful. A church planter has a sense of urgency about the mission of the church and is able to develop a plan for the future of the new congregation. He or she is able to articulately communicate the plan and build something from nothing. A church planter must be able to self-start and manage his or her time without direct supervision. Such pioneering ministry requires an entrepreneurial spirit. Paul M. Verrochi reminds us that "entrepreneurs don't march left, right, left. They march left, left, right, right, skip, hop, skip." Willingness to take risks because God has called them to do so is a core characteristic of effective church planters.

A church planter is

• someone who is able to build and maintain strong, trusting relationships with diverse persons, especially those under the age of thirty-five. She or he must have demonstrated by past experience the ability to recruit and train people to work on a team approach to ministry.

Stephen M. R. Covey writes about the importance of trust: "Trust impacts us 24/7, 365 days a year. It undergirds and affects the quality of every relationship, every communication.... Trust is not some soft, illusive quality that you either have or don't; rather, trust is a pragmatic, tangible, actionable asset that you can create" (Stephen M. R. Covey, The Speed of Trust [New York: Free Press], 1). Covey goes on to detail the behaviors that build trust in an organization (church), such as straight talk, transparency, delivering results, accountability, and keeping our promises. Church planters must be constantly building cohesiveness within the congregation, helping the new church adapt to changing circumstances, managing the inevitable conflicts that emerge, and keeping everyone moving toward the common vision. Staying on the same path will not happen without a high level of trust. Trust is extremely important with younger generations and those who come from an unchurched background. New persons will not stay in a situation they perceive to be lacking in trust.

A church planter must be a competent person with a proven track record of producing results. Three basic competencies are critical.

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Excerpted from The Future of The United Methodist Church by Scott J. Jones, Bruce R. Ough. Copyright © 2010 Abingdon Press. Excerpted by permission of Abingdon Press.
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