At the conference I attended last week Bishop Willimon said something that I have always thought, but didn’t know exactly how to express. He attributed this thought to someone else, but I didn’t write down who it was. He said that every pastor has a size of church in their being. That is, if you assign a pastor who is a 400 member pastor to an 800 member church, then pretty soon they will be the pastor of a 400 member church. They will lose 400 members because that is not who they are as a pastor and they do not have the gifts and graces necessary to pastor a church that size. On the flip side, if you appoint a 1000 member pastor to a 400 member church pretty soon they will have 1000 members. They will naturally increase their church to that size.
Like I said, I had always thought of something like this but didn’t have the words to express this. Now do I think this is an absolute rule? Of course not. There have to be some exceptions. I don’t think that Adam Hamilton thought of himself as an 18,000 member pastor. Plus I think that some people can learn to the skills necessary to pastor an ever expanding church population.
Now what Bishop Willimon was talking about when discussing this was right-sizing the church, being honest about where we are, what our numbers truly are and what they represent and for cabinets to actually place ministers in the places that are best for the church and best for them. The respective cabinets will have to do a lot of work before this could ever take place because appointments are made for many different reasons and strategic deployment of clergy to the right church is not always the reason why people are appointed where they are.
I have to say that no one in the process, from the district committee, to the Board of Ordination to the district superintendent has ever asked me what type or size of church I think I am being called to serve. I wonder what most people’s answers would be? I think eventually people would try and scam the system and say “oh of course I want to be a pastor of a 500 member church” (which would be among the largest churches in New England), when in fact they are a clergy member for a 40 member church.
Now let me say I love the small church. There is nothing wrong with a 40 member church, as long as they are being church, which is another conversation. But should they be getting an inordinate amount of support from the conference? Should they have a full-time clergy appointed? The simple answer is no. Now they might be appointed a 200 member clergy with the hope of growing their church. But for many of these churches, they have no desire to grow, which is the issue of whether they are truly being a church or not, and so they should get a 40 member pastor to guide them, to hospice them as it were.
I honestly think that is where most of the clergy are today, they are small church pastors. In looking at many of the new congregations we are creating we are simply replicating the typical New England Methodist church. They get up and running and hit about 40-60 in average attendance and that is where they stop. Now in many ways this shouldn’t be surprising because, again, this is all that most pastors know. They probably attended a small membership church, they did their internship at a small membership church, and they were first appointed to a small membership church (or churches). They have never been taught to do anything different, and many have no vision for creating bigger and even when they do have the vision they don’t have the skills to take the steps, and in many areas they do not even have examples to look at to follow.
So here is my radical idea. Everyone at all levels of the church should begin asking clergy what type of church they are called to serve and then try and train them to meet the needs of that type of church, and then give them opportunities to match their call. A pastor’s fruit will tell you what type size of orchard they should be tending. God calls people to do different things, and so we need to recognize that in our education and in our appointments.
What would it look like if we set up internship programs and sent young clergy to the largest churches in the conference to serve for a year and see how they operate? Or even in some cases sent them out of the conference to other areas of the country so they can witness even larger churches and then bring back that information to this conference. These interns would need to be sent strategically and carefully chosen, we cannot pick people merely because they are the ones who are best at making friends and brown-nosing the system, which of how it often appears now.
Personally I believe that I would be best and most fulfilled in a church of about 1000 in average attendance. (Of course I could be wrong, but that is what is in my head) There are no United Methodist churches in New England that even meet that criteria and so I have to look elsewhere for guidance, learning and mentoring. And for those in my local congregation I do believe that we could grow to that place.
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