Definition of a "good" Church

So my last post got me thinking:

What is the definition of a healthy church? What are the characteristics? What is the definition of an unhealthy church and what are those characteristics?

Should this be something that is also categorized in addition to an overall definition of health? I'm thinking along the lines of the picture of administrative health, leadership health, ministerial health, etc.

Why we do what we do

Your last post, Administration & Pastoring, has kept me thinking. I will forever get wrapped up in the business of ministry while neglecting to give thought or attention to the ministry of ministry. However, without the act of doing ministry, the business of ministry is entirely pointless. So the following is a public service announcement as to why I want to do ministry consulting. I'd also be interested in hearing the "why" behind your involvement; it always gives everything a deeper meaning to me if i know the "whys" behind things.

I've been around the church for my entire life. I've visited a multitude of churches and been involved in a good amount of those. What I find time and time again is that people in church leadership generally have good intentions, but ultimately struggle in how to bring their good intentions to fruition. In the end, the ministry is a mess and people who need real help never attain it.

I also have an unshakable belief that the church is very uniquely positioned to be a tremendous positive voice in society. Even with the bad reputation the church has secured for itself in today's society, it is still overpoweringly influential in individuals' lives, and individuals are indeed the people who make up this thing we call "society". Moreover, if the church actually built a very positive reputation for itself in the public view, it would be an even more potent influence over society and culture.

I want more than anything to see the church succeed because of these things. What other organization can so positively impact both an individual and an entire community? However, to maximize on this potential, churches have to be well-run. They absolutely cannot be a breeding ground for commitment to the mediocre, a stagnant attraction to the status quo. They must be inspirational, empowering, purposeful, smoothly operating.

The glaring deficiency in attaining this, in my experience, is on the side of administration and execution. Ministry has not been treated as a profession - it has been treated as a role that can be filled by any person with a big heart, charisma, and good speaking ability. I want to see churches move beyond this and professionalize what they do.

Why not be excellent at devising and executing strategy? Why not be excellent at leadership and developing people? Why not have a rampant intolerance for subpar performance? Are we not working for God Almighty? The Creator of the Universe? The Sovereign Lord? Then why do we give sorry attempts at truly carrying out His mission to help the poor, the sick, the lost, the needy, the orphaned, the widowed, the broken?

So anyway, that's my half rant / half discussion on why I'm doing this. Very simply, I want to see churches excel at ministering to people, and they can't do that if they are clueless as to how to run an organization.

Adminstration & Pastoring

One of the things that I have seen come up in our conversations several times is a sort of dichotomy between the real need for good administration and leadership in the church today vs the other real need for true pastoral care and spiritual formation.  For example, our conversation the other evening about training volunteers and my own lament of my youth ministry in Fresno revolved around these competing themes.  After some more consideration over the past few days, I have some other thoughts.  My first two years in Fresno was spent building 5 great volunteer leaders-- 2 females and 3 males.  These leaders were there faithfully each week but the two female leaders never could make the transition over to doing 1:1 meetings with the students which is what I wanted them to do.  The male leaders were much better at this although it still took them a while.  All but 1 moved on during the past 2.5 years and one of the female leaders that had difficulty in the beginning, I hired last spring to serve as a part-time intern.  All 5 leaders still have significant relationships with students in that youth group.  And I did leave the youth group last spring with my 1 volunteer who I had for all 4 years and then this intern.  As well during those 4 years, I continually created new avenues for intergenerational involvement and interaction to take place and placed emphasis on family ministry and getting a solid group of 4 parents who generally came to most events.  

Yet the ministry was still built around me-- my energy and thinking constantly feeding the system.  And this is absolutely needed and what the new guy failed at doing.  My energy and thinking unleashed others' energies and ideas.  The new guy's failure to take the reigns served as a way of putting all of these leaders at arm's length.  

My other thought was that even though good volunteers were developed, parents group formed, and intergenerational collaboration created, perhaps always creating an "understudy"-- someone you raise up to take over when you are finished-- is needed.  However, this seems to be somewhat problematic because I am probably not going to attract someone with a similar skill set that I possess.  My volunteers and interns were not people who the congregation of UPC would choose to serve as Director but served as great volunteers.  

Second, I continually wish that there would be more "pastors" in churches today-- individuals who take the task of 1:1 pastoral care, visitation, and spiritual direction seriously.  

The pastor-scholar is also needed-- pastors who can truly handle Scripture and theology in effective ways that address the issues of our times.  

So, I think we have three areas that need to be addressed in today's churches-- pastor as systems thinker and structural manager, pastor as care-provider and priest-comforter, and pastor as scholar-teacher and prophet-challenger.  These are all really important and perhaps provide us three areas that we can address in our consulting practice.

Definitions

I think it's time for us to define our terms. I'm working on the revisions to the survey and the terms we need for that are listed below. I'm curious to see how you define them and what you see is the general overview of each of their activities (as in what do they do). I have started my definitions, but I think it would be good for us to define them independently first, then collaboratively second. This way our definitions are not influenced by the other's ideas and we have a better shot at coming up with something unique.

Here are the terms that will help define some survey questions:

One-on-one professional ministry coach
Ministry consultancy (organization)
Ministry consultant (person)

Signficant Quotes

It will probably be helpful for our endeavor here to just record some quotes that allow us to react, opinionize, and explore.  As such, I am going to start with Dr. Andrew Root's book Revisiting Relational Youth Ministry:From a Strategy of Influence to a Theology ofIncarnation.  He starts with the obvious-- youth ministry is about relationships.  However, he believes that the church has had a modern idea of relationship in mind (self-chosen and constricted relationship with strings attached where teenagers are an object and goal) rather than the incarnational mode where we become a part of another's world.

In chapter 2, he begins to unpack the emergence of adolescence in the United States and how modernistic ideas of relationships supported this emergence.  Here is what he says on pages 42-44:

The common use of technical rationality and the slow decay of community and kinship structures of the family led to  new emphasis on the self-chosen relationship to proivde individual feelings of intimacy.  In a modernized world that undercuts tradition by allowing individuals to chose their own destinies, preexisting social units (like families, communities, tribes, ethnic groups, etc.) no longer have the power to determine social interactions and therefore provide intimacy.  Rather, in a modernized world the individual must negotiate all meaningful relationships on his or her own terms.  Where in the past people could not escape such social units, in  modernized world mobility and diversification allow people the freedom to individually choose friends and lovers.... Relationships are individually negotiated zones of shared intimacy.... In a modernized world, then, the self-chosen relationship the relationship cut free from all social obligations, became the road to intimacy.  Only in a modernized world can direct attention be given to self-chosen relationships, because only here is relational interconnection optional and open to selection.  Therefore, we could define the self-chosen relationship as the frightening freedom to individually negotiate and sustain all your significant relationships of meaning and identity.... The turn toward the self-chosen relationship in the middle decades of the twentieth century would have extensive ramifications on the adolescent population.

After WWII, society expected adolescents to participate in secondary education.  But the high schol functioned as much more than an educational institution, becoming rather a common institution for all citizens in a particular community.  Football games, plays and homecoming queens were of community-wide interest, providing a distinct identity in cookie-cutter suburbs throughout the country.  The influence of the high school also meant the expansion of teenage life.  No longer did adolescents enter into an exclusive peer culture only during the school hours; now the distinct world of the teenager was a twenty-four-hour commitment.  Sports practices, weekend dances and community hangouts made leaving the teen world impossible.  Adolescents became more than a stage of life, it was a way of life.

Here are some initial thoughts on my part: 1) If Christianity is also a way of life, then are there aspects of the "church", "baptism", and "eucharist" that challenge this adolescent way of life and the way of life of the modern self-chosen relationship?  2) If we are truly being incarnational, how will our pitching our tent among adolescents and this culture shift the way that we are "church" and minister?  3) What aspects of the old world of family and institutions do we need to push for a re-emergence and what aspects of this modern world do we just need to accept as a part of our current situation that won't change?

Eight Elements of a Biblical Worldview

Kinnaman and Lyons in their book unChristian outline the qualifiers for how they define a person to have a deeper faith (p75). These were the qualifiers they used in their study for which the book presents the findings; they found that people who believe these things live substantively different lives. The eight qualifiers that show a person to operate from a biblical worldview are that a person believes:

1. Jesus Christ lived a sinless life
2. God is the all-powerful and all-knowing Creator of the universe and he still rules it today
3. salvation is a gift from God and cannot be earned
4. Satan is real
5. a Christian has a responsibility to share his or her faith in Christ with other people
6. the Bible is accurate in all of the principles it teaches
7. unchanging moral truth exists
8. the moral truth is defined by the Bible

Questions:

1. To what degree do you feel these eight elements are taught in ministry settings, events, or books?
2. Discuss the validity and feasibility of using these eight elements as the basis for a curriculum plan.
3. In what ways could these elements be embedded into all aspects of ministry?

Problem: Lack of Volunteers

Situation: The leadership of West End Church describes their church as far too “staff driven” with a strong desire to become more “lay driven.” But they have historically struggled to recruit and train volunteers. They have tried soliciting help through the newsletter, the bulletin, e-mail messages, even begging during the Sunday services but the vast majority of volunteers continue to come from the small pool of faithfuls who have served for years. Often, those who do volunteer complain of being overloaded and burning out.

The youth ministry is no exception to this pattern. The short-term volunteers who served in the youth ministry couldn’t wait until the new youth director was hired, allowing them to step back from their volunteer work. Within months of his arrival, the new youth director realizes that all of his youth ministry volunteers have resigned, leaving the church with less hours invested in the ministry than before the staff person was hired. This youth director, a “kid magnet” filled with energy and creativity feels overwhelmed, recognizing that he now must not only minister creatively to youth but must build an organization at the same time.

When the youth director suggests to church leaders that some programs might need to be cut in order to give him the capacity to develop a volunteer team, he meets with strong resistance and well-meaning suggestions that he simply “learn to delegate.”

Questions:
1. What do you see as potentially being the root cause(s) of this situation?
2. What are some recommended solutions for this problem?
3. What processes should be set in place to prevent this from happening again?