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Holy Week resources and reflections

Church development on parallel tracks

I I was discussing membership development strategy with a client, when it occurred to me she wanted a single strategy.

 

If her longtime members could just open their circles to embrace younger constituents and prospects, everything would work out.

 

Not likely, I told her.

 

First, I think it is unrealistic to expect longtime members to expand the friendship circles that make church such a joy to them. Why should they? They were raised to value circles of familiarity and shared values that reconnected each Sunday at worship.

 

Second, I don’t think younger adults are at all interested in breaking into those friendship circles. Why should they be? Their world is one of networking with people like themselves — much of it centered around work, technology and socializing. Chatting at Sunday coffee hour means little to them.

 

Instead of seeking a single strategy, we should think of “parallel development.” By that I mean seeking multiple development strategies that serve different cohorts and co-exist under an umbrella managed by a single leader or leadership team. Not just different activities, but entirely different strategies, expressing different styles, targeting different constituencies, and even expressing different values.

 

Instead of pressuring older constituents to welcome younger adults to “their” church, each cohort finds its unique circles of friendship, sources of inspiration, missions and purposes, and leaders.

 

Community leaders acknowledge each cohort as having value, and they don’t expect conformity to a single paradigm. Leaders enforce basic norms like tolerance that enable diverse people to learn from each other even as they remain separate and unique.

 

It won’t be like yesterday’s Sunday worship, when all different strands of church life came together in a visible way. In parallel development, groups won’t see each other, as worship plays a less unifying all-together-now role. They won’t necessarily know each other, although vehicles will exist to facilitate mutual awareness. If there is competition among groups — for space, for human resources, for budget — those will be worked out in top-level leadership, not in a showdown between older and younger.

 

This is the way mature institutions already behave. In a university, for example, people assume that different academic disciplines can coexist, as long as some overarching values like academic rigor are observed by all. In a healthy company, some departments rarely intersect, except at the umbrella-maintenance level where chief executives and boards operate.

 

In fact, the church might be the only institution that expects to function as a single family. It’s time we let go of that expectation, because it is holding us back.

 

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Better to have multiple “channels,” as we call them, all working toward similar objectives such as knowing God and transforming lives, but each functioning in its own ways. Stop trying to force “oneness” out of disparate constituencies, but allow oneness to emerge as grace and shared mission make possible.

 

Parallel development could also ratchet down power struggles. The key to its success is that it is win-win. One cohort need not lose what it values so that other cohorts can enter.



TOM EHRICH is a writer, church consultant and Episcopal priest based in New York. He is a founder of the Church Wellness Project. His Web site is morningwalkmedia.com.





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