Brian McLaren in Madison

I was very fortunate to be able to hear Brian McLaren speak in Madison, Wis., this past weekend. I could only stay for his first session, but DairyStateMom stayed for the whole day (and got some good quotes from the evening lecture).

In case it's of any interest, here's coverage of the event in Isthmus, Madison's alt-weekly newspaper.

Liberal Alternatives

I started this post some weeks back as a half-baked rumination by a non-clergy-person in response to a couple of posts by Christine Robinson. In the first of those, she suggests that

Most UU churches, it seems to me, benefit from being much more forthcoming about their denominational label.

Anyway, my post sat around in the drafts for some time, and now comes news that UU membership in the U.S. is continuing to contract. This offers what we in the news business call "a news peg" for moving this particular post forward.

I want to add one more wrinkle to the discussion.

Today people looking for a liberal, eclectic, non-doctrinal (or at least less-doctrinal) and progressive church experience may have choices besides joining a Unitarian Universalist church. They aren't everywhere, but the fact that they exist at all is intriguing to me.

They also exist on a spectrum.

At one end of that spectrum is a place like DairyStateMom's church. On the surface, it's a highly traditional Presbyterian church that is explicitly Christian in its practice and belief.

Yet parishioners with whom I've talked there talk quite openly about their own "spiritual journey" and an openness to "individual belief" there; the church institutionally is at the forefront of the efforts to open up Presbyterian ordination standards; and it is there that I've been introduced to the work of Marcus Borg and John Dominic Crossan, whose take on Jesus is certainly a radical departure from Christian orthodoxy.

The Easter sermon I heard there a few Sundays ago never sought to frame the resurrection in terms that had to be taken literally. And a year ago, the senior pastor focused her Easter sermon on Emily Dickinson's life story and her poem, "Hope is a Thing with Feathers."

I have said that, had I stumbled into a church like hers 30 years ago when I was unchurched and had not yet encountered Unitarian Universalism, I might very well have wound up joining it and never becoming a UU. Or, to put it slightly differently, if my 24-year-old self were to stumble into her church today, I might have found it comfortable enough to embrace.

Now, knowing all that I know now, I would find that at least a little bit regrettable, because I so value the much broader interfaith exposure I've gotten in UU churches.

One of the blogs listed down the side here is by Tennessee Presbyterian Minister John Shuck. As progressive and welcoming as DairyStateMom's church is, The Rev. Shuck's church is clearly further down at the left end of the spectrum, theologically and culturally, from hers. Except for the fact that its preaching is much more consistently centered on the life of Jesus, it would in fact come close to passing for a UU church, judging by its embrace of theological diversity and progressive social witness. If I found myself living in that part of the world, even as a UU, and it was closer than any UU church, I could see myself quite at home there.

Finally, there are across the country various progressive, often (but not always) non-denominational churches that while they primarily identify with Christianity, make it very clear that they welcome a wide range of belief and even non-belief. I haven't been to any of them in person but would happily go given the opportunity.

(Off the top of my head I'm aware of one in Wilmington, Delaware; in Florida [I think Miami], Evanston, Ill., and Grand Rapids, Mich. There's also a small Anglican group based in Milwaukee that operates in a similar vein, although to what extent it is an established church organization as opposed to just the vision of a few idiosyncratic organizers is not at all clear to me.)

It might be interesting to compile a comprehensive list of such places and map their location against the locations of existing UU congregations. I have no idea whether they tend to flourish where UU congregations are scarce, or if in fact they end up clustering in more or less the same places where there are UU churches as well, but filling some kind of felt need for some people that UU churches, for whatever reason, don't meet.

I don't think this is necessarily a zero-sum game. I am not saying these liberal alternatives keep UUism from growing or are some kind of "competition". And I am not saying that we should make our churches either more like or less like these other liberal alternatives. But in thinking about why UUism is shrinking rather than growing, it might be useful to see what insights we might gain from their presence.

How to Help Your Church Grow

Hint: It's not about whether you play modern music.

This morning DairyStateMom and I went to her church, where the pulpit guest was the Rev. Sarah Drummond, Dean of the Faculty at Andover Newton Theological School, a United Church of Christ seminary.

After the sermon (which I'll refer to in a moment), the Rev. Drummond gave a short talk about a research project she did that was written up last year in the magazine published by the Alban Institute, a sort of church think tank.

The study, described in the link at the top of this post, looks in depth at one UCC church that reversed a long and seemingly unstoppable decline: First Church in Cambridge. Drummond recalled visiting it when she was a student at Andover Newton back in the early 1990s and being overwhelmed by a musty smell that signaled decay.

A decade passed, and when Drummond returned to Andover Newton to join the faculty, she was struck by how that decline had reversed itself: the congregation was now thriving, welcoming new members by the dozen, most of them in the 21-35 age group.

In response to this phenomenon, the church, along with seminary students and Drummond, embarked on a study of its new members in order to learn how to better serve them. In the process, they learned what it was that drew and kept these new members.

The whole article fleshes this out, but here's the summary:

1) The new members welcomed high expectations of them for belonging to a church, but wanted and needed flexibility in how they might participate in the life of the church.
2) They appreciated being welcomed -- but when the welcome had a whiff of desperation, it was creepy and a turn-off.
3) They found comfort in a clearly stated belief system -- but wanted acceptance of their doubts and questions: belief without dogma, if you will. They also were drawn by the awareness that the church was living out its beliefs.

Oh, and by the way, this was a church that throughout the period of both decline and growth has remained liturgically (including musically) traditional within its denomination. Indeed, the sense of calmness and the sense of a space apart from the world embedded in its worship aesthetic was attractive to the many people who joined.

During the Q&A today, someone asked Drummond what at the church had preceded this influx of new members -- had there been some kind of strategy or marketing campaign launched?

The answer, she said, was that the church had engaged in a deliberate examination of what its vision for itself and its role in the community should be. As a result, it became much more connected with the wider needs of the community -- for example, connecting volunteers with a local homeless shelter that had been operating separately in the church's own basement for years.

"I'm hearing you say," I said, "that what the church did wasn't focus on, 'How can we recruit more members,' but rather, 'How can we be more authentic.'" Drummond agreed.

In a sense, it really was a case of "Build it and they will come" -- with "it" being not "a place that will attract young adult members," but rather "a principled religious community."

My point here is not to condemn contemporary music in worship or alternative worship styles. Rather, my point is simply to say that to the extent those are matters of style, they won't accomplish much for people who hunger for substance.

Driving home, I connected the insight with the text from Matthew that had been the topic of Drummond's sermon that day: Matthew 6:24-34. Specifically, I recalled how the passage ends:

31. Therefore do not be anxious, saying, ‘What shall we eat?’ or ‘What shall we drink?’ or ‘What shall we wear?’ 32. For the Gentiles seek after all these things, and your heavenly Father knows that you need them all. 33. But seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be added to you.

So it appears to have been with FCC: Instead of fretting about how to market itself to more people, the church thought about how to seek the kingdom of God. And that's what made the difference.