Rethinking the System

Lyle Schaller has done it again, has written another hard-hitting, utterly honest book that consists of the harvest from his great insights on church growth and decline. His The Ice Cube is Melting (Abingdon, 2005) is a provocative, evocative book. One of his seminal insights is that the United Methodist Church has become a system that rewards and produces small, unproductive, static congregations and punishes growing, large congregations. Below are some of Schaller’s insights on this topic:

UNITED METHODISM IS GROWING MORE SMALL CHURCHES AND IS KILLING LARGER CHURCHES:

“If you look at your policy as a reward system, it is obvious it calls for rewarding congregations for being relatively small and/or that have a below-average level of stewardship and/or do not pay their apportionments in full, while punishing larger churches and/or those with a higher level of stewardship and/or that pay their apportionments in full. Was that policy created as part of a larger strategy to encourage an increase in the number of small churches and to reduce the number of large congregations?”

p. 76

[There has been] an increase in the number reporting an average attendance of 19 or fewer from 3,839 in 1972 to 4,688 at the end of 2001, and (3) a decrease in the number averaging 100 or more at worship from 11,689 in 1972 to 9,925 at the end of 2001.

p. 77

. There is an emerging consensus in American Protestantism that if the goal is to provide a challenging assignment to a full-time seminary graduate, an average worship attendance of 125 to 135 or more is required. Only 1 out of 5 UM congregations fits in that size bracket.

p. 120

We have got to find a way to start more new churches and to care for newer, larger churches. We must challenge our denominational propensity to subsidize and to reproduce small congregations. Schaller says that we must stop blaming pastors and laity and start critically examining our systems, because systems tend to produce certain results and hinder others:

“W. Edwards Deming [says that] on this planet every system produces the results it is designed to produce. Instead of scapegoating people, and especially scapegoating parish pastors, a far more productive focus will be on (1) recognizing and accepting the fact that systems do produce the outcomes they are designed to produce, (2) achieving agreement on the desired outcomes, and (3) redesigning or replacing what has become a dysfunctional system with one designed to produce the desired outcomes..to design the road that leads to a better tomorrow.”

I believe that we are attempting to find our way toward a more productive system, or at least a system that produces the results that Jesus calls us to produce. I’m a child of the Sixties, which means not only that I believe “don’t trust the establishment,” (which is odd, now that I am the establishment!) but also “people don’t run systems, systems run people.” How can we gain skills in analyzing our systems of clergy deployment and church development and in changing those systems to produce the church Jesus means us to be? We don’t have the answers yet, but at least, with the help of people like Schaller, we are beginning to ask the right questions.

William H. Willimon