Dear Church:
Well, this is my last Sunday…as the intentional interim pastor. On Thursday, August 1, I move into a new role with you as the Lead Pastor at Blooming Glen Mennonite Church.
As you may have ascertained by now, I’m probably unlike any other pastor you’ve had here at Blooming Glen. For those of you who are disappointed by that reality, I truly am sorry. There are days when I wish I could be one of those guys who make it look easy, tells great stories, plays guitar, sings tenor, and make everyone feel at ease. I’m not that guy.
I’m the guy you call in crisis. I’m the guy that was called out of seminary in 1986 to stop the hemorrhaging membership in the oldest Mennonite congregation in Southern California. I’m the guy the regional church called in 1989 to start a different sort of church – a network of house churches that gave lots of rooms for unusual and unhappy people who had left the church to try to find a path back to faith. I’m the guy the Mennonite church in Los Angeles called in 1992 and sent off to earn an MBA in church management in 1995. I was then sent to step into regional leadership in the aftermath of civil unrest, reach out across cultures into the new immigrant communities of West Africans, Indonesians, Hispanics, and Chinese, and walk with pastors and leaders to equip them to build Anabaptist congregations, (some of which now identify as Mosaic Conference congregations). I’m the guy that Madison Street Church in Riverside called in 2006 after they had experienced their third church meltdown in less than ten years. I’m the guy you called 30 months ago to stabilize your congregational systems that had broken down and could no longer communicate with each other.
I wish I could look back over that list of roles and say I did everything perfectly and that all these ministries are functioning at peak performance today. I can’t do that. I made plenty of mistakes. I will make plenty more mistakes. And certainly not everyone appreciates the efforts applied in church crisis management. Some walk away because you don’t embrace their solutions or their priorities. Some walk away because your arrival has given them an opportunity. And some people walk away because I just rub them the wrong way. On more than one occasion in my life, an untimely migraine has been interpreted as being standoffish. My career in ministry has been mostly working with the moving targets inherent to crisis. The church does not tend to do well in crisis management. Half the folks in a church crisis blame the other half for the crisis, and the other half don’t even believe there is a crisis.
Well, Blooming Glen isn’t out the woods yet. I could cite several data points to make this case. I’ll cite two:
Reduced attendance. On the first Sunday of July 2014, worship attendance at Blooming Glen was 304. On the first Sunday of July 2024, in-person worship attendance was 146. We are ½ the congregation we were a decade ago.
Aging congregation. The invitations to the Senior Luncheon recently went out. They went to folks in the congregation over 75 years old. The number of invitations we are sending out this year is equal to about 1/3 of our annualized average Sunday morning attendance.
These two data points alone ought to establish clearly in our life as a congregation that business as usual may be a preferred option, but it is not a sustainable option. Blooming Glen is still in need of crisis management. To that end, y’all have, for better or worse, asked Debbie and I to stay here and risk serving with you in a new role. You have asked me to launch an effort of pointing the way to deeper discipleship within the church community and you have asked me to launch an effort of streamlining, clarifying, and strengthening the long-term institutional capacity of the congregation. You have correctly discerned that neither marketing gimmicks nor sincere apologies will bring back those who have left. The path forward to a sustainable Blooming Glen in 2050 is found only by reaching out to our neighbors near and far and inviting them into this congregation through acts of loving service and gracious generosity. We can only sustain that depth of missional behavior as we deepen our reliance on the scriptures as the narrative of the faith we confess and as we practice the way of peace by caring deeply for one another and challenging one another directly. In this strange, new world where the church’s story has developed too many hard edges and a very fuzzy center, where the church as an institution focuses too much on programming for the church and not enough on equipping of the church, where we are polarized by our secondary politics, rather than united by the Gospel, and where we walk around staring at screens that have all the world’s trivia at our fingertips, but none of the wisdom of God, we cannot find sustaining and sustainable ways of being the church unless we are committed to what Eugene Peterson called, “A long obedience in the same direction.” Discipleship for the long haul, which sustained the parents and grandparents of today’s Blooming Glen is what will sustain us into God’s missional future for us.
My role, beginning August 1, is to offer you a way of leadership that is grounded in the biblical text, that cares deeply for each of you, and that is also willing to challenge you directly as needed, so that you can and will be active in fulfilling God’s formational, intercultural, and missional purposes through teams of core ministries that curates worship, cares for one another, and loves our neighbors. Will it be perfect? No. Will I be perfect? Certainly not! Will this effort that we have branded “Church Together” address the longstanding crisis in which we find ourselves? I think it’s a start. Are we ready to work together to be Church Together for a sustaining and sustainable future? I sure hope so.
Let’s go!
Pastor Jeff
P.S. | Monday morning, July 29, 7:30am-8:45am, I’ll be at the A&N Diner, ready and willing to listen to whatever is on your mind. Friday afternoon, August 2, 3:30pm-4:45pm, I’ll be at the Broad Street Grind, ready and willing to listen to whatever is on your mind.