Transitional Parish: an Ill-Tempered Rant

Our parish is seeking a new rector. In today's sermon, the priest said that he had seen a draft of the Parish Profile. This is a document which is prepared by the search committee and disseminated to potential clergy candidates. The priest told us that it describes us as a "Transitional Parish." That is church-growth-speak for a parish with average Sunday attendance ("ASA" is their acronym) of 141 to 225 persons, and is equivalent to Lyle Schaller's size category "Awkward" (175 to 225).

In the system used by Arlin Rothauge, modified by the Diocese of Texas, and most commonly used in Episcopal circles, there are five types of congregations: "Family Church" (ASA of six to 75 adults), "Pastoral" (76 to 140), "Transitional" (141 to 225; we are near the top of this range), "Program" (226 to 400), "Resource" (401 and up). Here is a PDF that explains the jargon.

I submit that all of this is rubbish.

- It is the application of the models of the secular business corporation to the church.
- It takes the living entity of the Body of Christ and turns it all into numbers, statistics, goals
- It implies that every parish must strive to Grow.
- If you have failed to Grow, it is because you have not successfully applied the proper methods. You, in short, are a Failure.

Most of all, it make a "Transitional" or "Awkward-Sized" parish such as ours dissatisfied with what it is -- especially after we heard all of this ten years ago in our last rector search, have not grown, and are going through it all again. Might we not, just possibly, be the right size for our place and role in the community and in the Body of Christ? Might we not be fulfilling our ministry as a congregation exactly as we are?

This pernicious business-speak causes us to constantly tinker with ourselves, to make charts of which ministries are growing and which are not, to make mission statements and five-year plans and set goals and work on our "marketing" as if we were Wal-Mart or Target.

That sets the context for the music that was sung in today's service, shortly after the sermon which focused in part on our need to Change and Grow "to become a full-fledged Program Church." [Note carefully: I do NOT blame the priest for this. He was reporting the work of the search committee, and they are, I suspect, listening to the diocesan consultant. I blame the consultant, the "experts" in the background, and the manner in which our denomination matches priests with parishes, much like a computer dating service. As I have said elsewhere, we have a terrific interim priest and I am grateful for his ministry. And this day's sermon in other respects was excellent.]

This was the day when our combined choirs sang the end of Handel's Messiah: Worthy is the Lamb, Blessing and honor, Amen.

We had a guest organist who is a member of our parish; two trumpeters who are grad students at the local university; a cellist who teaches there (and is a good friend of the parish, though not a member), an undergraduate bass player who has also worked with us before and loves our parish. We had about twenty children and youth, and seventeen adult choristers.

It was glorious.

It was, I submit, an example of what this parish does well. It is an organic outgrowth ("Fruit," one might say - cf. St. John 15:5), something that has simply "happened" as a result of the youth choir getting a little better each year, the adult choir gaining in confidence (and gaining four new singers in recent weeks - not through any Mission Plan or Marketing Technique -- it "just happened." "What some would call chance," as Gandalf would say). It happened because of gradual development of good feelings between the parish and some of the students and faculty of the School of Music -- the cellist, for example, became a friend of the parish and occasional visitor for worship when her string quartet was the major part of the summer Chamber Music Festival a few years ago, and we were nice to them -- and also nice to her mother, an Episcopalian who was visiting that week and hanging around. I had a number of pleasant chats with the mother that week and strove to make her feel at home. The trumpeters came to us because of their connection with the former trombone teaching assistant who practiced long hours at the church, made recordings here with her brass quintet, and has told me that she will drive here from Chicago to play with us next Easter.

And we should be dissatisfied with this? We should re-design our programs and ministries so that they will be Bigger and Better and attract more people? It would be fair to say that we are one of the strongest parishes in our diocese. Music is only a part of this; our Christian Formation programs for children and youth are outstanding, the parish is much involved in the local downtown community and in ministries to the wider world.

In my annual review some years ago at another church, the interim pastor (brought in specifically because of his expertise in Church Growth Methods) castigated me because I was not starting New Groups. "You are not earning your salary unless you are forming two or three new small groups every year. You are dead weight, holding us back."

What is wrong with nurturing the groups, the ministries, that are already present?
What is wrong with nurturing the people that are there, right in front of you?

"Feed my lambs," our Lord said to St. Peter. We heard this today.
Not "Conduct a marketing survey of your neighborhood and produce a strategy to increase the number of lambs twenty percent by next summer."

I tried to talk to the choir after our final run-through of the Handel this morning; I couldn't. I was too choked up after hearing them sing the Amen fugue, after seeing the trebles watching me carefully for every one of their entrances, after seeing them Connect with the music, and commit themselves to those high G's and A's, after hearing it all come together as the fruit (that word again) of three months' rehearsal.

I tried to say: "Look around at the world. It is terrible. But that is not the last word. This is, this Amen that we have just sung."

These singers and musicians, these children of God, shall shine like the sun in the kingdom of their Father. Compared to this, nothing else matters.