I wrote earlier of my conviction that there is some unspoken Pact that underwrites the dominant contemporary church structure. As I am in between books in my reading queue (still waiting for the next one to arrive) I picked up one of my all time favorites and began re-reading it today. Miroslav Volf’s After Our Likeness: The Church As the Image of the Trinity (Sacra Doctrina) is an outstanding book, easily in my top 5.. In the beginning of the book Volf brings some important things to light and then spends a great deal of time unpacking them in the rest of the book.
I think that one of the most important things he brings up is the functional role of the congregation. There are a lot of people who spend a lot of time arguing about who can stand up front, on the elevated stage, behind the pulpit with the microphone but very seldom do you find people arguing about who can sit out in the crowd and even more importantly, what role those people play in the work of the ministry. This is something that hits me harder now than it did five years ago. When I was still involved in the church leadership and helped carry the weight of what would go on in the worship service I have to admit that we did not give much thought to who would actually be in the crowd. Our worship team tried to find music that would emphasize, illustrate, or highlight themes from the sermon and we– like every other church in our neck of the woods– tried to make sure the sermon was “relevant.” We could have (and that church still does) performed our parts just as we rehearsed them regardless of who was in the crowd.
Volf brings a very important corrective to this and forces us to wrestle with the questions of what role the congregation will play in our gathered communities. Unfortunately, it is my experience that most of the time we simply want them to show up and put money in the offering plate. If they volunteer for the children’s ministry that is a bonus but we don’t expect that. The way we structure these services it seems we don’t really expect much from this group. Show up. Listen quietly. Put money in the plate. As one website puts it:
One way many churches choose to “become more strategic” is by sending a letter to their members stating the situation and restating the dependence upon the person in the pew to fund the ministry of their church.
and
We, as church leaders, should feel strongly enough about the ministry we committed to earlier in the year to make a strong appeal to the entire membership body explaining the situation and why ever dollar is necessary to fully fund the work of the body of Christ.
When I read things like this I become even more convinced that one of the biggest, unchallenged piece of the unspoken pact is the economic model we use to fund ministry. While I am a little softer on this than I used to be, especially for those who are already entrenched in this model, I remain convinced that the best way forward for newly forming communities of faith is to rethink ecclesial economics in a way that removes the perceived need for a paid, full-time, professional pastor.
I realize that this is a gianormous, systemic problem with roots in current theological education, and church as business, but I wonder how people can really think that it is economically sustainable over the long term. Especially in light of recent statistics that show the average salary of a “senior” pastor is around $80,000/year. Of course, these figures are based on churches with a minimum average attendance of 100-300 average attendance. Most new churches do not have that kind of attendance when they start and so the pastor’s either make less money, or continue to make that amount of money even though the church cannot afford to pay it.
In our current, competitive church paradigms there are also expectations that a church have good children’s and youth ministries, quality worship.1 In a paradigm that does not expect much from the congregation, the lower social capital must be replaced by hard cash and all these programs cost money. If you paid the children’s ministry director, and the youth pastor a sustainable wage we could reasonably expect an annual budget for salary alone to be more than a new church can collect from its members. And we have not even started to include costs for meeting space and the all important sound system and projector.
I am not sure exactly why this issue has become so important for me in the recent days. For some reason, I have been feeling the gravitational pull of participating in a community of faith and Volf’s book is fanning the flames of some of my thoughts that have been smoldering below the surface of my busy-ness for a long time. Maybe it is simply that I have been at a Sunday church gathering more in the last month than in the last two years. What ever it is, I feel some creative juices flowing.
Here are some quotes from Volf’s book that are scratching where I itch at the moment:
Is then the salvation of worldwide Christendom to be expected from the Free Churches? By no means. Too often, the latter merely reflect the cultural worlds surrounding them along with the serious illnesses attaching to those worlds. Let me mention but one example. Whether they want to or not, Free Churches often function as “homogeneous units” specializing in the specific needs of specific social classes and cultural circles, and then in mutual competition try to sell their commodity at dumping prices to the religious consumer in the supermarket of life projects; the customer is king and the one best suited to evaluated his or her own religious needs and from whom nothing more is required than a bit of loyalty and as much money as possible. If the Free Churches want to contribute to the salvation of Christendom, they themselves must first be healed.
After Our Likeness: The Church as the Image of the Trinity, page 18
Every genuinely Christian speech act is, at least formally and implicitly, an act of confession. Thus, for example, a preacher can proclaim Christ as Lord only if the activity of proclamation is accompanied at least formally by the activity of confessing faith in him. Without this confession accompanying and supporting the proclamation, there is no proclamation. By confessing faith in Christ through celebration of the sacraments, sermons, prayer, hymns, witnessing, and daily life, those gathered in the name of Christ speak the word of God both to each other and to the world. This public confession of faith in Christ through the pluriform speaking of the word is the central constitutive mark of the church. It is through this that the church lives as church and manifests itself externally as church. Although such confession is admittedly always a result or effect of the “word,” just as faith, too, is a result or effect of the “word” (see Rom. 10:8-10), the “word” is proclaimed in no other way than in this pluriform confessing. The confession of faith of one person leads to that of others, thereby constituting the church.
After Our Likeness: The Church as the Image of the Trinity
page 150
And, perhaps my favorite quote in the book…
On this side of the eschatological gathering of the whole people of God, there can be no church in the singular.
After Our Likeness: The Church as the Image of the Trinity
p. 157
- by which they usually mean music [back]
