Big Lessons from Little Places

Faithfulness and the Future in Small Congregations

Kay Collier McLaughlin

• Publisher: Morehouse Publishing
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9780819231673
• eBook ISBN: 9780819231680
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Ministry

"Churchwide discussions on structure and growth tend to focus on the importance of increasing "butts in the pews and bucks in the plates." Suggestions have been made on merging smaller dioceses to create larger ones and closing the doors of congregations which do not have Sunday attendance of at least 200. This is a model of scarcity without consideration of the value and abundance to be found in small churches. Discover the roles, possibilities, promise, and potential of being a small church! Travel with Kay Collier McLauglin as she takes the back roads and byways of the United States, visiting small churches that are making a difference in their community. Each chapter tells a story about an example of faithfulness in the life of a small congregation and relates that story to the essentials of faithful living and being church. The book challenges the decision-makers in the Episcopal Church to think beyond traditional measures and shortterm economic fixes to discover the life-giving opportunities and models presented by the smallest congregations.

CHAPTER ONE

“I’ll Be Singing to the Cows”

This is home because Minnie
and a few hundred other
people trust me to hold their
hands should they die. …

It is home because Angus and Minnie dared to tell me the truth. It is home because old ladies reach out to touch our children as if they were their own. It is home because the checker in the market calls me by my name. It is home because I don’t want to go anywhere else. What I know now is that how this came to be home is a stranger story than I thought. But the story usually is stranger than we first thought. … I know that much that has come upon me in life I did not search out and choose, but rather found by chance and accepted as grace. The will of God is an intricate weaving of incidents and accidents, plans and providence. Sometimes it works through us, sometimes in spite of us, but in all things, it can work for good. MICHAEL L. LINDVALL¹

A small parish in Appalachia was probably not what Press McCone envisioned when he completed his undergraduate degree at Harvard, when he received his Master of Divinity degree from Princeton Theological Seminary, or set out to serve the Presbyterian Church. God, with an infinite sense of humor, had other plans for Press.

Along the way, he would run into the Episcopal Church, and find himself at The Church Divinity School of the Pacific in Berkeley, California. It was at Berkeley that he was handed a brochure which read, “Don’t let the dream of seminary die … come serve the people of Appalachia …” and subsequently found himself the Minister-in-Charge of a family sized congregation in southeastern Kentucky. After three years, Press and his wife headed west—not to the urban areas of Berkeley or Boulder—but to yoked parishes in Nebraska, eight hours from the diocesan offices. On his final Sunday in Kentucky, the son of a parishioner, holding a recent master’s degree in vocal performance and planning for Met auditions in the fall, sang at the Eucharist. “I took a few lessons from Ronald,” says Press, “thinking I might need to sing the liturgy at my next cure. And now, I know, I’ll be singing to the cows!”

Fast forward two years. Sitting beside his study window hundreds of miles from the place he never imagined he’d call home, Press reflected with me on his life in another small town, far from urban lights. “No lines to get my driver’s license, no traffic, low cost of living, lots of wonderful people. I just have to work a little harder to get to the opera!”²

“It’s about falling in love,” says Ben, a successful businessman before God called. “Once I fall in love, I’m done. Maybe in a larger place you can be defended against that vulnerability, but not when you are in this kind of intimacy.”³

Like Press, Ben was a product of a large sponsoring church—and large expectations, both from the secular world which measured his success in dollars and corner offices, and in clergy mentors and professors who assumed a career path for him moving quickly up the ladder from a first assignment to one of “importance.” “They called it ‘steeple jumping’ when I was in seminary,” Press says. “The bigger the better. There was no sense of preparation for ministry that might not be about growing something larger; that a small church might be different in lots of ways than a large one.”⁴

It was a reality Press, Ben, and others have stumbled into, as well as their love affairs with the “normal” sized” churches to which they feel a real vocation. “I want to stress the “normal,” Ben says. “I am tired of hearing about “small” this and “small” that, as if the norm for Episcopal churches, or mainline churches in general, is the megachurch, or the cardinal parish, or even a good-sized program congregation. This is normal!”⁵

Church consultant Lyle E. Schaller, in The Small Church IS Different, states: “The normal size for a protestant congregation on the North American continent is one that has fewer than forty people at worship on the typical Sunday morning.”⁶ Today, too many church leaders assume that the very large congregation is the normative institutional expression of the Christian congregation. More recent data from the Duke University National Congregational Study substantiates Schaller’s statistics by setting the median figure at seventy-five regular participants in worship.⁷

A number of men and women interviewed were products of small, or “normal” sized congregations. The “largest” churches experienced by this group prior to seminary were program sized, with an average Sunday attendance, according to their informal estimates, of “somewhere between one hundred fifty and two hundred” and the smallest family sized congregations of twenty-five to thirty. “I had no idea that a congregation of five or six thousand members might even exist in the Episcopal Church,” says Ann, who grew up in a mission congregation in the south. “I was in my twenties, just out of college. I assumed most churches were like mine. I have always seen myself as ministering in a small parish.”⁸

In 2005, the Rt. Rev. Stacy F. Sauls, then bishop of the Diocese of Lexington, looked around his diocese of predominantly large family or small pastoral congregations and noted that for a certain number of them, the only consistency in ordained leadership was the lack of steady healthy and energetic clergy. Supply clergy to offer the sacraments were an occasional answer, as were newly ordained folks with little experience and less guidance, or folks nearing or past retirement.

“I don’t think most of us answered the call to ordained ministry expecting to have to move up some ladder to be able to pay off seminary debt,” Bishop Sauls said. “I think that in many hearts, there is a dream of being in a community where it is possible to be in relationships. And one thing I was becoming more and more convinced of—these parishes needed energy and excitement from their clergy, as well as vision and training.”

In the Diocese of Lexington, the result was a three-year program similar to a hospital residency, in which the best and brightest are recruited from seminary graduates each year and offered a priest-in-charge position. Support systems in place aided in intentional priestly formation in the context of a “teaching parish,” whose mission is about forming priests not just for themselves, but for the Church-at-large. We called this the Network, and its advertising brochure read: “Don’t let the dream of seminary die. …”

People like Press and Ben agree—while acknowledging that it wasn’t an option that anyone talked about, or considered admirable, during their years in seminary in the early 2000s. “Maybe it had to do with the economy, and the thought that as things crashed and burned, small churches were not going to be able to afford full-time clergy,” says Paul, a product of those years. “The financial crash in 2008 meant that a lot of churches lost the endowments they’d depended on, and things were looking pretty bleak all the way round.” Don remembers not only discouragement about the small churches, but a bleak outlook in general that suggested that indeed, his class members might be the ones to turn out the lights and close the doors on the Church in general, not just the small church. In the second decade of this millennium, there are reports from several seminaries that are looking more closely at the context of ordained ministry and what growth means, perhaps with a move toward recognition that there is value in the small or “normal” sized church.⁹

“It was OK to consider taking a small parish just out of seminary,” Ben says, “but when I considered it for my second call, a trusted and well-loved mentor strongly advised me against taking the position. ‘If you take it, you will die,’ he said to me. I think, in retrospect, that he was saying my career opportunities would die; that I would get pegged as the guy who took broken-down parishes, and that was not a way to make a career in the Church.”¹⁰

Bill remembers that when he gave his senior sermon at seminary, he said that he saw himself called to small churches. A seminary professor approached him afterward and said, “Why are you limiting yourself so much?” A few years into his life as a priest in a small church, a former classmate told him that he had been really frustrated with Bill because he thought he had “no ambition.” “The good thing,” Bill says, “was that he finally had come to see that I just loved what I was doing!”¹¹ The attitude of both professor and classmate seem not unusual in the stories that are told. Small congregations are where deacons and new ordinands serve—until they get a “real” church!

Phil’s call to small church ministry began with his own yearning for deeper connections than he had experienced in the urban parishes in which he grew up. “I had felt isolated,” he says today. “I felt connected to God, but not to people.”¹² Nothing in his formal training encouraged his interest. He was encouraged to pursue further training at Oxford; he was urged to prepare to accept one of several invitations to be nominated in bishops’ elections. And in the several dioceses he has served, he has continued to see new seminary graduates assigned, however briefly, to the smallest churches. As others have observed, the general understanding is that this is the way that dues are paid, until one gets that “real” church!

Sometimes God has a funny way of getting people’s attention, even when it’s about falling in love. About recognizing a vocation, even if no one else does. For Press, it took a divorce that sidetracked the upward climb, and introduced him to bi-vocational or tent-maker ministry, in places where he would come to know the people of his cure in deep and special ways. Ben checked back into corporate America, where he found himself lost in a world where he once moved with the high rollers. “This is where I’m dying,” he concluded. Something was wrong.

“So I went back and considered the calls I had rejected,” he says. “Something in me had changed, had shifted. And probably something in the congregations, too. I remember something my father, who was a deacon, had said to me before I ever had the remotest idea of being a priest. He told me to look at the story of the feeding of the five thousand, which is in all four gospels. And in one of them there is a line that is easy to miss: “He sat them down in groups of fifty. He did NOT endeavor to feed them in an undifferentiated mass of five thousand people.”¹³

He goes on to point out that several theories of organizational life use the number fifty as optimal for community life. “And there is the scriptural basis for those theories—as well as for the church.”¹⁴

Bill is fond of saying that if he were in the Roman Catholic Church, he would be known as a “diocesan priest,” sent by the bishop to cover congregations whose needs matched with his particular skills; congregations which often do not have the resources to conduct a full search on the open market. Serving in a similar role, but without that title, he has come to a really in-depth understanding that as a priest he is never a member of any church, but is called or sent to serve.

Roma’s pre-seminary career took place in large, urban churches, and her expectation was that she would be most comfortable in those settings. On a job interview in a rural d...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Foreword
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• CHAPTER ONE: “I’ll Be Singing to the Cows”
• CHAPTER TWO: From “So Far Away” to “Part of the Family”
• CHAPTER THREE: Recognizing Faithfulness Upside Down
• CHAPTER FOUR: Bigger Than You Think
• CHAPTER FIVE: Miss Bessie, Pleasant Company, and Part-Timers
• CHAPTER SIX: Gathering Around the Table
• CHAPTER SEVEN: Westward, the Women—North, South, and East, Too!
• CHAPTER EIGHT: Being Present
• CHAPTER NINE: What Does It Take to Be the Church?
• CHAPTER TEN: Jello Salad, the Cookie Lady, and Urban Neighborhoods
• CHAPTER ELEVEN: The Words of My Mouth, the Meditation of Our Hearts—and Is Julie Sick?
• CHAPTER TWELVE: What’s an Institution to Do? From ASA Snobbery to Hope for the Future
• Afterword
• Bibliography