I finished my approval essay a few days ago and thought it would be fun to share it in the form of blog posts. I’ll be making a few posts out of it and it’ll take me some time to adapt each section to the blog, but here is the first part.
aspects of the larger changes mentioned above affect that setting and context most
significantly, and in what ways? What is happening? How, when, where and why is it happening? What office or position of ministry leadership do you hold in that setting?
I have a specific vision for the type of ministry setting to which I believe I’m called. I imagine an old congregation, which was once thriving, located in an “up and coming” urban area. The neighborhood is getting an influx of young adults who have no interest in going to a traditional Lutheran church service, because they see church as being largely irrelevant to their lives. Those few that do try to go are driven away by the pervasive negativity of a dying congregation. The new residents of the neighborhood probably don’t look or act like “typical” Lutherans, they are racially and ethnically diverse, LGBT, more spiritually curious and less connected to a tradition, or all of the above. As a result, although the church is in a thriving neighborhood the membership continues to decline. In fact, many in the congregation don’t even realize that they should reach out to their neighborhood, assuming that only white heterosexuals of Scandinavian or German descent would ever come to a Lutheran church. In this specific context, I think economic disparity issues may be less significant than other issues, although there may be some subconscious racism in the existing congregation that assumes that the new neighbors are poorer.
It is most likely that I would serve a context like this as a solo pastor, but it is possible that I could serve a larger church as an associate focused on outreach to the new neighbors. An integral part of my plan is to create a second worship service that follows a very different style. Good theology would be central to everything about the service, but every other aspect of the worship could be changed. In some respects, this would be two congregations in the same building, but the intention is that the existing congregation would support and nurture the emerging congregation. I don’t just mean financial or volunteer support, I think there is tremendous potential for intergenerational community between young adults and older retired people around traditional skills and handcrafts. Knitting is a great example of something that is extremely popular with both young adults and older people. I think community could be built around things like organic gardening, cooking, or woodworking. Rather than force two groups to come together around what separates them, I would focus on the things they have in common and draw on both the wisdom in the older generation and the energy of the younger. My role in that context would be to create opportunities for those groups to come together, to protect sacred space for them to be apart and to foster authentic worship for both groups.
