So, how'd we get here?

A few of you have been asking how life at Orchards UMC is going since the change in our Worship format, and a few of you have been asking how we got to the point in making the change so I thought I'd offer this:

Back in September of last year the Administrative Council members, and some of our congregation members who have held offices for some time in the past gathered to discuss what the future of our congregation looked like.

Part of the motivation for the meeting was give us some information I had learned while at an Alice Mann seminar regarding her book Raising the Roof, I had been invited to attend by our conference. As part of that discussion we looked at the statistics from our church over the last 20 years. We noticed that there was a trend that had developed roughly every 5 years or so. The congregation would have periods of growth and reach a “glass ceiling” in terms of attendance at around 190. We would hold that # for 6 months to a year, then slowly decline over the next two years back to between 150-160. There would be a change in Pastors or some other event, that would generate some momentum and we would start the cycle over again. We noticed that we had just come through a year and a half with attendance average of 180 and were beginning to see the decline.

There were quite a few possible reasons for the cycle ranging from pastoral leadership styles, to facility limitations, to the state of the economy and neighborhoods we serve and our structure, all of which play a role. Much of the day was centered on breaking this cycle we found our selves in. A huge part of the process is defining who we are, and who we want to be.

It seemed that breaking that cycle left us two viable options. The first was be a church of around 150 people... not just a church of 150 but a healthy church of around 150 people. Instead of ramping our resources and energy into increasing attendance, what would a healthy congregation of 150 look like. We talked about becoming a church that was spiritually mature, involved in the social holiness that is the bench mark of our tradition, and equipping individual members to be ministers with OUMC as their home base. The second alternative was to shift the structure of our church to move towards growth. Those conversations revolved around breaking our group of 150+ people that seemed to be too big to have meaningful relationships with each other and grow, into several smaller groups (or cells as some consultants refer to them). The idea was that three groups of 50 people have a better chance of building genuine relationships with each other and more potential for growth. This second option had a lot more emotional implications to it. It meant having to give up the notion of “knowing everyone in the church” (which we were already too big to do) It meant smaller groups that shared their lives and spiritual journeys together, instead of the anonymity in worship with a larger group. Some of us loved the feeling of being part of that larger group, and even had a very deeply held belief that a worship service with an attendance of 160 was “better” than a service of 50. The hardest part was that this shift meant that our church would need to be defined by something other than our Sunday Morning Worship Service, which had been our identity for about 125 years. Our identity would have to refocus to our relationships with each other outside the worship service. That meant building a community of spiritual friends that met in each others homes and shared their lives. As we talked we realized that that refocusing and creation of smaller groups also allowed us to do the things we thought a healthy smaller congregation would do.

So the gathered group decided to pursue the more difficult and emotionally charged path of breaking our single cell up in the hopes of building genuine community with potential for growth, rather than remain the smaller congregation. We asked our Administrative Council to adopt a three service format that allows us to give our kids an entire hour together for Sunday School (Extreme Faith Explorers as we call it) and allow us to create some Adult Education classes. Now instead of a single group, we have three made up of about 50 people each beginning to build relationships with each other (actually its about 70, 40, 40) We are embarking on more gatherings in our homes, worship services that not only foster meaningful worship times, but facilitate building a community of spiritual friends. Our prayer is that we wouldn’t be identified by the building we use, or the time that we worship, but by the spirit of God that draws us together and out into our world. It is a big step for us and in some ways a bit painful as well... Change always is.