Our Mission Again is .... ?

Before I get to money, I want to focus briefly on what our mission is after all ...

I am mindful that there are many ways to measure how we are doing on our prime directive of making disciples.  If we truly believe that making disciples is best done at the local church, and we do indeed offer that right after we speak to the idea of transformation in our Book of Discipline, I posit that Average Worship Attendance is a very good metric to determine how we are doing in terms of our prime directive.  I am open to other metrics, but this is a good one, if not the best (or only) one.  

I call this chart A Complex Look at Attendance because of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Senior comments about simplicity being of value ONLY after it has been filtered through the lens of complexity.  I see this chart as simultaneously complex but also simple.  

Our attendance from 1976 to 2001 was a relatively flat.  We were in 36,000 range for those twenty-five years.  

But that was a function in part of decline in the churches founded before 1974 offset by increases in those who moved, merged, or were chartered in 1974 or later.  

Our decline over the last fifteen years has been by and large a function of (1) continued decline in the older churches and (2) a lack of new church starts, good strategic mergers, and moves over the last twenty-five years.  

Here is the point:  attendance is down by 10,000+ since 2001.  

Hold that thought -- in one of the most critical metrics of how we measure our effectiveness, we are down by right at 30% over the last fifteen years.  I do not wish to sound here like a "Chicken Little" screaming that the sky is falling.  I do believe that the focus of our accumulated "treasure" should be directed towards a better focus on our prime directive -- making disciples for Jesus Christ at the local church for the transformation of the world.  

I confess that one person's need for urgency can be construed by someone else as anxiety.  I don't know how to solve that, but I am not trying to inject anxiety into the system.  I expect that anxiety makes a system that doesn't always work well in the first place, work even less well.  But I do hope we can raise the temperature on what is the most important task we have in front of us:  transformative disciple making.  

I hope you keep reading.  

Selah, Dennis Shaw   

The next blog is HERE