I have seen the future and it is The Rock

The Rock La Roca is the future of the United Methodist Church. Rather, I should say that churches and ministries like The Rock La Roca are the future.

I say this not out of excitement or sentiment, but out of a sober assessment of reality.

1.The Kentucky Annual Conference has tried a number of church plants/restarts, and The Rock La Roca and Hope Springs are the two success stories. Both of them fit a similar profile of working in marginal neighborhoods.

The suburbs have too many churches competing for limited market.

Most pastors want to be in suburban churches. There is more prestige where you can get paid more, and there is a perception of greater stability in the congregation.

Denominational bureaucrats tend to press the need for a church to be self-sufficient and pay money to the national agencies. Therefore, there is great pressure to put the churches in places where it is assumed that the congregation can raise the kind of money that the national body needs.

So, churches begin a scramble to move to the newest area of growth, or the place where they assume they can reach prosperous (largely white) people.

The first problem is simply practical: Methodists are behind the 8-ball and are generally late getting to a location. The success stories are the exceptions that prove the rule.

To make a church work in the suburban area inevitably means 2 kinds of growth: by transfer and sheep-stealing. That is, many churches have made quite a killing by focusing on disaffected Methodists and Presbyterians. The church grows, but not by adding anyone to the kingdom, only shuffling members around.

This is a simple fact; in spite of the growth of mega-churches, there is no county in America with more people in church today than it had in 1990. Therefore, the growth of large churches at best represents a growth for that church, but a net decline for the Kingdom. I read somewhere that failure is succeeding at something that doesn’t matter. What about succeeding at what will ultimately kill you?

If churches get bigger and the Kingdom gets smaller, it means retreat and eventually collapse. So, we can keep trying to fight with other churches to reach the kind of people that can feed our denominations’ hunger, or we can get down to Jesus’ work.

We have to move into new, underserved “markets.” This means neighborhoods like The Rock La Roca is in. Neighborhoods that have been left behind by stores, schools, “good people” and churches. There are a number of churches near The Rock La Roca, but they are all small and crumbling, except for one which still has managed to keep its old members, even though they live far away. The working class areas of our towns are almost entirely unreached.

It’s a difficult population, to be sure, but a large population, one that is unreached. 125 million people in the U.S. live in multi-unit housing (condos, apts, trailer parks) but they are generally ignored by the mainline churches because we want homeowners and the potential money they represent.

I know I’m not being politically correct here, trying to win friends and influence people. That’s not my strong suit. Someone else can do that. I lay out the facts as I see them and try to move forward.

Because this demographic is underserved, it is the prime place to move into. If we keep trying to be suburban, we will have to compete with denominations that are simply better at running the kinds of programs to draw folks in (and frankly, preaching some kind of “conservative” gospel that will reach the people left cold by typical mainline preaching and, again, exceptions like First Church in Santa Monica only prove the rule).

But if we make a move into the unpopular, unreached parts of our towns and cities, we will reap a reward because no one else wants to be there. (Additionally, I think that our rural areas can be a place of revival, but it will mean serious cooperation between small churches—a possibility perhaps as remote as what I am suggesting about urban ministry…)

The advantage that we have is that we generally already have churches in the very neighborhoods I am describing. They are often churches in decline, staffed by part-time pastors. The chance we have is that, as a connectional church, we can direct our resources to fund staff and ministries for the churches in “marginal” areas until they can get on their feet. This is precisely what we would do to “plant” a church in the suburbs. But since planting churches in the suburbs is going to be dicey (i.e. others are better at it than us) and the people I am suggesting we reach are precisely the people Jesus would have us reach, the only conclusion is that we need to put our resources and efforts into a viable future, not the path we are on now, where each church that closes only sends a portion of its members to other churches.

p/g,

Aaron