With a number of proposals being presented at Virginia Conference this year, I’ve been giving some thought to “strategy.”   The delegates at this and other annual conferences are being asked to consider responses to various challenges that our denomination is facing:  membership decline, underfunded pensions, closing some churches and starting new ones.  As this quote from Craig Van Gelder (Missional Church in Perspective) suggests, Americans have a profoundly pragmatic outlook on life, that leads us to seek strategies to solve our problems:

Interestingly, a continuous unfolding of movements focusing on strategy can be observed within U.S. churches during the past half century.  These were generated largely by the church’s efforts to respond to continuously changing contexts.  These movements, in focusing primarily on strategy, largely reflect a deep pragmatism within much of U.S. culture that tends to concentrate heavily on technique.  This focus has led generation after generation of church leaders to search for fresh approaches to help the church remain successful within a changing context.  These various strategies have typically focused on redefining the purpose/mission of the church as a way to get the church back on track in its mission and ministry.

Now, there is nothing inherently bad with identifying problems and proposing strategies to address them. That is a very essential act in any human organization.  But it does raise one important question for consciously Christian organizations (like churches):  On what foundation are we trusting to help us through our challenges? Is it possible for us, who live every day in a nation of passionate pragmatists, to rely too heavily on technique and strategy?  And, as United Methodists, who have inherited our founder’s adept organizational acumen, can our emphasis on organization mask the deep spiritual needs of the people in our communities, and our pews?  The strategies that we develop, necessary as they are, must be grounded deeply in our understanding of what it means for us to be the church in these rapidly changing contexts.  The Methodist movement in the 18^th century forced the Church of England to ask those deeper questions.  The intense and rapid changes taking place around us today demand that we do the same, and effective strategies are only part of the answer.  What do you think?

Methodists are good with numbers.  We’ve got books filled with all kinds of numbers – baptisms, professions of faith, worship attendance, giving, you name it.  We’ve been ably tracking statistics ever since John Wesley gathered his preachers together for the first “annual conference” over two hundred years ago.  Wesley applied his superb organizational genius to the early years of the Methodist movement, and we’ve been faithfully following his example for years.

Scripture also testifies to the importance of numbers.  After Pentecost, the early apostles celebrated when “day by day the Lord added to their number those who were being saved.” (Acts 2:47).  As Bishop Richard Wilke once said, “we count the things that are important to us.”  Numbers reveal the ways that God is working in our midst, giving us reason to celebrate.  And, they expose the difficult reality of our denomination’s “membership decline” (over forty years of it), and help us ask questions about what it means to be faithful to Christ in our present day and age.

Numbers are big in the corporate and government worlds as well.  I spent twenty years serving the federal government, the last five in positions of leadership and management, and “performance metrics” were the hot item.  Tangible numerical targets are one key way that organizations create motivation and momentum for change.

Because our Methodist history is so replete with “faithful counting,” it can be tempting for us to believe that the solution to our problems, particularly numerical membership decline (if it’s really a “problem” at all…), lies in ever more faithful record keeping and BHAGs (big hairy audacious goals) like “planting 250 faith communities in the next twenty years.”  Don’t get me wrong: I’m all for aggressive efforts in church planting, and setting audacious goals is great as long as we have an authentic commitment to meeting them.  Employing contemporary management techniques CAN be helpful, as long as we place those techniques in perspective and realize that what motivates God’s people in the end is not an increase in “numbers” (whatever those happen to be) but the sense of purpose and identity that comes from participating in God’s mission in the church and world.  And that requires a willingness of us to hear and enter the great Story that God is enacting in our midst, and a similar embrace of the power of the Spirit to bring about the change we seek (and perhaps the change we don’t seek!).  The Methodist movement began because the Spirit moved powerfully among people radically seeking God.  Numbers were put on paper only afterwards.