Vital Signs

Do you see your cup half-empty, half-full or overflowing?

    

     I spent this past Thursday afternoon with member of the Presbyterian urban consortium that includes the 12 Presbyterian Churches in Rochester, New York.  The size of these congregations ranged from over 1,000 members to under 75 members.  This group gathered several months ago to discern how they could support and resource each other, and how they could work together to build up Presbyterian mission work and presence in the Metro Rochester area.  At our gathering, there was lots of energy, ideas and excitement expressed by members from the churches on projects they could do together, e.g., Elders’ training, work projects, be a prophetic voice on issues impacting the Rochester community.  These churches felt it was important to move past the talking stage and to walk the walk!

            On Friday, I drove down to Geneva Presbytery to hear about how the Presbytery and several churches in the Presbytery are teaming up to organize a new fellowship for immigrant Chinese living in Corning, New York.  The fellowship is housed in the First Presbyterian Church in Corning.  Several folks expressed how much this emerging ministry is not only transforming the members who are joining this fellowship but how it has also spiritually impacted the churches that are engaged in partnership with this ministry.

            Over the weekend, I met with the Rev. Judy Hay and members of the urban congregation she serves, Calvary St. Andrew.  Members of Calvary St. Andrew have been involved in addressing affordable housing issues, public safety, community violence and other community issues with faithfulness, imagination and creativity.   This smaller membership urban congregation has never let their size or the challenges that they constantly face in their community overwhelm them. This congregation has developed affordable housing projects, organized their diverse community around a variety of issues and deepen their relationships with their neighbors. This is a congregation that is sharing God’s good news wide and deep with its community.

            Each of these stories reflect congregations who are excited about taking the gifts that God has given them to serve their communities.  These congregations see their cup not half-empty or half-full but overflowing with God’s spirit!  When I visited with each of these groups, I experienced a spirit of hopefulness, enthusiasm and a can-do spirit for doing God’s work.

When I visited these groups, an article written by Michael Lindvall, pastor of Brick Church in New York came to mind.  This article was published in the latest Presbyterian Outlook, June 29, 2009.  The article is titled “Subway Attitude.”  Michael writes the following – “I recently read an article about some extensive research a group of church consultants had done with congregations across the country.  Some of the congregations they studied were growing; some were shrinking.  The research report said that there was only one consistent factor that differentiated the ones that were thriving from the ones that were not. It wasn’t liberal or conservative theology.  It wasn’t traditional or contemporary worship style.  It wasn’t even geographic location.  Consistently, the report said, churches that were thriving operated out of what the report called a mindset of abundance.  ‘We have something to offer, and whether we’re rich or poor, conservative or liberal, praise songs or hymnbook, by the grace of God we have everything we really need to be the church.   On the other hand, the congregations that were not thriving, typically operated out of what the researchers called a mindset of scarcity.’  There’s not enough to go around.  We don’t have enough resources to offer much, and we won’t be able to do a lot until somebody gives us what we need.” 

            So what kind of mindset does your congregation and leaders operate out of - a spirit of scarcity or abundance?

  

Interview with Carl Dudley

I found this 2003 interview with Carl Dudley in SCUPE's archive where he talks about the wonderful qualities of small urban churches (Carl passed away last month).   His words then about small urban churches and also about small churches still  resonate today.  I thought you would enjoy reading and reflecting on his comments.  
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Allowing the Small Urban Church to Thrive – Interview With Carl Dudley

CityVoices newsletter: October 25, 2003.  This interview was conducted by Roger Johnson, editor of CityVoices.  CityVoices is produced by the Seminarian Consortium for Urban Pastoral Education (SCUPE), Chicago.

For many years, Dr. Carl Dudley has served as a professor and congregational analyst, most recently at Hartford Seminary and the Hartford Institute for Religion Research. In 1978, while teaching at McCormick Seminary in Chicago, he wrote “Making the Small Church Effective,” establishing his place as one of America’s experts on the dynamics of local church life. He has now published an update to that volume, “Effective Small Churches in the 21st Century.”

Many city churches (neighborhood, ethnic or storefront) are small churches. What should we understand about these small congregations?

The small churches, let’s be clear, are the oldest form of Christian faith. When you say “small,” it’s usually in comparison to something else which is bigger. And the bigger churches are what have grown. What is new in the 20th and 21st century are the large, and now the megachurches that dwarf anything else. But in fact, the small churches are becoming more numerous.

The press likes to concentrate on the churches large enough to maintain a professional clergy and a program, and that kind of thing. Probably, only one-third of congregations in the United States are large enough to comfortably maintain a staff. Somewhere around two-thirds of the churches are below 125 in regular participating adults, fifty percent are below 100 in regular participating adults. So, it shouldn’t be thought of as unusual to be small. They’re the oldest and the most universal form of Christian faith.

Where the statistic is interesting, is a ratio that I call “50 to 15.” It works in two ways. Fifty percent of the members of most denominations, are in the largest 15 percent of the churches. And 50 percent of the churches have about 15 percent of the members, that’s 50 percent of the smaller churches have about 15 percent of the total membership of denominations. And they are served by about the same number of clergy.

So you’ve got a disparity that organizational types want to “clean up.” The reason it can’t be cleaned up is that small churches are not a continuous flow of congregations from large to small. Small churches are a different breed. They’re a different experience. It’s not like people don’t know they could go to large churches. They just decide they want to maintain small churches. And they do it because of intimacy. Because of the kind of caring that is typical in a small congregation.

When I say intimacy, caring or extended family, it doesn’t mean people are necessarily nice to each other. It just means they’re genuine to each other. They’re vulnerable; they’re exposed to each other. They accept diversity. Not only that, they don’t let people change. They almost enforce diversity. Somebody wants to be different than they used to be, and they still call them by their old name and put them back in the old box. They accept characters and they accept “kinkiness.” It’s just part of who somebody is.

What about the expectations of a new pastor coming into a church like this, especially if they feel they can make that small church grow?

It’s a different kind of experience because in the large congregation you can join a group. In the small congregation, you have to join the whole thing. In fact, it’s a lot more difficult to join the whole culture than it is to join a particular activity. Furthermore, you can’t earn your way in. One of the things that small churches do is exploit energy of outsiders as organizers, but never let them into the group. Yes, they can grow but they grow in a different style. They grow by adoption – people join the past, not the future. The pastor has got to help the church open up the past and be proud of it, before any joining takes place.

Carl, years back I heard a figure concerning small groups saying that about 11 percent growth in one year was about the most they could handle.

Small congregations can only absorb as many people as they can get to know. That means you introduce them fairly slowly. I’ve heard pastors tell me that they could take in half a dozens families a year, but that’s about all they could get in. The point is that they don’t grow fast, but they grow intimately. They want to know everything about the person. The nature of the small church is that they know, or they think they know, everything there is about everybody else. Or they’ll want to know it, or they’ll invent it.

You can make or help a small church to grow if they are willing to give up the essential character of being small. If you can break the church up into groups, if they will permit groups to exist in which they don’t know everybody, they can grow. And you can break them up by fracturing them, but that destroys the thing that many people like about being part of a small church. So they’ll fight it something awful, and they’ll fight it on a very emotional basis. The small church is hard to kill. One executive said to me, “They won’t grow and they won’t go away. They just stay there.” Sometimes they even come back in a different form. What sustains small churches is not organizational structure or even finances. Emotional ties sustain them, and that’s pretty powerful stuff. They can be rational about wanting to change, and still not able to do it.

Summarize the simple "graces" of the small congregation. What do small congregations in the city in particular, have to teach experts who seek steady, even exponential growth?

In some sense, they can’t teach them much of anything. The graces of the small church generally get in the way of growth. Now large churches can have intimate groups so long as they’re separate little cells to themselves. Large churches can have the strength of caring if they’ll put it into “caring cells.” But the small church is all one cell. Small churches can emphasize the uniqueness of individuals, and not make people conform either organizationally or structurally. Small churches have an affinity for “kinky” people.

Small churches are generally larger than their membership, and large churches are generally smaller than their membership. That suggests that small churches can grow by something like “kindred spirits.” Which is to say, having an extended membership – an extended group that’s already part of the membership, but doesn’t belong. In many cases, there are “vicarious members” – people that belong to the church by somebody else. Small churches can engender that consciousness.

Small churches have a kind of authenticity that’s very appealing to many people. They have a kind of earthiness and a natural sense of ecology of the rhythm of the soil and the soul. I think they have a kind of biblical basis and foundation. They’re not into great flights of spiritual worthiness. Rather it’s a kind of down-home, basic stuff.

America's cities have always been complex places. Do present urban dynamics (city zoning, big money, increasing technology) allow for continued small church ministry? Or, will more people simply either go downtown, or out to the suburbs for their spiritual needs?

Small churches have a sense of turf, which is related to that earthiness I was just talking about. They dig in, they tend to be very neighborhood, very local and specific in their focus. Now, that can be, and often becomes a kind of ethnic, racial, cultural enclave – our kind of people. But often the church sees itself as a journeying congregation, a pilgrim people, where they’ve been on a journey and they want to accept anybody else that’s been on their journey. They can often share that with another culture. But it’s not the liberal notion of pluralism. It’s a pluralism where people are named by their idiosyncrasies. People can also be called and named by their ethnic backgrounds; and it’s not an insult. It’s an affirmation to be somebody different in a group that accepts differences. I think small churches are really good at that in some urban neighborhoods where there’s a collection of humanity looking like the United Nations. They’ve got one big umbrella, but they keep their own cultural diversity as a gift. It’s not so self-conscious as liberals saying, “Gee, we’re all one.” It’s the recognition of their diversity that makes it possible for small churches to keep going.

Are you seeing any denominations or traditions doing a better job enhancing and supporting small church ministry than others?

I can’t point to any. Some denominations have produced very good literature that’s been sensitive to small congregations. But a lot of denominational literature urges small congregations to become something else, which I think is counterproductive. Some small churches can grow, but a lot of them are just not gonna grow. To say, “You’re small, but you really ought to be bigger,” doesn’t help much. But some denominations have put out some literature that’s really very affirming of the caring qualities of small congregations.

My reservations are that printed materials aren’t all that persuasive within the oral culture of small congregations. Some of the most effective things are done by denominational staff people, local and regional, who really know these characters. In fact, the most effective denominational people are those who know the church so well that when they come they can tell stories about the leading characters in the local church. And when they really know the church well, the stories often have just a tinge of something shady in them. Everybody can laugh about it! It’s fun and it affirms the earthiness of the small church. Now I don’t know where we’re training those kind of denominational people, because the dominant theme (and income) comes from the large, more efficient and more organizational style of churches.

Carl, you've studied, and written about, small congregations for a long time. Will you continue to do that in formal (or informal) ways?

Well, this last spring, I took what was a 30-year-old book and rewrote it (“Effective Small Churches for the 21st Century”). I rewrote it with a lot of new material that I’ve found accessible. One of the things that’s very interesting is how many of these small church pastors, disproportionately have access on the web to all sorts of new resources. When you compare it, you’d think that the large church with its highly technical staff would be quicker on the web, but in fact, by proportion of pastors, the number of small church pastors that use the computer and its tools is proportionately higher.

Any standard (or unsolicited) question or word of encouragement that you like to offer pastors in small urban churches around America?

I don’t have a standard word, but I do have an observation. The small church pastor learns about the whole world by going deeper into the lives of the people in their immediate community. And the deeper that you go with any one person, the more universal the experience is apt to be. Small church pastors have access to that in ways that many organizational and program-driven pastors don’t. There’s an openness and fullness of knowing the lives of your people that just never happens in larger churches. And it’s a grace, a great gift.

 

  

Tentmaking Ministry - Viable Model of Ministry

The Presbyterian News Service published a story today about Rev. Robert Hattle, a tentmaker in Topeka, Kansas.  You can read the story about Rev Hattle at
http://www.pcusa.org/pcnews/2009/09400.htm.

During the past few months, I have met tentmakers in Northern California, South Dakota, Iowa, South Carolina and other places across the United States.   In addition to doing a great job in ministering with their congregations, these tentmakers also serve as farmers, accountants, doctors, and ranchers. As the Rev. Marcia Clark Myers, director of the PC(USA)’s Office of Vocation says in the above article, tentmaking is not only a viable model of pastoral ministry, it is also becoming a model of choice for more clergy serving smaller membership churches.

I hear some members of smaller membership churches say to me, we're not a church unless we have a full-time pastor.   Tentmakers will remind us that the apostle Paul was a tentmaker!   Tentmaking ministry is a viable model of ministry and it reminds us that the ministry of the church belongs to all of its members. 

If you want to know more about tentmaking ministry, go to the webpage of the Association of Presbyterian Tentmakers at http://www.pcusatentmakers.org. 

Carl Dudley - Lover of justice, urban and small churches

Carl Dudley was a mentor, teacher, co-worker and friend to me.  He was a passionate advocate for justice, for urban ministry, and for smaller membership churches.  Carl passed away yesterday.  His spirit and ministry will be deeply missed.

Here is a brief remembrance written by his son Steven.

Carl Safford Dudley, Presbyterian minister; author, co-author or editor of 16 books about church and community relations; community leader and activist; vivacious neighbor and faithful friend; devoted and loving husband; and energetic father, died in his Hartford, CT, home on Wednesday morning of complications due to cardiac amyloidosis, in the company of his wife and children. He was 76 and is survived by his wife, Shirley, sister, Jay Goldspinner, his five children and nine grandchildren.

Reverend Dudley spent a lifetime in the ministry, organizing churches from Buffalo, New York, to St. Louis, Missouri, and rallying communities from Selma, Alabama to Hartford, Connecticut.

While often described as a maverick for his unorthodox ways and his open challenges to the status quo, it was Dudley's discipline and perseverance, as well as his understated pragmatism, which made him a great leader in the church and the community. 

Dudley's ministry started and ended in the home, where he created a space for both his family and friends to flourish in his presence. He will be missed by many.   

(photo of Carl and Shirley Dudley taken by Cynthia Woolever)

It's Personal!

            A few weeks ago, I read in USA Today about a survey conducted on the issue of evangelism (March 26, 2009).  The article quoted Ed Stetzer, Director of LifeWay Research, a Christian research firm who said, “Baptists like to talk about evangelism than to actually do it.  Personal evangelism is a great concept that’s hard for people to get motivated to do.  People have lost that mission impulse that Christians are supposed to have.”   If I did not know that LifeWay Research has an affiliation with the Southern Baptist Convention, I would have thought that Stetzer was talking about members of the Presbyterian Church (USA)!

            The Southern Baptist Convention is using the results of this survey to launch its new national campaign to motivate its members to evangelize unbelievers.  The survey found that only two ways most people said that they were somewhat or very willing to “receive information” about Jesus- from a personal conversation with a family member (63%), or with a friend or neighbor from the church (56%).  Think about it.  When we enjoy a great meal at a restaurant or like a movie, what do we tend to do afterwards?  We talk about it and recommend the restaurant or movie to a family member or friend!  But when it comes to sharing the Good News with others, we take the non-relational route.  When we want to talk about God and our church, we tend to send fliers, stick door hangers, advertise or build a sexy website so that ‘they will come.”   The LifeWay survey basically rebuff these outreach efforts.  In her conversations with growing mainline congregations, Martha Grace Reese says in her book, Unbinding the Gospel: Real Life Evangelism, that a family member or friend had invited 59% of the people who joined these growing congregations. 

            We don’t need a pastor, program or budget to do evangelism. Carl Dudley says that when a congregation  creates an evangelism committee, it basically passes the buck to a few to build these relationships and have conversations with their neighbors.  This is not evangelism.  Evangelism is everyone’s responsibility to reach out with their neighbors, to build relationships, and to invite their neighbors on a walk and relationship with God.  Stetzer says, “believers should realize that the unbelievers next door still need a simple, personal invitation to talk, to be in community, and to church."

Heavy Lifting Required

                               

It’s been a while since I posted something on my blog.  I am amazed at folks like our GA Moderator Bruce Reyes-Chow who not only blogs regularly but also writes regularly on his Facebook, twitters, and uses every technological medium possible. More power to Bruce and folks like him!  The long-term question I have about all this technology is –can it truly develop deep and sustaining relationships and ministries?

I have spent the last month and a half traveling and visiting with pastors, CLPS,  tentmakers and congregational leaders serving small, rural and/or urban churches in Napa Valley, California;  Rockford, Illinois; Spartanburg, Greenville and Clinton areas of South Carolina, Indianapolis, Indiana and Dayton, Ohio.   Regardless of the size of congregation and the community context, the two questions consistently lifted up in my visits and conversations are:   1) What can we do to change/transform our congregation?; and 2) What are the ways that we can reach out to/with our neighborhood/community?

            These questions are inter-connected to me because I  believe that a congregation that is poised to experience transformation and renewal is a congregation that is spiritually grounded in it’s call from God to serve with its neighborhood/community.  The problem is that some of our churches want to experience transformation without having to leave the comfort of their church walls and connect with their neighborhood/community.  These congregations believe that if they can purchase the right congregational transformation package, hire the right consultant, or develop a sexy web page that this alone will turn their congregations around.  They want somebody else to do the spiritual and physical “heavy lifting” required for effective congregational transformation work.

One of the congregations I recently visited was Bethany Church in Clinton, South Carolina.  Bethany is a member of the Laurens County Cluster of Smaller Membership Churches, a coalition of 15 smaller membership churches working together in shared ministries.  This is hard work but it has paid off in the numerous ministries developed by Bethany Church and the congregations in the Cluster in serving with their neighbors nearby and across the globe in Haiti and Dominican Republic.  This community outreach effort is led by the Rev. Herb Codington.  Rev. Codington is consistently living into the reality of the time and effort it takes to build relationships and bridges.  On the local level, the cluster offers programs for all ages. There are fellowship gatherings, prayer expeditions to different churches, and leadership training events. Each summer the cluster sponsors a youth camp. Along with Bible study and recreation, participants serve in projects like cemetery clean up, repair and re-roofing of homes of the elderly, and visitation in nursing homes.

No doubt, using electronic communications such as the web certainly have their place in connecting with people, but there is still no substitute for face-to-face, one-on-one contacts that will deepen these lasting relationships over time.

In my many conversations with folks across the country regarding congregational transformation, I continue to wonder , “How can a congregation serve its community if it does not know the dreams and needs of its neighbors?  How can a congregation develop mission partnerships with its community if it does not know what skills and gifts exist within its community?   How can a congregation leverage its resources if it does not know what kind of human and financial resources exists within its community? How can a congregation be faithful to God’s call without embracing the ‘stranger in their midst’”?

Opportunities for Mission Partnerships/Collaboratives?

      I had the wonderful opportunity this past Monday to meet with pastors and leaders from the eleven urban congregations in Rochester, New York.  We had a deep and fruitful conversation about the possibility of these congregations breaking out of their silos and forming an urban partnership/cooperative to help strengthen their individual and collective congregational life and ministry, and to provide a Presbyterian witness to/with their city (see article “Conversations on Urban Collaboration Initiated in Genesee Valley Presbytery from the Synod of the Northeast webpage at www.synodne.org).  The Rev. Judy Hay, pastor of Calvary/St. Andrew Presbyterian Church and Rev. John Wilkinson, pastor of Third Presbyterian Church, are ably leading this vision and effort. 

     Organizing and building a shared collaborative ministry requires vision, leadership, imagination, time, energy and patience.  In light of the current economic crisis, congregations should take this moment as an opportunity to explore how they can build new collaborative ministries so that they can leverage their resources and recruit new partners to further the mission work of their congregation and the larger church.

     My question is - why are there not more urban and rural congregations organizing collaborative ministries?  What is preventing your congregation to pursue this opportunity for ministry?

 

 

 

A Small Chance by Carol Howard Merritt

So, Ismael Garcia, my ethics professor in seminary, told one of his classes about a medical doctor, who decided to work in a big city because he could get a better salary and a more prestigious job. Even though the doctor knew that he was needed in the small towns, where they had no medical professionals, he didn’t care.

Ismael was a masterful teacher, and he had us all worked up, booing the doctor, decrying the injustice. Then he turned around and said, “You hypocrites! All of you pastors do the same thing. You’re all going to bigger cities. You let these rural churches flounder. You won’t give them any time.”

Yeah, he laid on the guilt pretty thick. And it worked, at least in my case. When we were looking for calls, I was encouraged to take the associate pastor position at some large, prestigious church, but instead, I decided to go to a small congregation in rural Abbeville, Louisiana.

Now, I’m not going to tell you that it was easy. I’m not going to regurgitate the romantic mythology that people will love you more at a rural church, or that the appreciation they lavish upon you will far outweigh the lack of salary, because it’s not really true. It was difficult. I regularly experienced culture shock, and we would constantly escape to New Orleans to get a bit of city life in our souls.

But, now that many seminarians are looking for their first calls, I do want to urge you to look at a country church or two. At least, don’t completely write them off. If you have a spouse who can manage it, and if your student loans responsibilities aren’t too much (and if you’re Presbyterian, the BOP might be able to help you out with that), it is at least worth a look.

Why?

(1) You might like it. I met a wonderful, gifted pastor in Iowa a few months ago who lived in California most of her life, and she loves her country church. As I listened to her story, I wondered if it was a surprise for her to figure that out. Even if you don’t like it, you might find out some things about yourself that you didn’t know before.

(2) It will give you opportunities that you can’t get in larger cities. It’s the big fish/small pond thing. I was quickly placed in leadership positions within the city and within the denomination. It allowed me to gain a lot of great experience that I wouldn’t have gotten otherwise. Plus, other clergy were very good at mentoring me, whereas in larger cities, new clergy go unnoticed.

(3) You can develop your preaching skills. We all think that we’re naturally gifted and talented orators when we come out of seminary. But, in reality, any art form requires practice to do it really well. You just won’t get that practice if you’re at a really large church, preaching four times a year. What people often don’t realize is that it doesn’t matter if you learn by preaching to a thousand people or fifty people. What matters is how many times that you do it. Serving a small church will give you the opportunity to write and preach on a consistent basis.

(4) They need you. Seriously. We’re in a crisis time in our denominations. In the PCUSA, forty percent of pulpits are empty. They are in rural areas, where it’s difficult to attract good candidates. You could give a congregation an opportunity to celebrate communion on a regular basis, or to have some consistent care, which they haven’t had for a long time. It is a sacrifice, but it’s for a very good cause.

Now, to denominational leaders, in order for this to work, we can no longer assume that a person went to a really small church or a rural pastorate because he or she was a low-quality candidate. Because, you know that’s what too many people are thinking. Can we resist that temptation? If seminary students decide to go to a rural parish for a first call, can we make sure that we don’t discriminate against them for giving up some prime years of their lives for the good of the denomination? If we see two people looking for a job, one who’s been on staff at a large prestigious church, and one who’s been a solo pastor at a rural church, can we stop making assumptions about who might be more qualified?

(This article reprinted with permission from Carol Howard Merrit from her blog - TribalChurch.org, January 5, 2009.  Carol is pastor at Western Presbyterian Church in Washington, D.C., and author of Tribal Church:  Ministering to the Missing Generation)

Reinventing Ourselves

 "The hallmark of those companies and countries that continually thrive is that they continually reinvent themselves."
    David Rothkopf, an energy expert and visiting scholar at the Carnegie Endowment
    (Hot, Flat and Crowded by Thomas Friedman, pg. 23)

"When the wind changes directions, there are those who build walls and those who build windmills."
    Chinese Proverb (Hot, Flat and Crowded, pg. 24)

    In his new book, Hot, Flat and Crowded, Thomas Friedman discusses how the United States has lost its way as a world leader and how it must reinvent itself by taking the lead back in solving the world's big problems.

    I've had the joy this this past year to visit many urban, rural and smaller membership churches.  Many of these churches are wrestling with how to reinvent themselves so that they can meet the winds of change that are blowing in and through their congregations and communities.  The churches that are growing spiritually are building windmills rather than walls to face these winds of change.  These churches are not just making piecemeal changes by tweaking their worship services in adding a new praise song, or changing the name of their church home, or making name tags for their members to greet visitors.  These churches are making major changes in their mission and life together.  They are reinventing themselves so that they can reach out with their communities by listening and responding to the issues and needs of their communities, by broadening their leadership base to include new folks, and by building new mission partnerships. 

    As we prepare to begin a new year, how will your church family be building windmills to meet the winds of change?

Food for thought for Urban Churches, or Maybe All Churches?

I recently received a copy of Sabbath in the City by Bryan P. Stone and Claire E. Wolfteich (WJK Press, 2008).  The two authors led the project called "Sustaining Urban Pastoral Excellence" conducted by Boston University School of Theology and its Center for Practical Theology.  This project was part of the Pastoral Excellence grant program funded by Lilly Endowment and was the only project specifically focused with urban pastors.

I recommend this book for your reading.  I like to share with you a few quotes from this book -

"One thing is certain:  urban churches that are intentional about remaining and thriving in the city must be committed and open to change.  Indeed, some of the congregations that not only survive but thrive in the city have come to see their relationship to the ever-changing urban context as a pilgrimage - as an opportunity to be embraced hopefully rather than an obstacle to be hurdled......  An excellent urban pastor is one who can tolerate ambiguity and has a relative comfort with a high degree of chaos (pg. 8)."

"There may be no place to 'stand' in the city... or certainly no place to stand still.  But one of the empowering messages heard repeatedly from urban pastors is that in the midst of transition it is important to remember that the church is God's not ours (pg. 9)"

Though these words are directed toward urban churches and pastors, I believe they speak to all churches.  Food for thought!