Barnabas File

Many in the church today look at the current situation and remember a “golden age” of church life.     Post World War Two the pews were filled, Sunday school classes overflowed with children, budgets were growing, the community was influenced by what the churches supported, seminaries were booming, and denominational bureaucracies were expanding.      Today, church members look around at empty pews, unused classrooms, diminishing resources, and an overall lack of relevance in the community around them. This disparity provokes grief, confusion, anger, and disillusionment.   In his Doctor of Ministry project at Central Seminary pastor Jason Mack pointed out that this “golden age” was an aberration.  Noting the work of Gil Rendle in  Quietly Courageous: Leading the Church in a Changing World,   he calls this “aberrant time.”   Postwar influence drove the population to be cohesive and common values were espoused.  Re...

  Here’s a new word to add to your vocabulary:  permacrisis.  It refers to “an extended period of instability and insecurity, especially one resulting from a series of catastrophic events.”  The Collins Dictionary added it to their files in 2022 and declared it the word of the year. The word represents the compounding crises we have seen in recent years including inflation, the cost-of-living crisis, the pandemic, disastrous climate change, the war in Ukraine, and ongoing racial tensions.   Permacrisis may well take the place of the VUCA acronym—volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous—to describe our present-day situation. Although it has been used in economic, social, and political contexts, the word might appropriately be applied to where we find the church in North America today.  It appears that several crises are coming to a head for our churches.  All denominations report that their congregants are aging, resulting in...

Whether we like it or not, someone is bound to ask the question: “How big is your church?”   One might avoid the question by responding with questions such as, “What do you mean by ‘big’?”   “Do you mean how many resident members or regular Sunday morning attendance?”   “Do you mean square footage?” While well meaning, the initial question can be translated, “Is your church successful?”  The question is rooted in our ingrained desire to measure success or progress.  Numbers indicate whether a church is growing or declining.  For some, numbers indicate the vitality of the congregation.  Of course, numbers can also apply to dollars, member involvement in missions and ministry, and whether the church is able to support its staff, pay its bills, and keep the roof fixed. Since numbers define what we do, perhaps the best thing to do is to come up with our own numbers or metrics to measure where we are on the journey.  In his book, ...

I am a leadership junkie.   My interest goes back to college days when I participated in a number of student organizations that were supposedly “student-led.”      It continued through my time in the military and as I became a campus minister working with college students in the organization then known as Baptist Student Union.   Leadership was an important concern as I worked with colleagues across the state while leading the program of collegiate ministries in Tennessee.   These days, I continue to reflect upon my own leadership—both successful and not so successful, read and study about leaders, and work with leaders of congregations and judicatories. As you might expect, I was particularly interested in the comment in a recent interview  with long-time church consultant Gil Rendle.  Rendle said, “I am still struck by how few seminaries even acknowledge leadership as a discipline and don’t address it in any way, or...