Sandy Godel attends Trinity United Church in Cold Lake where she admires the work ethic of her congregation while she strives to invite space for spiritual presence.
Whether
you are a lay leader or ministry personnel, if you are ready to stop the snoozing
in the empty pews on Sunday mornings, Bruce Sanguin's book, The Emerging Church:
A Model for Change & a Map for Renewal, is for you and your congregation.
Sanguin ministers at Canadian Memorial United Church in Vancouver, the "model" church in the book. He is also the author of Darwin, Divinity and the Dance of the Cosmos, a challenging book about ecological spirituality.
In The Emerging Church, Sanguin promises to provide us with a guide, not just for renewal of our mainline liberal congregations, but one that will transform us and the communities in which we live. He starts the book with a litany of complaint about how we have mucked up the Christian movement so far. We have too much busyness, meeting time and niceness in our churches, and not enough ministry, prayer time or leadership grounded in God's spirit. We wear out our ministry personnel with too much expectation, and we have forgotten our congregational purpose.
Sanguin tells us there is a fix for these problems, and it starts with a process for choosing our leaders. He refuses to let us be complacent with whoever shows up for the job; instead, he insists that potential leaders arrive with Spirit-given gifts for leading and become well trained to use them. Then, when the inevitable conflicts that come with change develop, he helps us to understand that the clash is due to differences in our stage of development of Christian values, as some of us operate from a more evolved state than others. This fascinating analysis of value development is depicted cleverly in a color insert.
The Emerging Church is sarcastically humorous and well organized with one meaty topic per chapter followed by an exercise for church leaders to complete - the "map" of the renewal. The book contains an example of an organizational chart, a values statement and a board agenda; a thorough bibliography; and a very helpful (but too short) review of what went wrong during the transformation of Sanquin's Central Memorial Church.
Does the process in the book, work? Sanguin reports that his church has doubled in size since they started the renewal, and a peak at the church website (http://www.canadianmemorial.org) lists many opportunities for personal and spiritual growth, a pastoral care ministry, environmental initiatives, and outreach efforts locally, globally and for all ages. If all our churches were this vibrant, there would be no need for the book!
Alas, few churches in Canada have the demographics and resources of Sanquin's affluent congregation. Many churches in need of renewal are in isolated rural areas with a rapidly aging population. Ministers there struggle to provide worship services to multiple-point charges, without adding leadership training and initiating an organizational change process to their list of duties. For them, advice from Sanguin to discover the "color of their Christ" (Chapter Six), and to embrace the naysayers of change as though they were angels (Chapter Seven), sounds just a tad too New Age for their practical realities.
Since transforming a congregation can be such a difficult task with slow results, I'd rather attend a church where the pay-off from the change has begun: Canadian Memorial United Church. Unfortunately, since I don't live in Vancouver, I'm stuck with my ho-hum church. However, after reading The Emerging Church, I find I have energy, hope and a vision for the future of my congregation--and a guide to get us there.
Bruce Sanguin, The Emerging Church: A Model for Change & a Map for Renewal.
CopperHouse. 205pp., $24.95
Congregational News May 2009 Vol. 15 No. 3