Voices outside the Narthex

When I am in my office getting ready for the worship service, it is always nice to hear familiar voices in the narthex as they come in and meet the greeters.  Those are the voices I recognize and pay attention to.  But there are voices outside the building also. Those I don’t recognize and cannot hear very well.

Jessica Tate in her blog NEXT Church regularly pulls on wisdom from community organizing as she thinks about being the church in the 21st century. In this month’s edition she writes about developing children’s ministry. This is what she has to say: “’If you build it, they will come.’ We held that maxim for several years in children’s ministry at the congregation I first served. It is not true. ‘We need better curriculum,’ I thought. ‘One that more fully embraces the Presbyterian theology we preach,…. one that takes children and their spiritual questions seriously, and is easy for our teachers to use. That is what good curriculum should do….’ So we researched and acquired a new curriculum. The children did not come. ‘Our teachers need better training so they will be more invested, more prepared, and developing spiritually themselves.’ We did more training. Our teachers were ready! The children did not come. ‘We need better snacks, more play time, less choir, more choir, more Bible drills, parent education, family events… ‘the list went on and on and we tried it all. They did not come. I thought the stagnation of the children’s ministry was simply a matter of technical fixes and re-energizing volunteers. Two years in we realized we were wrong and we were frustrated. All of us believed in the value of forming our children in faith, but we couldn’t get more than a dozen families engaged. We didn’t know what else to try.” So she got training, which completely reframed the ways in which she understood how to do her job as a pastor, namely, “by working primarily relationally within and outside of my congregation (as opposed to programmatically).” She found what it was really like for people in her community. She found problems with affordable housing and affordable dental care were some of the obstacles to church attendance. She also concluded that relationships are essential to the community’s life together, that people will act on their interest when they are able to name what that interest is, and, because lives are constantly changing, programs needed to be continually dis-organized and re-organized.

That Jessica Tate was talking about children’s ministry is much less important for us is what she learned: really listening to people and having them listen to themselves in the process causes change, not trying out programs. This is something we can learn from. Finding a strategy and a plan was all about listening and developing relationships.  Isn’t that what we found in her exploration groups: we wanted to come up with great plans and what we got was people listening and getting to know each other.  I notice how it has tightened the bonds of people at Parkview.  Sometimes we need to do a lot of listening and developing relationships before we can come up with big plans. That’s why exploration takes time and that is why we are taking more time for it.

But what about the voices outside of our narthex, outside of our building, outside of our fence? Don’t we have to listen to them to?  Does it matter that you are on the corner of T and 8^th streets in downtown Sacramento? Or is the location unimportant, as long it is in comfortable driving distance?  To what degree is Parkview’s future tied to the future of the community around you? Is it possible to develop more relationships with the people and organizations around the church so that you can listen and find out what they are looking for and how come they cannot find it? Can we develop a listening strategy with the community? Maybe people don’t know yet that they need a place like Parkview, because they have never experienced it. May God help you find the answers to these questions and many more.  Thanks for all you do! See you in church.  Aart