 |  |  |  |  |  |  |  |  |  | | | PRACTICAL WISDOM FOR LEADING CONGREGATIONS |
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After the Rev. Dr. Gail Cafferata closed a church in Northern California after nine years of service, she needed a break. The experience had been emotionally taxing. She leaned into rest and retirement and jumped at the chance to sail and race with friends in the San Francisco Bay during the summer. "I didn't go into my home office for a while," she said. "It was too painful." Later that year, however, when she finally reached a point of sitting down to reflect on her experience closing a church, she wondered how other pastors had dealt with similar experiences. "I didn't know anyone else at that point who had closed a church, because no one in our diocese had done it," she said. "And then I thought, 'I wonder if anybody's ever done a study?'" Having served as a sociologist at universities for two decades before becoming a pastor, Cafferata went back to school and conducted a survey of 132 pastors who had closed churches. The research led to her recent book, The Last Pastor: Faithfully Steering a Closing Church. Cafferata recently joined our colleagues at Faith & Leadership for an interview. |
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When the Rev. Dr. Shelley Best was given her pastorate in Connecticut, those who gave it to her expected it to die. But under Best's leadership, it didn't die. It transformed, grew and flourished. "I had to do things differently in order for us to survive," she said. In the midst of a community ravaged by drug and alcohol addiction, Best decided that traditional models of funding were not going to help her church. Instead, she turned to what she calls "community economics."
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MANAGING STRATEGIC AND CASH RESERVES IN THE WAKE OF A CRISIS A CHURCH NETWORK WEBINAR | AUGUST 20, 2020
Join Connor Carew from Permanens Capital Partners for a webinar exploring what the market's historic sell-off and historic rally means for your congregation's or your organization's endowment. We know that the post-COVID world will look different economically; this webinar will seek to explain the long-term implications of this unprecedented event.
Learning Objectives: After attending this event, attendees will be able to:
- Understand the move in capital markets that took place over the past few months
- Understand how the current market environment affects your endowment
- Have a list of topics/questions to bring to your next investment committee meeting
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A number of scholars have noticed how congregations often mimic the life cycle of biological organisms. Each year, I work as a consultant with dozens of churches, and through years of accumulated experience in ministry as a pastor and in congregational development, I have found the effects of this life cycle on congregations to be readily apparent. Demonstrating this life cycle and helping a church find itself in the progressive route between life and death has become an important tool for helping church leaders find their way out of stability and decline to vital ecclesial health. |
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Not only do new church starts in significant numbers bring systemic change and renewal to mainline denominations, but new church development brings similar change to individual aging congregations in their vicinity. Author Stephen Compton argues that a decline in new church starts in the last half of the 20th century was the major contributor to the decline of mainline church groups -- not liberalism or lack of faith, as is often cited. He shows in this book how introducing considerable numbers of new congregations into these old denominations can cause these venerable institutions to revisit the meaning of "church" and "congregation," develop a clearer vision of their collective mission, and grow in their ability to bring about positive change in the world. In effect, he contends, new churches in an aging organization do not merely make it grow. They make it change in ways that make it more effective in its mission and ministries. This book will appeal to leaders across denominational lines, including those not ordinarily called "mainline," and especially to pastors and leaders of older congregations.
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