May 7, 2001
Frank urges U.S. churches to search their souls By Elaine Justice
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A recent comprehensive survey of American congregations affirms what
Thomas Frank has been telling his students and congregations all along:
Most of the countrys churches will never be mega-churches.
And, he added, they shouldnt aim to be. Frank, a professor of church administration and congregational life in
the School of Theology, said he is surprised by how dominant the utilitarian
commercial perspective on church has becomethat bigger is
better, that growth is the byword, sometimes to the exclusion of everything
else. As a result, he said, few people look [for inspiration] to a congregation
of a hundred participants with a thriving ministry in an urban neighborhood,
or a church at which a few dozen immigrants gather to sustain life and
hope. But maybe they should. In his most recent book, The Soul of the Congregation: An Invitation to Congregational Reflection, Frank urges pastors and lay people to stop thinking of growth as the only yardstick by which to measure their faith and begin studying one of the thousands of congregations that have been around for awhilenamely, their own. Look what you can learn if you look at your church as a living
culture, Frank said. There is a tremendous treasure of stories,
symbols and traditions that pass from generation to generation that represent
the best of what churches have to offer. Its rare to find that in
todays society, when the emphasis tends to be obtaining the latest
product that can improve my life. Frank wrote Soul of the Congregation partly out of frustration with what he calls the product mentality of church literature, most of which, he said, treats churches like a widget. A frequent leader of seminars on congregational vitality, Frank likes to point out that the theology behind this [widget] mindset is, The more we produce, the closer we are to God and to doing Gods will. Clearly, he doesnt agree. Thinking of a church as a system of productivity does not reach
the depths of what church is for or why people associate with churches,
Frank said. When participants recite a creed or sing a hymn from
memory, when they kneel at the altar rail, when they give a Saturday to
cook food for the homeless, something else is going on that can only be
addressed with a narrativenot of progress, but of presence; not
of productivity, but of place. He admitted that the message more is not necessarily better
is hard for many churches to hear, particularly those with an evangelical
tradition such as his own United Methodist. Yes, were evangelical, Frank said. Yes, we go
where the people are; Methodists traditionally have been among the first
people in the community. But we, along with Protestants from many traditions,
are facing the question of, Now that were established, now
what? What is the content of our faith, and how do we sustain it
over a lifetime or many lifetimes? One way to do that, he said, is for congregations to draw deeply on their
own traditions, to find their own souland nurture it. His definition
of a congregations soul is the place where people meet
the world through everyday practices, activities, things they make, actions
they take, ways they find to express themselves and their faith out of
the materials the world has to offer. Frank cited the experiences of one of his seminary students who divided
his time preaching at two small country churches that look almost identical
from the outside, yet respond very differently to crises. One congregation responds with panicthey draw inside,
Frank said. The other responds with action. When the local plant
down the road closes, they open up the building and set up a soup kitchen
for the unemployed. What difference does it make, knowing the soul of a congregation? Its crucial for pastors and lay leaders, Frank said. You cant adapt to a changing world unless you know who you are. |