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The Paper Chase: Part One

As I have said, I am beginning to work on my doctoral thesis and it's taking most of my writing energy to do it.  So I thought perhaps I would share the first draft of the introduction with you and solicit your comments.  It could be a big help to writing a decent paper.  The working title of this puppy is:

 "Changing Times-Timing Change - The Rural and Small Town Church: Family Chaplaincy or Mission to the World?  Dealing with the Inhibitors to Developing a Missional Church in a Family Church Ethos."

Is that a mouthful or what?  Well anyway, here's the intro to the thing.  I'd like to know what you think.

Chapter 1

I have a love-hate relationship with the small church.

I love living in a rural area. It gets me the opportunity to be in a community at large, to participate in the life of the community and to make a difference - one that is tangible, and readily satisfying. But it is fraught with all sorts of other things as well. The distance to centers of culture, the inability of the core population to put up with strangers, seeing them more as a threat or, at best, an inconvenience to their way of life. The small church is a microcosm of diverse personalities and tastes and shepherding one is like trying to herd cats.

Many, especially long time, small church members will say that the small church is like home. It is their church. It is like family. All will be correct, in their own reality. After nearly fifteen years of rural, small church ministry, I agree with them that the small church is a lot like family. But it is a family more like the Osbournes than the Cleavers or the Nelsons. Ward, June, Wally and the Beav just don’t exist in this context and never did. In the real world there are many very human personalities which make up the small church "family."  For example:

There is the Grande Dame, the matriarch who tends to rule and overrule as she sees fit, concerned only for the continuation of the way she understands things with little care for the good of the misson of the church.  Her favorite phrase is "We’ve always done it this way. This church will just not be church if we move this way or that."

There is the Kindly Aunt, who is usually a friend or sister of the Grande Dame, who knows her very well, including her nasty little secrets. While never sharing them, she is always encouraging those afflicted by her nastiness to keep moving and not to worry. "We need those new ideas so we can grow!" she will usually say and she is usually the one who runs interference for everyone with the Grande Dame.

There is the Father or Mother, usually the clergy of the congregation, who is generally seen by the Grande Dame as the spawn of Satan or at least the offspring incapable of raising his or her own family in the manner by which the Matriarch has decreed as the only acceptable way.

There is the Black Sheep, the one member of the family no one talks about, who is loud, smokes and drinks too much, is generally held in low regard by the Grande Dame but is beloved by Auntie and regarded cautiously by his or her awestruck and more conservative peers.

There are Multitudinous Siblings, the congregation, like children of the Father or Mother who are endlessly bickering, endlessly vying for the attention of Mom or Dad, endlessly acting out, endlessly doing surprising, wonderful things.

I've identified but a few here.  There are many, many more and this is the true make up of the small church "family." It’s a reality that is hard to swallow for the members but it is essential for the leadership to understand this distinction in order to get the small church to be the church and not just another dysfunctional family.

The small church, tends to be more diverse in its membership than it lets on. While the small church may look, on surface, to be a gathering of homogeneous types, there just aren’t enough people in a rural area to have a consensus on any one type. Thus the small church is a mix of farmer, professional, blue collar, tourist or snowbird, and what-have-you. Diversity abounds in a small church where it wouldn’t be so in a much larger church which nurtures the sameness of groups in its programs for divorcees, single parents, singles, educators and the like. The small church has to take a diverse crowd and live with it. It is sometimes pretty and most always messy, but it can be the church as it was meant to be if a few of the obstacles that inevitably crop up are dealt with smartly and effectively.

The small church can be a maddening enigma. It is mostly always poor, mostly always lacking in membership, but it just won’t go away. It stands in a world reeling from the effects of rapid shifts of lifestyles. The world is more fast paced than ever before and yet the small church remains steady. The world is certainly more expensive than ever before, yet the small church remains plain. As the world becomes more complex, the small church remains simple. In a world ever more rational in its thinking, the small church has feelings. In a mobile world, the small church is an anchor. And in a world where anonymity is the norm, the small church calls us by name. It is sometimes mean, most times insular, but always in place, always together, always pulling one more day of existence out of the Hat of God. The small church is at once maddening, enigmatic, caring, conniving, treacherous, loyal, reverent, and a pain in the ass. But it stands as a bastion against a world that has forgotten how to care, how to love, how to serve, how to pray. It stands as a beacon saying "I am still here in spite of the world, in spite of our own troubles. Praying when you can’t or won’t, holding you dear and opening my doors to all who wish to sojourn for a time." The small church is all these things and much, much more. It is a difficult thing to describe, and in spite of being self-described black and white, it is ambiguous to the max. People disagree with each other over trivial things and will argue them until the wee hours of the morning, possibly not speaking to each other for a time afterward, and yet will, in the space of five minutes, vote unanimously to support a major issue facing the survival of the church with nary a moment's hesitation and little if any discussion.

This paper will state the obvious, and restate many things that have been said about how churches run, especially the small church. It will look at effective ways of communication between people, how to deal with conflict, how to deal with very real, nasty antagonists. It will at once be a rant and a song of joy reflecting my own struggles with small churches as I have worked to move them into the 21^st century with a sense of mission to a larger world and have had to deal with the inevitable conflicts which have arisen by the self-proclaimed matriarchs of the congregation in response to changes in the way we do things, the growth of the congregation to include membership from outside the circle, and (as my bishop so sagely warned me would happen after any relatively long tenure in a place} to deal with having made some life-long, bitter enemies on this journey.

I have also made some life-long friends. And these I cherish. They have been a source of comfort to me as I have tried to be a source of comfort not only for them but for those enemies of mine, as well, who are open to it (and one or two are).

I will develop case studies on several churches in the area - all small, or used to be small, all on different mission tracks, all with unique problems. I will show how the small church can be an effective witness to the reign of God with limited resources if the inhibitors to moving out of an insular model of ministry can be overcome. I will identify some of those inhibitors, the types of which will be surprising to no one, and how they have been overcome in my own and in the parish case studies I will be using, which may be surprising.

The small church can be a beacon in the spiritual darkness. It can be more than just a community of people who want nothing to do with outsiders. It can be the force by which the world is changed, and may be the only force that can, because it isn’t so big that it trips over its own feet.

4:58:59 PM
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