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Who owns your church? By Joe W. Walker
Jun 2, 2004, 01:26  I am not talking about legal possession of property. Maybe I can explain it best by an experience I had in a hardware store. I needed to talk to the store owner.  The first person I approached told me, “I’m only a customer.†The next person said, “I just work here. Talk to Mrs. Smith, the owner.†She was the person who could make decisions about the store.  Mrs. Smith had ownership in many ways. She cared how the store looked, how customers were served, how the store used various means to attract new customers. She made sure the shelves were neat and attractive and fully stocked. She dearly loved the place and was proud of what was done in it to serve people.  So who owns your church? Sad to say, many persons who enter a church do so more as customers than as owners. Some may feel that they do work there, but someone else really “owns†the church.  Because the physical arrangement of our churches are so much like a theater or concert hall, we all too often enter the church with the same mind-set as we do a theater. We are there as an audience, more to listen than to worship, or as spectators, more to look at what the choir and preacher are doing than to feel we too are participants in the service.  We clergy, in the minds of many laity, are the “owners†of the church. What we want or do often determines the programs and ministry of the church, not involving laity in making decisions. Laity accede to clergy all too often instead of feeling enough ownership to offer their own ideas or to challenge the pastor’s.
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It needs to be said that few clergy take over ownership intentionally. Many clergy feel they are called to the primary “ownership†of the local church and establish subtle patterns by which they dominate and control. This subconscious well-intentioned controlling ownership is made evident even at the Annual Conference level when most chairs of boards and agencies end up being clergy or when Cabinets assert themselves into control of nominating procedures and other arenas of decision-making.
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The time of the greatest expansion of Methodism took place when most of what was happening in the churches was being done by laity. In the first half of the 19th century Methodism spread across the whole frontier. The clergy circuit-riders deserve much credit for this great expansion. But they sowed and laity harvested. Clergy would gather a group of laity together to become a church. They would then leave to start a church elsewhere, not to return for three to six months.
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Laity “owned†that new church. They planned the worship, preached the sermons, called on the sick, and witnessed to others. There was no way they could settle for being an audience or spectators or customers. The laity had to own the shop or go broke spiritually!
And the churches flourished and grew. Spiritual holiness was spread across the land!
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Can clergy again let laity become partners in owning the church? Can DSs and bishops begin to engage laity in the connectional work with the same vigor with which they now engage clergy?
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Are laity willing to accept both the joy of church ownership and the responsibility and burden that are a part of ownership? Will local church lay leaders accept the role of co-leader with the pastor? Will pastors let them?
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Is it time for laity and clergy alike at all levels of the church to share both the authority and the responsibility of owning the church. The hope for the future lies in a new pattern of ownership that will make laity and clergy partners in running the shop. This will come about not because of some programmatic strategy, but because both clergy and laity celebrate their valid co-ownership of Christ’s holy church. Show (0) - Add comments: |
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