A Good Start

The research and leadership team began meeting this past Sunday night to begin helping First Lutheran Church discern its calling and set its long term direction. It's a great group of people, and we are off to a great start. I'm really excited to see where God is going to lead us together.

We handled two main topics for the night. The first and most important thing we did was to build a strong foundation of weakness. It sounds funny now that I say it like that, but I'm not kidding. We prayed together and acknowledged the importance of being dependent on God instead of producing some kind of self-driven strength, which is a real temptation for many of us, perhaps all of us. As part of our conversation, we were responding to readings from Jim Cymbala's book Fresh Wind, Fresh Fire. The human brokenness evidenced in that book is more obvious than it is in most of our community, but that doesn't make it any more real, and if First Lutheran is going to be place of grace and healing that looks anything like a community centered on Jesus, then we may as well drop the charade and get on our (literal and metaphorical) knees before God.

Second, we took some time to look objectively and empirically at our church and region. We reviewed internal membership data and worship attendance data, and we reviewed census and survey data for the zip codes around FLC. At FLC, we have started to see some signs of numerical growth in the last 4-6 months, particularly in contemporary worship and in new member classes. From an external perspective, nobody was surprised to learn that our area is relatively affluent, well educated, and white with a higher than average majority of white collar workers and two-income families. We saw that only 1/3 of people in our area report being strongly involved with their faith, and only 13% list "finding a good church" as something that they are concerned with.

If people were looking for a church, there was a (to me) surprisingly even split among people who would prefer to worship in a traditional/formal environment and those would would prefer to worship in a contemporary/informal environment. And then another, equal number said they had no preference! People also expressed a fairly high value for bible study, theological discussion, and prayer groups, and they preferred worship services that are both emotionally inspiring and intellectually stimulating.

I'm looking forward to the rest of this process.

(If you want to keep up with just the posts on this blog that are specifically about First Lutheran's process of discerning its call, just click on the "discernment" label at the bottom of any of these related posts.)