This Weekend

Annelle Ruemmler is a greatly-loved colleague, friend, and excellent keyboard player in The Rivers of Life Clergy Band. (Have you booked us to come to your place yet? Contact me for details.)

She recently shared an article with the others of us in The Clergy Band. Here’s a potent excerpt —

From 2007 to 2014, according to Pew Research, the number of mainline Protestants in the United States dropped by about 5 million people, leaving just 14 percent of Americans — about 36 million — identifying with any mainline denomination.

— In the face of this comes a resurgence of what we United Methodists call The Circuit Rider. That’s what the article’s about. You can read it here:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/religion/the-circuit-preacher-was-an-idea-of-the-frontier-past-now-its-the-cutting-edge-response-to-shrinking-churches/2019/09/23/e3cced32-d348-11e9-9343-40db57cf6abd_story.html?fbclid=IwAR0WoP2Gl6ZD5kh-NhZ0TKYtecVLsr6XrWWElHSQFqj3li6_Rt-aFTpJTRA

But behind it, and woven into it, is the question of the very future of our churches. While it’s a multi-faceted crisis, and any solution will have to likewise be multi-dimensional, I keep returning to a couple of questions we each need to be asking:

1. What does our church offer that’s unique?
2.  What difference would it make to our community if our church vanished tomorrow?

And maybe there’s a third question: What am I doing to help our church not just survive, but thrive? 

Correction: that’s not a third question.

That’s where we need to start.

As in, this very weekend, what am I doing to help our church not just survive, but thrive?