GS27: Leadership development

Jun 27, 2009 by Daniel Ross-Jones

Eboo Patel addressed the UCC General Synod today, calling on our church to be a community of bridge-builders, developing and growing a structure of leadership for today’s pluralist America.

He encouraged the church to “build young people who are interfaith leaders.”  With all due respect to Eboo (whom I have met on a number of occasions and am deeply infatuated with his work), I’m wondering if he’s met many of the congregations in our church.

With around 2% of our clergy being under age 35, we certainly don’t have a lot of young people in pastoral ministry.  With one of the highest average ages among American church groups, the United Church of Christ has occupied itself with many of the issues that face its demographic position: ’60s and ’70s style community organizing, ’60s and ’70s style justice issues, ’60s and ’70s style leadership development.

We’re open-minded, non-scripturally-literal folk — we don’t focus much on ecumenism and inter-faith efforts not because we’re closed-off, but because we simply don’t know how. After it was apparent that we would not be a United Church as in other places like Canada, Australia and India, where a majority of the national Protestant bodies came together to create one unified church structure, we moved on to other things.  We quit talking about our own faith.  Rather than attempting to explain what we are, we took up our identity as what we are not: we became an anti- church.

And so we developed the status quo.  We continue doing what we do because we simply don’t know what else to do.  People died off, and we wring our hands in lament over a society that doesn’t refill the pews like it used to.  Hot damn, we actually have to do something to get people to come in the doors!  (Even scarier, we might even have to go outside them ourselves!)

I was reading a study not too long ago (I’ll Google it sometime and link from here) about how the majority of clergy surveyed identified as introverts.  In the same study, lay church members placed the primary responsibility for outreach, membership development and recruitment (I hate the word “evangelism”) on the pastor’s shoulders.  Hello?  Does anyone else see a disconnect there?

Growing up, I learned the two things one doesn’t speak about in polite conversation are politics and religion.  As I went through college, the two most popular topics among my peers were politics and religion.  In the case of the latter, we all were finding our own ways in the world, accompanied by our own canons of experiences, books, and resources, because so many people didn’t know where to go!  I have a number of under-30 friends who sought out advice and counsel from Christian pastors, only to end up claiming Buddhist and Muslim labels for themselves and initiating themselves in those faiths because their laypeople and clerics would speak directly to their beliefs! What a telling statement about so many of our churches today.

To the UCC, I hope that we keep Eboo’s challenge to us as we reimagine our church.  The early Christian church of Paul’s day was deeply influenced by its encompassing Hellenistic culture of the time.  Our own UCC has been deeply influenced by the American culture of the 1960s and 1970s.  What does the church of the 2010s look like, and how do we build our leadership and structure our organization for the rapidly-changing, quickly-evolving future?

(Side note: this article and its follow-up from the Massachusetts Conference are over eight years old, but I believe a good, quick read to illustrate the demographic and financial structural flaws of our current system in the UCC and why it is absolutely imperative to change tracks.)

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