01/15/2012An Evaluation of Our Call:

Policy and Program Impacts at the Local Level

Rev. James J. ReidExecutive Minister, Classis of the Greater Palisades

Background:In the best of all worlds, I would not be drafting this paper and you would not

have to be wading through it. Instead, we both would be paging through an evaluation design put forth by the RCA denominational administration that would outline how it intended to measure and cull lessons from its two key missional programs, Church Multiplication and Leadership/Revitalization. That evaluation would have been conducted during the tenth and final year of Our Call, the ten-year plan, adopted in 2003 and modified in the nine years since. The results of the evaluation would inform discussion at all levels of RCA governance during a year-long interim period of reflection and dialogue. That discernment process would then lead to the formation of any future national denominational plans and programs.

But as of this writing, January of 2012, there is no public plan in hand for a comprehensive evaluation of Our Call prior to starting the formation of a second decade-long plan. At an event planned for next month in Orlando Florida, a portion of the General Secretary’s keynote address will be devoted to a sharing of “lessons learned from Our Call”. Following that half-hour survey, participants in this Conversations event will asked to set a denominational vision for the ten years 2014-2024. That vision will be disseminated to the wider church, comments will be received over a period of about 90 days. The combined input will be processed by a special task force and then set before GS 2012 as a proposed plan for the next decade. This assures that no full-scale evaluation of the results of Our Call will be conducted until after the next decade’s denominational emphases and programs have been authorized.

At GS 2011 last June, several delegates questioned this apparent lack of evaluation plans, both off the floor in conversations with staff and on the floor during sessions. A resolution calling for an evaluation to be prepared prior to the Conversations event failed on voice vote and on recount lost by a 60/40 margin. Arguments against the motion included a lack of time to conduct an evaluation, indecision about ‘appropriate metrics to employ” and that the workshop discernment process and the Conversations event would cover this ground. Of course, the timeline crunch was of the GSC’s own making and we can see that any thorough evaluation, beyond the “lessons learned” segment of the upcoming keynote address, is not anticipated. As to the appropriate metrics argument, that decision had been made back in 2005 when the GSC revised the annual consistorial reports and announced to GS2005 that data from those reports would be sufficient to measure progress toward Our Call’s objectives [MGS 2005 p.302]

According to the audited financials of the RCA, a total of [at least] $20,617,729 was expended on Church Multiplication and Leadership/Revitalization from 2003-2010. Of that total, $14,289,771 was spent for Church Multiplication and $ 6,347,958 for Leadership/Revitalization. The latter expense was partially offset by a Lily Foundation grant for $3,000,000 that runs to 2013. A minimal sense of good stewardship would demand that expenditures of this magnitude be closely evaluated as to their efficiency, effectiveness and impact. The results should be shared with the church membership whose assessments funded the great bulk of the programs. A church whose membership recites a creed affirming that “Christ shall come again to judge the living and the dead” ought to be willing and able to judge its own efforts on Christ’s behalf.

The Nature of This Evaluation:

The author is not in a position to conduct the far-reaching evaluation which this situation demands. Only the General Synod Council commands the resources and access to data required to do the job in accord with generally-accepted practices. Reading the GSC Minutes, it appears they have no present inclination or plan to conduct a thorough program evaluation of either or both mission emphases. Doubtless it will be argued that all GSC programs are subject to constant monitoring under Carver governance. But internal monitoring is management practice, not objective evaluation over against publicly-stated goals. Moreover, unless one is among the Carver cognoscenti, the vocabulary employed for this internal monitoring is hardly understandable to the average RCA church member, to whom we are all fiscally accountable. Enough data of a global nature [e.g. the consolidated financials] is on the public record to see the broad parameters of each program. One might deduce overall expenses, statistics of membership and organized churches, and the like, but line-by-line expense analysis, budget detail, fund transfers, participation numbers and other data useful for evaluation are kept within the GSC.

What is possible is an evaluation of Our Call from the perspective of local assemblies of the RCA. This evaluation is from that perspective, in particular from the perspective of a metropolitan classis on the East Coast and its varied local churches. It will address the ways and the extent to which Our Call has apparently impacted [or not impacted] that classis and its churches in their day-to-day functioning. This is an evaluation that is not empirical in the sense of counting the number of contacts with each program or the number of participants in various workshops or training sessions. If such numbers are tracked at all, they reside in the databases of the denominational agencies. At the local level, numbers that matter are obtained by asking rather simple questions. How many churches have become organized through the Church Multiplication process and how many through other means? How many leaders have participated in revitalization networks and how many are in other networking arrangements? Those numbers show a minimal impact upon the local classis and local church by Our Call.

Initial Decisions Shaping Our Call

The most important part of this evaluation concerns the constellation of denominational policies and practices that surround Our Call and their cumulative impact

upon the relationship of local assemblies with the national denomination. Our Call carries with it a set of assumptions about our local assemblies and churches and about the role of the national denomination that have resulted in policies and practices which duplicate and displace the work of local ministry. We need to look closely at Our Call’s basic working assumptions, their sources, the policies that have been derived from them and the substantial strains they have placed upon relationships among RCA assemblies. The question must be raised whether the Our Call mindset, program and policies can be extended into the future without bringing the RCA to a breaking point.

To fully evaluate the impact of Our Call to date on local church work, the following factors need to be examined:

The presenting problem which Our Call was intended to address and solve. The partial assumption by the national denomination of two key duties vested in

the classes by the BCO, along with the apparent rationale behind that realignment of responsibilities;

The relational ambiguity and parallel structures created by Our Call and the strains they have placed upon inter-assembly cooperation.

The ways in which changes in General Synod governance have added to the relational ambiguity among RCA assemblies;

The failure of Our Call to take into account the economic realities faced by local churches and classes.

The starting point is to re-analyze the problem Our Call was designed to solve: the 40-year downward trend in the number of RCA organized churches and active members, the head-count upon which RCA per capita assessments are based.

The Scary Numbers:

Each year when the RCA denominational statistical summary and the Minutes of General Synod are published, there are three numbers that local consistories look for: the number of RCA organized churches, the total RCA membership and the per member assessment for the year to come. For decades, the first two figures have been declining and the last has been escalating. For local churches, this means less money will be available for local ministry at a time when their own costs are increasing. In addition, there is a drag on organizational enthusiasm, since the overall RCA drop in membership often parallels their own local experience. A sense grows that we are dealing with a problem for which the remedy may be unknown.

Our Call posed two solutions for the declining numbers of churches and members: First, develop new congregations through a rekindling of evangelism and do that

in volume to offset the churches that are closing. Second, motivate leadership to redouble their evangelism efforts by the

establishment of accountability networks. For all intents and purposes, the latter program focused on the professional leadership [ministers of the word and sacraments] rather than congregational leadership [elders and deacons]. That these particular solutions were selected goes back to how the problem of decline was analyzed, which will be explored further on.

Both emphases are internally focused despite their methodological emphasis upon evangelism, i.e. the working assumption behind the proposed solutions is that the membership decline is primarily due to factors within the churches and thus correctable by changing internal institutional behaviors. Simply put, it says: “We are not sufficiently evangelical—so if we crank up our practices of Gospel witness as churches, and especially as ministers, membership numbers will grow.” Numerous anecdotes of growing evangelical churches are cited as support for this analysis. But at base, the working assumption is that local churches and ministers have only themselves to blame for the scary numbers; they are the weak points in the organizational system.

Calvinists are not the only persons on the planet who are ready to assume blame for declining circumstances, but we have refined that process into a fine art. So RCA folk are primed for explanations that they are not “this enough” or “that enough” and that we are falling short of the mark. The evangelism explanation did resonate within the RCA, despite the fact that it has all the weaknesses of a single-factor analysis. But it is important that we do not allow quick fixes to divert us from a broader analysis of the problem and block from view other causes and more effective solutions.

Certainly, personal evangelism has not been as emphasized in the RCA as it has been in some other Protestant bodies, a few of whom have shown considerable growth in membership during the same period when RCA membership declined. But this is the point at which two and two can be added to obtain the sum of five. Direct comparisons of methodology and membership are difficult because the numbers of both the RCA and the more evangelical churches are influenced by many factors, not just by their most obvious disparity.

It is important to analyze the extent to which the problem of membership decline is due to internal or external factors or to a combination of both. Examining the RCA membership decline, for example, we could be asking whether other organizations are experiencing similar issues. Quickly, we would find that other “mainline” churches in the USA are in the same situation as the RCA, but that offers small comfort. Harvard sociologist Robert G. Putnam, however, points out that membership decline is characteristic of almost all local voluntary organizations in America over the last 40 years. After interviewing over a half-million people about their voluntary associations, Putnam points to an evolution in how Americans relate [or fail to relate] with one another. His first study, Bowling Alone [1995] demonstrated an overall loss of “social capital” in American society as we turned from being face-to-face friends into being Facebook “friends”.

A recent study, Grace in America [2010], updates his data and focuses upon American religious congregations. Putnam’s multifactor analysis of the American religious scene shows that as a whole, churches, because they are congregationally-based, are suffering membership loss in an era when all manner of direct personal interaction is devalued. The least affected will be churches who define their members as those who have a direct personal interaction with God and engage in personal faith witness. More affected will be churches who have a more generalized definition of membership and who have depended upon passing along their faith intergenerationally. Traditionally, the RCA has been counted in the latter category. As Our Call has worked out, it would have the RCA shift further into the former category, even to the point of adopting evangelism as a formal mark of the Church.

At first blush, this seems a logical move—to bring forward the practices of personal and professed faith, which has always been a tenet of the RCA, in order to mitigate the impact of a societal shift. As another empirical researcher, Christian A. Schwartz, has pointed out, it is no loss to strengthen a weakness. Seemingly every RCA congregation that conducts an NCD survey tests out weakest in “need-oriented evangelism” and “passionate spirituality.” But is that predominate result showing us just an internal faith weakness or is the wide spread of that result pointing to the penetration of the larger societal depersonalization into our congregations? We may feel reluctant to talk with neighbors about Jesus, but that is far from the only topic we avoid discussing with them. Indeed, we may be backing off from talking with our neighbors almost entirely. Sharpening up our evangelistic skills can help, but what has evaporated are the ready-made occasions for its practice that once existed over back fences, in social clubs and at bowling lanes.

These days, occasions for evangelism must be deliberately constructed or re-constructed. With its emphasis on hundreds of new congregations, Our Call takes the constructivist tack of creating new occasions for evangelism by planting evangelists in different localities. There is no loss in that tactic, although it may experience a more-than-moderate mortality rate. Great resources have been put into that effort, hoping to move the number of RCA organized churches upward. But far less effort and resources have been expended on using already organized local churches as platforms for creating new community contacts. Where that sort of regeneration has been taking place among extant churches, it seems incidental to the Our Call revitalization program, although Our Call is lately promoting methods [such as the use of non-profit entities] as ways of re-approaching local neighborhoods.

The analysis of the problems to be addressed by Our Call was not sufficiently comprehensive. It failed to take into account that the RCA’s scary numbers were part of a much larger mega-trend. Changing the denomination’s internal orientation from intergenerational sustainability to evangelistic recruitment doesn’t hurt, but to date, it is not changing the scary numbers. Equal or greater emphasis needs to be placed upon working with and through local churches and classes in an effort to assure that our churches exploit their unique local position to fulfill service and community-building roles. Together we must confess that RCA churches have largely let slip their position as not only as evangelists, but also as community-builders. In times past, many rural crossroads towns and suburban developments found their community values developing out of the work, faith and service of a local RCA church. Where our churches seem most alive, we observe a membership engaged in laying the practical and moral foundations for civic regeneration. Where we still retain footholds [sometimes mere toeholds] in neighborhoods that are swept by demographic, economic and cultural changes, we need an all-out effort for community re-engagement. What is truly scary are not the numbers within our church walls, but the erosion of the interface which once existed between our churches and their neighborhoods.

Christian Schwartz makes the point that church growth is not so much about numbers as it is about quality. Keep in mind that his eight qualitative measures were developed in a European society where even established churches are outside the experience of most ordinary citizens---the very direction in which the USA appears to be headed. We can learn from the European church experience while our nation is still

“religious” (in one sense or another) and strive to regenerate the assets we have in place, hearing that numbers of adherents increase as the quality of their church experience deepens. That would argue that local church revitalization has priority over new church development; the inverse of the emphases and expenditures of Our Call.

There is yet another framework available to us, lessons we can learn from within our own RCA ranks. Local churches in the Eastern Synods and classes are, in effect, mission stations. Instead of sending missionaries out around the globe as in former times, today the varied populations of the earth have come to inhabit the neighborhoods surrounding our church facilities. One of the RCA’s most successful foreign mission endeavors was in Chiapas, Mexico. The churches we helped plant there have grown into a church whose numbers far exceed that of the entire RCA. Reading Vern Sterk’s account of his forty years there, one sees that the Chiapas model was one of patient presence, immersive identification with the ordinary people, intense local focus, identifying and servicing the most critical local needs, striving to make the non-believers’ lives qualitatively better, and being unrelentingly evangelical as opportunities arose. We need to pay much more attention to this Chiapan frame of reference, especially since so many central and south Americans have migrated into our local environs.

We can change our situation by expanding our framing of the problem to be solved; moving from internal institutional changes of style towards re-involvement with local neighborhoods. Our Call started down that road, but the journey has been interrupted by a series of policy decisions that have choked off communications between national and local levels of the denomination. What should have been a cooperative venture in local church regeneration has devolved into a house divided against itself.

Again, all is not lost. There are serious indications that Americans are becoming interested again in civic involvement, although less in the national arena where confidence in institutions is at an all-time low, and more at local levels. The emerging organic gardens in the city of Detroit, built on lots opened up by foreclosures, fires and dismemberment of the previous community are one example. What has made that land available for growing tomatoes was not a happy series of events; certainly akin to the emptying of our church pews. But instead of abandoning the local land asset, it was retained and resources from local persons were combined with resources from regional and national levels to start turning things around qualitatively. This could happen in the RCA with respect to its local churches, but there must first be some fundamental changes that foster cooperation.

Roads Not Traveled

When the original concept for Our Call, then known generically as the Ten-Year Plan, came before GS2003, it was nearly defeated [MGS2003, pp.65-66]. Wes Granberg-Michaelson shared his perspective on that experience in one of his last “Words from Wes” columns. The enabling motion was discussed and an amendment was adopted that stripped out the total number of 1,100 congregations and the 2013 deadline. It called for ministries to be developed in concert with our ecumenical partners. By the time that particular Synod session came to a close, two further amendments to restore the new congregation language had failed. The resistance to the numerical goals stemmed from what most delegates had experienced in their local classes---that it took a number of years

to bring mission congregations along to the point being able to survive on their own. Stillborn congregations had been painful instances for many classes. The Plan as presented called for about a one-per-year pace of organizing new churches among the 42 classes and that just seemed an overreach. The aspect of involving ecumenical partners seemed a way of adding resources to the effort.

Nevertheless, overnight a self-appointed task group developed a substitute resolution for the following day’s session, which became the Ten-Year Plan:

Following Christ in mission together, led by the Holy Spirit, andworking with all the partners God provides, we believe that God iscalling the Reformed Church in America over the next ten years tofocus its efforts and resources on

• starting new congregations and• revitalizing existing congregations,

thereby empowering fruitful and faithful ministries for the gloryof God; and further,

to affirm the framework of the five missional values and threedynamic foundations of discipleship, leadership, and mission forthe implementation of the goal; and further,

to invite regional synods, classes, and congregations, as they sharein the task of equipping congregations, to consider how they mightcontribute to accomplishing this goal; and further,

to direct the General Synod Council to formulate specificstrategies and measurable objectives in both areas identified in thegoal, for inclusion in the GSC’s report to next year’s GeneralSynod. (ADOPTED)

As they formulated those strategies and objectives, the GSC evidently discounted the initial resistance of the 2003 assembly. By the time of its report to GS2005, the Ten-Year Plan was renamed Our Call and the GSC had reinstated even larger numerical goals, along with the December 2013 deadline:

400 new church starts 90% of RCA churches in church health assessment programs with 75% showing

improvements 500 pastors participating in coached revitalizing networks for 5 years 2/3rd of RCA churches growing in mission, ministry and members.

It is most important to recognize that in adopting the goals it did, the General Synod and its implementing body, the General Synod Council, was entering into two areas of ministry that the Book of Church Order assigns, not to that assembly, but to the various classes.

It is the duty of the classis to organize and superintend new churches and it is also a classis obligation to superintend its members who are ministers. The General Synod has no authority to create new congregations, nor to superintend them. Ministers of the Word and Sacrament are amenable only to the classis of their membership. The resolution adopted at GS2003 did nothing to change that church order, nor could it. In that context, the apparent interpretation of the Ten-Year Plan resolution for the GS2003 delegates who approved it was that the GSC would be working with and through the classes to meet these goals.

Organization and superintendence of local churches is at the classis level for practical as well as historical reasons. Classes are local enough to know the ministry needs and opportunities of their localities. Indeed they are mandated by the BCO to regularly survey those needs. Classes are also in prime position to accomplish hands-on resourcing of emerging ministries in a timely manner. In superintending both churches and ministers together, classes can get the whole operational picture of local ministries within their bounds. Importantly, acting as both initiating body and overseer, a classis has the capacity to respond to the increasing variety of opportunities for Christian work and witness.

Classes are in a first-responder stance towards local churches. In a society where waves of demographic and cultural change repeatedly sweep over the landscape that is crucial ground to secure. At the classis level, even five-year plans have too belated an expiration date. If we are to be inclusive, for example, we must operate in two or three different languages and forge partnerships across cultures we find in and around our churches. This applies to not only static features, such as translations of organizational documents, but to dynamic situations, such a mediation of disputes.

As a first-responder, a good deal of classis work is accomplished in the white space of the BCO, out of necessity. Classes work through issues with the tools of negotiation and diplomacy because the BCO enforcement processes are too clunky. The super-majority legislative process of supercession is almost unworkable without years of previous pastoral and diplomatic effort toward achieving mutual consent. One can refer to the classis as a “corporate bishop”, but in reality, neither the personnel nor the property is fully “in the Bishop’s hand” as in hierarchical Christian denominations.

From the mountain-top of denominational structures, decade-duration planning and great leaps forward may seem more feasible. But in formulating and promoting such plans, the denominational leadership needs to recognize its distance from the field of operations and tailor its roles appropriately. Our Call is an instance in which the denomination has attempted to intervene locally, to create local markets for its program emphases whether or not they fit the varied and rapidly changing local situations. The GSC entered the decade with answers to the “scary numbers” dilemma, long before the proper questions had been formulated. The resistance expressed in the GS2003 assembly alterations to the Plan has been ignored more than it has been addressed. The GSC, as the implementing body for the adopted Plan, had an opportunity in the 2003-05 period to enter into cooperative arrangements with classes for the development of new churches and the networking of local leadership [ministers, elders and deacons] as a revitalization tool. It chose otherwise; to proceed with new church development and revitalization as alternative programs to whatever efforts the classes were exerting. The psychology of that decision is important to understand and will be examined further on.

Vibrant dialogue with classes was the road not taken by the GSC as it has pursued Our Call. Consider for a moment the passive mood of the language of Our Call’s implementing resolution when it refers to their participation in Our Call:

to invite regional synods, classes, and congregations, as they sharein the task of equipping congregations, to consider how they mightcontribute to accomplishing this goal

The attitude of the paragraph is that assemblies other than General Synod are outside of Our Call looking in---their position is one of considering how they might get into the goal being established. Lower assemblies need to be invited in, to figure out how to claim a share in the declared task of equipping congregations.

The reality, on the other hand, was [and remains] the inverse of what is stated above. It is the classes and local congregations who are continuing their long-standing mandate of equipping their members for ministry and it is the GSC which needs to be invited in to share in that task. In this sense, Our Call started off on the wrong foot. A stance was created that Our Call was “a denominational program” in the sense that it was owned and operated by the GSC and its staff. Rather than operating cooperatively on work that all parties saw as important, parallel tracks were created that would be competitive with one another for the scarce resources of human energy and fiscal support. Subsequent policies and practices only exacerbated this initial misstep.

The Policy-Shaping Power of Ideology:

Deducing the ideological forces at work in the GSC in the 2003-04 period would have been a near-impossible task were it not for the happenstance of an opportunity to apply for a large grant from the Lily Foundation. The application process generated a fourteen-page proposal document, “A Revitalized Leadership for a Renewed Church” that was submitted by RCA staff on July 15, 2003. A significant portion of that document is devoted to a detailed background of events and thinking that led up to the proposal, which Lily eventually funded for $3,000,000. Starting with the Presidential address of the Rev. Tony Vis to GS 1997 and working through the GSC discernment process of 2001-03, the narrative describes the steps and influences leading up to the date of proposal submission. It describes the development of what is characterized as a grass-roots movement among pastors of two Midwestern regional synods to form small group networks for mutual support and ministry enrichment. This effort was guided by a voluntary Church Revitalization Team, which operated outside of the GSC and which reported good results among its minister participants. In the proposal to Lily, this six-year effort is designated as a Phase I of a proposed three-phase program to fulfill the second Ten-Year Plan goal of church revitalization. Lilly was being asked to fund a Phase Two initiative which was to extend the already established model from the Midwest to other regional synods and classes and to expand participation from 200 to 500 RCA pastors.

By adopting the in-place program as its own implementation of the revitalization goal, the GSC also granted establishment to that program’s ideological and methodological baggage. In the words of the proposal:

“A number of leadership models and resources are available to assist the RCA in this enterprise. The Church Revitalization Team, which directed Phase I, found

the work of Church Resource Ministries of Anaheim, California, to be very helpful.”

Indeed, the CRM influence turned out to be more than helpful; it was the dominant one in the networking program Lily has funded. For example, the materials circulated for the formation of RCA ministers’ networks was a page-for-page clone of CRM’s Refocusing curriculum, an indoctrination program seeking to center a pastor’s entire ministry upon evangelism. Along with those materials came the assumptions upon which that curriculum was built and which CRM forthrightly proclaimed on its website:

a heavy emphasis upon evangelical leadership as a defining ministerial characteristic,

a belief that pastors in the field needed to sharply revise the academic training they had received in seminaries,

that this revision is best accomplished through mentoring, that leadership networks operated best outside of denominational accountability

structures, and that the primary discipline to be cultivated was one of entrepreneurship.

At that time, CRM was also beginning to advocate the formation of new churches under the guidance of a specialized genus of minister, the church planter. In its description of its own organizational DNA since its 1980 founding, CRM notes it roots in the Navigators movement and in the Church Growth Movement of Fuller Theological Seminary.

The GSC inherited this DNA as it set up its programs to be implemented under the Plan. It describes its proposed Phase II network as “mirroring but not accountable to our polity…”; other language for saying that they would operate independently and parallel to the RCA bodies constitutionally charged with leadership supervision, namely boards of elders and classes. Only one month after the GS 2003 vote, the opportunity for cooperative action across denominational levels was being closed by GSC action. Of the eventual $3,000,000 granted by Lily, less than $500,000, one-sixth of the total amount has found its way down to local levels in the form of individual participant grants. No detailed accounting of where the remaining funds are being expended has been made public beyond the GSC. Indeed, no accounting is available as to the distribution, use and impact of the local grants. Looking across the measures of accountability promised in the Lily proposal, it is clear that a system of “metrics” has been in place all along by which to determine the success or failure of each aspect of the program. It cannot be that difficult, for one small example, to determine how far the program has expanded beyond its original Midwestern base. [The answer is that 80% of the network groups are based in two Midwest regional synods.] From there, one can go on to inquire about how deliberate were the recruitment measures taken by staff to extend the regions served to other localities and to ethnic affinity groups. There is not a lot of mystery in conducting an evaluation of what you have accomplished over against what you said you were going to do. But Our Call accounting has taken the form of anecdotal stories rather than accounting figures; apparently in the belief that we can learn valuable lessons only from our successes and not from our shortfalls.

Call dropped---GSC Enters the Carver Tunnel:The dialogical opportunity that was crippled by the GSC decision to advance

church start and revitalization efforts that were parallel to those of classes was all but

extinguished by the GSC’s downsizing and adoption of Carver governance. The former GS Executive Committee [GSEC] had been comprised of delegates appointed by the classes, who brought forward the concerns and viewpoints of their classes and who regularly reported back to classes on the deliberations and decisions of the national denomination. The movement to an indirect selection of GSC membership and its reduction in membership numbers by half restricted this channel of communication and representation of local interests.

Carver governance shut the door even more tightly with its insistence on the secrecy of GSC deliberations; that all members speak on all issues with one voice outside of the GSC sessions themselves. Reports back to classes, when they occurred, came in the form of reiterations of press releases previously available on the RCA website. GSC members were virtually self-accountable. Examinations of the GSC Minutes proved of little value as well since they were couched in the vocabulary of Carver governance, a system it took an intensive week of training to absorb. This same terminology worked its way into the reports of GSC agencies to each annual General Synod. Increasingly, classis delegates were confronted with a terminology they were untrained to comprehend as they opened their briefing books and agendas. Eventually, they too were handed press releases to be distributed as their reports back to their home classes.

While the Church Herald remained in existence, there was some avenue for local church members to express their opinions in their own words. But that venue was closed off with the consolidation of all publications formats by the GSC. Again, efficiency and cost considerations were cited for the move, although it became unclear why the savings from closing down the Herald were not passed down in the form of reduced assessments on classes.

GSC control on information necessary for effective General Synod governance continues to tighten. At this past General Synod of June, 2011, delegates were not provided with 2012 proposed budget information until 24 hours prior to the close of Synod and the vote on the 2012 assessment level. This is a change even from 2010, when six pages of financial information and background were provided weeks in advance to delegates. Persistent efforts by several delegates both prior to and during Synod were required to gain the information that was belatedly given. And even at that point, the budget information circulated was labeled preliminary, and it was on those unfinalized figures that the assessment vote was taken. The General Synod By-laws states that the GSC shall present a proposed budget to each General Synod. That we came so close to not having that take place speaks volumes about the air of independence which GSC breathes. These are actions that border on rudeness and even contempt, a dangerous course for an assessment-based body to be traveling.

One incident at this past General Synod was especially chilling. The mood of the Synod was generally quiet, if not passive, but during one presentation repeated questions were raised by a delegate from the floor. The President, who is by office a GSC member, made the open-mike comment that such intensive inquiry amounted to “a questioning of our denominational leaders.” Such an entry into the debate itself is disorderly at best. But the shift of focus from issues to personalities, although out of line, was telling. It revealed a mindset which insists that leaders, once chosen, should be followed without further critical thought; that we go forward on their vision alone rather than on the discernment of multiple hearts and minds gathered together in Christ’s name over time. If that is

where we are as the RCA, we are at a most critical moment in our history and in our understanding of what it means to be Reformed. The announcement that the Conversation event was to be keynoted with the new General Secretary sharing his vision for the RCA was thus a source of initial concern. Thankfully, Tom DeVries has begun his tenure with a concerted effort to listen rather than to proclaim.

The Ambiguity of Dual Accountabilities:

The GSC embarked upon the course of planting new congregations through [a] the selection and training of a new specialized form of pastor, the church planter, and [b] through a process of initial funding for mission congregations who submitted a conforming new church plan. The standardized measures that were employed for selecting and evaluating suitable candidates for church planting quickly ran into trouble when applied to ethnic pastors. Pastors who had been out in the field for years establishing new congregations were screened out as unqualified because the instruments were geared to Caucasian preferences. Likewise, mission congregations who already were in operation found it difficult to qualify as a new church plant and thus secure financial assistance. There was no effective mechanism established to coordinate planting efforts among national and local assemblies.

It has taken years to gain official recognition for the situation of ethnic congregations who are organized by classes ‘through adoption.” These are congregations, usually Korean and Taiwanese, who approach classes for membership in recognition of shared roots and theology with the RCA. Absorbing these congregations takes time and particular effort, certifying the credentials and qualifications of ministers who pastor the congregations and subsequently educating the congregation members and leaders to the operations of a classis. Many of these congregations are start-ups and their pastors are part-time, so the prospect of obtaining RCA recognition and fiscal support is attractive. When they encounter an additional layer of forms and criteria beyond that of the classis and with which the classis is not in synch, the way forward is ambiguous and confusing.

Getting congregations planted is one thing; providing for their nurture is another matter. One source of the classes’ hesitations in 2003 was their experience that getting a start-up congregation to the point of being able to support full-time ministry and contribute full assessments was a long and varied process. The GSC’s viewpoint seems far more entrepreneurial, granting start-up support to an individual planter that diminishes year to year. It is up to the planter to get things going on that 3-5 year schedule and to make the switch of support from denomination to congregation in that time frame. Whether that goal is attained has to do with individual responsibility; the planter/leader succeeds or fails. And it is only at the point of formal organization that the “scary number” is changed.

Classes know that more factors are at play in getting congregations to the level of formal organization and a good shot at institutional permanence. Planters need support in their efforts and the more varied the sources of that support, the better. A coaching relationship at distance or a specialized group may help, but classes can also be recruited as sources of support, encouragement and information. Too little of that sort of cooperation is apparently happening because classes are not actively recruited to play that

role. Classis members may be able to share important information about the local social context or customs.

When a planting fails, as some are bound to do, it is the classis which must live with the residual consequences, not the denominational initiative. The classis has as much “skin in the game” as any other party, whether or not that is acknowledged. The discouragement factor is especially persistent over time. Planting pastors may have their membership in the local classis and their situation after a failed plant is not easy and commands support from colleagues. It is not entirely clear what sort of decompression assistance is being rendered by the GSC.

A similar situation arises with the second GSC initiative of pastoral networking and coaching. This system exists independently from ministerial accountability to one’s classis of membership; it is truly a parallel system of advisement. That does not make it immediately suspect; many ministers find their closest companions outside of their classis, in ecumenical groups or community organizations. But those other outside associations do not bear the imprimatur of the RCA and it is reasonable to expect that there be some effort to assure that both parallel systems are in fact on the same page. There are some ethical considerations that come into play regarding confidentiality, for example, that have had no open discussion. If a coach in the RCA system observes some disturbing thoughts or pattern of activity in one of their pastoral clients, do they have an obligation to alert the classis supervision committee? Or visa versa? Issues like this need frank discussion before crises occur.

It is also disturbing to see that the GSC initiative, which at the outset stated that it would network elders and deacons as well as ministers, has fallen far short of fulfilling that promise. Half the classis delegates are elders, not ministers, and they constitute ongoing leadership in our churches. The day may not be far off when a majority of classes have a majority of their churches under part-time ministerial leadership—due strictly to the economics of operating local churches. What will then become clear is that the consistory is the actual leadership of the church. The classes and the denomination would be well advised to train up its lay leadership before that day.

Show Me the Money

One of the wonderments of Our Call is how it goes on ignoring the economic realities of “doing church” in the USA. It may have seemed quite up-to-date in 2003 to “grow our way out of trouble” through church planting, similar to the then-prevalent notion of growing our wealth through real estate leveraging. The cold-water bath of 2008 cured us of the latter notion but the GSC still seems addicted to the former belief that we can grow our way out away from our numerical decline. One needs to be quite isolated from on-the-ground economics to not comprehend that things are not so straight forward.

The late William Sloane Coffin once said of the Vietnam protest movement he helped lead, “The one question we failed to ask was, ‘But what if our cause was to prevail?’” What if the church planting aspect of Our Call was to be a complete success and we were looking at 400 organized churches at the end of 2013? What would be the economic implications of that success? Assessment income would be up, but how would these 400 congregations be housed? Would either the denomination or the classes

collectively have the wherewithal to fund facilities for the new churches? One can reasonably expect that they would desire some suitable facilities from which to operate, unless we are willing to speculate that a majority of them or better would be content to function in shared facilities or as congregations-without-walls. At the classis level, we have seen that shared facilities are quite possible, even desirable, but that they require close monitoring. Functioning without facilities has been attempted on a cyclical basis since WWII in America and a house-church movement is rekindling among Pentecostals recently as their response to the issue of construction costs. But within more structured denominations such as ours, the movement never lasted long. So, with minimal church facilities costing at least $750,000 to construct, the RCA would be looking at about 300 million dollars to get the 400 churches in out of the rain. It may be a problem we would love to have, but it is still a problem because it impacts upon the future growth and stability of those churches.

Pooling all our cash resources across all levels of the RCA, we are unlikely to have such resources or even enough to leverage the required funds from outside sources. Still the machinery rolls on as if that goal could be funded if attained. From time to time over the past eight years, there seemed to have been some indirect recognition of the economic obstacles. At about year five, the thought occurred that new start money could become available if classes were willing to liquidate the real holdings of their “failing” churches, and so began the Refresh initiative. One classis went to workshops sharing how they had closed and sold off low-performing churches in urban areas and used those funds to start new congregations further out in more suitable locales. This testimony was both disturbing and familiar to Eastern classes. It brought back memories of “white flight” in their own experiences and, given the threshold numbers being given out for determining congregational failure, the classes realized that a majority of their churches would fall into that category. The prospect of church cannibalism was a real turn-off. Folks who have any longevity in classes know that closing churches is traumatic to the whole organism of the classis.

The great bulk of RCA wealth is tied up in the real estate and facilities of its local churches. Like ownership of our family homes, church real estate ownership is both fiscal and emotional. One invests in sacred spaces on many levels. Selling is not simply a financial transaction. Classes have closed and sold church buildings for decades and for all those decades, they have heard second opinions about each sale. It is a fact that we could not buy our way back into the communities we have left; neither in terms of dollar cost nor in terms of rebuilding neighborhood confidence.

What all this comes down to is that, no matter how many or how few new church starts get planted by 2013, it is the classis that will have to follow through with their nurture to full organization. The longer close coordination with the classes is postponed, the more difficult the ultimate transition will become. That assumption of new churches will be costly and classes cannot continue to support higher and higher assessments from regional synods and General Synod and still have resources needed to bring new congregations to final fruition. For assessment-based assemblies, this is a hard truth to digest: prior to any cash flow increase from newly organized churches, there will have to be a substantial drop in assessment revenues with a redirection of resources to the classes and local churches coming on board.

There have been some schemes floating about that would seek to avoid this pending reality. One would impose a time limit upon classes for granting organized status to new church plants, cutting the average ten-year period down to four years. A new plant could be granted organized status after the four year period by a body other than a classis. This formula may look better from a distance, but it ignores and discounts the local experience of classes and does so at the peril of all concerned. It can come about only with a BCO change that is unlikely to gain support from a majority of the classes.

Some years ago, an effort was made to ‘level the pyramid’ of RCA polity by combining regional synods and classes, staffed by the GSC. That would have placed the control of real estate under the effective control of the GSC, who would also assume the other functions appropriately placed in the hands of the classes. That effort was put to rest by two successive General Synods. We will need to figure out how to finance growth together and each level of our polity will have to determine the role it can play for the up building of our churches.

If Not Our Call, then What?

Our Call has attempted to advance our cause by centralizing our energies, resources, programs and political power at the national denominational level. But the USA is moving in the opposite direction—from confidence in national structures to reliance on local institutions. The RCA needs to follow that trend, which will characterize the “Twenty-Teens.” We are well-placed to lead locally because we have outlets and stakes in all manner of local villages and neighborhoods. We just need to start thinking outside the box in which we have placed ourselves in a vain attempt to find numerical security.

We are not bombarded by answers, but have more than enough clues surrounding us to stimulate our imaginations. Think of this instance: For decades, we have watched our children go off to college and into some distant oblivion, torpedoing our hopes of establishing our church habits within our next generation. Tighter economics have lessened the distance college-age young people travel, lengthened the time of their studies and placed many under a cloud of financial debt. Social networking allows the church community to track and communicate with these young adults, conferring the opportunity to lend them support on an almost daily basis—in other words to keep them active in a church-related way of life. They could be across the block or across the nation and still feel a part of their home community. There are churches where this is happening, now. It is a local outreach that costs little and deacons are really good at it!

For decades we have asked our communities to support our church events and causes. Now, the shoe is on the other foot. Churches need re-engage with their communities and their needs:

to provide coffee and consolation to the long-term unemployed, to value them as human beings in ways that the economic world will not;

to house organic food cooperatives that connect our urban neighborhoods with farmer-friendly church communities served by other RCA congregations;

to sponsor friendly-visitor programs that assist elderly neighbors stay in their homes;

to operate mediation programs that can assist with local controversies and family disputes;

Really, the list of local opportunities is endless. As churches, we need to better demonstrate that we are sources of social capital that can enrich life and that have demonstrated values to share. It’s always been our strong point and it can be in the future.