September 4, 2008
The Hansen Report: Where Are You From?
Can you shepherd a flock that won't stay put?
Where are you from? No, where are you from from?
If you live in a suburban or urban area, you have probably asked and answered these questions countless times. The follow-up question is meant to uncover something about your conversation partner that can't be learned by hearing which faceless suburb he or she inhabits. But at the rate Americans continue to move, this follow-up question may not elicit a better answer.
According to a USA Today report last fall, nearly 50 million Americans - more than 16 percent of the population - moved in 2006. Mobility increases during inclement economic weather, which is one reason why during the late 1990s the rate slowed to pre-World War II times. Though 2008 data has not yet been analyzed, we can expect the moving rate to increase given the high number of home foreclosures.
Wall Street Journal columnist Peggy Noonan recently connected this trend to the Republican and Democratic nominees for President. Sure, you know Sen. Barack Obama lives in Chicago, and Sen. John McCain lives in Arizona. But do their places of current residence tell you anything about them?
Noonan doesn't think so. "Neither man has or gives a strong sense of place in the sense that American politicians almost always have, since Mr. Jefferson of Virginia, and Abe Lincoln of Illinois, and FDR of New York, and JFK of Massachusetts," she writes. "Even Bill Clinton was from a town called Hope, in Arkansas, even if Hope was really Hot Springs. And in spite of his New England pedigree, George W. Bush was a Texan, as was, vividly, LBJ. Messrs. Obama and McCain are not from a place, but from an experience."
These would-be presidential vagabonds share their interstate experience with millions of fellow patriots.
"All this is part of a national story that wasn't new even a quarter century ago," Noonan observes. "Americans move. They like moving. Got a lot of problems? The answer may be geographical relocation. New problem in the new place? GTT. Gone to Texas."
This mentality, common both inside and outside the church walls, makes pastoral ministry exceedingly difficult. How do you encourage the deep fellowship that only develops with years of experience if the congregation switches like a hockey team's line change? Longevity is necessary for the kind of lay leadership that really gets things done in the church. Those lay leaders need pastors they can trust who aren't always looking around for churches that offer higher salaries and bigger ministry platforms. Writing in No Place for Truth, David Wells observes that congregations during the early 1800s would rather put up with poor preaching than lose their preacher. That won't fly today, but we could learn something from them about the bonds that unite parishioner and pastor.
Longevity in one place also makes church discipline possible. Discipline means little if the offending member finds a new church home across town. For discipline to work, members must know each other well enough to confront one another over sin. Fences may make good neighbors, but they make for lousy church members. Anonymity is the enemy of ministry. Yet anonymity results when frequent moving breaks down the difference between suburb and suburb, state and state, and region and region.
"Modernization has broken up many of the small social units that used to be so important in the raising of children and the shaping of national character, such as the nuclear and extended family, the neighborhood, and the larger community," Wells writes. "These were the contexts in which children used to learn about life. Today, however, extended families have been scattered by geographical mobility, nuclear families by divorce, and the more functional ethnic and urban neighborhoods by the social and economic forces that make flight to the loose-knit, anonymous suburbs a temptation."
For the sake of loving each other and loving our neighbors, Christians should re-learn how to put down roots in one community. There will often be valid financial and educational excuses for leaving. But if you invest in your community, the community will invest in you. For too long Christians have followed that American dream to greener pastures, to the neglect of their genealogical and ecclesiological families. If we hope to reverse this trend, shepherds should set the example.
Collin Hansen is a CT editor at large and author of Young, Restless, Reformed: A Journalist's Journey with the New Calvinists (Crossway, 2008).
Posted by UrL Scaramanga on September 4, 2008
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Comments
I appreciate the insight and challenge of this post Collin.
A question that surfaced while reading this: What about those Americans for whom poverty doesn't allow them to be so mobile? In order to shepherd congregations that exhibit socioeconomic diversity, it may be all the more important for pastors to stay put and demonstrate a commitment to the towns and neighborhoods that many don't have the option of moving from.
Posted by: David Swanson at September 5, 2008
"If we hope to reverse this trend, shepherds should set the example."
I totally agree with this, and yet...this is so antithetical to the upward mobile preacher looking to score that hot lead pastorate position that seems to infect the American Church that I can't help thinking that this is little more than a pipe-dream.
"Longevity in one place also makes church discipline possible. Discipline means little if the offending member finds a new church home across town. For discipline to work, members must know each other well enough to confront one another over sin."
ROFL!
Lets try starting with the basic concept of "obedience" which seems to be as foreign to Americans, and the American Church, as is the term compassion, forgiveness, and humility.
No, the American church can't even begin to address the very biblical teaching of discipline when it has no discipline itself. And when the American church has a devil of a time just trying to "obey" one very simple command of Y'shua's, "Love one another as I have loved you", I think it best to just stuff "discipline" into a tidy little envelope called "someday, maybe."
Once we get the desire to "obey" Y'shua's "love one another" ingrained into our collective thick skulls, then we can revisit this topic of discipline because we'll have something to build on.
Posted by: sheerahkahn at September 5, 2008
the apostle paul might take issue with the concept of "putting down roots..." whether one stays put or lives on the move, loving your neighbor will always be a challenge. otherwise we wouldn't have to be instructed to do it...
Posted by: bryonm at September 5, 2008
I've found that it is particularly helpful when pastors stay put as a team. Our church has spent two years building a great leadership team, and it would break my heart if they all started moving on just as they were getting into a rhythm.
Which raises a few questions. How do we learn to be content where we are? How do find grace and growth in the midst of routine?
Posted by: Mark Goodyear at September 5, 2008
I think part of the problem is that the Church universal actually supports vagabond ecclessiology. When I look arround at the churches in my context i find that they are competing for people who are already church. There are very few pastors that I know of which would challenge a visitor to return to the community that they are hopping from. Churches actually compete over the already churched there are several churches in the area that have many events that they advertise which only are of interest to the already churched. How does that fulfill the mission of the church, how does that fulfill the great commission?
Part of the problem is that we need to be less concerned with numerical growth and more concerned with growth of the community in depth.We need to need to be concerned with becoming a more redemptive community so that others see us and recieve the redemption that Christ offers. We can't do that if when a pastor preaches something that does not agree with our sophisticate palate we decide that God's calling us to another church, or that we'll just go to a church where we like the preaching because it falls in line with what we already think. its an anemic Christianity, if it can be called Christianity at all, that does not continue to transform lives no matter how long a person has been a Christian.
Posted by: Jared Fields at September 5, 2008
It may be oversimplifying the matter, but a person can't serve both God and money. Do we ask God before we make decisions? Or, are our lives and decisions shaped primarily by our circumstances, and our values and principals become subtly secondary?
Of course, if asked, we would say that God and relationships are more important than career, education, or money, but when the decisions come, which one drives us more? Do our lives and decisions clearly follow our values, or do our values play second fiddle to perceived necessity?
Scott in Vegas
http://www.newchurchreport.com - New Church Report
http://cells-twelves.blogspot.com - Expectation Blog
Posted by: scott in vegas at September 5, 2008
"How do you encourage the deep fellowship that only develops with years of experience if the congregation switches like a hockey team's line change?" is the question.
Your answer in this post is to seek "longevity" or to just stay put both personaly and otherwise. I agree that this is a fundamental issue, but the reality is we also need to adapt our models of ministry so we can also minister to our "nomadic" brothers and sisters. It is an "and" thing rather than an "either/or" thing.
To start we need to invest ourselves in discipleship - which is growth towards becoming more like Jesus, and not just outreach. We have to view salvation as a linear path that includes not just a prayer of commitment, but the sureender of all our will and life to Jesus. What does that take in a mobile society?
My hope is that the response to this brings to the forfron some strong discipling programs. CSB Ministries operates club type programs that is gender specific (men working with boys) for youth and children. As a parachurch organization they can be in any city, and a 15 year old boy could go from one coast to the other and still plug into the same personal discipleship course regardless of denomination in his new church or local, regardless of denomination. He would know his expectations, etc. The same could be said for men or women or girls. So maybe we would be wise as a church to tap into some of the great programs out there that are national, rather than just regional or, as many large churches do, created only from within.
No single program or ministry will meet every person's every needs. We've got to look at how tointegrate people quickly, but also how to let people go. With the technologies of today in social networking and the internet, especially in North America, we need to even develop some online tools (especially in discipleship) that transcend geographic situations.
Just some beginning thoughts on this.
Posted by: Steve Grove at September 5, 2008
I'm troubled both by the generalizations I am reading here. There is a significant difference between moving to another part of the country and moving to a church down the street. The reasons and motives are usually very different. People who leave one church for another sometimes have good reasons, but often do not. People who move from the city to the suburbs, or the suburbs to the exurbs, may have heart issues they need to deal with. But moving to a different place? That is a different animal, with too many possible reasons to make blanket statements.
And not every pastor who leaves for another church is doing so in order to "move up." I've known very few pastors who make decisions like that. Maybe that means I've been blessed in the pastors I've known. But sometimes pastors get fired or pressured to leave for not-so-good reasons. Sometimes pastors labor for several years and realize that they aren't a good fit for the congregation or the community. Sometimes pastors are led by the Holy Spirit to take up the work somewhere else. Sometimes pastors or their wives are abused by their congregation and need to move on. Sometimes pastors move to be closer to family. There are too many reasons to make such judgmental statements.
Maybe part of the reason both congregants and pastors were less mobile in the past is because we weren't able to be as mobile. It wasn't all that long ago that the average person never went more than a day's journey from home. Technology and opportunity have made the difference.
Love is always work, as bryonm so helpfully pointed out. If it were easy, it wouldn't be commanded.
Posted by: Justin Keller at September 6, 2008
My husband and I have lived in the same house for 21 years. All our neighbors have changed several times and the neighborhood has gone down in the process. We own the, "American Nightmare." I don't know what the answer is. My daughter never wants to own a house. She wants to be able to move when things start going down. My husband worked for the local government and moving was not an option. Everybody at our church moved. We have moved to different churches but have not found a "Church Home." It has been very difficult.
Posted by: Ruth at September 6, 2008
Lamenting today's Diaspora is as pointless as lamenting aging.
We may not like it, but a mobile population is today's reality, Collin. We're nomads. Deal with it.
Posted by: Jarrod at September 6, 2008
Two thoughts. First, I'm a United Methodist pastor. Since the days of Wesley itineracy has been one of our defining characteristics. Sure, we've changed with the times (and our host culture), but moving is still something we do in faithfulness to our tradition.
Second, I'm a genealogist by hobby. As I look back on previous generations of many of the families I've researched, I sure see a lot of mobility. While some families seem to stay in one place generation after generation, moving is nothing new for Americans.
Posted by: Richard H at September 7, 2008
I agree with the sentiments of those responding who say that before the Church can begin to teach the practice of discipline in any form, it must first practice discipline itself!
I would even argue that the longevity process that is being proposed would build more walls instead of break them down, especially between the Church and those outside of it.
Posted by: Topher F at September 10, 2008