Crafting a New Story

Facing a national — indeed global — economic crisis, it is no wonder that much of our attention gets focused on that scale.  Here in the shadow of our nation’s capital, it is becoming almost a daily commonplace to hear someone lamenting the fact, as the Washington Post did last week,  that “Faith-based charities, which provide an enormous array of private social services to the nation’s sick, elderly and poor, are facing unprecedented cutbacks from one of their biggest funders: the government.”

Jim Wallis of Sojourners had only the week before written about our national need for “Finding the Faith-Based Balance ” — and already it seemed we were in need of crafting a new story to describe the challenges non-profit social service organizations face in carrying out their missions to the neediest.

As important as this discussion is for our country, it also is important to realize that the same need for crafting a new story in a time of crisis is experienced on a local level as well, especially among the members of religious congregations. Recently Alban Senior Consultants Larry Peers and Dan Hotchkiss led an Alban Webinar entitled, aptly, “Crafting a New Story in a Time of Crisis.” It was based on a simple observation, that the current economic slump not only poses financial challenges for almost every congregation, but even more importantly casts doubt on some of the stories we most like to tell about ourselves. For example,

• Congregations who have portrayed themselves as helpers of the needy now see their own members needing help.
• Success-oriented congregations struggle to make sense of setbacks.
• Congregations that have built and borrowed as their members prospered now live in an era when belt-tightening, foreclosure, and bankruptcy are the currency of daily life.

The profound question then becomes: When comfortable stories cease to speak in altered circumstances, how do we craft new ones?

One creative alternative is described by Alban author Joy Skjegstad, who recently has been pondering the potential in congregations partnering with, or indeed founding their own, non-profits in order to fulfill their missional imperatives of service. The participants in the Alban Webinar on “Crafting a New Story” responded with observations and questions of their own to augment the expertise of our two panelists, Larry Peers and Dan Hotchkiss.

They spoke of their congregations’ “historically low expectations” about “openness to embracing a new story” about the role of money — sought after, as well as spent — in church and synagogue life.  They pondered the challenges of reconciling liberal commitments to social justice with conservative attitudes about frugality and financial responsibility. They wrestled with their desires for long-range missional thinking about money, especially when facing their congregations’ short-term problem-oriented preoccupations with sheer survival.  Other listeners wondered aloud about what good might come from having our financial ‘comfort zones’ disturbed, and how it might actually help congregations to rekindle the imperatives of love and justice that are at the foundation of religious community life. They marveled at what they were learning about what they really care about, are proud of, and admire and how that is related to having or not having the financial security they had come to take for granted in congregational life.  Others agonized about what it means to be a minister in a congregation when facing personal questions about their own financial commitments as leaders.

The webinar ended with two summary remarks that I leave you with here.  The first was a recognition of how far Dan and Larry took us into this uncertain and demanding territory: “Thank you. You guys rock,” was the actual final comment submitted by a listener!  Even more important was the person who wrote: “Some of us likely hav our own ‘fresh ideas’.  Can Alban add a blog near the recording of this webinar where participants can share their own ideas?”:

Well, here it is! Please write your comments to what I’ve said here, so others can benefit from your questions and wisdom.  Longer comments will be turned into blog posts in their own right, so others can more readily engage in conversation with you about your ideas and experiences.

You can click on the word Economy in the “tag cloud” to the right, and it will sort out all of the blog posts already on the Alban Roundtable about the economic crisis facing congregations and the world we live in.

Happy Blogging!!  I’m sure I’ll be back in a few days to say myself: “You guys rock!”  Have fun helping one another in this important process of “Crafting a New Story in a Time of Crisis.”