John Meunier

An English major’s disorganized grammatical ruminations on the mission statement of the United Methodist Church.

The mission of the Church is to make disciples of Jesus Christ for the transformation of the world. (¶120 United Methodist Book of Discipline, 2008)

mission – The primary noun. The subject about which the entire sentence speaks. In my online etymology dictionary it says the word dates from the Jesuit missions to America in the 1590s and comes from a root word meaning “to send.” The meanings and history of the word suggest a group sent from outside. The anti-colonialists among us might find the word splattered with ugly memories.

of the Church – A prepositional phrase modifying “mission” and telling us which mission or whose mission. Some in the awkwardly named field of missiology tell us the church does not have a mission; the mission has a church. We in the UMC did not get that memo. The church has a mission.

is – An equals sign. The sides of the equation are interchangeable. A verb without activity or action. It is a sign on the side of the road. The two parts of any sentence that bear the most meaning are the subject and main verb. Our verb says nothing. It only points to other words.

to make – An infinitive acting as a noun. Grammatically, we have take a verb and yoked it down into concrete. We have taken vitality and made it an object, a thing. The dynamism of the verb has been excised. The verb “make” itself has one of the longest list of dictionary definitions I can remember coming across. The online etymology dictionary suggests the origins of the word might relate to the building of mud houses by ancient Germanic tribes. It is is hands on and messy work, perhaps?

disciples – The object of the infinitive. It tells what we are making. From the Latin. Students. Pupils. Learners. Does this mean we do not make apostles or teachers?

of Jesus Christ – A prepositional phrase modifying “disciples.” It tells us “what kind” or “which ones.” A necessary clarification, but one that Jesus did not make so clear. He said “make disciples” but did not say “of me.” In Acts 2:42, it is the teaching of the apostles that the faithful are devoted to. Perhaps a quibble and a looking for hairs to split on my part, but is it true to say our students are students of Jesus Christ? Or are we students of Paul and Apollos and Peter and so many others?

for the transformation of the world – an adverbial prepositional phrase modifying “to make” and telling us why or to what end. This making takes place so the world can be transformed. But note, the transformation is subordinate to the making. It is the outcome or reason for the making, but it is only accomplished through the making of disciples.

Latest data show Episcopal Church membership below 2 million.

Alban looks at the pros and cons of large churches: Why size matters

(Anyone else find that headline out of place in a church publication?)

If you want to see how high-stakes accountability systems change the behavior of organizations, talk to a teacher.

The standardized testing and high-stakes accountability movement have had deep impact on the way schools operate and the way teachers teach. Today’s New York Times has a story about one school.

The movement has undoubtedly had some good consequences. It has put a focus on some things that needed to be looked at, I’m sure. It has also totally changed what it means to be a teacher in the public schools.

Standardization is the follow on to high-stakes accountability. Schools that do poorly on high-stakes measurements have no argument against the hierarchy when it comes in with packaged solutions and mandated curriculum changes. Teachers, too often, are reduced to ciphers for the pre-packaged lesson plans.

And the incentive to cheat can become overwhelming. When careers, insurance packages, retirement plans, and opportunities for advancement are tied to numbers, the numbers sometimes get manipulated. At the moment, that is a particularly attractive option in the UMC where none of the numbers are audited in any meaningful way. The honor system only works when the people in the system are honorable. When careers get tied to numbers, people will rationalize gaming the system for their own advantage.

The United Methodist Church is committed to high-stakes accountability.

No one is using the phrase “high-stakes” in public, but when pastoral appointments are tied to numbers, that is, by definition, high-stakes. If in the future congregations are closed or forced into plans of reconstruction based on numbers that is high-stakes.

As we move into this high-stakes future, we should be mindful of the impact such regimes have had on other institutions. Business certainly. Health care, yes. Public schools as well. We should learn from their successes. We should also look for the ways high-stakes accountability had unintended consequences and seek to head them off before they take root.

Eugene Peterson wrote somewhere that the pastor should view himself or herself not as the star player of the church, but more like a baseball manager, someone whose job is to get other people prepared and in position to succeed.

That notion has stuck in my head for the last few years. Then the St. Louis Cardinals won the World Series and I remembered that I had a book by Buzz Bissinger called Three Nights in August that is an inside look at how Cardinals manager Tony La Russa does his job. So, I thought I would pull it out and see what I could learn about pastoring a church from a book about baseball.

In the preface, Bissinger writes about La Russa as the antithesis of the changes in baseball brought about by MBA general managers who quantify and number crunch their way to winning.

In the fallout of Michael Lewis’s provocative book Moneyball, baseball front offices are increasingly being populated by thirtysomethings whose most salient qualifications are MBA degrees and who come equipped with a clinical ruthlessness: The skills of players don’t even have to be observed but instead can be diagnosed by adept statistical analysis through a computer. These thirtysomethings view players as pieces of an assembly line; the goal is to quantify the inefficiencies that are slowing down production and then improve on it with cost-effective player parts.

In this new wave of baseball, managers are less managers than middle managers, functionaries whose strategic options during a game require muzzlement, there only to effect the marching orders coldly calculated and passed down by upper managament. It is wrong to say that the new breed doesn’t care about baseball. But it’s not wrong to say that there is no way they could possibly love it, and so much of baseball is about love. They don’t have the sense of history, which to the thirtysomethings is largely bunk. They don’t have the bus trips or the plane trips. They don’t carry along the tradition, because they couldn’t care less about the tradition. They have no use for the lore of the game — the poetry of its stories — because they can’t be broken down and crunched into a computer. Just as they have no interest in the human ingredients that make a player a player and make a game a game: heart, desire, passion, reactions to pressure. After all, these are emotions, and what point are emotions if they can’t be quantified?

Of course, the contrast Bissinger draws does not map onto the church. For one thing, we have few thirtysomethings and none of them are in charge. But the spirit of quantifying people and reducing them to units of production certainly sounds familiar in some ways. The appeal to tradition, lore, stories, poetry, and human messiness also sound familiar.

All that said, La Russa’s dislike for the moneyball approach does not extend so far that he does not count some things. Indeed, La Russa obsesses over all kinds of numbers. He breaks down the match ups between batters and pitchers. He constantly tries to tweak situations to get just a little bit more advantage in any given at bat. And for all his love of tradition, he has not qualms about shaking up things in the interest of giving his team a better chance to win.

And, yes, that final number matters. Everything is done to win the game.

We might find talk of winning and losing where the metaphor breaks down. I think it opens up new and interesting questions.

In the church, how do we define a win? What is that ultimate standard by which we judge our efforts? If a baseball manager and team do remarkable things but the team loses, it does not matter what the stat line says. What is the thing we do that serves the same role as wins and losses in baseball?

Bissinger and La Russa remind me that nothing is simple. They remind me that some numbers are fundamental, but we can go too far. They remind me that love and passion are central to what we do. They remind me that I need to know my people well if I am ever going to really help them.

Maybe none of this is all that insightful, but I thank Eugene Peterson for giving me the idea.

Two links for Sunday morning.

Fleming Rutledge: Marcus’ Borg’s message (btw, if you were going to invent an Episcopalian priest living in Virginia, could you come up with a better name than Fleming Rutledge?)

The Reformed Arminian Blog: Who’s to blame for the rise of Calvinism

Long-time friend of the blog Dan Lower argues for more than the simple Gospel: Isn’t that enough?

Shane Raynor recently wrote that megachurches are more efficient than smaller churches.

The fact is, most megachurches run more efficiently than smaller churches, which frees up more money for service and mission. Take the largest congregation in the U.S., for example, Lakewood Church in Houston. In 2005, Lakewood moved into the Compaq Center, a former sports arena. The church paid $75 million to renovate the space, and then paid just under $12 million in advance for 30 years of rent. At the time, there were critics who complained that Lakewood was being too extravagant with its building plans.

But consider that Lakewood Church averages about 43,000 people per week at its weekend services. That comes out to around $1750 per person for the renovations and 76¢ per person per month for rent. If a church of 300 reached this level of efficiency, they’d be spending a little over half a million bucks on their building followed by $228 a month for rent or mortgage.

I don’t know if that is a good way to analyze it, but I got out the latest conference journal to see how my tiny church compared with some of the larger ones in the conference. Since we spend no money at all on debt service, I had to change metrics to make comparisons. Instead of a single line item, I looked at the total operating budget of churches compared to average worship attendance (AWA).

At the church I serve, we have about $1,200 in budget per average worship attendance member. The two largest churches in my conference have about $1,140 to $1,160 per AWA. I checked a few more of churches various sizes, and they all fell with the same general range of between $1,150 and $1,200 in budget per AWA.

Now, $50 per AWA can get to be real money when your worship services include 5,000 people, but I was expecting much larger gaps. I was stunned to see so many churches land in about the same range. (Of course, this was not a random sample or systematic study, so I may have just hit on some that come up this way coincidentally.)

But I wonder if there is an established benchmark out there. When is a church doing well? When is it in danger? Do we see typical shift is budget per AWA as we slide up the church size continuum?

I’m not sure my little 20-minute experiment reveals anything useful. It is interesting to me at least that the little congregation I serve is not actually much less efficient in its use of resources than the megachurches in my conference.

I was paging through some of my old statistics textbooks today (what?) and the Towers Watson report in the Call to Action steering committee report came to mind again.

Yes, this is what it is like to live in my skull.

That report, with all its unreported p values and missing r values, will forever trouble me. But something deeper comes to mind this evening.

The Holy Spirit does not fit in our statistical models.

The entire enterprise of engaging in a statistical analysis of the “drivers” of “vitality” assumes that the things that drive vitality can be measured, controlled, and predicted. They assume, in other words, a mechanical universe run by natural law where the only challenge to understanding how and why something happens is one of proper technique and technology. Once we refine our methodology, mystery will disappear.

I’m not saying the church should never use statistics or sociology, but I do think we should be upfront about the fact that the universe has variables that cannot be plugged into our equations. The Holy Spirit cannot be compelled to show up because we’ve put all the drivers in place. This is not magic or science.

In a closed universe with no God — or a deistic one — we are wise to assume that every problem can be reduced to one of technique. Give us enough computing power and let us refine our measurement tools far enough and we’ll explain it all.

I don’t believe the United Methodist Church has given up on the Holy Spirit. We should just remember that our tools sometimes do not share our theological commitments.