I was talking to a client from a small denominational tradition the other day about how to best support congregations struggling to keep up with their needed fundraising. She mentioned, in particular, that these congregations were sometimes extremely burdened by their denominational apportionments. I was surprised by that, as, having worked in UMC churches, I assumed that all apportionments were, well, proportional. 

She explained that they were, sort of. Because of the way the by-laws of their denomination are written, apportionments grow with congregational size, but they do not shrink. Meaning that if a church had a membership of 500 several decades ago, and that membership has shrunken to 100, the church is still paying the apportionments of a 500 member church. My friend told me that this was framed in their denomination as an intentional choice to keep churches from becoming isolated and complacent, and that the policy was intended to continue to call the church into living up to its demonstrated potential. 

When church shrinkage is the national norm, decades in the making, demonstrated potential becomes less of a promise and more of a weight. Apportionments can become so significant that the church’s primary programming becomes fundraising to pay them. The burden limits imagination, possibility, and capacity to fulfill their missional goals, it can be, in the words of my friend, “crushing.” These congregations are literally buckling under the weight of their own past success. 

Aren’t we all?

What youth pastor hasn’t heard tell of years where they took four buses of teenagers on choir tour? What senior pastor hasn’t been regaled with stories of how successful the pastors before her were? What congregation hasn’t felt like its own history is an albatross around its neck, a reminder of what it was once? 

Like trying to fit into our high school jeans, our congregations are chasing an image of what we considered to be our best days, thinking that with the right magical combination of staff and program and crash diet, we can be that again. We don’t want to believe our best days could be behind us. 

They aren’t. I just think we don’t know what our next best day looks like yet. Our days with the most people, the most cash, the most attention, were not necessarily the days we were the most faithful, the most aligned with our mission, or the most Christlike. Nostalgia can cover a multitude of sins, and the idea that God is done with the church and it’s people just because the institutions that have historically held power in the church are declining, isn’t aligned with who God has demonstrated Godself to be. 

Every time I speak to church leaders, I offer them this, and I offer it to you too, on the off chance you also work at a community that is still holding on to its high school jeans. 

God has not given up on the world. 

God has not given up on the Church as God’s chosen instrument to bring God’s kingdom.

God has not given up on the people God called to lead.

So,

If it doesn’t feel like God is moving in your church, then that must mean God is moving elsewhere. 

Your invitation, your calling, is to go find where, and to join in.

Our calling is not to bring back some glory days that were never really that glorious. Our calling is not to turn our churches into museums, living artifacts of the way things once were. Our calling is to join in with the Spirit’s on-going work in-breaking the kingdom of God. Those high school jeans don’t serve you. It’s time to let them go, and start to discover what your next best days are really going to look like.