THE TEFLON CHURCH - Christianity Today

Several Sundays ago at church, my wife met a woman who recently had been divorced, deserted by her children, and fired from her job. Scraping together all her money-$950 in cash-she had put it into a briefcase, and then the briefcase had been stolen. Then her car had been impounded because of a stack of unpaid parking tickets. Had she not had an arrangement with her landlord to clean vacated apartments, she would have been on the streets.

But down those long streets she had walked to church that Sunday: a newcomer.

What happens to such a first-time visitor?

It depends on the church. Some churches, strong and sure of themselves, brimming with corporate energy, healthy and outward looking, will embrace such a vulnerable person. (In fact, a member took this woman home that first Sunday, and a group in the church has been helping her since.) But churches struggling with internal conflicts and disabilities may not have the corporate energy and health to spare anything for needy people. Such churches lack the wherewithal to give much of themselves to incorporate a newcomer-or to hold on to members in less dramatic circumstances who are slipping away.

Not all people arrive on the church doorstep with the needs of this woman, but research indicates that most people who, on their own initiative, walk into an unfamiliar church shoulder emotional pain or stress. They may have just moved to the community, or given birth to a child, or undergone the C. S. Lewis-like trauma of conversion. Such events bring stress in people’s lives.

Visitors typically carry with them an anxiety cluster that may, when shared, overwhelm the unwitting congregation that is struggling with its own difficulties. The church with a hefty burden of corporate pain will back away from such individuals, because that church typically isn’t ready to deal with any more pain. Such a newcomer will be screened out rather than assimilated.

Such a congregation becomes a Teflon church, an organization to which visitors cannot stick because the church is unable to summon the energy to hold them.

Assimilation and Pain

Assimilating someone into the life of the church is different than helping them become a member. Rounding up bodies and getting them to join the church doesn’t finish the task. People who join a church may well drop out a few months later. The church needs to incorporate them into the life, the emotion, the ministry of the congregation. People need to become a part of the church body rather than be merely attached to it.

To do this, however, a congregation must have a positive self-image; it must believe in itself. The reasons are obvious. First, it takes energy to incorporate a foreign body into the church body.

Consider the people who join a church. Although these people likely are coming because of their own anxieties, the church expects them to make new friends, accept unfamiliar beliefs and practices, learn new social rules, and become active in the congregation. But the newcomers are troubled, trying to find a house or struggling with a new job or patching together a shattered life or learning to be a parent. They’re coming to church in hope of finding friends. They want help, not new assignments.

Consequently, the church that wants to incorporate these people will have to do most of the giving, bending, and reaching out. That burns corporate calories.

And some churches don’t have enough calories. Their own traumas, battles, or discouragements have sapped their congregational vitality. They carry too much group pain.

I know of a seven-thousand-member church that lost a thousand members and one million dollars of income last year. Two Sunday school classes, each with over two hundred members, pulled out to start their own congregations. Then, after the sermon one Sunday, the head of the congregation convened a congregational meeting and fired the pastor on the spot. Now, how much energy does that congregation have to incorporate newcomers?

Investing Necessary Energies

Expending the energy to enfold newcomers is a front-end investment: if you expend the energy at first to reach out and embrace new members, you obtain a net gain in corporate energy. The more robust a church, the more it can enfold a large and diverse group of newcomers. And those newcomers add to the vitality of a congregation, giving it even more energy to reach out.

In fact, the new-member assimilation record of a church provides a fairly accurate indicator of its wellbeing.

Yet, the energy requirement is almost a Catch-22: it takes corporate energy to assimilate members, but if you don’t assimilate people, you lose energy. Then again, even the hungry summon the drive to find and eat food, expending the energy to gain energy.

A positive church self-image is necessary for effective assimilation for another reason: attractiveness. People simply aren’t drawn to a listless or combative church.

A little church my wife and I worked with fired its pastor, but he wouldn’t leave. When the church brought in an interim, the fired pastor walked into the service on Sunday and interrupted Communion, announcing, “This is my church, and I’m taking over worship!” Before the morning was over, two police officers were in the church trying to oust this guy from the building. It was eighteen months before a court order dislodged him from the parsonage.

That church holds little attraction for any unsuspecting newcomer who happens to visit, and even if it did, the congregation has little emotional attention to spare.

Corporate pain also works to delete people already in the church. One church with which I consulted had recently changed pastors. The previous one had alienated many people, many of whom had left. The new pastor was so warm, gentle, and loving that some of those people started coming back.

This angered one of the stalwarts who’d hung on through the difficult times. “I’ve been here doing the hard work,” she complained. “I paid my pledge, but these people opted out. I don’t know if I can let them get as active as they were!” Had the congregation not deliberately interceded, this woman would have screened out the returning Diaspora.

Corporate pain also tends to delete from the body not just marginal but healthy and resourceful people. Such people will size up a deeply troubled congregation and say, What’s going on here? This isn’t for me. A sinking ship isn’t the most hospitable environment, and when the healthy get the picture and start leaving, the decline becomes self-perpetuating.

The local congregation can exist in one of four stages of health: excellent, neurotic, declining, and demising. Each stage displays an identifying communication pattern, energy level, goals, and dominant theology, as well as a distinctive coating of new-member Teflon.

Excellent Churches

These well-functioning, healthy churches take in new members, nurture them, place them in responsible ministries, and assimilate them into the life of the congregation. The level of corporate pain in excellent churches is low to nonexistent, and they have no Teflon coating. People stick.

Effective assimilation in such churches is explained by their characteristics.

Communication patterns. In a healthy church, people give the right information at the right time to the right people, and decisions are made in an open and orderly manner. Members don’t do business furtively in the church parking lot after worship. Pastors aren’t talked about behind their backs. Feedback is allowed-even encouraged-whether it is positive or negative.

I worked with Ted Weeden, who took the large but declining Asbury First Methodist Church in Rochester, New York, and turned it around. He did it in large part by his openness to feedback.

I served as director of the calling and caring ministry, and he’d regularly ask me, “What are our people hearing about our church when they make calls?” He’d coax every scrap of information out of me, and not once did he become defensive.

The healthier the organization, the more open people are to feedback.

Energy level. In the excellent church, things are happening. Congregational life is full, and the members reach out to others. For instance, the excellent church actually calls on those who are beginning to drop out of church life.

Excellent churches have high levels of input and output. Output means the congregation reaches beyond itself. To use business language, the representatives are in the field selling the product. In a church, that means that people go beyond the church walls to care for and evangelize those not yet a part of God’s church.

Input means the sales people are getting orders for the assembly line. In other words, people are being brought into the life of the church. When members are saying, “We have a wonderful church. Why don’t you join us?” outsiders are taking them up on it. The excellent church brings in more healthy people.

Goals. A healthy church has clear goals that stretch the organization. It knows where it’s headed. It stages its operations to arrive at its goals on schedule. And when it meets these goals, it makes new ones.

In other words, the excellent church has vision and can articulate that vision in concrete goals.

Dominant theology. The excellent church supplies its members with a rich and full theological diet. Although the sermons are consistent in theology, they vary in the kinds of topics covered. Missing are hobbyhorses and tirades and one-issue bandwagons. Difficult topics aren’t skipped, because the church has the energy and health to tackle them.

In short, healthy churches attract people and actively enculturate them into congregational life.

Neurotic Churches

The neurotic church is just beginning to experience troubles. It can assimilate people, sometimes in Sunday school classes or small groups, but not with the agility of the excellent church. A thin Teflon coating begins to form on a church characterized like this:

Communication patterns. A church’s pain, whatever its source-board politics or a pastoral firing or a changing neighborhood-needs to be discussed. But in a neurotic church, people who try to deal with pain run into roadblocks.

Some pastors will not let congregations deal with strong emotions, because anger or sadness seem sub-Christian. Sometimes the pastor is threatened by conflict. In one church, the pastor said from the pulpit, “If you disagree with me, you’re my enemy.” When that happens, the congregation no longer openly discusses internal conflict, although it may exhibit passive aggression, such as boycotting events the pastor plans.

Another communication roadblock is inappropriate pious language-language of denial. The emphasis here is on inappropriate. For example, a secular counselor referred a woman to me, frustrated that he was getting nowhere with her. “She talks only in religious language!” he grumbled.

When I asked her how I could help, she replied, “Jesus told me to come see you. You know, I love Jesus.”

“That’s good. In what way do you love Jesus?”

“Well, when I get up in the morning, I ask Jesus what I should put on, and Jesus always tells me. And Jesus tells me what to make for breakfast.”

“Hmmm.”

“I really love Jesus, you know,” she continued. “I take Jesus to bed with me at night. He’s a marvelous lover . . .”

That’s an extreme case of inappropriate pious language. The woman had been suicidal but had had a deep religious experience. That sealed off the pain. But when she had a big fight with her husband, her suicidal thoughts returned, and she didn’t know how to deal with them because she had claimed for years that Jesus had healed her. She ended up avoiding the whole issue by talking religious nonsense.

Neurotic congregations can assume many of these traits. They talk about everything but their pain, carefully walling it out with inappropriate pious language: “Count it all joy, praise the Lord. Isn’t the Lord good?”

A third communication roadblock is set up by those who circumvent the established systems. When there’s a problem, they don’t talk to the right person about it; they go to someone else, and the grapevine takes over. Role confusion sets in; people begin to get fuzzy on who’s supposed to do what. They often take projects into their own hands, making an end run around the committee structure. This labyrinthine communication pattern confuses the newcomer and distracts the members from reaching out to the stranger at their door.

Energy level. In neurotic churches, more and more of the corporate energy is drained in an effort to suppress pain. They’re too busy dealing with hidden and disrupted messages. That means less energy is available to do ministry.

Goals. The neurotic church begins to fail to achieve some or many of its goals. Some goals are actually sabotaged. An event is planned, and a handful of people show up. Nobody has complained, but neither have the people bought into the goals. Or a budget is planned, and then people withhold their pledges.

The goals of a neurotic church begin to look unattainable. Healthy people start to say, “Church, you’re in trouble.”

Dominant theology. The theology of the neurotic church becomes pharisaic. It begins believing it should avoid trauma and try to look perfect on the outside, and the preaching follows this belief. The church looks white on the outside but is full of rotten pain on the inside.

God’s church started as a wounded institution. After all, the group in the Upper Room after the Crucifixion was eleven rather than twelve. And a wounded institution it has been ever since. But the neurotic congregation’s theology attempts to avoid that reality. It denies the pain, the problems, the difficulties. And that means denying entrance to people who need the church’s energy and attention.

Declining Churches

In declining churches the Teflon coating is thicker and smoother still. The church fails to reach and incorporate people at a rate equal to the loss o f healthy members.

The declining church is like a declining industry: the sales force isn’t selling much product, so the assembly lines are shut down. Then the salespeople begin quitting because there’s nothing to sell. Keep that downward spiral going, and pretty soon all the resources are gone, and there isn’t much institution left.

Communication patterns. In declining churches, information is not only given to the wrong person (as in a neurotic church) but also only partially.

For instance, if someone has a beef about the choir, he’ll tell the associate pastor that worship isn’t feeding him the way it used to. The associate walks away thinking, Maybe I should tell Doctor Wills that his sermons need to be meatier. In such a situation, those trying to work within the church don’t have all the information they need. Messages get crossed, and people start filling in the missing gaps, often incorrectly.

In such churches, pastors may hear mixed messages, such as, “You’re a good pastor. You probably won’t stay here very long.” What does that communicate? First, such pastors who stay begin to wonder if they’re good pastors after all. And if they leave, it only corroborates the parishioners’ hunches. Either way, the church loses.

Energy level. The church in decline has a flattened energy level. What energy it has is being consumed in internal matters-avoiding conflict, denying reality, putting out fires. Pretty soon it’s feeding off of itself, eating up its own resources and adding nothing to increase its corporate spunk.

Healthy people have sized up the situation and sought a more energetic fellowship. The people who visit and remain are often “clinkers.”

In a coal furnace, a clinker is a piece of slag or iron or slate mixed in with the coal. The heat of the furnace melts the clinker, but the clinker doesn’t burn. Therefore it doesn’t add anything to the fire. In fact, it saps energy from the burning coal to heat it, and actually lowers the furnace’s fuel-conversion efficiency.

Church clinkers attend but are never assimilated. They tend to sap some of the remaining energy from the group as it tries to work with them, but clinkers don’t contribute their time and gifts to the congregation.

Such people make wonderful scapegoats in a neurotic or declining church, which can say, “No wonder we aren’t growing if people like this are what we get.” Declining churches will complain about clinkers but rarely do anything. Why? They don’t have the energy.

Goals. In declining churches, corporate low self-esteem begins to dim the vision and sabotage the goals.

One member of a church with which I worked gave me the classic line for a declining church: “Anybody who is anybody goes to the church down the street.” That’s an inferiority complex, and God-pleasing goals cannot derive from such a mind-set.

The goals of a declining church aren’t lofty. Perhaps they’ll set the goal of slowing the decline. Or maybe they’ll get brave and try a new program, but one that doesn’t really attack their problems. Or they will ratify goals year after year-and then forget them until the next year.

Dominant theology. A declining church latches on to remnant theology: “People are leaving, but we’ll survive. If those people want to leave us, we don’t want them anyway. We who are left really love one another.”

Remnant theologians refer often to Gideon or Jesus and the ten lepers (of which only one came back). They assume decline is a product of separating wheat and chaff. Whole denominations are in this stage!

The declining church operates in a deficit economy, expending more of its people than it takes in. People are sliding off the Teflon and out the door in increasing numbers.

Demising Churches

When in demise, the church doesn’t necessarily close, but it no longer affects its community. The church is comatose, or at least catatonic. It is breathing-barely-but it no longer breathes life into its surroundings. For all intents and purposes, its function and purpose have stalled. At this point the Teflon is so effective, you couldn’t bake a new member on in a blast furnace.

Communication patterns. The demising congregation has not only lost all its resources, it will not accept further help. The problem: it doesn’t believe it has a problem.

I met with a pastor last year whose church’s worship attendance had declined from two hundred to only twenty-two. His church hadn’t taken in one new member in seven years. Someone in the church told me, “No visitor ever comes back more than twice, because the message from our congregation is clear: ‘You’re not wanted here.’ ” Unbelievably, the pastor still couldn’t understand that he had a problem.

Such churches would rather die than deal with their pathologies. They reject help. That was the case in a church I visited last year. I made my initial visit. Later the pastor got the church together and told them that to have anyone come in from the outside-particularly me-would be a work of the Devil. They then voted and, by a vote of twelve to ten, barred my return. That’s denial; meaningful communication has ceased.

Energy level. In demising churches, no one is willing to call on the visitors or departing members. No one even thinks about it. It just isn’t worth it.

One fellow in the church of twenty-two members told me, “I wouldn’t ask my best friend to come to our church.” When I asked why, he stated honestly, “Because there’s nothing here for him to come for.”

“So why do you still go?” I asked.

“This is the only place I know.” He has attended that church for over sixty years, and he feels stuck. Not committed, but stuck; there’s a difference.

Goals. Demising churches have no goals. Hope is gone. When I interviewed one pastor of such a church, he said, “We can’t do anything about it. All churches are dying these days. There’s no church of our denomination growing in the state anyhow.”

Dominant theology. Demising church pastors never preach on such themes as abundant life or the Great Commission; they most often preach abstractions. The demising church hears ” ‘Peace, peace!’ when there is no peace.”

I sat through a sermon by the pastor of the church of twenty-two. The man had a Ph.D. in New Testament Greek. He lectured for twenty-five minutes on topics so foreign to the life of the congregation that everybody else blocked out the sermon long before I did. I’m a trained listener, and I had a hard time following him.

Why did he preach irrelevancies? Because if he passed anywhere closer to the actual “life” of the congregation, he might hit on something too painful to deal with.

But in the demising church, almost no one listens to the preacher, anyway. That was given up a long time ago. A new person who would happen upon such a service would find nothing relevant.

How does the church assimilate a newcomer in such a situation? It doesn’t. Like greased Teflon, it allows the person to slip right off.

Scraping Off the Teflon

How, then, does a slippery church begin to retain members? A fearless congruence is a good place to start. Church Teflon may well be little more than an updated version of the Pharisees’ whitewash.

Churches need to allow their outside appearances to reflect the realities of their inward dispositions. Avoiding pain and conflict and continually trying to look great on the outside are shams.

The people around us are wounded, and if the church can honestly acknowledge its own woundedness, the candor alone will attract people. But when the church denies the reality of its conflict and pain, it moves into the spiral toward demise.

Let’s investigate how churches in each of the stages, beginning with the sickest, might begin to remove their Teflon coating.

Demising churches. Without a healthy pastor, the demising church doesn’t have a chance. One of our staff members said of a pastor he worked with, “This pastor can break stuff faster than I can fix it.”

I asked one church whose pastor was causing some problems, “What would happen if you changed pastors?”

“Oh, we can’t do that!” they replied. “We had a terrible time with the last three pastors, and we promised ourselves we’d never ask another pastor to leave.” They’d had three painful experiences in a row, and they hadn’t dealt with any of them adequately. They were using the ostrich method to avoid conflict.

Besides getting a healthy pastor, two other techniques can help demising churches.

First, a healthy pastor can change the church’s ingrained belief system. An attitude that expects no success can be countermanded by a pastor who constantly strokes the congregation by celebrating every little success and never condemning failure.

Such a pastor says things like, “Isn’t it marvelous what happened in our church this past week! Did you know that every day, Betty called on a man dying of AIDS in the hospital? What an example of Christian love! You know, folks, you’re a very caring people.”

When the pastor does that every week, the worship service doesn’t become a place of the doldrums. There are no floggings, only celebrations of the success of the gospel in people’s lives. The cure is long, however, and it demands a long-suffering pastor.

Second, fellow congregations can help a demising church with another rescue technique. The “screeners” who keep newcomers at bay in a demising church easily overwhelm visitors. But what if the visitors overload the screeners?

Let’s say that a Presbyterian church is dying. The presbytery can ask for two or three volunteer families from several nearby churches to join the dying church for two or three years. This ingesting of two to four dozen healthy families acts like a marrow transplant for a leukemia victim: it overwhelms the system with healthy cells. The screeners may try to screen like crazy, saying in many ways, “We don’t know if we can handle you,” but the sheer number of newcomers makes the screening ineffective.

The healthy new families help create an atmosphere in which off-the-street visitors can be assimilated. Of course, it means having a pastor in place who supports the process.

Declining churches. To turn a declining church around, you must deal with corporate pain. Such pain nearly always seeks a vulnerable individual to vent upon, and sometimes that’s an innocent pastor.

The pastor of a three-thousand-member church called me at 11:00 at night and began crying on the phone. “I’ve been here only two weeks, and I don’t know what’s happening,” he gasped. “I’m getting life-threatening phone calls from parishioners at 3 A.M. My kids are being physically hassled on the school grounds. Frankly, I’m scared. I don’t know what I could have done in two weeks to cause all this!”

“I hate to shoot down your ego when you’re not feeling good,” I reassured him, “but there’s nothing you can do in two weeks-even twenty-four hours a day!-that could cause you all this grief. You’ve inherited twenty-eight years of corporate pain.”

He was a young, gentle, caring man. I went to consult with the church, and his church is the only one where I’ve been physically attacked. The poison in that congregation was horrendous. Still, it had to be uncorked for the church to survive and for the innocent pastor to continue.

Some pastors shoulder more of the responsibility for decline. Another church I worked with expected itself to be healthier and more successful than the pastor would let it. He said to me one day, “I’m aware after being here ten years that this church is too good for me.”

This pastor had become a master saboteur in little things. Although he was a gentle, caring man one-on-one, put him into an administrative setting, and his sensitivity left him. For instance, he quoted me in a sermon, but it was something I’d never said. He’d done similar things with his leaders, and they’d lost confidence in him. For this church to get well, they needed a new pastor who had a belief system that allowed success, and they finally found one.

Most declining churches also need an infusion of new vision, new hope. One church that formerly was declining now believes it can do well. Their pastor has been with them ten years, and his belief in the church is beginning to pay off. I notice the difference even in how they speak about themselves. They’ve developed new support groups, and the church is becoming healthy again. It takes a long time to return to health, but it happens.

Neurotic churches. Neurotic churches have more internal resources from which to draw. The key is to utilize remaining resources in nonneurotic ways, which is easier said than done.

One of the greatest resources for a congregation is its healthy members. They come in two varieties: new and existing.

Even in the neurotic stage, the church usually has plenty of existing healthy members who haven’t left. These individuals need to be mobilized. Some churches form a Resourcing Task Force that directs people with needs to members who can help. That way, individual pain is handled rather than covered over. In much the same way, conflict resolution teams can tackle corporate pain.

Then the formerly neurotic church won’t lose its other human resource: healthy new members. Newcomers, instead, transfuse new energy into the congregation, helping push it toward excellence.

Excellent churches. These churches are already holding on to the newcomers, but they always want to do it better. One such church, First United Methodist Church of Jefferson City, Missouri, has developed a structure to keep the system healthy.

Congregational traumas fire off all kinds of emotions. Perhaps a key leader comes down with cancer, or a child is diagnosed with AIDS. What can a church do to handle that kind of trauma rather than push it underground?

Gene Rooney, First Church’s pastor, has helped create support groups for the various events that cause such difficulty. Say your wife comes home from the doctor with the news she has cancer; the church has two groups available: one for you and one for your wife.

This large church has handled many traumas lately with its many healthy small groups. With many groups, it has not only a variety of support entities, but it also has damage control; if one group collapses, it doesn’t affect the whole church, because other healthy cells can fill in where the one left off.

Smaller churches may not have lots of resourceful people to care for the congregation in this way, but they can band together. If several farming families go bankrupt in a rural community, a group of churches can provide a support group for the families, helping them find psychological and financial help. People never leave a church that gives them that kind of care.

I once saw a sign on a mental health center wall. It read: THE ONLY WAY OUT IS THROUGH. Not over, around, or any other means but through is the way churches must handle corporate pain.

One of the healthiest stories for churches is the one of Peter trying to walk to Jesus across the stormy Sea of Galilee. Peter walks into the storm when Jesus says, “Come.” But then he gets scared and begins to sink. Jesus is right there, however, reaching out and drawing him up.

It’s a marvelous story for churches to appropriate, because when we enter our congregational storms, it is scary and it takes faith. It takes a belief we sometimes don’t have in our churches. But once we’re invited into the storm, then Jesus stills it-not before.

The church that holds on to people is the healthy church that has walked into its own tempest and emerged, holding on to Christ.