A few years ago, the national media touted Colorado Springs as a place of growth and opportunity. Plentiful high-tech jobs and mountain beauty attracted thousands of people. Military assignments brought thousands to Peterson Field, Fort Carson, and the Air Force Academy. Housing starts reached all-time highs.
Then the recession hit. One third of the city’s population has moved out of state during the past five years, making it one of the nation’s most transient cities. Area pastors were caught in the middle of turbulent change.
Ministering to a transient culture, however, is not just a Colorado Springs phenomenon. It is becoming the norm, it seems, for our mobile culture. In many suburban areas, for example, one fifth of the population may turn over yearly. Pastors throughout the country know the difficulty of trying to build a church on shifting sands, trying to minister to nomads without going mad.
After interviewing pastors from the Colorado Springs area, I found that churches are adapting to the transience. The pastors have learned a great deal-and in the long run are actually benefiting from the process. Here are some of the lessons they’ve learned.
Challenges Intensified
Transience is not a new phenomenon, of course. America has been a mobile culture from its beginnings, so most pastors have learned to live with it, even appreciate it. But when transience intensifies, so do many of the typical church problems.
Loss of leadership. Larry and Jane were very involved in First Presbyterian Church. They had three sons, each active in Sunday school and youth ministry. Larry was an elder. But when the economy fell apart, his real estate and development business evaporated.
“He tried for months to find another avenue of income,” says John Stevens, senior minister, “and then he was offered a fine position in the Chicago area. So they left. I could name a hundred couples like this.”
Jim Pearring, pastor of Living Word Church, lost fifty people to out-of-state moves late last spring-elders, Sunday school teachers, worship leaders-out of a congregation of 275.
“Last May we were making plans for two services in the fall. The exodus changed our whole course,” he said. “One of our elders moved last summer, and it wasn’t until after he moved that I realized what a tremendous asset he had been. Within two months, we had to radically change the concept of what our elders were doing and raise up another elder board.”
Harvey Martz, senior minister of the 950-member Calvary United Methodist Church, also knows the pain transiency can bring. “About twenty-five active families left between April and August of 1990,” he says. “We lost talented leaders. I miss them.”
Lack of loyalty. “The whole fabric of the church is affected,” says Roc Bottomly, pastor of Pulpit Rock Church. “Transient people often have a consumer attitude toward church. They attend one church as long as it meets their needs better than another. You don’t know who you can count on. People are fickle and tend to be critical. Rather than saying, ‘We’re part of this and we’re going to make it go,’ they act as if the church is on probation.
“When a church is constantly gaining and losing people,” Roc laments, “you feel you have to be more careful about the way you do things. The church’s ability to weather struggles-a change of pastor, a building program, any type of turbulence-is greatly lessened. A pastor’s margin of error is thinner.”
Bottomly speaks from experience. When the previous pastor of Pulpit Rock Church left, the congregation dropped from 1,300 to 600 people.
Stevens adds, “In a transient community people think, I won’t be here all that long, so they hesitate to get involved, to put roots down too deeply.”
Discouragement. High turnover can discourage those who remain.
“When people move out of state, those who remain think something is wrong with the church,” explains Pearring. “They look around, don’t see as many people, and think the church is falling apart. And when it’s their friends who move, it weakens their roots in the church. That can snowball: we’ve had people leave as a direct result of others’ moving.
“One young lady said to me, ‘We want to be involved in a church where people stay twenty-five years.’ Obviously that’s nearly impossible to find nowadays, but she kept searching anyway.”
Budget uncertainties. Pastors in transient communities quickly discover that it’s difficult, if not impossible, to develop accurate budgets.
“This year, because of the increased transience, we set a three-month budget,” says Pearring. “We have no idea what will happen after three months. We’ve had so many changes that trying to plan a year’s budget is suicide.”
Bottomly has a different problem. Now that the church has a full-time pastor, people who left during the transition are returning, but their financial loyalty is unclear.
“We’ve grown 50 percent in six months-four hundred new people,” he says. “But giving is up only 10 percent. In our transient church, it takes people a while to trust us enough to give. There are more people, with less institutional commitment. As a result, our income is below average for a church this size, so we have to run our operation with fewer staff.”
First Presbyterian Church has also had to cut staff.
“The finances of our church today are much more difficult than they were five or ten years ago,” says Stevens. “For the last five years, we’ve been cutting back on staff, streamlining procedures, increasing productivity, and using resources more efficiently. Last year we underspent our budget by nearly $40,000 simply by watching expenditures carefully. If we can find a cheaper way to do something and still get it done in an effective, acceptable way, we do it.”
Getting the Word Out to Newcomers
The flipside of ministry in a transient area is that churches must aggressively cultivate first-time visitors and potential members.
“I have to constantly stay on my toes. As a church, we must welcome newcomers,” says Pearring. “If we don’t, there won’t be a church anymore. Two or three weeks ago, a man was upset with me and said, ‘The church is focused on newcomers.’ I agreed. It has to be.”
So churches have extra incentive to do all the things necessary to attract newcomers.
“We spend lots of money on Yellow-Page ads to let people know we’re here,” says Martz. “Also, at Christmas and Easter we print 2,000 invitations to advertise our services. That’s a time when people are open, when they have a spiritual awareness and longing. The best method, of course, remains personal invitation.”
Visiting newcomers also becomes more important than ever.
“Everyone who visits our church is personally contacted the very next week,” says Stevens. “We work hard at that.”
Martz adds, “A lay person is at the visitor’s doorstep on Monday evening with information about our church and a loaf of homemade bread. We thank them for coming, ask how they learned about us, answer questions, and invite them to return. Then we track their attendance. After they attend a few Sundays, we follow up with a phone call inviting them to a new-member orientation session. We’ve found that the earlier we contact visitors, the greater the chance they’ll return.”
Getting New People into Leadership
Transience forces pastors to put people new to the church in leadership positions.
“In my last church in Oklahoma,” Bottomly confesses, “most of the elders, deacons, Bible study leaders, and Sunday school teachers were people who had been and would be around for years. Someone almost had to die before a new person could have a ministry opportunity.
“Here in Colorado Springs, we are constantly losing Sunday school teachers, elders, deacons, Bible study leaders. So we’re forced to put new people into those positions. I’ve noticed, though, that these new people do a better job than we thought they would. In fact, this approach has improved the quality of our programs.”
That’s not as easy as it sounds, however. In many churches, it’s hard for transient people to work into significant levels of responsibility. Ironically, even as pastors lament the ongoing loss of gifted people, some overlook people in the congregation who have previously taught Sunday school, been elders, even attended seminary or pastored churches.
“When these people move to a new church,” says Bottomly, “it’s not easy for them to communicate gracefully that they’d like to labor at a significant level of responsibility. So the leadership must find these people quickly and communicate, ‘You don’t have to earn your stars or spurs here. We respect what you’ve done in the past.’ “
So pastors in a transient community look for ways to spot potential leaders and aggressively recruit them. The old way of letting people simply rise to the surface and prove themselves doesn’t have time to work.
Sometimes simple approaches work well. “We give people a talent survey when they join the church, and then again once each year,” says Martz. “They can sign up for anything they’re interested in, and another member follows up their response. Using a computer readout of the surveys, our nominating committee contacts people when needs or positions arise. If you count typical roles like Sunday school teachers and choir members, more than 200 people in our church are involved.”
Still, transience hurts. When a church loses veteran leaders, pastors spend lots of time training. The burden also grows heavier on church leaders, who must carry a bigger load until new leaders are recruited, trained, and in place.
“If Colorado Springs stays in the same condition it is now for another five years,” says Stevens, “some of our outstanding leaders won’t be able to bear the load.”
In addition, constant turnover hurts one-on-one contact ministries, like lay visitation.
“Our lay ministry deals with inactive people who start to drift away from the church,” says Keith Hedstrom, pastor of Ascension Lutheran Church. “That ministry depends on volunteers who will make ongoing contact, to follow up those who’ve undergone a death in the family, a divorce, or whatever. When those lay visitors move, we lose that continuity.”
In the end, though, these churches are seeing good come out of their situation.
“God provides,” Stevens says confidently. “As I’ve watched this passing parade over twenty years, I’ve seen people leave and wondered how we’d ever find people to replace them. Even though we never get people exactly like them, God brings others who have great commitment and ability. If I’m patient enough and don’t panic, God sends people who are right. Sometimes he doesn’t send them as fast or as well prepared as I’d like, but he provides.”
The Pastoral Anchor
In a transient setting especially, a pastor’s own commitment plays a vital role in a church’s long-term ministry.
“I’ve always seen myself as a pastor of a local congregation,” Stevens says. “I travel seldom, take few outside speaking engagements, and have not written a book. I make hospital calls, attend meetings, preach, teach classes. I have never viewed this church, regardless of its size, as a way to propel me into greater ministry. My job is to serve this church during good times and bad times.
“These are hard times,” he admits. “The church needs my leadership more now than it ever has in the past. I’m determined to give it the best leadership. If we’re gaining members, that’s wonderful. If we’re not, that’s the way it is.”
“Pastors move too often,” Stevens warns. “The average minister stays less than ten years, and the smaller the church the more often pastoral leadership changes. Many pastors do not develop a real sense of commitment to their church and the community. They sit loose in the saddle because they don’t expect to stay too long.”
When pastors come and go frequently, congregations respond more slowly to a new leader’s vision.
“They tire of bouncing back and forth between pastors and visions of what the church should be,” says Stevens. “It’s difficult for a church like that to develop a consistent approach to ministry, a long-range plan. Our church, in fifty years, has had two pastors. That’s one reason it has 5,000 members and why it is what it is today.”
Success Redefined
Confronted by the challenges of ministry in a transient city, pastors I spoke with have had to reexamine their views of success.
“A pastor’s self-image can be tied too closely to the size of the church,” says Pearring. “Mine is, and God has ripped that. But I’m still having a tough time with that. Go to any pastors’ conference, and who are the guys speaking? They never ask a pastor of a 100-member church to speak. That custom just reinforces that mentality. So if your church goes from 200 to 250 you feel great, but when it goes from 200 to 150, you feel like trash.
“If I realize, however, that success from a biblical point of view is obedience, faithfulness, servanthood, love, purity, and teamwork, I again ask, ‘What are we trying to accomplish?’ It’s to make disciples, and we’re doing that.
“Not all of them stay in Colorado Springs, but we’re having an impact. I have to get back to the basics: What has God called me to do? Am I doing it as best I can? Am I giving my all to it?”
Pearring is not alone in the struggle.
“I have had to look at my needs,” says Hedstrom. “If I need to be successful and develop ideal programs that appeal to everybody and fill the church, I will be frustrated because it won’t happen here. It’s hard to ‘do church’ in a traditional sense in Colorado Springs. On the other hand, if what I am about is helping people grow and become more Christlike than they were yesterday, then I can find fulfillment.”
He recalls a young man who, as head of the youth program, was too shy to ask the congregation about holding an activity. “After eight years of involvement, he became a lay preacher! That is the goal of our church-to train and equip people, not to maintain a program.”
Vision plays a key role. “A church has to have a vision of what God wants it to be about,” says Stevens, “and it has to hold to that vision. It cannot be dependent on where a community is in its cycle. As pastors, we must ask, ‘Where do we need to be in order to position ourselves to do what God is calling us to do?’ understanding that ministry is long-term, not short-term.”
Seeing the Wider Ministry, to Uttermost Parts
After investing so much in training and equipping people for ministry, do pastors in Colorado Springs feel discouraged to see so many people move out of state? Sometimes, frankly, yes.
“There has always been an enormous turnover here,” says Stevens. “In the past, though, while we were losing some people, we were gaining others. Now, new people aren’t coming into town the way they used to. It’s more difficult to watch people leave because I don’t necessarily see others replacing them. And now when I see those talents, gifts, commitments, and ministries departing, I feel a sense of loss. I may even panic if I’m not careful. The last couple of years have been very difficult for me.”
Still, in spite of battles with discouragement with the local situation, pastors have learned to see the big picture.
“It’s easy to become discouraged and say, ‘Man, let me go someplace else,’ ” Pearring admits. “Now I view departures from a broader perspective. Our church is able to have an impact on people across the country and world. Three of our members are in Saudi Arabia right now, leading small groups.
“Whatever we give people that is good, right, and helpful-introduce them to a new ministry tool, give them a solid, biblical philosophy of ministry-they will take away from here and multiply it elsewhere. So it’s not a total loss. In one sense we’re privileged. We’ve become a sending church.”
In that way, churches in transient settings know firsthand what it’s like to be a mission church, one that gives its life for others. It often hurts and often complicates church life, but the potential impact knows few bounds.
Copyright © 1991 by the author or Christianity Today/Leadership Journal. Click here for reprint information on Leadership Journal.
