I just spent awhile reading our Book of Order to understand the different categories of church membership.
I can’t claim to understand it all, but one thing is clear: the spreadsheet I have now lists different people with their membership status in one column. At a minimum I need to add another column that says when their status last changed. But I should probably change all the ‘inactive’ people to any of three different varieties of inactivity.
(Who thinks this stuff up? “Deck chairs, meet Titanic.”)
“Deck chairs, meet Titanic.”
That doesn’t sound good, but it does sound familiar. A few of us pre-septuagenarians were talking the other day about where our local church will be in 20 years. Our excuse is that the population out here in the country is aging and shrinking: we’re in our own little demographic death spiral.
The structure and orderliness is all very well. You can’t just have a charismatic leader swoop in and replace the leaders and kick out everyone who disagrees. So that’s good.
But.
I see more lively churches that seem to be accomplishing a lot more, with a lot less denominational infrastructure (like six categories of membership and the attendant year-end bookkeeping). I guess the question is, are you willing to risk the bad in order to stay more focused on the good? And in a country without an established church, when you can start a new church as soon as they kick you out of your old congregation, does it make sense to be so focused on these worst-case scenarios?