Learning to Take the Stairs

Last night at Ad Council it was brought up that what our church needed was an elevator speech...(aka: a mission statement). A neatly wrapped statement so pretty and appealing that such a statement could harness the marketing power to sell our church to even the most skeptical buyer.

Although we might all call this presentation by different names, the idea is not a unique request. In a postmodern age, Churches are constantly grappling with how to articulate a fluid identity in an institution that no longer is defined by a single experience.

While I am no social scientist, I would guess that the desire for a 'marketing plan' is probably a natural reaction to the anxiety of a changing cultural. A culture in which the church is facing the realities of an increasing sense of irrelevance. It makes sense that the Church would wish to define itself in the midst of a crumbling foundation.  That we would want to convince ourselves that if we could just tell people in the right way, at the right time, how wonderful our church is then they would quietly sit in the church pew. This has become our new idea of salvation. God, give us the words to save us from a faith which calls us to change and challenge.

Looking out on the church pews, though, it is obvious that God's activity is calling us to do just what we are crying out against: To Change. That in spite of our best efforts and greatest intentions it will take much more than any elevator speech, mission statement, or marketing campaign to revive our churches.

But before any growth or vitality can begin to invade the Church as we know it, there will need to be a fundamental conversion experience in which the people sitting in the pews desire to come alive in Christ. A conversion experience which inspires action and redirects us toward a new conversation. One that values deed over word, faith over predictions, outreach over isolation, heterogeneity over homogeneity.

It will be that experience through which our hearts begin to adjust to God's action in the world, showing us its time to get off the elevator and start learning to take the stairs. It's a longer, more demanding process. It requires intentionality, training, and courage. But it also reflects the reality of Christ's call to live as Disciples, having faith that God will take care of the church. Accepting that we are to care for the world.

Perhaps our first step upward on God's path is to do the exact opposite of what our anxieties tell us we need. That in the presence of faith we would choose to find peace living in the walls of an institution and not knowing quite who we are. Embracing that we are a struggling community living in anxiety and fear but that in the face of individual death and institutional extinction we remain committed to physically beginning a new journey toward a vision of Hope.

Our mission statement might just be that we are going to live as a physical sign of God's love in the world and that in this action of outreach and mission we have faith that God will make clear the identity of Her Church in this new world. Our elevator speech, however, well, that will have to be our visible actions...