Church hell redux

I am going to take some more precious bandwidth and talk about my church in Pittsburgh again. As frequent readers will remember, I posted concerning my church on Aug 19th. If you haven't read that entry, this one will not likely make a ton of sense to you. Maybe you should go read that one first.

Anyway. Last October my church entered into the transformational ministries program of the ELCA. This program is designed to help congregations that are facing changing ministry challenges. The basic format is to select 10 people from the congregation. They go on a retreat and when they come back, they are so fired up that they begin a revival in the church. Well, the retreat was in January. The transformational ministry team came back and they were so moved on such a personal level that they couldn't share anything that happened during the retreat. In the last 9 months all that has come from that entire process was one Bible study.

At the last church council meeting one of the members of the transformational ministry team told the pastor that she didn't think that his sermons were doing anyone any good and that we should use the sermon time in the service to do a Bible study. Now, what makes this so interesting is that she has not been to worship, or, any church function in more than 2 months (this is the sister of the CE director who cut Sunday school short).

Now our church is supposed to exit the transitional ministry program and enter the congregational equivalent of anger management. We are on a path to becoming a "functional church" (as opposed to dysfunctional, in the psyc way). Oh yea, and don't forget. . . unless something changes drastically in the congregation's financial picture, it will close in 18 months. I am becoming more and more convinced that it would be a better stewardship of what few resources the congregation has left for us to close the doors now and give the money to someone who is actually doing God's work, not just keeping a building open.