Church Buildings and Plastic Couch Covers

By Derek Penwell

Growing up I had a friend whose family had a formal living room. I’m not sure why they had a formal living room, since they got just about as much use out of it as the crawl space under the stairs, which always seemed prone to flooding. But having a formal living room was a big deal … I guess in case the President or K.C. and the Sunshine Band stopped by to visit.

And while the President and Mr. Sunshine Band would have been welcome to sit on the plastic couch cover, ordinary human beings were not. It was a place set aside for some ultra special event that everybody believed might one day occur, and for which no one wanted to be unprepared. And so it languished in all its Teak-paneled and shag-carpeted glory, its uncomfortable looking orange couch and lacquered end tables gathering dust.

Not that it looked like a great place, either to play or relax, but I always harbored a secret desire to sneak into that living room and start moving the macraméed owl wall hangings and the vases filled with big glass balls around. I knew such hijinks in the forbidden room would be stroke-inducing to the people in charge, but dang, it felt like it needed to be done.

I suspect the need to have a perfectly preserved room (even if it looked like a touching/creepy homage to the Partridge Family) stemmed from the desire of working class folks to have nice things. Many of the folks in that generation had come of age in the aftermath of the Depression, World War II, and then the cultural pre-pubescence of the 1950s. Having nice things for certain social classes in this generation was still a relatively new phenomenon. Like domestic police, the impulse to “preserve and protect” seemed a natural response to the rapidly shifting political and cultural forces reshaping the American landscape.

“Get out of the living room!” and “You better not spill anything on the good furniture!” became the new suburban rallying cries. Some rooms were for everyday, and some rooms were for … well, never.

I preferred the family rooms of my youth to the living rooms—the former to be used, dirtied, broken, and restored, the latter to be encased in harvest gold amber, and to be later excavated by post-apocalyptic anthropologists looking to explain the domestic habits of late twentieth-century bourgeoisie.

Unfortunately, not only were the aesthetics of this time ecclesiastically enshrined in church buildings [Seriously? Burnt orange upholstery on the pews? Have you seen this?], but in many congregations so were the attitudes about church buildings as special places to be protected against all human encroachment, preserved for some special purpose at a distant point on the horizon of time.

Look, I’m not saying that there shouldn’t be places in a church that are set apart as holy space. The sanctuary probably shouldn’t double as the gym for the Day Care during the week. The baptistry probably shouldn’t house hidden jacuzzi nozzles for staff parties. We probably shouldn’t eat our Cap’n Crunch out of the offering plates. Fine.

Let me be clear, I’m thinking less about the use of particular rooms in a church than about the church building itself. In many people’s minds the church building has become the plastic-wrapped living room that should be safeguarded against the invasion of sticky-fingered people bent on messing it up.

But what if the church building was recast as a family room, to be used, dirtied, broken, and restored?

What if we turned loose of the idea that churches are antiques to be collected, rather than tools to be used to accomplish some purpose?

What if congregations took a chance and let the community use their space as a gift to those with whom they live and work, instead of defaulting to suspicion of motives or fear of what might happen?

Declining mainline denominations have these huge legacy buildings, sucking up more and more resources. What if congregations said, “We’re going to think about this building as a launching pad, rather than a saddle?”

Mistakes will certainly be made. It’s going to get messed up. Somebody’s inevitably going to spill something on the plastic couch covers; somebody’s going to move the owl hangings and leave beer can rings on the lacquered end table.

So, fix it … or learn to love beer can rings.

People visit museums; they don’t live in them.

Give Yourself a Break

By Derek Penwell

I played baseball in college. The first half of my freshman year went fairly well. At least I didn’t embarrass myself too much.

The second half, though, was a nightmare. I got into a terrible slump that I couldn’t get out of. I changed my batting grip. I changed my batting stance. I changed my batting gloves. Nothing worked.

After some weeks, I’d completely lost patience with myself. I was pressing … hard.

One of my coaches, who hadn’t said much to me throughout my struggles, finally took me aside and said, “It looks like you’re trying to hit two home runs in one at-bat. You’re thinking too much. Let your body do what it knows how to do. You’ve practiced and practiced. Now let your body do the work.”

And I said, “Yeah, but what if that doesn’t work? What if I don’t ever get another hit?”

Coach said, “You can’t control what happens to the ball after you do what you’ve trained to do. Muscle memory. You can only control the swing you’ve practiced. And if you’ve done it correctly—and you have, because I’ve made sure of that—it’ll eventually work itself out. You’ve got to quit thinking so much. What? Do you think you're Ty Cobb?  Give yourself a break.”

I over-think just about everything, and I’m not good at giving myself a break.

Writing is the same way. You do something you really like, and some other folks seem to like it too. Then, the next thing you do (which you also like) barely raises a yawn. Then, you produce several yawners in a row, and you start to think that maybe you’ve managed a couple of flukes, but now everybody has wised up and can see what a fraud you are. And you’re convinced that they’ll never read anything you’ve written again. (I’ve been assured by other writers that this is a thing—that it’s not just me.)

The temptation when you hit a dry patch in writing is to try to think, think, think of something new and important to say—something that will drive page views or book sales (or whatever measuring stick for success you happen to be employing).

You start pressing, start trying to hit two home runs in every at-bat. So, you write stuff like “Fourteen Reasons the Church Needs to Be More Like Lady Gaga.”

But writing also has its own version of muscle memory. Writers write because they can’t not write, which means that they write for the love of the act writing and not for the results writing produces.

Why?

Because you can’t control what happens after you push “submit,” after you send your work out into the ether. You trust that your writing muscles will remember what to do, and do it. And you trust that what comes from that will be a good representation of all the time and energy you’ve sunk into throwing words up on a screen. What people do or don’t do with it, you can’t control.

Struggling congregations often look like slumping hitters who can’t catch a break or writers who believe their best words have already found their way onto the paper. They press. They catastrophize. You can smell the fear of failure, the neediness for approval all over them.

Congregations in decline start thinking how they might change their luck (“because, you know, we’ve got to do something or we’re going to die”). Rather than trust themselves, they start thinking about gimmicks that will break the slump.

“I heard about a church out in Kansas that did this thing on Tuesday nights with a calliope, a tattoo artist, and bears on unicycles. Maybe we should check into that.”

But, assuming you’ve thought and prayed about the ministries you engage, and that you have something to offer, what you need to focus on is remaining faithful to your best lights.

When it comes to congregations, what do I mean by “remaining faithful to your best lights?”

Here’s what I mean: congregations should spend time discerning where God is leading, and then head in that direction. If the community is convinced that it’s the right way to go, then go and quit worrying that somebody else knows a shortcut that you don’t know.

You have to get over the mistaken notion that you can engineer the results you want. Muscle memory. You do what you do the best you know how to do it, and then you let God take responsibility for the results.

Does that mean if something’s obviously not working you shouldn’t change?

Let me take a different tack for a moment. Don’t confuse tactics with strategy. Strategy is a direction. Tactics are a path. If you’re headed east, several paths may take you there. If you find that one path doesn’t work, don’t feel guilty about stopping and heading down another one. But you need to remain convinced that east is where you need to go.

That’s a lot of metaphors for one post. The point is, congregations need to look to God for the kind of work they need to be doing. Then, they need to do that work as often and as well as possible. Finally, they need to let God worry about results.

Give yourself a break.

What If Small Is the New Big?

By Derek Penwell

Bookstores and Our Relationship to “Bigness”

As a kid growing up, almost all of the bookstores I knew about were found in malls—B. Dalton and Walden Books. You could expect to find one (sometimes two if the mall were big enough) in almost every mall. These bookstores didn’t carry an extensive inventory—mostly best sellers, coffee table books, children’s books, magazines, and so on. The experience was about buying—browse if you must, but find what you want, buy it, then get back to the rest of your business at the mall. They had no chairs, no coffee. It was a place to stop in and take a break from doing something else. The strategy wasn’t about great selection; it was about ubiquity: “We’re everywhere, and if we don’t have it, we can order it.”

As the 1990s unfolded, however, the ubiquity of mall bookstores began to decline. People’s relationship to books and the stores that sold them began to change with the increasing popularity of a couple of new chains, Borders and Barnes & Noble, and their imitators. These stores carried much more substantial inventory, and they appealed to people’s book buying experience. These new bookstores made an attempt to appear like a cross between a retail library and a coffee shop—come in, browse, relax, read a little, and have a latte. They provided comfortable chairs that they actually seemed to want you to sit down in, new and interesting music softly played, grad students with tattoos and multiple piercings, and a crap ton of books that allowed you to discover new authors and subjects you didn’t know about. The strategy was about great selection and an inviting experience—”We’ve got stuff you didn’t even know you wanted, which you get to explore at your leisure.”

But as the Internet realized popularity, a new kind of book buying experience emerged—online shopping, led principally by Amazon. Amazon and the other online bookstores boasted a nearly exhaustive inventory that could be accessed from the comfort of your own living room. What they gave up in ambience, they made up for in convenience. Not only could you order books and have them shipped straight to your door, you could order just about anything else—from TVs to hernia belts. The strategy centered on almost unlimited selection available with unbelievable convenience—”We’ve got just about everything, and you don’t even have to put down your Mountain Dew to get it.”

Things really started to change, however, with the advent of e-books. Amazon introduced digital books that gave people the convenience of online ordering coupled with instant online delivery. There was almost no waiting at all. You could have a new book in seconds, no matter where you were.

Still, after the big chain bookstores almost crushed them, and after Amazon and e-books almost crushed the big chain bookstores, some local independent bookstores have managed not only to survive, but to thrive. How do they do it?

Here’s where a really good writer might offer the winning strategy, distilled to its essence: The thing that makes some small independent bookstores succeed in the land of the giants is __________.

But if there is a strategy, distilled to its essence, I don’t know what it is. Of course, I have some ideas—an emphasis on niche marketing, an appeal to customer service, a local community atmosphere. I imagine all those things, and probably some others, have contributed to the success of certain small independent bookstores.

What I want to focus on is the broader reality of bigness. For years the roadmap to success appeared to wend its way through Mega-ville. Go big or go home, right? Walmart. Microsoft. McDonalds. Google. The New York Yankees. Hollywood blockbusters. Page views. Empire.

In fact, so closely did success seem to correlate with bigness that—at least informally, if not explicitly—that’s gradually how success came to be defined. Biggest is best.

When Big Became Small

But the narrative of bigness has bumped up against some difficult realities. For one thing, a market that is increasingly fragmented by the vagaries of demographic diversity—race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, and gender expression … not to mention, the perennial issue of the range of individual taste—is difficult to dominate in a general way. When a culture is largely homogenous, generating broad appeal is much easier—you only need to get a couple of things right to saturate the market. When the market is fragmented, however, broad appeals are almost impossible, since whatever you offer will almost certainly exclude wide swaths of the population.

For another thing, with the increasing presence of the Internet, and it’s almost endless platforms for publishing and marketing, the signal to noise ratio is as high as it’s ever been. So, while it’s easier now than ever to get your message out, your message is one among millions. Being heard is both easier and more difficult, in that your message is easier to broadcast to a potential audience, but because there are so many voices, it can be more difficult to have your message actually heard. Time was you could craft a message, publicize it through traditional media, and have a reasonable chance of having it being heard by your intended audience. If you were quick enough, properly resourced, and sufficiently smart, you might run the table. Boom! Big. Nowadays, however, mass appeals untailored to highly specific audiences have difficulty making connections.

No question but that bigness still exists. And where it does, it’s really big … huge, in fact. (Think Apple, Walmart, Google, Comcast, Verizon, American Airlines). But it’s becoming rarer and rarer.

Small and local are also thriving (Think Farmers Markets, CSAs, Record Stores, Community Ministries). What we have less and less of is moderately big (Think Montgomery Ward, Circuit City, Newsweek, Borders, My Space). A large swath in the middle—including much that would traditionally have been called large—finds itself being squeezed on both ends.

So, maybe we need to rethink the endgame. Maybe our understanding of success needs recalibration.

* What if scrambling to be a monopoly is a waste of time?

* What if “mega” scares off more people than it attracts?

* What if, as Seth Godin has suggested, small is the new big?

I want to suggest that these are questions denominations and congregations should be considering just now.

Penwell's Law of Travel and Why Churches Need to Plan for Failure

By Derek Penwell 

Boy, howdy, do I get cranky on the first day of vacation!

For months I look forward to the time off. I do all that pre-vacation planning, thinking about how long we’ll drive each day, where we’ll stop to eat, the kind of hotel that can accommodate five people. I like the planning.

The packing, though? I don’t like the packing. In particular, I don’t like the “getting-out-of-the-house” part. It always takes exactly two hours longer to leave than I planned. There invariably seems to be one more thing that, if it gets left behind, will mean certain calamity—medicine, power cords, the six year-old’s nebulizer.

And I tend to take out my frustrations on my family. For the first hour in the car I’m a sullen jerk. I don’t want to be a jerk. Nobody wants me to be a jerk. But there I am privately (or if you ask my family, not so privately) seething about the fact that now we’re two hours behind my meticulously thought out schedule.

Except it’s not that meticulously thought out, is it? I never seem to factor in the two extra hours that, no matter how much we’ve packed and prepared the night before, it takes to get on the road. So, either because of my poor planning or my bad memory (or more likely, some combination of the two) my family has to start its time together with a Dad who blames everybody but himself for the late start and the bad mood he’s in.

It strikes me that often churches also start new journeys with much of the same kind of crankiness. Churches plan. The good ones plan some more. And the really good ones try to anticipate in advance the problems they’re sure to encounter along the way.

The problem, though, is that you can never anticipate all the wrinkles that will inevitably throw off your scrupulous preparations. No matter how methodical you are, you’re still going to leave your contact case behind.

Call it Penwell’s Law of Travel: No matter how hard you plan, you’re still going to leave something important behind, still going to wind up with a bad radiator thirty miles outside of Des Moines, still going to find yourself in a smoking room at the Holiday Inn Express (when you very clearly told the reservations manager that you have kids with asthma, and so cannot possibly take a smoking room).

A version of the same law applies to churches: No matter how hard you plan, you’re still going to have someone forget to remind the AA group that they can’t have the fellowship hall on Friday night when you launch your soup kitchen, still going to wind up forgetting to make sure that the heat gets turned up in plenty of time before the attendees show up for the new adult day care center and start complaining about how “it feels like a meat-locker in here,” still going to find yourself playing host to a surly group of young adults who are pretty sure somebody promised there’d be beer at the Bible study kick-off.

So, the question isn’t “Will something go wrong?” The question is “How are you going to respond when something goes wrong?”

Churches in decline tend to obsess over the accidents, the mistakes, the unforeseen misadventures. In fact, so afraid are they of mistakes, so undone are they by accidents that they will use the memories of those things as an excuse for never launching out into the unknown again.

Mistakes, to struggling churches, are viewed as an enemy and accidents as a moral failure of planning. The problem with undertaking a journey with these prejudices is that it fails to take into account Penwell’s law: something is going to go wrong, be forgotten, get busted, remain unappreciated. If you keep living as though it won’t, you set yourself up for frustration and crankiness.

Make peace with the fact that on any new journey, any new initiative someone or something will screw up in ways you failed to anticipate. Figure that into your planning—or at least your mental preparations—so that when it does happen you’re not thrown by it. Or worse, you’re scared out of packing up and taking the family someplace next time.

Indeed, you’ll never know success unless you learn to understand mistakes as a necessary part of the information gathering process. If you want to succeed, you have to be prepared for failure. It’s the law.

Look, nobody wants to travel with a sullen Dad. Even sullen Dads don’t like it that much. Believe me, I know.

An Update on the Life of the Church

By Derek Penwell

As you may have noticed, a number of things have changed around Douglass Blvd. Christian Church over the past few years. I thought I'd take a moment to help you see the scope of these changes, and to offer you the thinking under which we're currently operating. It's all pretty exciting!

Organizational Philosophy

We no longer operate on the Functional Church Model of church organization—that is, an efficiency model of church organization popularized during the industrial revolution. The thinking in the early twentieth century was that businesses were enjoying some success by reorganizing themselves with a board of directors, an executive committee, and a host of standing committees. The Functional Church Model worked pretty well during the salad days of Mainline Protestantism's cultural ascendancy in the middle of the twentieth century. Unfortunately, as churches experienced membership decline beginning in the early 1970s, filling out the organizational flow chart became more and more difficult. [I've written extensively about this here and here and here.]

Moreover, with the increase in the number of families where both partners work, finding time to devote to committee work became increasingly difficult. At some point, young people seemed no longer to be stepping up to take over the often difficult work that had been performed by committees. Consequently, congregations began experience a great deal of stress, wondering how the work that had been getting done, would now be done.

At DBCC we've experienced these same stressors. Beginning in 2006, the congregation underwent the transition from the old Functional Church Model to a new form of organization, where the work is driven no longer by committees "thinking up stuff to do," and then having to figure out how to convince someone to do it, but by people who have a desire to see a particular ministry take shape. We still have a few ministries that cover things like worship, property, and personnel, but almost all of the ministry opportunities in the church have developed because someone saw a need, and asked the church for help in figuring out a way to meet it.

• Woodbourne House
• our move to become Open and Affirming
• Louisville Classical Academy
• the Douglass Loop Farmers Market
• Freedom House
• our public stance on marriage
• our ministry to refugees
• our work with the Fairness Campaign and Louisville Youth Group
• five mission trips to Mexico
• CLOUT
• our support of the Louisville Gay Men's Chorus
• Diersen House
• our support of GLAD
• the expansion of our web and social media presence
• the clothing closet

None of these ministry initiatives started in a Leadership meeting, or because of the work of a committee. They all came about as a result of people who saw a need, brought it forward, and then took responsibility for helping to make it happen.

Now, our Leadership Coordination Ministry isn't primarily responsible for thinking up new things to do; it is responsible for seeing that the church meets its obligations and for seeing that potential ministries have the resources they need to thrive. Consequently, we don't have to worry about expending energy on continuing things for which there is no longer any enthusiasm. We invest in ministry where the energy is.

Facilities Management

One of the most visible changes in the life of DBCC over the past few years revolves around the use of our campus. We've undergone a philosophical shift in our thinking about the resources over which God has made us responsible. For years there was anxiety about how the church was going to maintain a campus as large as the one we have with a congregation that, for a time, continued to see itself shrinking.

There were several serious discussions about how we should handle such an enormous responsibility, ranging at certain points all the way to whether or not we might be better off selling our building, and finding somewhere more manageable.

A philosophy began to evolve, however: What if we use our building and grounds as tools to be used for ministry, rather than as keepsakes to bequeath to future generations. Of course, we'd still want to care for them as good stewards. Only now, we could feel free to give them away to other groups when we could, and to charge rent for other space where we needed to.

As important as anything about this shift in philosophy is its implications as a theology of stewardship. We've tried to move from an "attractional model" of programming—in which we do programming with an eye to attracting people to membership at DBCC—to a purely ministry-driven model of programming—in which we offer space and programming as a gift, because it's the right thing to do. Of course, we hope people will like us and want to come find out about us, but that's not why we do what we do. We do what we do because we believe it's what God is calling us to do.

This theology of stewardship has allowed us to have our facilities used at almost total capacity every day. With Woodbourne House, we've helped offer low cost senior housing to eleven people. We give our grounds to the community on Saturdays for the Douglass Loop Farmers Market, allowing a neighborhood gathering place every week for people in our community. We donate space to Highland Community Ministries every weekday for a senior adult day center. On weeknights, we donate space to two AA groups, the Humane Society, HCM Water Color and Ball Room Dancing classes, the Louisville Gay Men's Chorus, and an LGBT Film Group.

We offset the costs of ministry by renting space to the HCM day care and to the Louisville Classical Academy. In addition, we rent 28 parking spaces every day to businesses in the Douglass Loop, and lease the front parking lot to the bank.

Our mixed-use formula has allowed us to stabilize our revenue over the foreseeable future, while at the same time giving us an opportunity to serve the community . . . just because.

Operations Management

The change in our organizational philosophy, the way we use our facilities, together with the increasing use of electronic communications is revolutionary enough that it has caused us to rethink the way much of the staff does its job. With the constant use of our facilities, we've had to employ a handy man, Neil, whose primary responsibility is to maintain and repair the building. Neil, in consultation with Gary King, is kept busy trying to look after a heavily used facility.

These changes have probably had more impact on Jennifer Vandiver than anyone else. Jennifer's responsibilities have increased significantly. She still answers the phone and produces the bulletin and newsletter. But now she spends a great deal of her time coordinating the use of the building between so many groups. Recognizing this shift in responsibility, Jennifer has been given a new job title by the Leadership Coordination Ministry: Operations Manager. Because we now must deal with the reality of space limitations, Jennifer is the point person when it comes to the many requests to use our facilities. Moreover, she acts as the "first responder" when a group has a difficulty or complaint.

Our Internet presence, which has grown considerably over the past five years, has become a major area of ministry to people all over the world. A majority of first time visitors when asked how they found us will say they saw our web site. Our sermon podcasts and blog articles are consumed by people all over the world. The realization that our ministry was broadening in this area caused the Leadership Coordination Ministry this year to fund a new position, charged with the responsibility of managing this new frontier for ministry. We're proud to welcome Geoff Wallace back to help us discover the exciting possibilities of ministry done on a global scale.

And of course, Joanna, Brenda, Clare, Ben, and I are also finding new ways to engage in ministry that allows us to equip followers of Jesus for the unfolding reign of God.

As we move forward together, please help us keep our eyes open for new possibilities for ministry at DBCC. The coming years look just as exciting!

What I Learned about Leadership from Being Stuck in an Airport

By Derek Penwell

As I sit in the Dallas airport, 25 hours into my version of the airport story from hell, I cannot help but think about the way something as simple as a flat tire on an airplane can put a serious kink a person’s faith. Apparently—and I did not know this—the FAA doesn’t consider Fix-a-Flat a suitable repair for a damaged airplane tire … at least that’s what the kind woman at the American Airlines gate told me when I walked up after seven hours to make suggestions about how we might possibly, “if-it’s-all-the-same-to-you,” move this along.

I’m going with a group to Mexico to do work on water purification, which is neither here nor there, except to draw attention to the competing impulses of a group that both urgently wants to get down to Mexico to do what we’ve been planning to do, while still remaining committed to the prospect of sidestepping the temptation to act like turds. They’re actually doing great, but nobody could blame them if they did spike the sphygmomanometer.

The thing about being stuck in airport is that not only is it exhausting staring at the same patterns in the industrial carpet for hours on end, but the uncertainty can tax even the strongest spiritual constitution. What lies ahead is uncertain, with just enough hope to keep you from wandering away from the gate and down to the bar to lay in liquid stores for the duration. And so you sit—miserable to be where you are, but with not information to provide you with the incentive to go somewhere else.

Which misery sounds like a lot of congregations I know. Life in declining congregations often mirrors the nightmare of being stuck in an airport. They don’t know what the future holds, and nobody can give them enough information to act on, so they sit on their hands, vacillating between the anger that nobody knows anything and the fear that whatever it is that nobody knows will materialize without warning and cause the whole journey to veer off into the ditch.

But the other thing I learned about being stuck in an airport is that good leadership can be the difference between communal thriving in a less than optimal situation and a spiraling descent into a band of mutant circus geeks on the prowl in search of the heads of airline personnel.

Here’s what I learned about leadership in a declining congregation from being stuck in an airport for 26 (now) hours:

1. Being calm is contagious. If the person in charge is wound too tight, everyone gets anxious. Tranquility sells.
2. Anxiety over things you can’t change isn’t merely a waste of time; it also robs you of the joy of the adventure. You can expend a great deal of energy worrying about things you have no control over, which leads to anxiety (see above). Anxiety causes the mind to race, limiting options and impeding creativity. But just as importantly, it blinds you to the fact that adventures are adventures precisely because of the challenges … not despite them.
3. Being a jerk to people who can’t do anything about the situation doesn’t change anything but the atmosphere. Not only does being an overbearing fussbudget fail as a strategy for making things better, it also helps to create overbearing fussbudgets of others (see above). Remember: You have to live in the climate you create.
4. Laughing makes everything a little less crappy, and can help bind a community together. In addition to the fact that laughter helps to relieve the tension of a difficult journey (see above), it also helps to draw people together. Any adventure is not only better with companions, it also makes survival that much more likely … just ask Frodo Baggins, or Harry Potter, or Jesus—although survival in Jesus’ case apparently required stretching out on a stone slab for a couple of days—which is sort of like airport furniture, if you think about it.

Being a part of a congregation in decline (or stuck in an airport) isn’t, generally speaking, high up on anybody’s list of things to do before they die. But if you stick around long enough, chances are pretty good you’re going to find yourself staring adventure in the face. You might just as well do it with a little grace and style.

Your band of traveling companions will thank you.