Briefly, a merger!
May 2, 2024
By Rev. Rick King
Now is an exciting time for our church! If you’ve not already read the Call to the May 18 Special Congregational Meeting and Carol Holm’s piece inviting you to consider serving as an at-large Executive Board member, both in this issue of the TAB, I urge you to do so.
You’ll read of the group discernment process (our “Future Search”) underway since last November, the four possible paths the board presented to the congregation at its annual meeting in January of this year, and the strong consensus we reached at April 20’s congregational working session in favor of pursuing a merger conversation with New Life Presbyterian.
Why? Because roughly 80 percent of the 320,000 Protestant churches in the US have plateaued or are declining, and 2 percent of congregations each year vote (or are required) to close—and these figures are from before the COVID-19 pandemic.
The board reasoned that unless we start doing church differently, we’ll be out of one-time money inside of two years. We have a window of opportunity to transform our church to make it more viable and vital, if we start now.
But I want to confess to you my bias, as a leader: If we look at merging only as combining our assets and people, we will fail to revitalize. In other words, simply merging our two declining congregations without a compelling mission to reach the wider community is a recipe for life support, but not life.
Commonly, two churches merge and double in size and resources, but within five years participation drops to about the number of participants in the larger of the two congregations.
What if we looked at merger as marshalling our two churches’ people and resources in order to create one NEW church? Not just combining, but transforming—where the whole literally IS greater than the sum of the parts? Jim Tomberlin and Warren Bird in their book on church mergers, “Better Together,” write: “For the past decade, we have been witnessing a swelling wave of mission-driven church mergers that is transforming the church landscape across North America.”
Moreover, “These mergers succeed today largely because of a united and compelling vision that lifts a church, especially a church that’s stuck or on a downward slope, into a new pattern of life and growth.”
New Life and Falcon Heights Churches have a rare opportunity to make this merger creative and transformative of our mission and ministry as a multigenerational, progressive Christian church in a wider community that needs us.
What are YOUR dreams for this new work God will do with us?