An Evaluation of Our Call

01/15/2012

An Evaluation of Our Call:

Policy and Program Impacts at the Local Level

Rev. James J. Reid

Executive Minister, Classis of the Greater Palisades

Background:

In the best of all worlds, I would not be drafting this paper and you would not have to be wading through it. Instead, we both would be paging through an evaluation design put forth by the RCA denominational administration that would outline how it intended to measure and cull lessons from its two key missional programs, Church Multiplication and Leadership/Revitalization. That evaluation would have been conducted during the tenth and final year of Our Call, the ten-year plan, adopted in 2003 and modified in the nine years since. The results of the evaluation would inform discussion at all levels of RCA governance during a year-long interim period of reflection and dialogue. That discernment process would then lead to the formation of any future national denominational plans and programs.

But as of this writing, January of 2012, there is no public plan in hand for a comprehensive evaluation of Our Call prior to starting the formation of a second decade-long plan. At an event planned for next month in OrlandoFlorida, a portion of the General Secretary’s keynote address will be devoted to a sharing of “lessons learned from Our Call”. Following that half-hour survey, participants in this Conversations event will asked to set a denominational vision for the ten years 2014-2024. That vision will be disseminated to the wider church, comments will be received over a period of about 90 days. The combined input will be processed by a special task force and then set before GS2012 as a proposed plan for the next decade. This assures that no full-scale evaluation of the results of Our Call will be conducted until after the next decade’s denominational emphases and programs have been authorized.

At GS2011 last June, several delegates questioned this apparent lack of evaluation plans, both off the floor in conversations with staff and on the floor during sessions. A resolution calling for an evaluation to be prepared prior to the Conversations event failed on voice vote and on recount lost by a 60/40 margin. Arguments against the motion included a lack of time to conduct an evaluation, indecision about ‘appropriate metrics to employ” and that the workshop discernment process and the Conversations event would cover this ground. Of course, the timeline crunch was of the GSC’s own making and we can see that any thorough evaluation, beyond the “lessons learned” segment of the upcoming keynote address, is not anticipated. As to the appropriate metrics argument, that decision had been made back in 2005 when the GSC revised the annual consistorial reports and announced to GS2005 that data from those reports would be sufficient to measure progress toward Our Call’s objectives [MGS 2005 p.302]

According to the audited financials of the RCA, a total of [at least] $20,617,729 was expended on Church Multiplication and Leadership/Revitalization from 2003-2010. Of that total, $14,289,771 was spent for Church Multiplication and $ 6,347,958 for Leadership/Revitalization. The latter expense was partially offset by a Lily Foundation grant for $3,000,000 that runs to 2013. A minimal sense of good stewardship would demand that expenditures of this magnitude be closely evaluated as to their efficiency, effectiveness and impact. The results should be shared with the church membership whose assessments funded the great bulk of the programs. A church whose membership recites a creed affirming that “Christ shall come again to judge the living and the dead” ought to be willing and able to judge its own efforts on Christ’s behalf.

The Nature of This Evaluation:

The author is not in a position to conduct the far-reaching evaluation which this situation demands. Only the General Synod Council commands the resources and access to data required to do the job in accord with generally-accepted practices. Reading the GSC Minutes, it appears they have no present inclination or plan to conduct a thorough program evaluation of either or both mission emphases. Doubtless it will be argued that all GSC programs are subject to constant monitoring under Carver governance. But internal monitoring is management practice, not objective evaluation over against publicly-stated goals. Moreover, unless one is among the Carver cognoscenti, the vocabulary employed for this internal monitoring is hardly understandable to the average RCA church member, to whom we are all fiscally accountable. Enough data of a global nature [e.g. the consolidated financials] is on the public record to see the broad parameters of each program. One might deduce overall expenses, statistics of membership and organized churches, and the like, but line-by-line expense analysis, budget detail, fund transfers, participation numbers and other data useful for evaluation are kept within the GSC.

What is possible is an evaluation of Our Call from the perspective of local assemblies of the RCA. This evaluation is from that perspective, in particular from the perspective of a metropolitan classis on the East Coast and its varied local churches. It will address the ways and the extent to which Our Call has apparently impacted [or not impacted] that classis and its churches in their day-to-day functioning. This is an evaluation that is not empirical in the sense of counting the number of contacts with each program or the number of participants in various workshops or training sessions. If such numbers are tracked at all, they reside in the databases of the denominational agencies. At the local level, numbers that matter are obtained by asking rather simple questions. How many churches have become organized through the Church Multiplication process and how many through other means? How many leaders have participated in revitalization networks and how many are in other networking arrangements? Those numbers show a minimal impact upon the local classis and local church by Our Call.

Initial Decisions Shaping Our Call

The most important part of this evaluation concerns the constellation of denominational policies and practices that surround Our Call and their cumulative impact upon the relationship of local assemblies with the national denomination. Our Call carries with it a set of assumptions about our local assemblies and churches and about the role of the national denomination that have resulted in policies and practices which duplicate and displacethe work of local ministry. We need to look closely at Our Call’s basic working assumptions, their sources, the policies that have been derived from them and the substantial strains they have placed upon relationships among RCA assemblies. The question must be raised whether the Our Call mindset, program and policies can be extended into the future without bringing the RCA to a breaking point.

To fully evaluate the impact of Our Call to date on local church work, the following factors need to be examined:

• The presenting problem which Our Call was intended to address and solve.
• The partial assumption by the national denomination of two key duties vested in the classes by the BCO, along with the apparent rationale behind that realignment of responsibilities;
• The relational ambiguity and parallel structures created by Our Call and the strains they have placed upon inter-assembly cooperation.
• The ways in which changes in General Synod governance have added to the relational ambiguity among RCA assemblies;
• The failure of Our Call to take into account the economic realities faced by local churches and classes.

The starting point is to re-analyze the problem Our Call was designed to solve: the 40-year downward trend in the number of RCA organized churches and active members, the head-count upon which RCA per capita assessments are based.

The Scary Numbers:

Each year when the RCA denominational statistical summary and the Minutes of General Synod are published, there are three numbers that local consistories look for: the number of RCA organized churches, the total RCA membership and the per member assessment for the year to come. For decades, the first two figures have been declining and the last has been escalating. For local churches, this means less money will be available for local ministry at a time when their own costs are increasing. In addition, there is a drag on organizational enthusiasm, since the overall RCA drop in membership often parallels their own local experience. A sense grows that we are dealing with a problem for which the remedy may be unknown.

Our Call posed two solutions for the declining numbers of churches and members:

• First, develop new congregations through a rekindling of evangelism and do that in volume to offset the churches that are closing.
• Second, motivate leadership to redouble their evangelism efforts by the establishment of accountability networks.

For all intents and purposes, the latter program focused on the professional leadership [ministers of the word and sacraments] rather than congregational leadership [elders and deacons]. That these particular solutions were selected goes back to how the problem of decline was analyzed, which will be explored further on.

Both emphases are internally focused despite their methodological emphasis upon evangelism, i.e. the working assumption behind the proposed solutions is that the membership decline is primarily due to factors within the churches and thus correctable by changing internal institutional behaviors. Simply put, it says: “We are not sufficiently evangelical—so if we crank up our practices of Gospel witness as churches, and especially as ministers, membership numbers will grow.” Numerous anecdotes of growing evangelical churches are cited as support for this analysis. But at base, the working assumption is that local churches and ministers have only themselves to blame for the scary numbers; they are the weak points in the organizational system.

Calvinists are not the only persons on the planet who are ready to assume blame for declining circumstances, but we have refined that process into a fine art. So RCA folk are primed for explanations that they are not “this enough” or “that enough” and that we are falling short of the mark. The evangelism explanation did resonate within the RCA, despite the fact that it has all the weaknesses of a single-factor analysis. But it is importantthat we do not allow quick fixes todivert us from a broader analysis of the problem and block from view othercauses and more effective solutions.

Certainly, personal evangelism has not been as emphasized in the RCA as it has been in some other Protestant bodies, a few of whom have shown considerable growth in membership during the same period when RCA membership declined. But this is the point at which two and two can be added to obtain the sum of five. Direct comparisons of methodology and membership are difficult because the numbers of both the RCA and the more evangelical churches are influenced by many factors, not just by their most obvious disparity.

It is important to analyze the extent to which the problem of membership decline is due to internal or external factors or to a combination of both. Examining the RCA membership decline, for example, we could be asking whether other organizations are experiencing similar issues. Quickly, we would find that other “mainline” churches in the USA are in the same situation as the RCA, but that offers small comfort. Harvard sociologist Robert G. Putnam, however, points out that membership decline is characteristic of almost all local voluntary organizations in America over the last 40 years. After interviewing over a half-million people about their voluntary associations, Putnam points to an evolution in how Americans relate [or fail to relate] with one another. His first study, Bowling Alone [1995] demonstrated an overall loss of “social capital” in American society as we turned from being face-to-face friends into being Facebook “friends”.

A recent study, Grace in America [2010], updates his data and focuses upon American religious congregations.Putnam’s multifactor analysis of the American religious scene shows that as a whole, churches, because they are congregationally-based, are suffering membership loss in an era when all manner of direct personal interaction is devalued. The least affected will be churches who define their membersas those who have adirect personal interaction with God and engage in personal faith witness. More affected will be churches who have a more generalized definition of membership and who have depended upon passing along their faith intergenerationally. Traditionally, the RCA has been counted in the latter category. As Our Call has worked out, it would have the RCA shift further into the former category, even to the point of adopting evangelism as a formal mark of the Church.

At first blush, this seems a logical move—to bring forward the practices of personal and professed faith, which has always been a tenet of the RCA, in order to mitigate the impact of a societal shift. As another empirical researcher, Christian A. Schwartz, has pointed out, it is no loss to strengthen a weakness. Seemingly every RCA congregation that conducts an NCD survey tests out weakest in “need-oriented evangelism” and “passionate spirituality.” But is that predominate result showing us just an internal faith weakness or is the wide spread of that result pointing to the penetration of the larger societal depersonalization into our congregations? We may feel reluctant to talk with neighbors about Jesus, but that is far from the only topic we avoid discussing with them.Indeed, we may be backing off from talking with our neighbors almost entirely. Sharpening up our evangelistic skills can help, but what has evaporated are the ready-made occasions for its practice that once existed over back fences, in social clubs and at bowling lanes.

These days, occasions for evangelism must be deliberately constructed or re-constructed. With its emphasis on hundreds of new congregations, Our Call takes the constructivist tack of creating new occasions for evangelism by planting evangelists in different localities. There is no loss in that tactic, although it may experience a more-than-moderate mortality rate. Great resources have been put into that effort,hoping to move the number of RCA organized churches upward. But far less effort and resources have been expended on using already organized local churches as platforms for creating new community contacts. Where that sort of regeneration has been taking place among extant churches, it seems incidental to the Our Call revitalization program, although Our Call is latelypromoting methods [such as the use of non-profit entities] as ways of re-approaching local neighborhoods.

The analysis of the problems to be addressed by Our Call was not sufficiently comprehensive. It failed to take into account that the RCA’s scary numbers were part of a much larger mega-trend. Changing the denomination’s internal orientation from intergenerational sustainability to evangelistic recruitment doesn’t hurt, but to date, it is not changing the scary numbers. Equal or greater emphasis needs to be placed upon working with and through local churches and classes in an effort to assurethat our churches exploit their unique local position to fulfill service and community-building roles. Together we must confess that RCA churches have largely let slip their position as not only as evangelists, but also as community-builders. In times past, many rural crossroads towns and suburban developments found their community values developing out of the work, faith and service of a local RCA church. Where our churches seem most alive, we observe a membership engaged in laying the practical and moral foundations for civic regeneration. Where we still retain footholds [sometimes mere toeholds] in neighborhoods that are swept by demographic, economic and cultural changes, we need an all-out effort for community re-engagement. What is truly scary are not the numbers within our church walls, but the erosion of the interface which once existed between our churches and their neighborhoods.

Christian Schwartz makes the point that church growth is not so much about numbers as it is about quality. Keep in mind that his eight qualitative measures were developed in a European society where even established churches are outside the experience of most ordinary citizens---the very direction in which the USA appears to be headed. We can learn from the European church experience while our nation is still “religious” (in one sense or another) and strive to regenerate the assets we have in place, hearing that numbers of adherents increase as the quality of their church experience deepens. That would argue that local church revitalization has priority over new church development; the inverse of the emphases and expenditures of Our Call.

There is yet another framework available to us, lessons we can learn from within our own RCA ranks. Local churches in the Eastern Synods and classes are, in effect, mission stations. Instead of sending missionaries out around the globe as in former times, today the varied populations of the earth have come to inhabit the neighborhoods surrounding our church facilities. One of the RCA’s most successful foreign mission endeavors was in Chiapas, Mexico. The churches we helped plant there have grown into a church whose numbers far exceed that of the entire RCA. Reading Vern Sterk’s account of his forty years there, one sees that the Chiapas model was one of patient presence, immersive identification with the ordinary people, intense local focus, identifying and servicing the most critical local needs, striving to make the non-believers’ lives qualitatively better, and being unrelentingly evangelical as opportunities arose. We need to pay much more attention to this Chiapan frame of reference, especially since so many central and south Americans have migrated into our local environs.