more on the church


sarah stumbled upon this (set date range from 2000 to 2006, click 'find church by name', type huffman and press enter) yesterday evening as she was trolling around the internet and happened to wonder if the folks in our techno-ministry had updated huffman's site in the recent past. we were both surprised to see that someone was at least on the ball enough to update the staff page removing rick and donna and adding rev. denson and lindsey hull, our new part-time children's director. as sarah continued to peruse the site, most of it terribly dated (unless youth choir has re-started at 530 on sunday evening and i had not heard), she clicked on the conference link and followed her interest to the link i provide you above.

i am going to do my best to post my long awaited, long-hyped children's place entry tomorrow before i go in and close the store. but before i did so, i thought it might be of interest to those of you that pay relatively frequent attention to this site (and by product of your interest, you being privy to my internal skepticism about my church's future) to point you in the direction of some cold, hard facts and not just my opinion on the matter.

it does not, in any way, shape or form, take a statistics geek to analyze our charts. 400 fewer members in our fold by the end of 2006 as compared to the end of 2000. 200 fewer in combined worship. and keep in mind that the years in question contain the end of not one, not two, but three alternative worship services "designed" to attract un-churched or de-churched persons. drops in professions of faith and baptisms are seen next, but both of those numbers were pretty weak even back in 2000. the first four charts are bad. real bad. but the most defining chart is the last one. our apportionments. most of you readers are aware of this, but apportionments are the portion of each united methodist church's budget that are pledged towards the conference whole. in other words, apportionments are a church's tithe toward the sum of our conference's parts, god's church and god's kingdom. only once in the six years charted did we even meet half of our pledge and in 2003 (charles lee's only full year), we didn't even reach 15 percent of our goal. as i look at this and reflect on the figures, am i the only one that feels uneasy? we do not, as a church, tone down our stewardship campaign and efforts when it's time to get ready for the next year's budget. but how can we expect our congregation to fully buy in (financially) to what we at huffman are doing if we cannot fully buy in (financially) to what our conference and god's greater kingdom has in store for our monetary gifts? we tell our congregation that what we give of ourselves god will return several fold. we tell our congregation that we should consider god first with our finances because he considers us first in all walks of life. we tell our members to not be afraid to tithe "your ten percent", because god will provide. but we, as a church, are not committed to this idea. if we, on the whole, are not convicted, then why should we be as individuals?

is there a direct link between the failure to meet our apportionment and our congregation fading away at an alarming rate? maybe not directly, but what i see is this. rather than recommitting as a church and saying, "ok. we are going to come at this from another direction. we will give god his first and work from there. we are trusting ourselves to fix this and it is not working. it is time to, literally, give this over to god and ask him for the wisdom to save our church.", we have developed a bunker mentality. instead we are saying, "shit. we are dying off way faster than we are reaching new people. so, let's see how long we can drag this out. we'll cut full-time staff to part-time. we will not readjust our apportionment because we can't afford to. and we will all sit indian-style with our fingers crossed and hope something happens."

that's just not how it works, folks. for all my gloom and doom, if you are inclined to trust the context of scripture, we see that god trusts and puts faith in persons and groups that trust and put faith in him. huffman is not holding up our end of the deal. and we are paying for it.

i am glad i happened upon some numbers that say that in a way that doesn't just come across as me whining.