"if everyone in this room shows up with a paintbrush, we'll finish in about twenty minutes"
(cue laugh track)
((we were there six and a half hours))
(((you do the math)))


for two consecutive sundays in february, i pimped our church daycare's second paint day with the above joke. it wasn't terribly funny, but, then again, i didn't really mean for it to be. i said it in a light-hearted enough way, for i knew the way that it sounded would come across as exaggerative.

surely, he doesn't mean all of us could fit into those tiny daycare classrooms. that would be foolish. he must be joking. i'm gonna laugh to ease my tension.

on the second and third sundays last month, we probably had around 200 people in worship. some of them young. some of them young-ish. some of them middle-aged. some of them older. some of them older than that. most of them all capable of holding the smallest of paintbrushes. those that were not, i would never hold them no-showing against them.

the daycare has been floating our church for more than two years now. in my head, it seemed like a very fair request, even if i didn't word it in this way.

because of the children's place, no staff have been let go. because of the children's place, no significant ministries are no longer offered. because of the children's place, no hard and fast conversations have been had or been necessary to radically reshape our budgets to accurately reflect what our congregation is able to support. as a thank you for the hard work and dedication of the children's place advisory board, the daycare staff, and, most importantly, the sweet children that OUR daycare serves, let us rearrange our own schedules, re-prioritize our own lives and come give those children a whole new world to walk into on monday morning, february 28th!!!

how i worded it was this way. "the daycare is having a paint day on saturday, february 26th. it would be greatly appreciated if you could help. (insert above joke)".

it didn't work. much like the first paint day, hardly anyone showed. a few church members. a couple daycare families. some daycare staff. that was it. as someone pointed out to me on facebook, it turned out that everyone else had another commitment that day.

and that's fine. the work got done. the kids got freshly painted rooms, and i got to re-teach myself the same lesson that i've been studying the last 11 years. what i think is important to others, what i think should be important, what i really, really want to be important to the life of our church often isn't.

and there are hundreds of different reasons for that, not many of which i am interested in re-analyzing today. today, i thought it important to write about the church in the hopes that it would kick me back into gear of writing about her more.

the natural church development survey has been taken. the results are in. the factor on which the church will focus its intentional energy has been chosen. i intend to track our progress here. i, in no way, intend to sabotage or throw darts at the effort, rather i intend to attempt to take a somewhat analytical look at the process. i will use actual numbers, true statistics, some of my own opinion, and gauge how i feel like we are doing. if this thing is truly a working process, the proof will be in whether or not the congregation literally moves together towards...something.

let's look at paint day: the sequel as our starting point. the entire church was corporately invited to the one of the most convenient and reasonable service projects that we could offer in several different forums (church announcements, messenger, bulletin, fliers on doors, etc.). not counting church or daycare staff, fewer than 15 members showed up. for the sake of starting the conversation, we'll be generous and say that we average around 200 folks on sunday mornings currently. that will make the math easy. for paint day: the sequel, the ppr (parish participation rate) was 7.5%. we'll introduce more statistics in the coming weeks, but we'll see and track ppr most often in the hopes that, over the course of the next sixth months, we see that number start to rise. if we notice the average attendance in worship over a four week span rise or fall, we'll adjust our calculations accordingly. meaning, if our ppr goes up just because attendance on sundays goes down but the same 15-25 people are still around and doing everything, we don't want to qualify that as a good thing.

i'll end here with a similar question that i asked on facebook last week. what has to happen for our church to be interested in moving together? our health team has posited that if we improve the functionality of our "effective structures", we will be closer to finding that answer.

let's pray they are right.