If IRTD (Part 5), I’d build some bridges

from flickr by jamesfischer

Infrastructure is one thing – but the churches are the real deal of ministry. So this week, the focus is on the churches.
It’s time to confront some brutal facts:

1. most of our churches are barely known by or relevant to their local communities. Few people outside the church would mourn or even know if most of our churches ceased to operate. 
2. the staff of most churches have position descriptions which focus entirely on in-house ministries
3. the budgets of most churches are almost entirely directed to ministries for church people

I suggest that fact 1 is a direct consequence of facts 2&3.

Fact 1 is killing us, and we need to face up to it. There is heaps of good hard statistical evidence that churches with deep connections into their communities grow. 

It seems to me that the single most important thing we need for the churches of the Diocese to do is to fiercely focus on launching numerous community care and engagement programs, to connect them by love into their local communities. Chris Swann’s blog is working on a series along these lines.

To give it some teeth I would do 2 things

1. give a $50,000 reducing grant over 3 years to any church that employed a half time Director of Outreach (Community Care and Engagement – or the same thing with a slightly shorter title), as long as they included a budget line item of 1% of their expenditure for community care (growing to 2% in the second year and 3% in the third year), and provided a ministry plan for the position including goals and reported on it every quarter.
2. make the Parish Partnerships division of Anglicare huge, with an immediate $500K budget and 5 staff (1 per region) whose only job was to work alongside parishes in researching, developing and deepening their community care and engagement programs (note: this is not Anglicare running its programs on a church site, although that might also be good).

Of course, this will take a significant redistribution of the Diocesan budget (which is much reduced, as reported in May Southern Cross). But that’s OK – the various Diocesan organisations will find ways to cope!

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