Congregational Renewal Through Listening with Liz Eide | Episode 210
A congregation experiences renewal and it is all owed to listening.
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Hey listeners and readers!
There’s still a lot to talk about concerning the election and what it means for the church and Christians, but in these next two episodes, I wanted to focus again on the local congregation. Especially within Mainline Protestantism, congregations seem pressed. People don’t go to church as much as they used to, which means fewer and fewer people in the pews (or chairs) on Sunday mornings.
We start to talk about decline and pastors and lay folk alike start worrying about their local church. What can be done to renew churches again? What can bring people back to the church? We start reading books and start to think that we need to do something new and different in order to save our congregations. As a young pastor, I remember reading book after book on change and how we need to change in order for our congregations to survive. I remember sharing the knowledge I learned from a recent book and one of the members of the congregation groused, “I’m tired of being blamed for decline!”
For a long time, I’ve felt the need to innovate. Churches needed to be innovative or they would die and all around me, I saw congregations in my denomination decline and close. I didn’t want my church to close, so how could we innovate and not die?
Reading books by theologian Andrew Root has made me rethink my need to “save” the church. I still want to see vital congregations, including the one I currently serve, but I don’t think that there is this one thing that will turn the church around. Root is wary of the innovation race, and instead tells people to wait and listen for God. In an age of social media and instant anything it is radical to tell people to wait and listen because we are told that for anything to happen, we have to do something.
Listening. It seems odd to think this could help congregations revitalize, but what if we tried it? What would happen if we listened to God, within our congregations and to the communities around us? What could happen?
Pastor Liz Eide, thinks it might make a difference. She is the pastor of Lutheran Church of Peace, an ELCA Lutheran congregation in Maplewood, Minnesota a suburb of the Twin Cities. This congregation was planted postwar and grew because of the growth of 3M, the multinational (and maker of Post-it Notes) based in Maplewood. But it saw a decline and in 2018 called Eide as its redevelopment pastor. One of the things she urged the congregation to do is to listen. They have started to see renewal.
In this episode, I talk with Pastor Eide about this process. We will talk about the history of the congregation, what caused its decline and what is fueling its renewal. And through all of that we will talk about how listening made all the difference.
Do you have any questions or comments on the episode or the podcast in general? Drop me a line at churchandmain@substack.com.
Happy listening!
Dennis
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