The Washington Post reports on how churches are addressing the debt crisis in the US:

With the country on the cusp of a recession and many people burdened by the mortgage foreclosure crisis, skyrocketing gas prices and rising grocery bills, religious leaders across the Washington region are increasingly ministering to their members about financial responsibility, encouraging them to control their spending.

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The Alban Institute discusses the work of afterpastors, who are interim pastors specifically trained to deal with congregations who have experienced a betrayal of pastoral trust. The work is often very stressful for the afterpastors themselves as they absorb the unresolved and unnamed emotions of the congregants.

The term "betrayal of pastoral trust" refers to serious professional misconduct by the ordained leadership of a congregation. This violation could be an instance of sexual abuse or misconduct by clergy or it could be a financial misconduct such as an embezzlement or some other professional violation within their parish.

Afterpastors, or clergy who minister in the aftermath of betrayal of pastoral trust, are challenged with a complex and stressful set of circumstances as they assume the leadership of the troubled congregations their predecessors have left behind. The relationships and interactions in their ministries are frequently characterized by distrust and suspicion. Afterpastors often feel misheard or unheard by lay leaders and congregants, and they often report feeling manipulated, coerced, and sabotaged by lay leaders or seeing their decisions co-opted or corrupted by poor process or underhanded leadership. And many say they are often criticized without cause or unwarrantedly berated for incompetence.

Nearly all afterpastors describe a general reactivity to their presence or position that encumbers their work and relationships. And some describe reactivity so acute that it makes them lightning rods for every upset, conflict, and complaint—large or small—in the congregation.

More often, afterpastors are triangulated in petty, perennial conflicts or caught in webs of mixed messages. Communications are characterized by boundary challenges, power struggles, threats, and coercion. Each requires considerable perspective, diligence, objectivity, and grace from the afterpastor, lest he or she become entangled in the dynamics.

Read more here.

Dan Hotchkiss of the Alban Institute writes:

The classic way to demonstrate loss aversion is to ask two groups of people to choose between alternative plans for vaccinating people against a disease. Without vaccine, the disease will kill 600 people. One group has to choose between a vaccine that definitely will save 200 and another that has only a one-third chance of saving everyone. Most people, given this choice, choose the first vaccine.

The second group is asked to choose between a vaccine that will definitely let 400 people die, and another that has only a two-thirds chance of letting all 600 die. Given these options, most people choose the latter, even though the only difference is that this time the choice is expressed in terms of a loss (letting people die) instead of a gain (saving people). We are more willing to take risks in order to avoid losses than to achieve gains.

This helps explain why new ideas face such an uphill battle for acceptance in most congregations, while old ideas persist unquestioned. Remaining in a familiar building or continuing a cherished worship style does not feel risky even though there may be good reason to believe that doing so may limit our potential to attract new members. Moving to a new location or changing our worship style, by contrast, feels extremely risky because it involves the immediate loss of something we have now. In reality, the risk of clinging to the old may be much greater than the risk of trying something new.

Another related concept is the “sunk-cost fallacy” or “gambler’s mistake.” For a gambler, this is the idea that if you bet a lot of money on a hand, you’d better keep on betting to avoid losing the money you have put into the pot. For congregations, it may be a matter of sticking with a strategy (like browbeating people for their stinginess) long after it has repeatedly proved unsuccessful. In part, this is a simple matter of saving face: so long as you keep on trying, you can blame other people or circumstances for your failure. But as soon as you wise up and quit, you have to admit you’ve made a mistake.

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Wayne Whitson Floyd over at Alban Institute discusses the vitality of congregations. What makes a congregation vital? Common faith? Common cause? Common story or experience? Shared heritage? Does the emotional intensity of the worship or the fervency of the preaching make for a vital congregation?

By contrast, Julia Duin at the Washington Times describes how evangelical churches, which everyone thought were growing like topsy, are shrinking partly because they don't appear to be paying attention to the basics.

Floyd says that a vital congregation is a community of intentional practice, which he says is not a new idea but a very ancient one in the Christian experience.

In my experience, vital congregations are more than a collection of individuals drawn together by similar personal experiences and needs that in turn are expressed through common beliefs or by similar styles of religious life. Vital congregations are communities of practice, where we immerse ourselves in those “patterns of communal action,” that in Craig Dykstra’s words “create openings in our lives where the grace, mercy and presence of God may be made known to us.”

Far from being a recent innovation, “spiritual practice” is actually one of the oldest ways to describe the formation and nurture of God’s people for faithful living. Sabbath-keeping, for example, is according to the Hebrew Scriptures a practice that helps us to pattern the rhythms of our own lives on the creative rhythms of God at work in the world. Or in the Celtic church of pre-Roman Christianity in England, the practice of leadership by monastic abbots occurred not only through teaching, but even more importantly by means of personal example of the spiritual practices of the monastery. Here monks practiced the habitus, or habits, of life and worship that kept alive the vitality of the Christian way of life during what would be a long, dark age.

When congregations attend to becoming communities of spiritual practice, we learn that faithful living is more than going out and doing what people are taught on Sunday. Rather, during every day of our lives, faithful people are who they are today, because they have long practiced faithful virtues as members of intentional communities of faith.

Becoming an intentional community of spiritual practice involves the reinvigoration of what are really quite traditional ways of faithful life in community.

Meanwhile, Duin talks about the experience of people in her circle of friends who have stopped going to their evangelical churches. One church could not organize a consistent way to get a disabled man to church. A single mom talked about her sense of isolation. Another felt that the congregations he experienced nurtured spiritual immaturity.

Religious attendance fell from 41 percent in 1971 to 31 percent in 2002, according to a survey sponsored by the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago. For years, Gallup polls have shown American church attendance hovering at 43 percent of the population, which would mean 129 million out of an estimated 300 million Americans at the end of 2006. However, two 2005 studies, one by sociologists C. Kirk Hadaway and Penny Long Marler and the other by Dave Olson, a researcher for the Evangelical Covenant Church, show that a more accurate attendance percentage is in the 18th to 20th percentile, half of what Gallup shows.

A significantly smaller number of Americans "are participating in the most basic Christian practices: the weekly gathering for worship, teaching, prayer and fellowship," Mr. Olson said in the April 2006 issue of Christianity Today.

Mr. Hadaway and Ms. Marler faulted the complexities of American life - exhaustion, traffic, two working parents, even children's soccer games increasingly getting scheduled on Sundays - as the main reason people give themselves much more leniency in skipping church.

Over at the site Practicing Our Faith, an intentional spiritual practice is defined as:

Christian practices are things Christian people do together over time to address fundamental human needs in the light of and in response to God's grace to all creation through Christ Jesus.

When we live the practices of Christian faith, we join together with one another, with Jesus, and with the communion of saints across time and space in a way of life that resists death in all its forms - a way of life that is spilling over with the Life of God for creation, for our neighbors, and for ourselves....

....Practices point beyond the individualism of the dominant culture to disclose the social (i.e., shared) quality of our lives, and especially the social quality of Christian life, theology, and spirituality. Our thinking and living take place in relation to God and also to one another, to others around the world and across the centuries, and to a vast communion of saints.

Floyd describes five practices which, when focused on with intentionality, makes for a vital congregation.

The Practice of Discernment, by which I mean discovering who we are in God’s sight—that our primary vocational calling is simply to be the creatures we have been created to be—in relationship, in community, celebrating the goodness of God’s creation...

The Practice of Story-Telling. The stories we tell about ourselves and about God have the capacity to shape—or to inhibit—the people we can become and the lives we can lead...

...If this is true about the practice of telling our personal stories, it is even more crucial for the practice of telling the stories of God—the Practice of Proclamation...

...These stories open up, or close off, the very Practice of Hospitality that we envision for congregational life. Are we merely tolerant of those who are strangers or different from us? Or do we attempt to be inclusive? Or can we go further to risk “radical hospitality,”—moving from mere inclusion to what theologian Miroslav Volf calls “embrace,” or what Adelle Frank at the Church of the Bretheren describes as “intentional vulnerability,” which is what Benedictine Sister Joan Chittester means, I think, when she speaks of living “without clenched fists”?...

...One spiritual practice, as we see, always leads to another, in this case hospitality turning out to be the twin of the Practice of Service....

Read: The Washington Times: Americans leaving churches in droves

Read: The Valparaiso Project on the Education and Formation of People in Faith: What are Christian Practices?

Read: The Alban Institute: Vital Congregations as Intentional Communities of Practice.

The Alban Institute's topic of the week is planning in the congregational setting. Gill Rendle and Alice Mann write:

Planning can be challenging in the contemporary congregation, where people share a common faith and values but may have very different preferences and needs. Some leaders want to reach out to potential members of the congregation, while others would prefer to direct resources to support current members. Some desire help for their own spiritual growth, while others would like a congregational initiative to address community issues that might shape or support other people. Some want to emphasize ministry with youth, while others hope for help in developing small sharing groups for adults. Some want change. Some want stability. The conversation about what a congregation is to do and where it will direct its resources can be quite complex.

What is a leader to do? How do you negotiate all of the preferences and opinions in order to come up with a plan that all agree with and are willing to support and work on?