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Hands, feet of Jesus
A mega-church Methodist leader insists attendance figures are not what counts
For a time, Pastor Mike Slaughter was sold on the mega-church model. A plan was diagrammed and ground-breaking neared for a new Ginghamsburg Church in Ohio, with a $10 million to $20 million sanctuary for a United Methodist congregation that he had inherited with 70 members and led to 2,800 in weekly attendance. He said he felt spiritually unsettled and that he heeded his internal alarm. Flipping a diagram onto a screen overhead, he told Methodist ministers and lay leaders from across Illinois that the plan is now referred to as the Disneyland Model. The ratcheted-down version for the campus has multi-use areas and plain construction. He has to preach five services to accommodate the numbers. That's a victory, not a mistake, to Slaughter, who now rejects a church model that emphasizes attendance. His church's model is one of simplicity, discipleship and mission service. He said, emphatically, "I'd rather have 40 people in my church who were serious about the Gospel than baby-sit 1,000." Slaughter was a conference keynote speaker, providing inspiration and insight to the Illinois Great Rivers Conference of the United Methodist Church as it assesses its effectiveness in serving God, community and the world. Wesley United Methodist Church in Bloomington hosted the event, on April 2. Attendance has been slipping across the American portion of the denomination and within the Illinois Great Rivers Conference, a division of the church based in Springfield and spanning from Kankakee to Cairo. The clergy is aging with its congregations. Slaughter is a star within the denomination and outside of it, for his success in mobilizing people for causes, such as relief to the genocide-threatened region of Darfur, Sudan, and for renewing dying congregations. But at the podium, he emphasized that numbers in the pew are not his concern. The title of the conference was "Leading Your Church Out of Yourself and Into the World." Slaughter said his church's mission -- and what should be every church's mission -- is being "the hands and feet of Jesus," intent on bringing Heaven into the world instead of obsessing over getting people into heaven and motivating people to live the gospel through service rather than just professing it. At Ginghamsburg, anyone can attend and Communion is open, but the church doesn't accept people as members unless they take classes on the basics of the faith, commit to tithe their earnings and commit to serve. Some people leave. But more fill their spots, to the point that his church members are expected to leave after a time to infuse energy into other Methodist churches. He told the gathering: "It's not the music, it's not the facilities, it's not the preaching - although challenge is awfully important." It's also not the affluence of location. Ginghamsburg is in an economically depressed, declining community outside Dayton, but the church now draws 4,400 adults weekly for service. It also embraces alternatives to conventional church. Currently: • Six affiliated house churches, with trained but unpaid lay leaders, gather for meals, fellowship, worship, Communion and a message. The cost to Ginghamsburg is $1.98 a week - the cost to burn a DVD of the pastor's message for viewing during the house-church service. • Six cafe churches worship in small, nonresidential spaces, including a small country church transformed into a 54-seat cafe, also requiring a $1.98 DVD for the church message. • Ginghamsburg is three years into a Saturday night service solely for people in recovery programs; 350 come, and they don't want to end the service at the designated time of 8:30 p.m. The mega-church Methodist pastor talks about these smaller gatherings with exuberance. He confessed that he used to chase numbers, but the church nonetheless had a tradition of service under his leadership. At the approach of Christmas in 1981, when the church had a $32,000 budget, he challenged the congregation to "quit acting like it's your birthday." Everyone was asked to take the amount of planned Christmas spending on themselves and match it with famine relief for Ethiopia. The congregation gave $18,000. Now, Christmas at Ginghamsburg, in celebration of Jesus' birthday, looks to the Darfur region of Sudan, where villagers and refugees are under genocidal attack. Compare the capital budgets to the missions budget, the pastor told the gathering. Facilities, staffing, maintenance, utilities, vehicles - the entire capital budget - totals $800,000 at his church. In addition to projects of food, clothing, free counseling, a car ministry and spiritual aid to the local community, Ginghamsburg in 2007 gave more than $1 million for schooling, craft-teaching and supplies for Darfur. "Minimize the bricks," Slaughter emphasized. That message produces a tension, a pastor at a follow-up panel session said, because service requires facilities. Slaughter oversees a church with multimillion-dollar structures, noted Roger Ross, pastor of Springfield First United Methodist. But Slaughter responded, "I said 'minimize' bricks, not 'eliminate' them." Over lunch at the church fellowship hall, he clarified to those at his table that the Disneyland Model for Ginghamsburg would have been a phased-in construction costing $70 million to $100 million. Instead, the church's worship space, children's area, preschool area, offices and 100 acres of land cost, in 1994 dollars, $5.8 million. Location of a church should relate to mission, speakers at the outreach conference said. Look to world missions, but also look locally, said Tim Bias, pastor of Peoria First United Methodist Church, which remains downtown. He said his church serves overseas but not before addressing Peoria needs through outreach such as a ministry for HIV-AIDS afflicted people, and it has a historical commitment to the Walk to Emmaus renewal program. "There's something going on," he told the gathering, "and it's not being sold-out to institution." Healthy attendance numbers can be a reflection of service, and Pastor Randall Perry, at Calvary United Methodist in Normal, believes it to be the case with his congregation. The congregation believes it already has outgrown the sanctuary it occupied in 2002, and attendance runs 700 to 800 per Sunday. All members are asked to serve in some way -- within the church itself or in communities through missions trips, at Safe Harbor Shelter, on a Habitat house building and in other ways. The church hasn't tabulated the percentage of members who answer that call, but Perry said he is certain service by laity drives the numbers at Calvary. "Authentic church growth is really based on ministry," said Perry, during a break at the conference. "Ministry drives the growth. We can try to refine what we do in terms of intentional hospitality. But it's understanding what our purpose is -- and people being excited about that purpose -- that is the source of growth." Optimism amid falling numbersBy Steve Arney | sarney@pantagraph.com Amid a prolonged attendance slide, the regional United Methodist bishop for downstate Illinois sounded a message of optimism. "I've never had more hope for the church than I have now," asserted Bishop Sharon A. Brown Christopher. Christopher spoke to a full sanctuary of pastors, staff members and laity at an April 2 conference at Wesley United Methodist Church in downtown Bloomington. She compared decline in the Methodist church to the death of Jesus -- to be followed by Resurrection. "Dance through the turn," she urged them. The bishop's office provided these statistics: • The Illinois Great Rivers area covers 915 churches with average Sunday worship attendance of 74,431 as of 2007. • There were 1,050 churches with 87,593 attendance in 1990. The cause for optimism was reflected in the conference title, which calls for focus on relevance, service and impact: "Leading Your Church Out of Yourself and Into the World." It was a one-day, specially scheduled conference as Methodists in a region from Kankakee and Cairo assess their effectiveness, not their statistics. For the United Methodist Church, the bishop said, the turn is "from maintaining ourselves to transforming the world." 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