Re-Visioning Retreat Group, Sept. 2010

In September, SPE hosted the tenth re-visioning retreat near Rocky Mountain National Park in Colorado. As these retreats always are, it was a holy event. One participant reflected, “I sensed the power and presence of God once again with renewed clarity.” Plans are being made for the Spring 2011 retreat; applications will soon be available.

GPS First Call Cohort, Sept. 2010

September also brought the launching of three new learning cohorts: a Preaching Cohort, a Pastoral Caring Cohort, and a First Call Cohort.

Preaching Cohort, Sept. 2010

Each of these groups has begun their extended studies together around their selected topics, utilizing retreat gatherings, online interaction, conference calls, and parish-based ministry projects.

Caring Cohort, Oct. 2010

We anticipate that this coming year of learning in community will again prove to be a meaningful and helpful way for Covenant pastors, missionaries, and chaplains to grow along their journeys.

One other exciting event is on the horizon: the first Sabbath Retreat, a 2 1/2 day retreat focusing on the practice of Sabbath. Watch your mailboxes for more information!

So what do the numbers mean? Giving to religion remains resilient. During the past two years giving to religion has been virtually flat in terms of current dollars but down -3.3% when adjusted for inflation.  During this same period, overall charitable giving declined by -5.5% when adjusted for inflation.

However, Giving USA 2010 underscores an important reality for religious practitioners; the religious landscape relative to faith and giving is changing the way donations are both given and gathered.  A few examples:

• From 1969 to 2009, the portion of charitable dollars going to religion declined from 50% to 33%.

• The top five religious groups making The Chronicle of Philanthropy Annual Top 400 Public Charities were from the Evangelical world.

• While giving to religion steadily increased from 1969 to 2009, the increase was at a slower rate than giving to other types of charities.

• Faith traditions are blurring as many people attend multiple places of worship; in the meantime, more individuals are embracing beliefs and practices from divergent religions.

• There are significant generational shifts in giving habits and practices as well as in church attendance between those over 65 and those under 40.

• The 1980s and 90s witnessed the explosion of what is called the  “megachurch.” Amidst the Great Recession, megachurches made headlines with massive staff reductions, salary reductions and budget shortfalls.

How should religious practitioners plan for the future? With savvy caution.Beware of either budgeting your optimism or bowing to your pessimism. We are at a time in history when the “wait and see” approach may well spell wisdom.  Only time will tell whether or not we will return – and if so, how quickly – to the boom years of the fifties and late nineties or to the more sobering decades of the seventies and eighties.

Contributing to the tempestuous climate, competition for the religious dollar has dramatically intensified as the number of reporting charities in the religious subsector have increased 89% from 1997 to 2007, even as giving to religion overall continues on a historical downward trend (see graph below).  As religious nonprofits compete for the shrinking charitable dollar, they will have to learn how to describe their unique mission with clarity, simplicity and arresting passion.

Copyright © The Lake Institute on Faith & Giving

2009 Academy of Parish Clergy Book of the Year

Tending to the Holy: The Practice of the Presence of God in Ministry (Alban, 2009) by Bruce G. Epperly and Katherine Gould Epperly has been named the 2009 Book of the Year by the Academy of Parish Clergy. Previous winners have included N. T. Wright’s Surprised by Hope: Rethinking Heaven, the Resurrection, and the Mission of the Church (2008); E. Brooks Holifield’s God’s Ambassadors: A History of the Christian Clergy in America (2007); and Diana Butler Bass’s Christianity for the Rest of Us: How the Neighborhood Church is Transforming the Faith (2006).

Tending to the Holy invites pastors to embody their deepest beliefs in the routine and surprising tasks of ministry.  Inspired by Brother Lawrence’s classic text in spirituality, The Practice of the Presence of God, Tending to the Holy integrates the wisdom and practices of the Christian spiritual tradition with the commonplace practices of pastoral ministry. Bruce and Katherine Epperly utilize a variety of spiritual disciplines—especially Benedictine, Celtic, Ignatian, Rhineland, and process spiritualities—to provide a framework for helping clergy nurture the awareness of God, creative imagination, and personal well-being in every aspect of their ministerial lives.

Practicing God’s presence in the ordinary tasks of ministry inspires wholeness, spiritual transformation, vision, imagination, endurance, and healthy self-differentiation in ministry.  Commitment to joining spiritual practices with the routine and repetitive tasks of ministry provides an important antidote to unhealthy stress, burnout, and loss of vision in ministry.  By seeing their congregational leadership in terms of spiritual transformation, imaginative practice, and relational interdependence, ordinary ministerial practices can become ways pastors can deepen their relationship with God.

Growing out of their work with pastors at every season of ministry, as well as combined ministerial experience of nearly sixty years, Bruce and Katherine Epperly invite pastoral leaders to complement and expand on their understanding of spiritual leadership, pastoral excellence, and self-care, integrating traditional and contemporary spiritual practices with the concrete arts of ministry.

The Pacific Southwest Conference has long had a network of spiritual directors, but the increasing number of trained Covenant spiritual directors enabled the North Pacific, Northwest, and Midwest conferences to develop their networks last year. Plans for 2010 call for networks to be developed in the Great Lakes, East Coast, and Central conferences.

“They’re another support mechanism for ministers and lay people in Covenant churches,” Pietrzyk says.

Spiritual direction is a process by which trained directors help individuals to discern (recognize) and respond to the movement of God in their lives, often focused around historically accepted disciplines.

Spiritual direction is in keeping with the historical Covenant ethos of asking, “How is your walk with Jesus?” Pietrzyk says, adding, “We are a people of the word, a people of prayer, and a people of community.”

Establishing a new network includes assembling a list of directors within a given conference and identifying a point person who can guide people to a director in their area, Pietrzyk says. The name of the point person and contact information is available on conference websites.

A majority of spiritual directors have been trained through the Center for Spiritual Direction, which is operated through North Park Theological Seminary. The three-year program will enter its sixth year this summer.

The number of directors has increased to a level that a first national gathering could be supported during January’s Midwinter Pastors Conference in Denver. The development of directors and emerging networks is the result of a strong partnership involving the seminary and the departments of Christian Formation and Ordered Ministry.

Pietrzyk says he hopes that enough people from each conference will be trained so that networks can be offered throughout the denomination. “I think that would be a gift to each conference to have a set of spiritual directors.”

The deadline for applying to the upcoming classes at the Center for Spiritual Direction is April 15.

Published by Covenant News Wire; http://www.covchurch.org/cov/news/item7591

Copyright © 2010 The Evangelical Covenant Church.

Key Findings

• The majority of congregations have not seen a decline in giving.  Nearly 37% reported an increase in fundraising receipts for the first half of 2009; 34% stayed the same and almost 30% saw a decrease.
• Just over one-third of the responding congregations reported making budget cuts in 2009. Almost 16% did not increase salaries, 14.5% reduced their utility costs and 13.6% cut some programs.  Mission and benevolence giving as well as local outreach programs were the last to be cut, if at all.
• The recession provided congregations with a teachable moment to talk about money and the faithful use of possessions. Almost 40% reported that they talked more openly and frequently about money and giving.  About 28% said that since 2008 they have offered special courses and seminars on personal finance. 36% initiated new activities to increase their fundraising success.

Inside the Numbers

• Type of congregation matters.  Based on information about congregations’ financial growth during the past five years and the change in weekly attendance rates during the past fives years, the study categorized congregations into four groups: Survival (declining attendance and just barely enough finances), Maintenance (attendance and finances have stayed relatively the same), Growth (increases in attendance and a growth in finances) and Other.  As is evident in the chart below, congregations in a survival or maintenance mode for the past five years were more likely to see a decrease in pledge amounts for 2009.

• Age of congregants matters.  Congregations where the average age of congregants was under 50 were more likely to report an increase in fundraising receipts for the first half of 2009, while those with an average age over 61 were least likely to report an increase.
• Household income matters.  Congregations with an average household income over $80,000 were less likely to report a decline in receipts in 2008 than congregations with lower average incomes – $40,000 or less.
• Size of budget matters.  Congregations with total revenue less than $150,000 were more likely to report a decrease in fundraising receipts from 2007 to 2008. Congregations with budgets over $600,000 were more likely to report an increase in giving.
• Dependence on endowments matters .  Almost 57% of the responding congregations reported having an endowment.  These congregations were less likely to report an increase in their 2009 budget.
• Geography matters.  Congregations on the West Coast and the South Atlantic region were less likely to report an increase in fundraising receipts from 2007 to 2008.

Tips for Planning your 2010 Budget

• Communicate, communicate, communicate!   Keep your congregation informed as to the financial realities of your budget and state of giving.  Honesty breeds trust.
• Tell stories that touch the heart and inform your members as to what your church has been doing to address the needs of the hurting amidst the recession.
• Be wary of budgeting your optimism. The economic outlook is too uncertain to risk bullishness in budget planning.
• Recessions are not sprints; they are endurance events . Be prepared for a slower economic recovery.  The current economic scene has been described as an inverted letter “L”: __/, which suggests we will be flat for some time before we experience a full recovery.
• Protect your core mission. You may not be able to pursue all your usual activities. Prioritize your core activities by reducing funding for less critical ones.
• Be a good steward of your endowment .  Don’t shortchange tomorrow in order to meet the challenges of today.  Endowment income will be less in 2010 than in 2009, as most endowments follow the policy of a set annual percentage payout based on a three year rolling average. This means that your 2010 payout will be based on the value of the endowment in 2007, 2008, and 2009.
• Revisit your “gift pyramid.”  There is a general consensus that donors in the middle of the pyramid were most affected by the economic downturn.
• Remember to say “thank you!”   Donors need to feel appreciated.  People stop giving when they no longer feel connected to an organization.

Copyright © The Lake Institute on Faith & Giving

Reprinted from the Fall 2002 issue of Divinity, the alumni magazine of Duke Divinity School

By Bob Wells

Dr. Gwen Halaas, a family physician in Kenosha, Wis., is concerned about a patient, a middle-aged professional whose case has drawn all her time and attention. She describes the case in the same concise format she learned years ago at Harvard medical school:

A 51-year-old male with symptoms of depression, the patient has high blood pressure and is overweight, presenting a heightened risk of heart disease and other illnesses. He works 60-70 hours a week in a sedentary job, does not currently engage in any physical exercise, and reports considerable work-related stress. Patient is married, with three children, one of whom expresses interest in following patient’s career path. Patient expresses little enthusiasm for encouraging child to do so.

While the case history may sound routine, Dr. Halaas and her patient are, in fact, remarkable – perhaps even historic. That’s because the patient is not a specific individual, but a statistically based overview of the typical Lutheran pastor. And Halaas is the project director of the Ministerial Health and Wellness Program, a major new initiative by the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America to improve the health of Lutheran pastors and other church leaders.

What makes her work especially significant, however, is that her patient’s condition does not differ substantially from that of clergy in just about every Christian denomination today. Doctrinal and theological differences aside, North American churches have in common not only the Cross and a love of Christ, but also a pastorate whose health is fast becoming cause for concern.

Prompted by rising health care costs and looming clergy shortages, some denominations are recognizing health as an important issue. A few – most notably the ELCA, the American Baptists, and the General Synod of the Anglican Church of Canada – have launched efforts within the past year to improve clergy health. Others, including the United Methodist Church, are following the issue with great interest. Click here to read the rest of this article at Pulpit & Pew.

• Arbinger Institute. (2002). Leadership and Self-Deception. ISBN: 978-1-57675-174-9.
• Kouzes and Posner (2006).  A Leader’s Legacy. ISBN: 978-0-78798-296-6.
• Malphurs, A. (1996). Values-Driven Leadership: Discovering and Developing Your Core Values for Ministry. ISBN: 0-8010-9015-6.
• Steinke (2006). Congregational Leadership in Anxious Times: Being Calm and Courageous No Matter What. ISBN: 1566993288.
• Heifetz, Linsky and Grashow (2009). The Practice of Adaptive Leadership: Tools and Tactics for Changing Your Organization and the World. ISBN: 1422105768.
• Ford (2008). Transforming Church. ISBN: 1434767043.
• Sanders (1998). Strategic Thinking and the New Science: Planning in the Midst of Chaos Complexity and Change. ISBN: 0684842688.

Click over to the “Pastoral Arts” tab for more reading on all the core pastoral arts: preaching, teaching, leading, and caring.

More information about SPE grants can be found at www.covchurch.org/spe.

Here are some pictures from the week:

To learn more about the SPE Re-visioning Retreats, visit www.covchurch.org/spe/constancy.