God Bless the 80 per cent
The
LCMS is not a monolithic organization.
It is 6,000 individual congregations linked one to
another. While
clumps of these parishes can be grouped in a general way by
size, each still has its own spirit and style.
Most
articles about our congregations feature the 20% that are
larger. Not much
is said about the 80% that faithfully go about doing God’s
work with 200 or fewer people in church on Sunday – the
majority with less than 100. Given those numbers it should come as no surprise that the
annual budgets of these 80% range from $30,000 a year (some
less) to about $200,000 (a few more), with most doing His work
limited by an annual income around $100,000 a year.
About
half of our LCMS members belong to that 80% and the vast
majority of our clergy serve in those parishes.
Though
organizationally petite, limited by money and members, they
are Scripturally mandated to the same six wide-ranging facets
of parish ministry which all congregations, larger of smaller,
must do: worship, witness, fellowship, service, teaching and
learning and stewarding.
For the 80% of our congregations these tasks are a
larger load and understandably more difficult.
More.
In the smaller 80% of Synod’s congregations pastors
are called to live out the same clergy roles as all others:
teacher, preacher, pastor, priest, administrator and
evangelist. Implementing
that sweep of pastoral services can be overpowering for a team
of workers.
Think
of how it looks to Pastor Horatio-at-the-bridge who serves
with no other certified assisting workers! On his own he must somehow stir to life all the key parish
requirements and then weave them into ministry, short handed
and budgetarily limited.
How is that even possible to consider, let alone do?
In
2005 we can thank God for three things, unique to our age,
that under the Spirit give heart to the thousands of clergy
who work under such unpromising conditions:
·
Our 2005 lay
member mix is made up of well educated, more broadly
experienced and, with few exceptions, literate (that’s novel
to the 20th and 21st centuries)
coworkers; and
·
Add to that
unique blessings of our age: the telephone, cars, computers,
visual aids of all kinds and so many other modern serving
aids; and
·
An exceptional,
dedicated and well trained clergy.
That
last bullet is critical because humanly speaking not only are
most pastors stand-alone servants of God, most are willing
spend their entire ministry at that circumstance.
So
what can we do to support the largely silent but enormously
significant 80% of our parishes and pastors, at least
numerically the backbone of the LCMS?
·
Isolate one or
more of these ministries and pastors who serve them for weekly
recognition, by name, in prayer.
Do it in your private devotions.
Do it in your parish’s public service.
·
Reach out to
them. Share with
them plans, projects and programs. No one can be an expert in every area. Create ways to lift each other’s hands.
·
Treasure them as
key elements of the synodical family and publicly recognize
them as such.
It’s
the 6,000
parishes of all sizes, together, that make us what we are as a
Synod. Thank God
for each and every one. Then
let’s do what you can to enrich the mix by helping all our
family so that they improve and grow. CSM
