Over the past several months, in newsletter articles and sermons and Vestry retreats and Parish Hall meetings, I’ve been talking about how the American religious scene has been shifting, how people are participating and attending and giving to churches in different ways and with different expectations. How people interact with their congregations, and how congregations give their people something to interact with, can be a bewildering maze of feelings and programs and habits and patterns. Sometimes it is a helpful mental tool to bundle that variety into manageable packages or extended metaphors called models. Different models of the church can highlight different bits of church reality, so that we can see and understand them more clearly. Three models of church that I find useful are models of the congregation as a market for Consumers, as an organization of Benefactors, and as a community of Ministers.
In the Consumer model, people think of the congregation as a provider of religious goods and services, and the congregants as consumers of those goods and services. The church is likened to a business, where branding and marketing are of paramount importance. The clergy and staff of the congregation are responsible for being entrepreneurial, up-to-date, and creative in crafting the sorts of liturgies, music, and activities that will attract, engage, and retain the highest number of attendees. Congregants, for their part, are expected to be savvy spiritual shoppers: they give generously in exchange for the goods and services they consume, they provide customer feedback that clergy and staff can use to improve their offerings, and, if they don’t find the goods and services they want at a given congregation, they go elsewhere, leading to a healthy competition in the religious marketplace. Congregants are often eager to assist their church in providing the goods and services they consume, by volunteering to help out with tasks usually performed by clergy and staff — not unlike the way customers of a co-op grocery, for instance, will volunteer to stock shelves or ring checkout, jobs usually given to employees, to keep their store in business.
Turning to the Benefactor model, we find that the principal metaphor here is not business, but philanthropy. In the Benefactor model, people think of the congregation as a benevolent society, and the congregants as the benefactors who give to the society to support its good works. The congregation is seen as one of many institutions that support and improve community life, along with things like libraries, museums, symphonies, service clubs, arts centers, and non-profit agencies which benefit causes close to their supporters’ hearts. Clergy and staff are expected to be community leaders, who are in touch with community needs, able to identify opportunities for benevolence, and skilled at major fundraising. Congregants come to worship services in order to maintain social ties with like-minded benefactors, and to be encouraged in their good works for the world. Parishioners may serve their church by sitting on vestries, committees, and ad-hoc projects, in the same way many of them also sit on boards of other civic institutions in the community. Generous giving is encouraged, both to maintain the congregation as an institution respectable among other institutions, and to work through the congregation to benefit the wider community.
Finally, in the Minister model, people think of the congregation as an assembly of disciples, all of whom are called and empowered for ministry by their baptism. Clergy and staff are not the sole providers of ministry to recipient congregants, but are regarded as organizers, trainers, coaches, and encouragers of the congregants’ own ministries. Clergy especially are expected to be trained (or re-trained) as ministry developers for their congregations. Congregants are expected to identify their own gifts and passions for ministry, with the help of clergy and other congregant-ministers, and to actively seek opportunities to do their ministry both within and outside of the institutional church. The congregational programs focus on worship, prayer, and Christian education, but may actually include few “social service” programs, preferring instead to encourage members to engage their social ministries through already existing secular organizations. Leadership in a Minister-model congregation is often grassroots, “bottom-up,” networked rather than hierarchical, and sometimes a little chaotic. Financial giving is seen as only one part — and perhaps not the most important part — of one’s giving of time and talent and body and soul for the work of ministry.
Of course, the real world is always more complex and interesting than our models of it; and real congregations and real congregants cannot be reduced to simple models. The Consumer, the Benefactor, and the Minister models each have their pros and cons. The Consumer model points to an important dynamic of contemporary religious life in America, but it tends to turn religion into nothing but one more market transaction; the Benefactor model leads to real good works in communities, but it tends to reflect and reinforce prevailing patterns of social privilege; the Minister model empowers many people to do Christ’s mission, but it can also fracture a congregation if different individuals and groups follow their ministerial passions with little regard for the overall shared mission of the church. All three models have some truth to them, they each point to some important traits, and they each leave out some significant facts. In practice the models overlap, and churchgoers can go from being benefactors to ministers to consumers and back again, depending on the program or situation or ministry in which they find themselves.
But looking at our congregation through the lenses of the Consumer, Benefactor, and Minister models can help us see some important things about ourselves. Which model seems most attractive to you? Where do you see yourself, and your reasons for coming to church, reflected in the models? Which model seems closest to your own experience of Trinity? Are there parts of the models that seem to clash or conflict with each other? Are there elements of different models you think we should try to develop at Trinity?
As we begin a new program year at Trinity, it is helpful to consider the models we use to understand and motivate our actions. Whether we’re here to receive religious goods and services, or to benefit the community, or to develop our ministries, or any combination thereof, what matters most is that we model the creating and sustaining love of Christ.
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