Will You Be Joining Us?

(On the need to separate assimilation and membership)

Once upon a time, people understood that the way to assimilate into the life of a congregation was to join that congregation. The typical indoctrination process began when newcomers attended the Sunday morning worship service and registered their presence on a pew pad. The act of registration triggered a series of welcome communications from the congregation, and perhaps a visit from a church or staff member. Within several months of the first visit, the newcomer was invited to attend a “newcomer” class, which connected them with staff and church programs. The class almost always resulted in an invitation (actually, an expectation) to join the church. Upon joining, the newcomer was paraded in front of the congregation. It was a well-orchestrated process that helped the newcomer become known to the congregation. Being known was instrumental to being connected, and being connected was instrumental to being accepted and ultimately assimilated.

We know at a cognitive level that once upon a time is long gone. We understand that many of the newcomers who explore our congregations are suspicious of membership, but they do want to belong in community. More specifically they want to feel that WE belong to them. They are not interested in being assimilated and becoming just like us; but they are interested in acculturating. (They want to belong to a community that will change itself to receive them, as much as they will adapt themselves for that community.) People want to be known and accepted, but they don’t see what any of that has to do with membership.

We say that we understand these things, but our behavior suggests otherwise. Our behavior towards newcomers is very much about assimilation, not acculturation. Our behavior towards newcomers is still deeply rooted in unstated assumptions about membership, and still deeply tied to our membership processes. How does a person who is not interested in membership get acculturated into the life of your congregation?

Let me offer myself as a case study. In the last year I began attending a new congregation. I believe that my experience of assimilation into the life of this congregation is pretty typical of what many people experience in our traditions.

I attended my new congregation for a period of three months before deciding that I really wanted to invest myself in the life of these people and this community of faith. For a variety of reasons that I won’t go into here, becoming a member was not appropriate for me. But, I very much wanted to belong.

So I kept up my semi-regular attendance and I met with the pastor, declaring my intention to be a part of the community. He assured me that I could participate fully in the things I wanted to do without becoming a member, and that membership wouldn’t really matter to people. I signed up to have an official nametag made so that I looked like I fit in. Over time I attended all of the available worship services; volunteered to help with housing the homeless; made several tentative visits to a Sunday school class that didn’t fit me well; stood awkwardly in the fellowship area after church hoping that someone (anyone) would talk to me; and generally hung around the edges of the congregation. Two rounds of newcomer classes came and went, but they were clearly linked into the membership process, so I didn’t sign up.

Each week attendance pads were passed around in worship, inviting me to register my presence. The form prompted me to check off whether I was a visitor or a member (no other option). After the first three months it seemed silly to keep checking off visitor, so I just left that section plank. The act of completing the form each week, and leaving that section blank, is a constant reminder that I’m not one of them.

During worship we greet one another during the passing of the peace. During this ritual people often approached me with, “Where have you come from?” After trying to answer that question in a variety of ways, none of which seemed to satisfy the asker, I came to understand that they wanted me to tell them what church I had previously been a member of. People sometimes asked me if I planned to join the church, and their eyes quickly glazed over when I tried to explain why I wouldn’t be joining (TMI… we didn’t really want to know, we were just making small talk and wanted you to know that we have a usual process for how this all works). I never saw or received a church directory, nor did I receive the electronic newsletter, or information about the church budget, or an invitation to participate in the financial stewardship of the congregation. Several congregational meetings were held for “membership” business. I didn’t feel welcomed and didn’t attend.

At the end of my first year I hadn’t formed a single meaningful relationship with anyone in the congregation. It was frustrating, and it was becoming painful to attend worship. I thought hard about moving on, but decided that the church really was a good fit for me and that I needed to try harder.

So, I finally bit the bullet. I signed up for the newcomer class, announcing my intent to stop just short of the act of joining. I realized that my assimilation was going to depend upon getting to know more of the staff and church leaders who could help me connect, and I knew that meeting other newcomers would introduce me to people who had not yet formed solid relationships in the church and might be open to friendship. And I was right! After three sessions of the newcomer class I met enough people that I actually began to feel a little more known, and a little more at home. I was starting to feel connected. But my progress didn’t come without additional awkward moments, of needing to explain why I wasn’t joining the congregation.

Don’t get me wrong, I am not trying to berate my new congregation. I love this place. My assimilation would have been warm and wonderful if only I could have/would have embraced membership. And I suspect many of your congregations would have offered me the same experience. Our cultures of assimilation are deeply embedded with assumptions of membership.

So, what does that mean for all of the people sitting in our pews that cannot or will not invest in membership? It means that they are regularly sidelined and reminded that they are not really one of us. It means that many of them leave us before we ever get to know them, because it is just too hard to find their way in. I know that this is not what we intend. It’s time to wake up and be more intentional about our behaviors and processes.

We have a lot of adaptive work to do in this area!

The Village Elders

All congregations are faced with decisions that can be made by a small leadership body (the governing board, the staff team, a committee) and decisions that must be taken on by the collective body. In the small to medium sized congregation, when full congregational decision making is required, a church-wide meeting is scheduled and a significant percentage of total membership shows up.  In the large congregation, leaders are continually frustrated by the small percentage of members that turn out for a “y’all come” meeting. It’s not unusual for a congregation with membership exceeding 2000 to have only 120 people show up for a congregational meeting where important decisions are being made.  Why is this? I believe that the answer has something to do with group threshold limits, and the number of people who identify themselves as the “village elders” at any point in time. Let me explain.

The full leadership body of the church is a self identified group of leaders who feel “responsible” for the overall well being of the congregation.  This typically includes members of the staff team and board members. It also includes an inner ring of leaders who are not currently serving in either of those capacities, but still feel a strong sense of leadership responsibility for the church. This group informally functions as the “village elder” body, keeping a watchful eye on the direction of the congregation.  It’s not an officially appointed body, and membership seems to self adjust over time. However, the size of the group always remains rather constant; somewhere between 75-150 people.  This seems to hold true regardless of the size of the total membership body.

Why doesn’t the informal leadership group ever grow larger than this number, even in the very large congregation?  Humans are known to have a cognitive upper limit to the average number of individuals with whom they can form cohesive personal relationships. That limit, known as Dunbar’s Number, is around 150 people.  Having enough memory space to remember people’s names and faces is not enough to manage 150 relationships. It is about integrating and managing information about the constantly changing relationships between individuals within a group.  When a group grows larger than 150 people, members of the group lose their ability to track relationships, and the group loses its capacity to function well as a community.

I would argue that in the large congregation the leadership body is always subconsciously reforming itself around the Dunbar limit. The leadership body must be able to think of itself in some cogent way as members of a single community. This requires that people know one another well enough to communicate around important congregational issues.  In response to this natural group dynamic, leaders are continually stepping into the informal village elder group and removing themselves from the village elder group, based on life circumstances.

In a medium sized congregation, if 150 people show up for a congregational gathering it represents a significant percentage of the membership body. In the large church it may represent less than 10% of membership.  The small percentage may be interpreted as a sign of apathy, but it’s really just the village elder system organizing itself to fulfill an important leadership role on behalf of the congregation.

How does this compare to your lived experience?

Photo Credit:  The Earth Tribe

Assimilation vs. Acculturation

In the 1980’s, literature and workshops about assimilating new members were the rage in church circles. People were paying serious attention to declining attendance in the mainline church. The assimilation genre of literature was a massive response to the question, “Why are attendance and membership numbers showing such rapid decline?” It was before we were talking about post-modernism, “re-traditioning”, and the emergent church. Leaders were convinced that better systems of inviting, welcoming and incorporating new participants into the life of the congregation were key factors in reversing declining membership and attendance patterns.  Today you’d be hard pressed to find a workshop on new member assimilation. The center of the conversation has shifted, as has the way that we talk about receiving and incorporating newcomers.

In 1988, Robert Blass defined assimilation as having three components: absorption, integration and incorporation . Assimilation was understood to be the means by which a congregation coordinated and blended new members into a meaningful and unified whole, with the rest of the congregation. Owen Facey defined assimilation as an ongoing process of intentionally bringing, including, and integrating people into the life of the local church, with the goal of equipping and releasing them to serve.

In the 1990’s the world became sensitized to the language of assimilation. As the culture in the United States became more ethnically, racially, religiously and socially diverse, people began to question whether or not it was appropriate to use the term assimilation in corporate and business settings. It was argued by some that the term assimilation had a “melting pot” connotation that didn’t set appropriate boundaries around change expectations as newcomers are incorporated. Assimilation refers to a one-way adaptation process in which the culture of one group (the dominant culture) becomes the standard of behavior for all newcomers merging into the system. In a process of assimilation everyone, regardless of social background, is expected to conform to the norms and values of the dominant group. Little, if any, of the unique culture of the newcomer is brought to the dominant group for their adaptation .

 Acculturation was introduced as a broader term that more appropriately described the need for both the organization and the individual to mutually adapt to one another. Acculturation refers to a two way process of integration in which both culture groups (the organization and the individual) change to some degree to accommodate the norms and values of one other . I would argue that when we talk about the integration of new members into the large congregation, we need to embrace the language of acculturation, not assimilation. First, it is more appropriate for many of our congregations who are struggling to diversify membership across racial, ethnic and social groups. If we truly want to welcome members who look and think differently than the people currently sitting in the pews, then we need to approach new member integration as a mutual process of adaptation.

Second, one of the strengths of the large congregation is its ability to hold great expressions of diversity. Choices in programming and variety in worship venues allow for the presence of diversity at all times. People can find their way toward others with whom they identify, without the entire congregation having to negotiate difference all of the time. Those who are uncomfortable with difference can avoid it by choosing to place distance between themselves and the one who is “other”. And those who embrace diversity can find meaningful expression of the difference they seek. When people join the large congregation they don’t really join the whole church, they join that portion of the church with which they tend to identify. This makes room for diverse viewpoints and interests to live comfortably side by side.

If we want to cultivate a culture that embraces diversity, then we need to think about the integration of new members through the lens of acculturation, not assimilation. This ought to have significant ramifications for the way in which we approach the integration process of newcomers. What might our welcoming, orienting and membership processes look like if we are intentionally trying to adapt our membership body with each newcomer that arrives?

Photo Credit: Mario Aguirre

Deer in the Headlights

There is a small wooded area at the edge of my suburban neighborhood that is home to several families of deer. In the last several weeks a drain construction project has encroached upon the edge of the wooded area and the deer have taken to wandering through our subdivision in search of …I’m not sure what.  At any rate, their presence has stirred up quite a reaction among the neighbors.  There are those of us who simply love looking up from our daily work, in awe, to see these gentle creatures roaming among us. We’re hopeful that they’ll stick around and figure out a way to coexist with us in busy suburban life, provided they don’t hurt us or themselves. The gardeners among us are worried. They’re convinced that the deer are going to destroy all of the vegetation that we have taken such care to tend. The animal lovers among us are fussing. They are certain that this does not bode well for the deer that are eventually going to be maimed or killed by the dangers of modern civilization. And the hunters are secretly fantasizing about grabbing the bow stored in the attic and taking out Bambi to demonstrate their prowess. But none of us is actually doing anything about the situation.

As I watch the varied reactions to the deer I am struck by the similarity between this phenomenon and membership assimilation in the large congregations, where demographic differences are concerned. Many large congregations are regional draw institutions, with long established patterns of drawing demographically similar people from large distances. It’s not unusual for people to drive 30-40 minutes to attend a weekend worship experience in a regional church or synagogue.  But the demographics of the communities immediately surrounding the congregation have changed and the people worshipping inside the walls of the congregation don’t look much like the people just outside its walls.

When the people from the surrounding neighborhood wander into our midst (like the deer wandered into my neighborhood) the folks inside of the church don’t quite know what to do. So, like my neighbors, congregation members stand back and watch the visitors with different reactions. Some immediately worry about the well being of the visitor, but don’t know what to do to appropriately tend to their needs.  Some are not really interested in interacting with the demographically different; they just want to stand back and stare in awe and appreciation. Some are most interested in protecting their turf from these different ones who might threaten our carefully tended structures and practices. And some are secretly plotting to figure out how to take the newcomer out, without looking bad in the process.

What is your congregation learning about dealing with the deer in the headlights (the demographically different) that you long to embrace, but can’t quite figure out how to assimilate?