Dinosaur Heart Transplants: Renewing Mainline Congregations

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E-Book Overview

Many mainline churches make the mistake of thinking that in order to reverse decline they must become something that they are not. Often that change of identity has to do with worship. In a study funded by the Lilly Foundation, Robert Cueni has interviewed pastors and members of dozens of large-membership mainline churches that have turned around long-standing patterns of stagnation or decline. The common denominator he identified is that the leadership of these churches have found ways to incorporate the church’s story and sense of identity into a new story of change and renewal. They work with the strengths they find, move away from the weaknesses, and arrive at a newly thriving congregation. In <em>Dinosaur Heart Transplants, Cueni shares the findings and conclusions from his groundbreaking study and demonstrates how even small and mid-sized congregations can incorporate these patterns of renewal.

Key Features: • Addresses a problem that is being faced in numerous ways by many churches today • Applicable to mainline churches of all sizes • Makes available in an accessible format the findings of a Lilly Foundation study

Key Benefits: • Readers will understand the factors that cause or characterize stagnating churches • Readers will understand the outlook necessary to move churches that have reached a plateau into renewal • Readers will understand how to crystallize a church’s story and sense of identity • Readers will learn how to incorporate that story and identify with a new story of change and renewal • Readers will learn how to identify churches’ weaknesses and move away from them


E-Book Content

Dinosaur Heart Transplants— Renewing Mainline Congregations R. Robert Cueni Abingdon Press Nashville To the twins: Annika Elaine and Elizabeth Jane— the next chapter in our family story Copyright Information Introduction It's the Name of the Neighborhood Country Club Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) Kansas City, Missouri A few years ago, the Chicago Tribune ran a list of funny church names. The writer thought the name of Lover’s Lane United Methodist Church in Dallas, Texas, to be the most humorous, and the name of Country Club Christian Church in Kansas City, the congregation I serve as senior minister, to be a close second. What that Tribune columnist did not consider, and what I am quick to inform those unfamiliar with Kansas City, is that "Country Club" identifies the neighborhood, not our mission statement. In the early 1920s, this congregation purchased land on Ward Parkway, a soon-to-be paved boulevard, in the newly plotted subdivision named for the nearby Kansas City Country Club. With only a handful of members, they called fifty-eight-year-old George Hamilton Combs to be founding pastor. During Combs’s two-decade ministry, the congregation grew from a committee to over two thousand members. In 1926, the sanctuary for a magnificent Gothic building was designed to seat nearly nine hundred people. At the time, the congregation had fewer than three hundred members, and only a scattering of homes dotted the neighborhood. What a testimony to the vision of the people and their leader! They intended to be a large, strong church. Over the next few decades, the Country Club District became the leading residential neighborhood of the city and Country Club Christian Church, the place where many of the city’s leading citizens belonged. A recent history of Kansas City claims that, unlike in many churches, the lay leaders of this congregation have always been more prominent than the clergy.1 As one of those ministers, I can confirm the accuracy of the statement. By 1948, membership had grown to three thousand members, and weekly worship attendance hovered around nine hundred. The neighborhood and the church then stopped growing. From the time of the Truman administration, the congregation