A Lutheran pastor--born, reared, educated and ordained in Norway--immigrated to Iowa.  After visiting the pastors of three Norwegian Lutheran parishes, he had received the same basic advice: "There is a growing number of Norwegians buying land about 80 miles west of Des Moines . That's where you should go if you want to start a new parish."

One of those three congregations gave this immigrant a cash gift of $50, and the other two contributed $25 each to help finance a new church.

This immigrant pastor took the advice and the money and went west to organize a new congregation. The year was 1902. Five years later, that venture had grown to a healthy parish of nearly 40 families. This immigrant pastor not only found a welcome, but he also found a bride who had migrated with her parents from Norway to America as a teenage girl several years earlier. The Norwegian image of this parish did not begin to fade away until death ended his tenure in 1938.

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"If I were you and looking for a place to start a new church, I would buy some land on the north side of Sherman Avenue ," suggested a city planner to a Presbyterian denominational official.

"Tell me more and why," came the response.

"First of all, our largest developer has assembled nearly 200 acres out there. He plans to develop about 15 to 20 acres for commercial uses, but the rest will be mostly single-family homes. It will be several years before it is fully developed, but his preliminary plan has been approved, and it calls for nearly 800 lots for single-family homes. He already has agreed with the public school officials on a three-acre site for an elementary school."

The year was 1953. Two months later, the Presbytery signed the purchase agreement for four lots across the street from the school site. As a goodwill gesture, the developer added one lot to the deal as a charitable gift. He was delighted he could tell prospective home buyers the center of this subdivision would include both a community elementary school and a community church.

* * *

"During the seven years I've been the pastor of this congregation, a total of 39 of our families have sold their homes and either moved farther west or out of town," reflected the Reverend Donald Alexander, the pastor of the Madison Avenue Church. Founded in 1921 as a neighborhood congregation, the average attendance at worship had peaked at 158 in 1954. Three years later, a 30-year pastorate came to an end, and the Rev. Alexander arrived in August 1957.

During the next seven years, the average worship attendance dropped from 126 in 1957 to 83 in 1964. One explanation was the end of that long pastorate. When the pastor-parishioner relationship that had motivated several families to drive back in to the inner city after moving to a new and larger homes was terminated, that became an appropriate time to look for a church home closer to their places of residence. A second reason was racial change. As the Rev. Alexander explained, "All but two of our 39 families who sold and moved, sold to a black family or to a landlord who rented to a black family. Both of the two white buyers are Roman Catholic. How do you maintain what has been a white neighborhood congregation for more than 40 years when the neighborhood population changes from white to black?"

The answer from denominational headquarters was simple and direct: "You were founded as a neighborhood church. You should continue to focus on reaching, attracting, serving and assimilating the people who now live in your neighborhood."

The congregation's answer came two years later in 1966. They sold their real estate to a black congregation and merged their assets with a suburban congregation they had helped sponsor back in 1949. Mother helped create a daughter church. When Mother became old and infirm, she moved in with that daughter.

Thirty-five years later, in 2001, that black congregation sold the property to a nine-year-old Latino congregation. That was another consequence in a sequence that had been white homeowners selling to black residents who subsequently sold to newcomers, most of whom traced their ancestry not to Africa, but to Latin America.

What Happened?
These scenarios illustrate several of the central organizing principles that dominated planning in American Christianity for more than 350 years.

How do you identify the constituency for a Christian congregation in the United States ? For most of American church history, the answer consisted of a combination of variables. One was nationality. A second often was language. A third was skin color. A fourth, and some would place this first, was the affiliation of that congregation to a larger Christian religious body. A fifth was the geographical proximity of the place of residence to the place of worship. A sixth often was social class. A seventh was kinship ties, and occasionally the eighth was the combination of the personality, gifts, leadership and long tenure of the pastor, most notably when that was a long-tenured founding pastor.

In reflecting on those factors, it is clear that skin color remains among the top three, along with nationality and language, in defining the potential constituency of a Christian congregation in America . The big exception is a small but growing number of American blacks who identify themselves as integrationalists rather than as separatists, and move other criteria ahead of skin color in choosing a church home. A second significant change is recent immigrants to the United States are more likely to come from Mexico, Latin America and the Pacific Rim rather than western Europe.

For many, the most radical change has been the erosion of loyalty to a larger religious body. This is most pronounced among Christian churchgoers born in America after 1960. One expression of this is the nondenominational Christian megachurch founded after 1960, although several dozen trace their origins to the pre-1960 era.

Another expression of this change has the migration of millions of American-born "Cradle Catholics" to Protestant congregations. Today it is not uncommon to find an independent or nondenominational congregation that reports one-third to one-half of its current constituents were born and reared in the Roman Catholic Church in America .

The combination of the widespread private ownership of motor vehicles and affluence plus suburbanization has increased the length of the journey from home to work, to school, to shopping, to entertainment, to recreation, to the delivery of health care, to visit Grandma and to church. One consequence has been the replacement of the small-to-midsized neighborhood congregation with the large regional church.

The combination of denominational mergers, ecumenism and the erosion of loyalty to traditional institutions such as political parties, lodges, veterans' organizations, department stores and institutions of higher education has made it relatively easy for Americans reared in one religious tradition to switch to a different church affiliation. This has been facilitated by three other changes. One is that, today, Americans marry later in life than was the pattern in the 1940s and 1950s. Second, today's 25-year-old American-born adult is more likely to have moved his or her place of residence across a state line than was true in the middle third of the 20 th century. Third, the church-related college of 1940 was more likely to be a place for a student to meet a future spouse of the same denominational affiliation than is the pattern in 2005.

One consequence of these changes is a Protestant congregation must be more intentional in defining its future constituency than was true in 1955.

What Are Today's Categories?
"More than a third of the adults who worship with us on the typical weekend were born and reared in the Roman Catholic Church," explained one pastor. "That is the primary reason our first worship service on Saturday evening and the 8:30 service on Sunday morning always include the Lord's Supper."

"Our slogan is, 'We're here to help you raise your children,' and that defines our primary constituency," commented a pastor in Texas . "The heart of our ministry plan is to serve parents who want help in rearing their children and in transmitting the Christian faith to their children. That is why we replaced our staff person who specialized in children's ministries with a specialist in ministries with families that include children. Instead of a youth pastor, we have a grandmother who leads the team that specializes in ministries with families that include teenagers."

"I was raised in a religious tradition that placed a high priority on converting nonbelievers to accept Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior," recalled another pastor. "The focus in our congregation is on the transformation of believers into fully devoted disciples of Jesus Christ. In our community, the number of self-identified Christian believers who have no active church affiliation exceeds the combined total of atheists and agnostics by at least a three-to-one margin. We focus on where the potential harvest is the greatest."

"When I was invited to consider being a candidate to replace the pastor who had retired after 28 years, I was told the goal was to reach young married couples with children," explained the new pastor of a congregation that had spent two decades growing smaller and older in the age of the members. "I arrived three days before I was scheduled to meet with the search committee and spent two hours with each of 10 pastors in this community. Nine of them told me their top priority was reaching and serving families with young children. None knew of any church here that was concentrating on young never-married adults. When I explained that to the search committee, they began to realize that my being single and 32 years of age were assets, not handicaps. I've now been here for slightly more than three years. Our worship attendance has more than doubled from an average of 83 the year before I came to 170 currently. Nearly all of our new members since I came have been young single adults. One downside is that it is a highly mobile group of people, and nearly every month two or three of our members move away. A second downside is I have officiated at 34 weddings during the past two years. Last month the board approved creating a staff position for a half-time specialist in children's ministries. Should we continue to focus on young single adults or expand our ministry plan to serve married couples with children?"

Those four ministry plans illustrate the replacement of those eight central organizing principles of the 1950s with a new perspective that places far greater importance on the needs of future constituents rather than on geography, nationality, denominational affiliation or kinship ties. The value of a good match between the focus of the ministry plan and the gifts, skills, personality, passion, priorities, experience, potential tenure and values of the pastor belongs on both lists, but it is more important today than ever before in American church history!

For more than four decades, Lyle E. Schaller has served as a parish consultant to hundreds of congregations and scores of denominational agencies. His recent books include From Geography to Affinity , The Ice Cube Is Melting, and A Mainline Turnaround .

Copyright © 2005 Lyle Schaller