What is the most difficult challenge confronting a parish pastor in the early years of the 21st century?

Revitalizing that aging and numerically shrinking small congregation that has been worshiping at the same address since before 1930? Transforming the historically all-Anglo congregation into a biracial worshiping community? Rebuilding the university church to the role it enjoyed back in the early 1950s? Transforming what had been a small rural church for generations into a vigorous and attractive congregation now that the surrounding farmland has been converted into shopping centers, residential development, office buildings, and new public schools? Leading what for decades has been a monocultural congregation into a new role in which approximately one-fourth of the constituents are American-born blacks, one-fourth trace their ancestry back to western Europe, one-fourth are Asian-American, and one-fourth are recent immigrants from the Caribbean?

Each one of those qualifies as a candidate for the role of the most difficult challenge. From this observer's perspective, however, a challenge that is far more common, and also far more difficult, is to recreate the neighborhood congregation that dominated the Christian church scene in America for more than three centuries. One model was the Roman Catholic parish that was defined by the geographical lines drawn by the diocese. As recently as the 1960s, the oral tradition called for a division of labor in the family moving into their new home. While the wife directed the men with the moving van on where to place the furniture, the husband went down and registered the family at the neighborhood parish office.

A far more common model was the denominationally affiliated Protestant congregation that—along with the general store, a service station, the local public school, the post office, a tavern, and perhaps the blacksmith shop or the hardware store—was one of the community gathering places in this village of 75 to 300 residents. The members of these churches either walked to church or depended on their horses for transportation.

The urbanization of America following the Civil War included the founding of at least 200,000 neighborhood congregations. In the North and the Midwest, many were defined first by the nationality of the charter members, second by their denominational affiliation, and third by the geographically defined community served. The name the Jefferson Street Church or the East Side Church or the Madison Avenue Church were examples of how the name identified with the place of residence of the members.

What Happened?
Three sets of statistics can be cited to illustrate the undermining of the concept of the neighborhood congregation. The first refers to the shiploads of immigrants from Europe. During the 15 years from 1900 through 1914, a total of 12 million immigrants came from Europe to make new homes in America. That number compared to a total population in the United States of 92 million in 1910.

Between January 1931 and December 1945, only 400,000 residents of Europe came to America to live. That compared to a population of 132 million in 1940. During the 15 years from 1990 through 2004, approximately two million Europeans came to live in the United States. During those 15 years, a total of at least nine million immigrants came from Asia, Mexico, and Latin America. The recently arrived Koreans or Mexicans rarely seek out a German or Swedish congregation when they arrive in America.

A second major change can be seen in the number of passenger cars sold each year in America. That number grew from 181,000 in 1910 to 3.9 million in 1937 to 9.3 million in 1965 to 17 million annually in recent years. The proportion of American households with an automobile rose from 54 percent in 1948 to 82 percent in 1970 and to approximately 92 percent in 2004. In 2004 passenger cars (exclusive of vans, buses, pickups, and trucks) traveled 1,700 billion miles on this nation's streets and highways, double the total for 1969 and 31 times the 55 billion for all motor vehicles in 1921!

Finally, the number of public school districts in this country plummeted from more than 127,000 in the early 1930s to 108,579 in1942 to 50,446 in 1957 to 13,506 by 2002. Those big yellow school buses help children meet and make new friends who may live several miles away. The small public school districts of the first five decades of the 20th century were consistent with Americans' preference for small institutions and with geographically defined personal social networks. Ninety years ago, for example, this nation's public school systems included more than 200,000 one-teacher schools, each serving a small geographically defined constituency. Their counterpart on the American religious scene was the small Protestant congregation averaging fewer than 50 at Sunday morning worship. The social ties of the constituent families in the church were reinforced by the school as well as by the pattern of neighborhoods socializing with and helping their neighbors. The number of one-teacher public schools is now below 1,000.

That longer journey to work facilitated by the widespread ownership of the private motor vehicle, the suburbanization of the American population, the consolidation of public schools, the emergence of large retail shopping centers in the 1950s and 1960s, the creation of regional hospitals and regional medical clinics, the shift from Europe to other continents as the primary source of new immigrants, the development of retirement communities in the Sunbelt, and that sharp increase in the proportion of high school graduates who leave their home county for a job or for higher education have combined to undermine the traditional role of the neighborhood congregation.

Add to those trends the fact that the new residents of a neighborhood may bear little resemblance to the long-tenured residents in terms of nationality, first language, religious preferences, family and marital status, age, social class, race, occupation, and preferences in music, and it is easy to see why recreating the neighborhood church of 1926 or 1956 may be an exceptionally challenging assignment.

Three Questions
One common example of the desire to recreate the neighborhood congregation of yesteryear is the church that traces its origins back to when it was founded to serve the new residents of new homes being constructed out on the edge of the city. The date might have been 1897 or 1907 or 1927 or 1947 or even 1957. Many of those houses are still standing, but the original residents have been gone for decades. Currently, perhaps one-fifth of the worshipers on the typical Sunday morning walked to church, but twice that many traveled at least three miles to church.

A parallel example is the congregation organized to serve a mining community or a dozen or two farm families or the residents of a village with a population of a few hundred. The charter members are long gone. It could be argued that the biggest single barrier to recreating the culture and the social systems of the per-World War II era is death. Nearly all the adults who created them and who were their strongest advocates are dead.

If the goal is to recreate the neighborhood congregation where most of the worshipers walked to church, the first question could be, "How large?" If the answer is an average worship attendance of 15 to 40 people, it suggests this could be a realistic possibility. The realist, however, may point out the limitations. If the goal is to be served by a full-time and fully credentialed pastor, that was an attainable goal in the 1930s where thousands of small Protestant churches enjoyed the services of a full-time resident pastor who lived in a church-owned house and received a cash salary of $50 to $75 a month. (After adjusting for the increase in the Consumer Price Index, $70 in 1933 is the equivalent of $1,040 in 2006. The monthly cost of the fringe benefits exclusive of cash salary of a full-time pastor in 2006 typically is double or triple $1,040.) It also should be noted that at least two or three of the families worshiping with the typical upper-middle-class white suburban house church arrive at that place of worship by private motor vehicle.

In addition, if the goal is to own and maintain a meeting place that is reserved exclusively for church purposes for 168 hours every week, the congregation averaging 25, more or less, at worship may not be able to fund the required budget.

That introduces a second question: Who will pay the bills? One solution is to be served by a part-time minister or licensed lay person and/or to rent out space in the building during the week. Another is to organize and operate an income-producing weekday program that will produce a surplus of income, such as a childcare center or a counseling minister or a Christian day school. In addition to covering all operating expenses, these dollars can be used to pay for the utilities, insurance, and maintenance of the real estate. Occasionally the part-time pastor is also the full-time paid director of that weekday program.

A more common response to this need for financial support is to depend on those loyal members who have died. Earlier generations of members purchased and paid for the land and also financed the construction of the church building and the house that is the home of the current pastor, who may be a semi-retired minister or a bi-vocational clergyperson. In addition, generous bequests from a few now deceased members created an endowment fund that yields a net income of $10,000 to $100,000 annually. The only difficulty in paying the bills on time arises when a cynic asks, "How do you create an attractive, inspiring, and challenging Christian worshiping community that lives on the gifts of the dead?"

One alternative for the denominationally affiliated neighborhood congregation is to rely on the denominational treasuries for direct and indirect financial subsidies. One example of the indirect subsidy is to ask the small churches to contribute a relatively tiny number of dollars for funding denominational budgets. Another is to pay the cost of health insurance and/or retirement benefits for the clergy out of the denominational treasury rather than to assess the full cost to each congregation.

Four Other Options
At this point the reader may ask, "Are there any more attractive strategies that include a place for the neighborhood church?" Four stand out on the contemporary scene in American Protestantism. The rarest are those averaging more than 150 at worship that are located in communities with a high level of homogeneity among the residents. The membership is drawn from one slice of that homogeneous population.

A second, and more common, alternative is based on the distinction between categorizing adults by age, marital status, gender, education, occupation, income, nationality, health, social class, and place of residence vs. categorizing people on where they are on their personal faith journey. The neighborhood church may include a heterogeneous collection of adults in terms of social class et al., but be homogeneous in terms of theology, Biblical interpretation, and the stage of their personal faith journey. Typically this model requires very long pastorates of three or four decades.

A third scenario is the product of the emergence of at least a thousand multisite congregations in American Protestantism. These are relatively large congregations that operate under one name with one governing board, one paid staff, one budget, one treasury, hundreds of trained volunteers, and somewhere between two and 200 meeting places. One version encourages small neighborhood congregations in both rural or urban communities to be adopted to serve as the "west campus" or the "Washington Street campus" or the "Hilltop campus" of that large missionary church.

A fourth version of the neighborhood church often is an immigrant congregation that was organized by a dozen or more committed Christian immigrants around the "three-self" 19th century central organizing principle for foreign missions of "self-governing, self-financing,, and self-propagating." In the 1950s, that principle was enlarged to the "four-self principle" by adding "self-expressing." This scenario describes a large proportion of the congregations in contemporary American Protestantism that draw most of these constituents from among recent immigrants.

Lyle E. Schaller is a retired parish pastor and parish consultant. His most recent book, From Cooperation to Competition, was published by Abingdon Press.

Copyright 2008 Lyle E. Schaller

Note: In last month's issue, Lyle Schaller's article wasn't printed in its entirety. For the complete article, visit www.rpnmag.com.