Typically, you find lots of discontent, disagreement, and unhappiness. The level of unease and collision of different views of who the church is at a particular time in history tends to increase during a size transition. In the church in transition, said Mann, one also typically encounters large conflicts of expectation around the clergy and what the proper role of the minister is. The minister feeling split between these choices often marks a symptom of size transition. Isn't it great that the church school is burgeoning I don't want to pay for a half-time religious education director.
Ambivalence is one of the biggest hallmarks of a size transition, and it is a horrible place to be.
But you can't resolve ambivalence without facing into the conflict, facing it squarely and saying, 'there is a choice to be made here. Churches, she said, sometimes face this by 'voting' on whether to grow or not. That does not resolve the question it is about grappling over questions of identity and purpose. Numbers are one way , but not the only way, of holding ourselves accountable for what is going on within our faith community. And if we are in a faith community and we have plateaued and the congregation has a rhetoric about being a welcoming church, maybe the words and the music aren't going together.