More Lessons from Unlikely Sources: When a Market Researcher and a Megachurch Meet the Episcopal Church

Q: What is the mission of the Church?A: The mission of the Church is to restore all people to unity with God and each other in Christ.Q: How does the Church pursue its mission?A: The Church pursues its mission as it prays and worships, proclaims the Gospel, and promotes justice, peace, and love.Q: Through whom does the Church carry out its mission?A: The Church carries out its mission through the ministry of all its members.1The statement of the mission of the church, reflected in the questions printed above, calls for the restoration of all people to unity with God and neighbor. It implies a gap between where people are and where they are called to be. In order for restoration to take place, there must be movement. There must be growth. There must be change. The Prayer Book asserts that the mission of the church is to work toward that kind of growth, to close the gap through spiritual practices, exercised corporately or individually, to be a place of transformation. This is not just work done by clergy. All the members of the church are to be involved in this process.How will we, with Gods help, fulfill that mission? How will we respond to the grace of God that meets us where we are, but loves us too much to leave us there (to borrow a line from Anne Lamott). For starters, do we understand where we are spiritually? Do we have a vision of where we'd like to go, as communities of faith, and as individuals in those communities? These questions have been explored throughout the history of the church, in a variety of ways. Reformations and revivals pose these questions. They are currently explored in many ways in the Episcopal Church, as cultural shifts around the connection to religious institutions (especially mainline congregations) call for renewed focus on mission. Authentic Episcopal expressions of discipleship are the topic of many conversations. Dwight Zscheile, in the introduction to his book People of the Way, captures the issue in these questions: "What does it mean to be a disciple in todays world? What does it mean to be a church member? Are they the same thing?"2One of the current paths of exploration in the Episcopal Church is called RenewalWorks, a ministry of Forward Movement. Forward Movement, now more than seventy-five years old, has been animated throughout its history by its mission to reinvigorate the Episcopal Church through renewed focus on discipleship, and specifically through personal spiritual practices. RenewalWorks offers one pathway to further that mission, applying learnings which originated in the work of researchers engaged by Willow Creek Community Church in suburban Chicago, one of the largest churches in America. In 2011, I was honored to write an article for this journal, reporting on the beginnings of a process by which research from Willow Creek was brought to the Episcopal Church in the Diocese of Chicago.3 That research had been gathered over more than ten years. Over two thousand congregations and over half a million congregants participated, in denominational and non-denominational contexts. The research was prompted by Willow Creeks interest in understanding more deeply what was going on in the spiritual lives of its members. Statistics like average Sunday attendance, financial commitment, or participation in church programs did not tell the whole story. Leaders were eager to understand what was going on in the hearts of members. They discovered, upon asking, that some of the most active members with the longest tenures described themselves as stalled spiritually or dissatisfied enough to think about leaving the church. Some of those dissatisfied members included leaders at the heart of the community, the Willow Creek equivalent of wardens and vestiy members.Church leaders at Willow Creek had operated with one paradigm, one model to explain spiritual growth: More church activity meant greater spiritual growth. The research indicated something different. …