The Rise and Fall of the Ohio Region, chapter 12
'Lived ecclesiology' as a way to see regions as churches
I wrote in my initial set of “Notes” about the Ohio Region’s troubles: “In the course of this last long year, 2017 not quite over yet, I’ve had occasion to read in our regional histories, and even more usefully through what historians call our ‘primary sources.’ Primary sources aren’t always better, but they are insightful. The minutes and budgets and letters of the period in question are always going to get you a little closer to ‘how it was’ than a secondary account written to smooth out the bumps and even out the edges of a person’s or organization’s story.”
Reading even more widely since that post, in over a half-century and more of regional board minutes and state society records for the Ohio Region, a number of things came very quickly to mind. First, it must be said: they were a group of old white men, indeed. Diversity was an issue unknown to them even not so many decades ago.
Having said that, they were incredibly serious. I mean that as a compliment. They were dealing with hard facts and detailed reports and it appeared that everyone in the room was wrestling directly with all of the matters before them. There was little “I feel” or “many people are uncomfortable with” or “we need to relate better to this issue” in their deliberations. Emotion and attitude are largely absent; yes, this means there are aspects of human experience that they aren’t addressing, but there’s something refreshing about how on point and concretely thoughtful the discussions are on the page about where things stood, about budgets and income and expenses and initiatives. It was never “I wish we were starting somewhere other than where we are” which is the worst way to approach planning, in any sort of organization.
And there’s another reality that came off the page to me about the work of the region (or state society) back then. They didn’t do much.
Oh, they worked, and they appear to have been working hard when in session, but it was a relatively short list of areas of operation they dealt with. New church establishment, effective fundraising through the year for fledgling congregations, supporting seminarians, organizing the annual assembly, reports from the field – clear, specific accounts of actions taken make up almost the entirety of the older board minutes for the Ohio Christian Missionary Society. This when there were 500 and more congregations involved, to one degree or another, with “the work.”
That’s what the state society, later the region was. It was “the work.” “The work” is what made us a regional church. The outcomes, the deliverables, of churches started, ministers trained, missionaries sent, attendance at Sunday schools registered: “the work” was what made us a church beyond the local church.
If you skipped earlier parts to get closer to the present day in my narrative, I do understand your reluctance to spend too much time in the early 1800s – but what you missed is the historical background for the fact that, woven deeply into our common life as Disciples of Christ, we not only don’t really have a solid sense of what it means for the region to be a form of Christian church, we have some inertia in our very DNA that pushes back against that idea.
Religious authority is, for us as Disciples, the problem to which our Restoration Movement is the solution. Creeds and catechisms and tests of fellowship enforced by rigid hierarchies: Stone and the Campbells, father and son, proposed that the local church, locally governed, would be the solution to much of the historic oppression they saw as arising from within Christendom. That also means the hazard of privileging local church as the normative form of faith community. So when it comes to what it means, theologically and institutionally, to be “church” beyond the local level, that’s where Methodists talk about being connectional, Catholics about being magisterial even more than hierarchical, while we struggle to articulate some form of “covenantal” relationship between churches and regions. But that historic negative pressure against co-operative activity is subtly entwined with much that we think and say and do to the present day, even when we’re not aware of it.
Our modern counterweight to that negative pressure is “the work.” And we have had, for seventy-plus years in Ohio, the idea and the work of Camp Christian as an overarching rationale and support for being “church” beyond the local church. Inside our congregations, that’s the one reason for “sharing our stuff” that they see. Ministers and others who regularly work on a wider Christian basis know that’s not all there is to God’s purposes at work in the world, but most of us only know what we live, and even that dimly.
So the debates of the 1840s and 1850s that I excerpted at some length (you should see the original material in full!) are where I hear not only the arguments against church co-operation, but also the echoes in our collective consciousness that call for some kind of co-operation, albeit without there being a solid, tangible focal point in most of our churches for remembering what that co-operation in Christ really looks like beyond the local context. The universality of the communion table certainly can be one place, offerings leading up to communion can be another location for that shared imagination, and the person of the preacher is generally one living symbol on the list: those three visible expressions of covenant and connection and co-operation are where we have and are and could still build up a healthy sense of why we are not just members of a local church, but part of a . . . regional church, and part of a general church as well.
Why do we need to think of ourselves as being part of a wider church, other than in apocalyptic preaching about the Church Universal? That last concept, “the church of Christ” writ large, tends to get too cosmic for the average worshiper to think about too often. Campbell (both of them) took the reality of the small-c catholic Christian Church as a given, but anti-Catholicism and confusion over the political aspects of ecumenism have eroded that concept for modern-day Disciples. It needs some rebuilding, too, but I think the first step for most of us Disciples, Ohio or elsewhere, has to be taken through understanding the regional church as a felt, a lived-out reality of Christian life. If our ecclesiology isn’t Catholic or Methodist, making the diocese or conference a kind of church that is actually constitutive of the local church’s authority to offer sacraments or hold property, then what do we make of the what and the why, let alone the how, of a regional church?
Before I attempt to answer that gap in our theological self-understanding, another caution. Part of what drove “the work” of the state society on almost every level, in any area of common endeavor, was the imperative towards growth. All through the century from 1870 to 1970, the priority on members and subscriptions and representation and church extension was about “more.” In a very real sense, for over a century, “the work” meant “growth.” And if you feel a slight hesitation yourself in reading that, and think “how could it be otherwise?” then you see what I’m talking about. If “the work” of being church equaled growth in numbers, then any decline in numbers would be equal to “not working.” Even if everyone could be measured as working twice as hard, if the outputs decreased, then “the work” wasn’t getting done, and if “the work” is what it meant to BE a regional church, then growth becomes very nearly a sacrament.
What happens if, for a variety of economic and demographic and practical reasons, growth literally isn’t possible? I know, evangelicals like to point out the particular locations where even in the Rust Belt and during recessions and fiscal contractions growth DID happen, but roll with me a moment. Let’s just say you could define a set of introductory conditions where after growth occurred, growth no longer could happen. If growth is your measure of the presence of God’s call, if your definition of the Spirit at work in the church is entirely around growth, then what do you make of decline?
Or if a region is equal to “the work,” and the work isn’t working anymore, are you even still a regional church? Because starting somewhere in the 1980s, after we had made a brave, bold start on a newly ecclesial model of regional churches amongst the local church model and the general church established by Restructure in 1968, we realized we had stopped growing, and it really began to nag at us into the 1990s and around the corner of 2000 into this new century.
Yet back in 1969, a German Catholic priest and theology professor wrote this in contradiction to the hermeneutic of growth as a defining characteristic of the faithful church:
“From the crisis of today the Church of tomorrow will emerge — a Church that has lost much. She will become small and will have to start afresh more or less from the beginning. She will no longer be able to inhabit many of the edifices she built in prosperity. As the number of her adherents diminishes, so it will lose many of her social privileges. In contrast to an earlier age, it will be seen much more as a voluntary society, entered only by free decision. As a small society, it will make much bigger demands on the initiative of her individual members. …
The Church will be a more spiritual Church, not presuming upon a political mandate, flirting as little with the Left as with the Right. It will be hard going for the Church, for the process of crystallization and clarification will cost her much valuable energy. It will make her poor and cause her to become the Church of the meek. … And so it seems certain to me that the Church is facing very hard times. The real crisis has scarcely begun. We will have to count on terrific upheavals. But I am equally certain about what will remain at the end: not the Church of the political cult, which is dead already, but the Church of faith. It may well no longer be the dominant social power to the extent that she was until recently; but it will enjoy a fresh blossoming and be seen as man’s home, where he will find life and hope beyond death.”
The author went on to become a leader in the Catholic Church, a Cardinal, one Joseph Ratzinger, who became Pope Benedict XVI, now himself retired.
What if smaller is something not to be feared, but to be taken as an option given, even a blessing which, like many of Christ’s gifts, we don’t see as such at first? What if we agree right from the outset that while growth has a place in the larger story of evangelism and extension and affirmation of what faith communities are all about, it isn’t the only or even a key measure of what makes a church a church?
For Ohio Disciples, I’d like to look at our history in “the work” of the church of Christ, but ask what our common work would look like as a definition of what it means to be the Body of Christ, other than as something that grows and gets bigger. How would we sustainably and healthfully and vitally live as the Body, together, with growth as an option but not as the only measure of whether we’re actually living out faith in a wider community. What would sustainable measures of “the work” of being the church look like then? This is where I find myself asking about our lived ecclesiology as a church at work.
Our lived ecclesiology in the wider church has generally focused on three areas: 1) the certification and recommendation of ministers to the local churches, which ends up naturally incorporating an ordination process on one end, and a search & call process on the other; 2) the management of funds shared in common for mission purposes, both in our own Jerusalem & Judea (i.e., in Ohio) and in effectively delivering them to our Samarias & ends of the earth (to the rest of the church and in global missions); and 3) to speak with vision, to witness in mission on certain topics of public concern across a region or jurisdiction where any one local church likely could not. That third area is usually found in a mix of mission projects and regional publications and through sermons at assemblies, as well as in the actions of the formal leadership of the church structure, though not necessarily limited to such.
Lived Ecclesiology -- Ministry
Where we might go first in regional life is towards a strong and robust Order of Ministry. For many readers, even those of you longtime clergy in the Disciples of Christ, that’s a phrase that may cause some head scratching. “Order of Ministry? We don’t have one.” Well, that’s actually not true.
So go back to both Campbell and those early state secretaries. The first step to being able to rightly order ministry and ministers is to know them, and for them to know each other. Even before we were the Disciples, up in the Mahoning Valley, those early “Reformed Baptists” had their annual or quarterly “School of Preachers.” Getting clergy together, to share and to study and to mentor and to certify: that’s been at the heart of our organized life as Disciples of Christ, and in the Christian Church in Ohio, from the very start.
Our ordination process is – one man’s opinion here! – a bit of a mess. We have handed over ministerial formation to the seminaries, and the seminaries have said from day one “we don’t do Christian formation, we’re academic in orientation.” Hear that clearly, please. They don’t do Christian formation, and they’re honest and open about that. And they don’t, definitely don’t do ministerial formation. They’ve never been ambiguous about that. Their gift is certification. They certify intellectual competence, and academic rigor. More recently, we’ve tried as regions to take better hold of the ordination process, to use a list of sixteen “competencies” as a checklist for skills, but the idea of doing both Christian formation and ministerial formation as a primary task of the region – I’ve never seen it done. The Indiana region had a nurture and certification program that made steps in that direction, but it was still more of an annual quiz on academic progress and professional competence than it emphasized a spiritual direction process. West Virginia has long taken seriously the need to form the region’s clergy into an “Order of Ministry” with common identity and mutual support, but even there they tend to assume clergy show up with that formation task already done.
We mandate a psych eval, and some regions recommend CPE or spiritual direction – again, outside of the regional life, it’s subcontracted – but we don’t do ministerial formation. We barely mentor, and marginally supervise. Let me add here, in the context of late September 2021: have you read Alan Dicken’s statement on leaving regional service? He exaggerateth not. Mentoring is called for in most of our regional documents about ministerial credentialing and standing, but it’s guaranteed not at all and provided rarely. What would happen if regions saw ministerial formation as one of our core callings? What if we were to realize and affirm that only a regional church can offer the gift of ministerial formation, just as congregations should be the home of spiritual formation for their members? Ministerial formation is not something that can be in the care of any one local church, though. It is, it has to be, a gift of the churches in community, of (dare I say it?) a region, first and foremost.
And then to develop that gift into a vital community, an Order of Ministry within a region, to which you were proud to belong?
We actually have the essence of such a thing in our history, and in our organizing documents. Our regional constitution says this:
“ARTICLE IV – THE MEMBERSHIP
Section 1. The membership of the Christian Church in Ohio (Disciples of Christ) shall be composed of the following: a. All recognized Christian Churches’ (Disciples of Christ) congregations located in the regional church of Ohio as listed in the Yearbook of the Christian Churches (Disciples of Christ). b. All ordained and licensed ministers who are residents of the regional church of Ohio and who have standing with the Christian Church in Ohio (Disciples of Christ).
Section 2. The authority of the Christian Church in Ohio (Disciples of Christ) shall reside in its members except as such authority is vested in the Regional Church Council.”
[see pg. 2 - https://www.ccinoh.com/media/124214/constitution_approved_at_october_2006_regional_assembly.pdf ]
Our regional membership, the constituent units of regional life, is made up of congregations, and clergy. Our ongoing standing process creates, de facto, an “Order of Ministry,” verifying and validating who is in, as well as who is out of the Ohio “Order of Ministry.” When we ask as part of the standing review, annually, if clergy have done continuing education, and maintained their status with current Ethical Boundary training and the Anti-racism program, we are affirming guidelines and outlines of what it means to be part of our Order of Ministry. What we mostly do is invite people into the Order of Ministry through an ordination process, but not as much about maintaining folks within our de facto ministerial community once they get there.
Let me repeat – I believe it is practically, pragmatically, phenomenologically clear that ministerial formation is a gift, specifically of the regional church. But certification, when it’s mostly checking off items from a list of criteria provided by outsourced organizations, is NOT ministerial formation. I will lovingly be specific about one way this does NOT work. If we make our ministerial formation dependent on spiritual formation, which we if not require at least affirm strongly through the Commission on Ministry . . . but most of our local spiritual directors are (as they indeed are) Catholic or Methodist, I have news for you. Intentionally or not, the ministerial formation that happens indirectly through spiritual formation during seminary and the ordination process will be grounded in Catholic and Methodist church norms . . . which are NOT the ways in which our Disciples of Christ processes work. You may personally feel that they should, and we can debate that elsewhere, but I can’t tell you how often I have to explain to long-time Disciples seminary students or even local church leaders that our local churches and regional church aka middle judicatory governance processes don’t work like the Methodist Church, let alone the Catholic Church. Like, no way? WAY. But this is what happens when most of our ministerial formation is outsourced to non-Disciples institutions and organizations, let alone seminaries (one of which I teach at regularly, God bless them).
And if I’m willing to say our ordination process is a bit of a mess, I’ll say with emphasis that our “Search & Call” system is a dumpster fire. As someone who is never going to be in that system again, it’s easier for me to say than most, so let me not hold back – “Search & Call” is simply, if unfairly, not trusted. Not by currently serving and searching clergy, and not by congregations. But this is much less about the general office end of the process than the business end of “Search & Call” as wielded by the regions and applied by congregations.
If there is any area where both congregations and clergy lack trust, it’s in the basic fairness and consistency of the “Search & Call” process. But I don’t have any grand new scheme or complicated set of recommendations much beyond – tell the truth. Tell the dang truth. It’s that simple.
Let me be blunt. I have served congregations which had candidates foisted upon them by the active collusion of regional staff to hide clergy misbehavior, including repeat offenders for violations of sexual ethics. Even after many years the wounds are still deep, and mostly unhealed, and are reopened any time there’s a conversation about regions and church and clergy placement, long before we get to discussions of the role of “covenant” in our common life.
And I know other similar stories from the last twenty years, on the congregational and regional level, which involve some very well known names, and when the blow-up comes, THEN you hear from people in official roles all over our polity saying “oh, I knew he was no good. Everyone knew he was a horn dog, a rascal, a letch.” I’d pause to make an inclusive note, but it’s almost exclusively men, so let’s just roll with it. Yes, I’m particularly frosted because in some of these cases I was involved, even consulted by local church leaders, but a regional or even general level staff person said “oh, they check out, yes there were some issues, but it’s all in the past” and an impatient congregation (or region) takes a step in haste they get to repent at their leisure.
If I were to get into all the ways congregational Search/pulpit committees lie to candidates, we’d never get any further into this overview, so I’ll just declare that as a key problem no one has come up with a solution for. But it certainly adds to mistrust when wise counselors have to mentor newer, younger clergy “do not believe a thing a search committee tells you without independent verification.” And trust me, we do say that. I know I’m not the only one. It’s not out of malice, it’s out of repeated, hard, bitter experience. Telling me “well, higher education and industry and civil employment practices do all these same things you’re talking about” doesn’t make it better, and since we are (for St. Peter’s sake!) the church, I think it makes it worse.
Meanwhile, the credibility of most regions on this subject is in tatters, and nowhere as much as in Ohio. So there’s my grand plan on “Search & Call.” Be honest. This should not be too much to ask for Christian communities. There’s more I could say here about belonging, and how we onboard and affirm and maintain an Order of Ministry, but I’ll save that for later. Be honest will do for now around how we identify and commend ministers to the church as a regional church.
Lived Ecclesiology -- Stewardship
Likewise, another place we have to go is on a journey to become transparent and honest about how we handle funds, especially trusts & endowments. In our money management in general.
I’ve already heard a flurry of contradictory statements this fall from different people who served in various roles of leadership, some saying “our financial records have always been open” and others saying “regional board financial reports were handed out and collected back in.” I even had someone tell me there was a non-disclosure agreement they had to sign, though in fairness I’ve not found a hint of that in print . . . which doesn’t tell me it didn’t happen.
[Major editorial update: I’m leaving the preceding paragraph and the next few paragraphs after this one exactly as I wrote them in the Fall of 2018. Then, after version 2.0 of these “Notes” appeared online in mid-October 2018, I was contacted by someone who had served on the Regional Church Council (RCC) for many years, who had been reading my then-Facebook postings from which this is adapted, asking me if I’d seen a copy of the non-disclosure agreement (NDA). I said I had not. This person explained when they were handed out to RCC members in 2013 & 2014, it was stated that these were binding both for the term of service, and also after one’s service ended, unless released by the regional leadership. To compress a large number of emails, I reached out to John Richardson, our interim regional head and the regional moderator, Tom Stephenson, and asked them to issue a blanket release from NDAs for RCC members, which they promptly did, and my inbox blew up. You can see a copy of a blank NDA used in those years below. The problem is there’s nothing wrong with this NDA as stated, it’s just the implication, as it has been communicated to me, that the need for confidentiality stated in the document applied to any fiscal information the RCC might handle, let alone the motions made and approved by them. Just to be clear: that’s not right for any non-profit, church or otherwise, to insist that all their fiscal matters are confidential within a limited group. Even if church groups technically are exempt from many legal guidelines governing other non-profit corporations, the principle to me is that those who give can’t be barred from the basic budget and income and expense information of any group of which they’re a member. So doing this wasn’t illegal, but I think it violates basic fairness and equity. Editor’s note – JBG 10-2021]
I’ve seen and heard enough to say this with emphasis as well: we’ve simply grown accustomed to doing what we darn well please in Ohio when it comes to money. And that has come to an end with our current insolvency, and the good news is this should be our opportunity to see to it that it doesn’t arise again in the foreseeable future.
A senior leader in the Disciples has said to me “Many regional ministers were never properly oriented, and didn't take the opportunity to learn, about the legal restrictions on permanent funds. Our Christian Church Foundation strove mightily to impress this information on our regional leaders, and in some cases they were quite successful. But in others, RMs either followed the poor practices of their predecessors or found their own new mistakes to make.”
I’ll go a step further. I think many have consulted with each other over the years on legal stratagems to pillage older trust accounts and designations. It’s appalling behavior, and it should stop. I have read some of the rationales for expending principal sums to zero and my blood boils. It’s a lie told to trample across generations, and it’s an untruth that rots those bonds of covenant we want to be able to talk about as tying together congregations and contributors across the region, and across our centuries of shared history.
[Ed. ~ This next paragraph, now in italics and within brackets, was in version 1.0 of these notes, and is mostly irrelevant now that we’ve paid down the 2013 camp mortgage and restored the trust amounts as permanently restricted net assets through investment & interest growth, but I leave it here for the record: We need to establish a Restoration Fund, and even if it’s just $50 a month, we need to start making progress towards restoring those trust accounts. I suspect the first obligation we will get paid off among the many we bear as the Ohio Region right now is the mortgage on camp, and once that’s done, we can take that discipline forward and start putting $3,700 a month into the Restoration Fund. We won’t have $2,000,000 in permanent funds again for some time, but we can get to the minimum $560,000 we owe our heritage sooner than you might think (the magic of compound interest).]
As for the rest of our convoluted accounts – stewardship is more than just money. Stewardship is rightly handling time and talents and other resources. Part of why our accounts are so complicated and our bookkeeping so confusing is because we have too many irons in the fire, too many plates on sticks, too many juggler’s chain saws in the air. We are not a region of 500 or 250 or even 200 congregations anymore, and frankly, we keep trying to live and work and act like we are. We ain’t. I just read a comment in late 2021 about Ohio having 150 congregations, and I laughed out loud, but not in a good way. Seriously, who are we kidding? Ah, we’ve been kidding ourselves, and for a long, long time.
I’ll take it a step farther.
Using more recent Yearbook figures, our Ohio congregations:
Average worship attendance (among those reporting, 129 churches in 2011; 114 churches in 2016; for a 12% decline in # reporting)
2011 — 99
2016 — 75
24% decline in average worship attendance . . .
Median worship attendance
2011 — 74
2016 — 55
26% decline in median worship attendance.
See where I’m going with this? [Ed. – it’s sped up in the Yearbook data for 2017 through 2019, and 2020 is of course hard to make sense of in any case.] We don’t have the bodies, the horses, the people to staff all these programs and initiatives and task forces. We’re exactly like a congregation that still has sixteen committees reporting to the church board meeting, of which nine are vacant, because the average Sunday has 30 people in the pews. We’re already too large and complicated for who we are, and . . .
Projection based on current [2017 data] trends:
In 2021:
Average worship attendance (100 churches reporting, projected)
57
Median worship attendance
41
[Ed. ~ obviously, with COVID, it almost doesn’t matter, but we’re close enough to that outcome for me not to delete it here in 2021.]
+ + +
Out of the 114 reporting congregations at the end of 2016 in the Christian Church in Ohio (other indications on record suggest that we have 131 participating in regional life, with 17 or so not filling out yearbook forms), the key indicator of Average Worship Attendance (henceforth AWA) shows that we have the following breakdowns by size:
55 congregations – less than 50 AWA;
20 congregations – 50 to 149 AWA;
12 congregations – 150 to 249;
6 congregations - 250 and up on Sunday.
But my horseback way of putting this (because some of those biggest churches don’t do much “with” the Ohio Region, and some of those tiny congregations are weighty in their involvement, God bless them) tends to go like this:
We have about 120 congregations in the Christian Church in Ohio, of which 40 like us, 40 loathe us, and 40 are barely aware we exist.
That’s an impressionistic measure that I think would hold up if you could find a way to test it. But add all these numbers up, and I hope you can see my point: we need to downsize the complexity of the region’s life and activities.
Let me break up this three part overview of what I’m calling our “Lived ecclesiology,” and come back in the next chapter to where “Missions” comes into the picture, because that subject will also be the theme of the last entire section of this work.