Churches in a new world: An interview with Lyle Schaller

Lyle Schaller: Many emerging issues would fall under the label of “technology.” The big changes in technology are that for a lot of people, projected visual imagery is the preferred channel for receiving messages rather than the spoken or printed word. People speak different languages. We used to think of it in terms of German, French, English, or whatever. Now we recognize that for a lot of people, particularly teenagers, music is a language. Numbers are a language. There are a variety of languages out there.

The big unknown out there is, “Do you have to go to work to be at work?” An increasing proportion of the population works out of their home. Do you have to go to the grocery store to purchase groceries? No, you can order them online and have them delivered. Do you have to go to the ballpark to see the game? No, you can watch it on television or your computer.

Do you have to go to church to go to church? No, you can watch a variety of television services. Or, increasingly, you can pick them up off your computer or iPod. What this is going to do is similar to what’s happened in professional football, basketball and baseball, which have said, “We can’t afford to play the game based on box office receipts.” So professional teams are getting more and more money out of selling television, radio and reproduction rights.

Motion pictures increasingly can be seen at home not after they have exhausted their box office or theatre receipts, but a few weeks or months following the first release. Many motion pictures bring in more revenue from electronic reproduction than they do from box office receipts.

How is that going to change how we do church? How is it going to change how we pay the bills? How do we do a whole bundle of things, including, how do we staff?

We are beginning to see these changes in the education field. Education has been, by and large, resistant to technology. But increasingly, we have online learning. You can earn your degree without ever setting foot on the campus. And that includes seminaries. You can stay current in your field of expertise by something other than going to a place.

Our society is moving from a vertical world to a horizontal world. There was a day when there were people in charge and people who worked for them. But increasingly, people work for themselves or in teams. This brings an increase in horizontal relationships. In education, we see this in a growing acceptance and affirmation of peer learning, which used to be reserved for one-room schools and graduate school seminars.

Chandler: Would you say that peer learning is going to become the chief educational tool for leadership in churches?

Schaller: I would say more than that. First of all, it already is the competitor for the teacher-focused Sunday school class. Our traditional Sunday school class was a teacher-centered affair. You had a teacher prepare and people came to class to learn. To be fair, many of these classes became caring communities. But a big issue as we move into a more horizontal world of peer learning and peer-driven groups is, “How are we going to teach and learn?”

People are now willing to talk with peers about their worries and concerns, where it used to be that you wouldn’t tell anyone about a problem at home, or with your spouse or children. People are much more open to talk about personal problems with their friends, kin and colleagues at work. So what we have are increasingly peer-driven, mutual support groups that include Bible study and prayer, as well as some looking after one another. We hear a lot of, “Oh, I have the same problem you do.”

One characteristic of peer-driven groups is that they surface issues. People think, ‘You can talk about that here?” “Yes, you can, you may.” “Well, I think I’ll practice.” And we begin to venture to talk to one another. The group is not teacher-driven; the peers are what matters. We expose our weakness and talk about them with other people, our peers. And these practice-runs in the group may lead to talking about issues in the home, that in the past were overlooked.

Chandler: How can pastors take advantage of this horizontal world for their own learning as leaders?

Schaller: Probably they can’t until after they’ve affirmed the legitimacy of this in their own church and have seen how it works. To some extent, it’s a generational difference or half-generational difference. The 55-year-old pastor endorses the idea and brings a 30-year-old on staff to build peer-driven communities. The pastor sits in on them once in awhile, silently. And says, “Hey, this is working. I wonder what’s out there for me, with my peers?”

Now we see pastors coming together in groups of five, six or seven. For many this has become the most valuable two hours they spend in a week. They bring a concern to a group, share it with the group, hear the group’s response, find out someone else who has faced the same issue and learned how they dealt with it, and that openness becomes contagious.

To take this a step further, this could change how American Protestantism is organized. In groups as different theologically as Southern Baptists and the United Churches of Christ, it raises divisive issues in the roles of national and regional agencies. These judicatories used to think of themselves as there to give out advice and counsel. They proved they were needed by holding big meetings that people would come to, and if the attendance was better this year than last year, then it proves it was working.

But what if there is a whole different style of what people are going to attend? If denominational people don’t offer peer-learning help, there are a whole range of parachurch agencies that will come in and do so.

Chandler: In this horizontal world, what competencies are going to be valuable for leaders?

Schaller: I think you will get almost unanimous agreement that number one is listening skills. Not simply sitting quietly and listening. But active listening, where you not only hear and see by body language what’s being communicated, but you wait long enough to be the fifth person to respond. Yes, someone has to respond first. But if I wait to be the fifth person to respond, then I have the benefit of the first four responders.

Chandler: The better leader is the one who is able to postpone jumping in until gathering all of the appropriate information, creatively processing it and only then responding out of the increased “wisdom” base?

Schaller: Yes, that’s right. Listening skills are number one.

Number two is patience. Now I don’t pretend to be real good at either one. But in parish consultations, I did learn to listen to an awful lot of lay people. Sometimes wanting to interrupt, but holding back and waiting until the person had really finished what they wanted to say (because quite often, they’d begin with a surface issue). But waiting and not giving negative signals, so they would know they could go a little deeper.

The final thing leaders will need is courage. At least one piece of courage is the willingness to tell the truth, to say what is not politely or politically acceptable. To be the one required to run counter to the thrust of what’s going on. Now, I put listening and patience ahead of courage, because if you speak too soon, you’ll simply be viewed as disruptive, and your comments get brushed off. You have to be patient to wait to say the courageous word.

The most common expression of the courage to tell the truth is to say, “It ain’t workin’.” I’ve had a dozen or two extremely difficult experiences over 40 years where a pastor would say to me, “You think my future is with this congregation or not?” The polite thing to say is, “Yes, you can stay here and serve as long as you want, or until something better or more challenging comes along.” But to tell the truth is to say, “It ain’t workin’.”

“Well, what do you mean by that, in ain’t workin’?”

“This isn’t, this isn’t, and this isn’t.”

“How do you know that?”

“Primarily from the feedback I’ve been getting from your lay people, particularly your leadership, some of whom are good personal friends of yours.”

“Well, that’s all news to me.”

“It probably is news to you, otherwise you would have acted on it. But I think they’re valid comments.”

“Is that all you have to say?”

“No, one more comment. It’s worse than it sounds. This has been going on long enough here that you’ve used up about all of the grace period that you have.”

“How long can I stay?”

“I’m not going to say five minutes. But I’m not going to say five months, either. I think you need to tell at least four or five of your crucial leaders that you know your time is limited. And ask them to be your allies in helping you through a phase-out chapter here. I don’t think you should try to do it all by yourself. I think you’ve used up the grace period already.”

Chandler: Might courage also be a leader saying to a congregation the same thing: “It ain’t workin’?”

Schaller: Same thing. The clearest illustration of this is when the numbers have been going down and have been for some time. Whether you’re talking about worship attendance, Sunday school attendance, giving, people leaving, joining another church not triggered by change of residence—when that’s happening, you can’t say, “Well, if they were loyal and they took their vows of membership seriously, that wouldn’t be happening.” You have to say it’s a free market out there. Your congregation and denomination are competing in what used to be a regulated market but is now a free market. People are willing to drive 12 or 15 miles to church each way, where they used to insist on a neighborhood church. Therefore, you’re competing against more choices, and the competition is at a higher level.

Now this is awfully hard to say, because the common response is, “Competition among churches is not Christian!” But the 1950s or 1960s marked the end of a cooperative period among churches and marked the beginning of an era of obvious competitiveness.

“Well, we’re doing what we always did and it always worked.” And I say, “The road that brought you to today is not the road that’s going to take you to tomorrow.” It takes courage to lead and to say that.

Chandler: What are the grace notes of encouragement and hope that you could offer to one who wants to be a courageous leader?

Schaller: The market demand by American citizens is for churches that call people to a high commitment to Jesus Christ, are focusing on discipling people and both challenge and equip volunteers to be engaged in doing ministry. The demand for those churches is at an all-time high. We’ve never had so many adult Americans who have dropped out of church “A” to join church “B” because church “B” is more demanding.

For a long time, we thought that the churches who were more demanding were the fundamentalists. Or we thought that they were the ones who would be shrinking. They expected everybody to tithe, and not only that, they expected that at least half of that tithe came through the church’s treasury. They expected that if you were a member, you would be in worship every week. They expected that you couldn’t even serve on a committee—much less chair it—unless you met certain standards. And the assumption was, “Those are the dying churches; they demand too much, they’re too strict, their expectations are too high.” Today—and this has been obvious for at least three decades—the evidence is that that the high-commitment churches are growing.