Why are Christian congregations important today?

We believe congregations are important, both to those involved in them and to their neighbors, and we want people to know that about our work. It is part of the reason we changed the name of our ministry from Leadership Education to Forum for Congregational Life. 

With that new emphasis and in a season of rapid societal change, we are also considering the impact of AI, cultural polarization and numerous other factors on the work and meaning of congregations.

When Dave started in ministry more than four decades ago, many denominations acted as if one of the primary roles of a congregation was to be an outpost of denominationally developed programs. Today, the activities of a congregation are often determined by its people and shaped by the opportunities and challenges in its particular context.

Given all that is shifting, Alaina believed that our team needed to consider why congregations matter both historically and in our day. We needed to speak the questions on our minds as we launch the Forum.

Christian congregations are the primary social and institutional manifestation of Christian faith today. In Christian congregations, individuals and families gather to receive, affirm and celebrate the transformation they have experienced through faith in the Triune God. In congregations, persons of all ages are formed together in seeking God’s purpose for their shared lives across many years.

This communal expression and experience of faith grounds individuals in God’s redemptive story. The shared work of communal worship gives congregation members renewed imaginations to see God at work in their homes, neighborhoods, workplaces and beyond.

A thriving congregation is firmly grounded in the story of God, continually retold through communal, family and individual practices such as worship, study of Scripture, prayer and discernment. A thriving congregation has integrated its sense of mission and calling into all aspects of its organizational life, including its formational programming and decision-making processes. A thriving congregation is deeply rooted in its place — invested in the culture and history of its neighborhood, faithfully interpreting its theological tradition and commitments within the life of the community beyond the congregation.

Finally, a thriving congregation has a thoroughly Christ-shaped and Spirit-led life, sharing an inextricable connection to the Triune God while remaining fully present to the needs, joys, sorrows and opportunities of the community. Healthy congregational leadership is not limited to pastoral and professional leadership; it includes laity and clergy working collectively to live as Christ lives.

Over the years, we have witnessed many congregations develop a mission or vision statement. In the end, those statements are remarkably alike. Often, the gift of such a process is for the participants to go back to the fundamentals of the faith life and the role of the congregation in that life.

It can be difficult to hold onto these foundational ideals in this season of rapid social and cultural change. All of us are trying to adapt to this environment. Technological advances have made remote work, virtual health care and online education possible. Artificial intelligence is transforming almost every sector of life. Geopolitical and environmental instability raise anxieties and fears for many.

It is not surprising that people may feel overwhelmed. Some attempt to turn back the clock, while others choose to trust in the latest innovation. Some may be paralyzed by the situation. In the midst of these changes, trust in institutions of all types is eroding.

Congregations, naturally, need to adapt to the changing circumstances. In a 2024 survey for the Exploring the Pandemic Impact on Congregations (EPIC) project conducted by the Hartford Institute for Religion Research, 46% of respondents reported that they regularly participate — in-person or virtually — in congregations beyond their primary one, and 7% identified as having more than one “home church.” What does this information mean in terms of church membership? What should any of these respondents’ congregations expect in terms of participation?

Leaders of congregations are considering a host of distinct and interrelated questions: How do we lead others to live a life of faith that matters? What is the role of technology in facilitating worship? How do we support Christian discipleship for families who seldom attend services and frequently access content on their phones? How do we measure the impact of our engagement with the community?

These shifts raise basic organizational questions about what a church staff and building should do: How do we determine the adequate size of a church staff? What is the role of a church building? What does it mean if a church is in a neighborhood? Some leaders are not sure where to find information and ideas beyond their friends, colleagues, peers and perhaps their denomination.

One way to see the new situation for congregations is to remember the effectiveness of the mid-20th century’s most commonly used metric for church life: average weekly worship attendance. Lyle Schaller, a highly regarded church consultant of that era, considered a congregation’s size to be the most crucial variable in predicting its culture and work. This measure helped gauge adequate programs, staffing, location, buildings and land use. Attendance still matters today, but it does not predict revenue or requests for support in the way it once did.

We can see another shift in expressions of congregational life through programming. In Schaller’s time, congregations offered a host of programs, ranging from youth groups to Bible studies. Even worship services were often planned like program events. The program-planning model has been slowly shifting, but these changes became much more widespread during the stay-at-home phase of the pandemic. Programs were generally shut down for months or longer. Worship, prayer and fellowship, however, continued in new and old ways that are still evolving.

Another shift is away from the congregation as a “voluntary association.” Since the same period when programing became central, congregations have generally been organized like civic organizations, such as women’s clubs or Lions Clubs. But all of these associational forms are shifting as we approach the mid-21st century. At the moment, few groups of this kind are attracting younger adults, who often connect instead through social media and are more likely to affiliate with a movement than a formal association. Yet the bonds of a movement are often not as long-lasting or consistent as those created in many voluntary associations, particularly congregations.

These shifts and changes invite us to wonder: How should congregations evolve to offer their gifts in new ways? The mission of congregations is not changing, but the expressions of congregational life are evolving. This transition can be difficult to track and notice across various Christian traditions. There are places for a congregation to go for help — like a denomination, a school or a consulting firm — but those places may not have the time and energy to develop networks so congregations can learn from each other.

We want the Forum for Congregational Life to be a place that supports the exploration of today’s pressing questions and any new questions that may emerge for congregations. We believe that the variety of Christian traditions and their congregations will likely respond to the times in many different ways, and we aspire to facilitate ways to learn from each other.

Participation in congregational life has been significant to Christian persons and families throughout the church’s history. In different seasons, congregational life has evolved to include many expressions: house churches, small rural congregations, megachurches, cathedrals and more. Alongside all who care about congregations, we are excited to discover how these forms are evolving and the impact congregations are having in this age.

In 2007, when he was a young pastor at a church plant in Salem, Oregon, the Rev. D.J. Vincent noticed that a group of unhoused people had been living in Cascades Gateway Park. He and his parishioners wanted to do something to help them out and settled on a simple idea: They’d host a potluck.

That impulse to share a single meal started a ministry that has grown into a multimillion-dollar nonprofit called Church @ the Park. It now offers outreach services, workforce development, emergency shelter and permanent housing to the area’s unhoused population. In 2024 they served nearly 2,000 people across six locations.

As Church @ the Park evolved, so too did Vincent’s approach to ministry. From his conversations with unhoused folks at the meals, he gained a new perspective about dignity, humility and relationships. He felt he needed to change the way he was thinking about his service work; in looking for guidance he came across Street Psalms, a faith-based organization committed to developing strong community leaders.

The organization, a network of more than 40 organizations in 100 cities around the world, was formed to help create “communities in mission” that foster human flourishing in urban spaces. Street Psalms is based on “theology from below” — that is, learning alongside people at the margins rather than imposing solutions from above. This approach aligned with Vincent’s experience at the potlucks.

“Street Psalms created a bubble of belonging for us,” Vincent said. “They value connectedness and relationship, and our organizational values are the Street Psalms values. We aren’t just a place for people to get resources, but where they can find value and dignity and responsibility.”

Learning to be peacemakers

Street Psalms calls itself a “sodal” expression of the church, as opposed to a more traditional “modal” one. “Sodal” comes from the Latin “sodalitas,” meaning “companion” or “partner.” The organization uses this description to explain how it seeks to develop leaders who are embedded in vulnerable urban communities, people who are trying to enact meaningful change in their cities.

“We’re an urban monastery without walls,” said Sarah Moore, Street Psalms’ senior fellow for applied research, who came to the organization after a career as a psychology professor. “We prepare people for the challenges they face out in the real world of service.”

Forming leaders who serve communities

Thompson has been with Street Psalms since it was founded in the 1990s. The organization initially served urban youth workers in Philadelphia and was an initiative of the Pew Charitable Trust. Kris Rocke, the current executive director, had written a curriculum for World Vision, a youth mentorship organization, and he realized that the leadership skills it cultivated could be applied to anyone looking to share the “good news in hard places.” In 2023, Street Psalms officially became a religious order.

“Our charism has crystallized, especially over the past eight years,” Thompson said. “We’re committed to the formation of leaders who are serving their communities. It takes a special kind of spirituality to do this work, and we realized people weren’t getting the training they needed in a more formal seminary.”

While Street Psalms has always mentored leaders in their specific contexts, its programming and curriculum has become more formalized and refined over the years. Its nontraditional seminary is not affiliated with a denomination and does not ordain pastors for local churches. Instead, it trains people to lead communities in mission. It ordained its first cohort of leaders in 2010.

“We say we’re joyfully unaccredited,” Moore said. “While we do not believe, not at all, that this replaces formalized and accredited seminary training, we do believe that this offers the type of transformational experience that prepares leaders to serve the sodal form of the church.”

Street Psalms offers a one-year novitiate program that ends in ordination. Through daily, weekly, and monthly rhythms and practices, as well as synchronous and asynchronous classes and workshops, ordinands learn the Incarnational Framework and how to employ it in their communities. Nearly 40 people around the globe have been ordained. The organization also has a one-year fellowship program that finances specific community projects. Funded by grants from large and small benefactors, it gives all of its materials away for free.

The program is rooted in a specific hermeneutic, a way of reading the Bible that prioritizes and centers the most vulnerable people in Bible stories and parables.

“What you practice with Street Psalms is a way of reading Scripture from below, from the perspective of the marginalized,” Thompson said.

“During my formal training for my M.Div., nobody helped me see that the context of Scripture is about people who were oppressed,” she said. “It’s written to tell that story, but you very rarely hear that. The Lord’s Prayer, for example, came about during the context of the Roman Empire. When you think about it like that it gives it a new resonance.”

Learning to read with this lens prepares leaders in urban communities to ask questions of the text that might unlock new significance for its constituents and to be open to new and surprising interpretations.

“One of the big things the church doesn’t talk enough about, that Street Psalms does talk about, is violence,” Thompson said. “It’s not just physical violence, either. It can be the political thing and the pressure to pick sides.

“With Street Psalms, we want to curate the kind of conversations that don’t create enemies on the other side. I don’t know where I’d be as a preacher or as a spiritual leader if I didn’t have this framework.”

Building ‘communities in mission’ around the globe

Street Psalms trains leaders to love their city and seek peace in it, which entails learning how to listen to their city’s “sacred song”— the literal meaning of “psalm.”

“With the name, you have two images coming together and resonating,” Thompson said. “’Street’ says, ‘I’m here,’ ‘I’m with my community.’ And ‘Psalms’ is all the joy and lament that you find there. All the raw ways history shows up through our people.”

The organization takes different forms with all its partners; every mushroom that blooms from the network is unique. These partners do many kinds of work, from homeless outreach to after-school programs to helping survivors of domestic abuse and walking with people coming out of prison. And they’re all over the globe.

When an organization commits to following the Incarnational Framework, it becomes a “community in mission,” which in the simplest terms means that it shares the See, Do, Be, Free philosophy and can tap into a web of support when it needs help navigating challenges that can arise when doing things with people and not just for them.

“We’re kind of like the wholesalers,” Moore said. “And our partners are the retailers.”

Changing the way leaders engage with the world

In addition to the seminary, Street Psalms runs a design studio that functions as a kind of incubator for innovative social change. Partners can put their ideas through their paces before testing them out in the world.

One idea that came out of this is the Preaching Peace Initiative. At gatherings called “Tables,” partners tackle issues that pertain to their communities using the Incarnational Framework and the “theology from below” hermeneutic. Thompson visited a Table at one of Street Psalms’ partners in Kenya.

“In Nairobi there was a Preaching Peace Table with Christian pastors and Muslim clerics, and they took a common theme and discussed it from their different perspectives,” she said, adding that there had been violence between these communities in the past.

“The theme was: ‘What does it mean to love your neighbor?’ So you get in this room and you see the kind of conversation about peace. It helped foster these ideas of abundance and peacemaking and asked what it would look like for that to exist there, in that community.”

Thompson likened that work to what Vincent is doing with Church @ the Park.

“They have a clear picture of what it means to serve the most vulnerable,” she said. “They have a common language of scarcity and abundance and what it means to work across difference for the sake of the poor.”

During the early potlucks, Vincent saw problems to be solved, needs to be met, deficits to be addressed — what he regards now as classic scarcity thinking. But as he listened to the people he was serving, he learned to see differently. His perspective shifted to one of abundance and collaboration. And he understood that the community already had what it needed to flourish.

“We grew into a ministry of mutuality, where folks can find not only resources, but value and dignity,” he said. “The goal is co-creating a better reality, and we are our best selves in community, not in isolation.”

Vincent now takes all of Church @ the Park’s staff through a version of the Incarnational Framework during their training. He wants the organization to be as inclusive as possible, serving people regardless of their faith background, sexual orientation, gender identity or any other typical dividing line. More than half of the employees don’t identify as religious, but they’ve found a sense of belonging in the organization and its mission for peace and relational abundance. This kind of radical acceptance and baseline humility is what helps make Street Psalms unique.

“It’s more than a curriculum or content,” Moore said. “If you embrace the framework, it changes the way you engage with the world.”

Familiar Bible stories can be some of the hardest to read as adults. The children’s Sunday school versions, with their accompanying crafts and upbeat sing-alongs, can obscure the full range of nuance and complexity in a given passage. Take the parable of the sower from Matthew 13.

In all the illustrations I’ve seen, the sun is out, the sower happily scattering seeds over an artfully textured ground. Given the bounty in the “good soil” harvest, the seeds that aren’t so lucky don’t seem to matter. The classroom drawings never fully capture the scope of loss present in the story — the seeds pulverized in the bird’s beak, withered by the sun among the rocks, strangled by the weeds.

Suddenly, this cheery parable fills me with discomfort. Why wasn’t the sower more careful? Surely there are ways she might have minimized the risk and maximized the yield.

I feel frustrated that the sower seems entirely unconcerned about failure. As she walks, she tosses handfuls of seeds to fall where they will. Some will grow; most will not. No attention is given to the soil quality. The sower simply keeps on sowing.

I’ve realized that this reading is challenging me to reconsider the parable’s lesson. Perhaps this story is more about consistent faithfulness and less about engineering results. But that is not what I want to hear in a moment of great change and uncertainty for the mainline church in America.

Congregations are aging. Membership numbers are declining. Churches are closing their doors and selling their properties at an unprecedented rate. This does not seem like the moment to be scattering our limited precious seeds with abandon.

And yet what if this is the exact right moment for the church to be taking risks and embracing failure?

Jeremy Utley and Perry Klebahn lead and teach at Stanford’s Hasso Plattner Institute of Design. They help organizations innovate in a rapidly changing world by cultivating cultures of experimentation — what, for the church, could be seen as the spiritual disciplines of listening, humility, courage and holy playfulness all rolled into one.

In their book “Ideaflow,” they write, “What are the chances you’ll make an interesting discovery doing something in the exact same way you always have?”

I wonder what this imagination might do for the church. If doing what we always have is no longer working, could this be the moment to experiment and try something new? Sometimes an experiment will produce 30 times what was sown. Sometimes an experiment will fail. Often it takes many failures before a successful solution is found. Recall the story of the light bulb.

I believe failure is essential for vibrant congregations. But failing is scary. In order to survive, the church must create a culture where failure is expected, welcomed and even celebrated.

Utley and Klebahn offer some suggestions on creating this kind of culture.

First, individuals and groups need to feel a sense of safety in order to take risks. When we’re afraid that we’ll fail — or that we or our ideas will be judged, laughed at or dismissed — our creative ability withers. Our brains (and that infamous entity called the church committee) are masters at naming why new ideas won’t work. While this instinct can keep us safe, it can also be wrong. We don’t always know where the good soil is. Scattering with abandon creates opportunities for learning and even surprise.

To scatter with abandon, shift the goal from finding “good” ideas to simply getting as many ideas out on paper as possible. Get playful. Bring snacks and colorful Post-it notes. Ask a middle schooler to join the conversation. Pull your chairs into a circle or move to a space with lots of light and big posters on the walls. At this stage, the goal is quantity over quality. The only rule is that ideas cannot be judged or deliberated.

Initially, ideas might come slowly and feel obvious. Keep going! One leader who uses the ideaflow process told Utley and Klebahn that it’s always excruciating for her — but only at the start. “As soon as she gives herself permission to write something truly outrageous, ridiculous or just plain illegal,” they write, “the floodgates open.”

Second, make space in the schedule to fail. Utley and Klebahn write, “To learn something new, you must try new things, and experiments always have a risk of failure. To take that kind of risk regularly, you can’t chase 99 percent efficiency every moment of your day.”

Not every new idea will bring in more young people or help balance the budget. But when framed with intention, every new idea is a learning opportunity for a congregation. Start talking about the congregation’s latest experiment and the learnings it produced, regardless of how well it achieved the anticipated results.

Utley and Klebahn note Thomas Edison’s response to a friend who lamented Edison’s lack of results on a project despite his hard work: “Results! Why, man, I have gotten a lot of results! I know several thousand things that won’t work.”

Not every project needs to be “the solution” as long as we are able to learn from it.

A few Sundays ago, I heard a pastor retell the parable of the sower and recount the harvest it produced as “thirty-, sixty- and even one hundredfold.” That’s how Mark 4 tells the story, but it’s not what Matthew says. Instead of saving the largest, most remarkable yield for the end, Matthew’s version says the yield was “in one case a hundredfold, in another sixty, and in another thirty” (Matthew 13:23 NRSVue) — concluding with the smallest. Even the smallest yield is worthy of note, Matthew seems to be saying.

Failure happens when we take risks. Our call is to be faithful sowers who scatter with abandon.

Keri L. Day sees a unique space in theological education for Black students and professors, and it contributed to the title of her new book.

The associate professor at Princeton Theological Seminary wrote “Notes of a Native Daughter: Testifying in Theological Education” as part of the Theological Education Between the Times series. One of the things she explores is the presence of both harm and hope in the academy.

“[There are] both the deep experiences of structural racism and a number of Black students as well as faculty members knowing that they have contributed and they have shaped theological education in profoundly important ways,” Day said.

Faith & Leadership: You write about how the theological academy is “a site of both harm and hope,” a site of both repression and affirmation, for racially marginalized groups. That is such a powerful image. Can you talk about it a bit more?

Keri Day: I’m thinking, for example, of how African American students come to the theological academy, say to Princeton Theological Seminary. On the one hand, they feel at times not heard, not seen, because the theologians that they’re studying are white, with particular kinds of experiences that are not their own cultural experiences. Or particular points that they make on a theological level do not resonate with those in the primarily dominant white class.

They feel themselves as needing to not just be understood but to prove themselves, that they too can participate in the intellectual “world building,” as we would call it in the context of theological education. That’s harm, a site of harm. It’s a site or a context where African American students and faculty begin to question themselves, their abilities to move through the context — what can they actually contribute to the context — because they feel so inadequate.

On the other hand, it’s also been a site of hope. The same students that come from the Princeton Theological Seminary will find themselves deeply tooled by classes that they’ve taken. Maybe they’ve come out of a church that is deeply conservative and doesn’t support Black women in ministry, does not support Black queer people. When they come to the seminary, they’re able to find and discover intellectual and theological tools that will allow them to make a case, to speak and affirm their own perspectives, and maybe those perspectives are not embraced within the context of the Black church or within the context of Black community.

In that way, it’s a site of hope, because here they do feel confirmed in their perspective. They do feel affirmed that they’re wanting to think more progressively about the world around them and about different experiences along lines of gender and sexuality. Here you have, again, this double consciousness that W.E.B. Du Bois speaks about — that they experience theological education on the one hand as still repressive in these kinds of ways that I mentioned but on the other hand as a site of profound possibility.

F&L: You have described parts of your book as a testimony. For those who do not know what it is to testify or understand what a rich and powerful part that is of some people’s theological experience, can you explain it?

KD: In this tradition that I grew up in, what made testifying so powerful was that it certainly is an individual act, in the sense that the individual is standing and declaring one’s own truth. In the moment of testifying, you are speaking your truth, your experience of God and the divine, your experience of the world, who you are.

There might be some people in the room who may not like what you’re declaring about what God has done for you or what you’ve experienced by way of struggles and victories through the week as you stand up in church and you basically speak what your experience has been with God and with the world and with yourself. But here you are. It’s a profoundly individual act.

But here is the key to the power of testifying and testimony: it is not only an individual speaking one’s truth; testifying is also a collective act. Part of what grants testifying or testimony its power is that presumably there is an audience or community on the other end that is waiting to hear and move into the experience with you.

When one got up in my tradition and testified to what God had done, one also knew that what made it a powerful moment is the community affirming by way of oohs and aahs, by way of saying “Amen,” by way of saying, “You better tell it!”

This call-and-response format is a way of the community affirming for individuals that they are heard, that their experience is valid, that basically the individual is right in speaking the truth that he or she knows to be true.

For me, the power at a metaphorical level, in my book of testimony and talking about theological education, is that part of what the theological academy has to do is be that community who is willing to participate in this powerful ethical moment. Not just a theological moment. It’s an ethical moment of affirming that what the individual — in this case, the native daughter, the native son, the African American student or faculty — that what they speak is important, that it needs to be heard, that it needs to be affirmed.

When it is heard, when it is affirmed in a collective manner, then that testimony becomes a form of knowledge about who we are as a community literally — not just about who I am as an individual speaker but about who we are. It becomes the truth of the collective, something that needs to be lived into by the community.

F&L: You end this book where you could not possibly have known you would when you began — in the pandemic. How do you think that made it different?

KD: I started this book a year and something before the pandemic hit, and in some ways I did have to go back and I had to reframe the book based on the pandemic. Because to me, it was in the pandemic that I was able to see in some ways the unrelenting nature of structural oppression. The pandemic more deeply exposed the unrelenting burden of structural racism on Black community, on Black students within theological education, on Black faculty.

I want to be clear: it doesn’t mean that other faculty who are not Black didn’t have issues. But what I am saying, as an example, is that I had a number of my students that come from communities that were hard hit by the pandemic because their communities have few resources, so they were more vulnerable. They were more susceptible to COVID. Many of them, Black students, had family members who lived in more economically disadvantaged neighborhoods and had COVID and were in serious condition, and [I saw] the burden that placed on these students, in the middle of online education, to perform.

They would come to me about their white professors, some of the very problematic responses in pedagogies that were operating, and in some ways a lack of desire by some professors to really understand the community that these students come out of and how their academic performance is actually affected by being Black in America, basically. It actually did call upon me to go back and to reshape some of what I wrote.

The postscript that I wrote to the book, the last few pages, I went back around to put the question mark back in the air. You get the sense that in the fourth chapter it is a prayer that I have of community, of theological education listening to native daughters and sons, of a kind of great gathering, of a beloved community.

But as a postscript, when I started writing about the pandemic, the question mark reemerges. Is it possible? It’s this sort of tension that I do want the reader to live inside of, where I talk about having students that felt like they were the problem. They were treated as if they were a problem because of all they were going through, given the community that they are a part of and how disproportionately these communities were affected, and them needing to balance what they do academically with this reality of their community and their family.

All of that brings back, Is it possible for theological education to truly listen? The question mark, again, reemerges. It’s this tension of what I was hoping to accomplish in the text. This tension reemerging by the time the reader ends the book, the postscript, that the theological academy is a site of both harm and hope.

F&L: What else would you like people to know about this book, about the process, or about what you hope they will take away from it?

KD: To the president and the dean of a theological institution, you must no longer take on a managerial position when it comes to the institution, just managing the institution according to what has happened in the past, just trying to preserve what the institution has been. To the president and the dean, after reading this book, I hope you take away that you must have bold, risk-taking vision in helping to release theological education into a more liberative future as it relates to race and gender.

To the faculty, to the faculty of color, to the Black faculty, testify. That in and of itself is often very hard and can be a dangerous thing if you’re on tenure track. But find ways to testify. Sometimes it’s therapeutic to ourselves to be able to just testify in safe spaces.

To the white faculty member, truly become an ally, as I talk about in this book, by attending to the policies and the structures of the institutions. It’s not enough to speak that I’m an ally or I have a good Black girlfriend or he is a good colleague of mine at my institution. Really stand up in the policy decision making of the institution and promote equity for Black students and Black faculty.

To the prospective student that wants to enroll in theological education, the groundwork has been laid down. We’re standing on the shoulders of others who in some way — and I don’t know if you can see this in my text, but I really try to give honor to those who have come before. I’m not just talking about what it means to be Black in theological education or a Black woman, but I’m also telling a story about how Black women have actually shaped theological education. I want the prospective student — white, Black, it doesn’t matter what ethnicity or race — I want them to be able to see that, to acknowledge that and to celebrate that.