Orchard UMC

Last week I had the joy of visiting six very healthy United Methodist Churches in Michigan.  I met with senior pastors who really understand their role as both spiritual leaders AND organizational leaders.  On Friday (August 27) I visited two delightful churches – Orchard UMC in Farmington Hills and First UMC in Brighton.  Over the five year period between 2003 and 2008 both of these churches experienced approximately a 10% increase in worship attendance.  I thoroughly enjoyed visiting with the senior pastors – Carol Johns (Orchard) and Sherry Parker (Brighton).  In my opinion, we have far too few mid-size to large churches pastored by women.  Carol and Sherry bring great pastoral skills and excellent intuition to their roles as senior pastor.  Here are a few things that I learned about thriving churches from these two pastors:

• Having crystal clarity about your mission or purpose.  Both churches have clean crisp statements that guide everything that they do.  The statement for Orchard UMC is “An Oasis of Grace” and the one for Brighton First is “Transformed by God to Transform the World.”  Both pastors affirmed that it would be hard to be a part of their faith community without hearing and understanding the meaning of their statements.
• Knowing the congregation well and shaping ministry to help them grow. Both Carol and Sherry described their congregations in ways that helped me to know that their leadership style had to take into account the age, intellect, and theological perspective of their congregations.  While this may not appear to be a great insight it was very clear to me that their personal ability to know and understand their congregations was critical to their success in attracting new persons to their churches.
• Successful pastors often use God-given talents not honed in seminary. These two successful pastors, like most of their highly effective pastoral colleagues, daily use management skills that are not, and maybe should not be, taught in seminary.  As leaders of relatively large “organizations” with responsibilities for legal decisions, human resource management, facility management, fund raising, and much more these pastors were blessed with many gifts that have allowed them to lead their churches effectively.

I have often said that I get to see The United Methodist Church at its best.  I saw some of its best churches in Michigan last week.  There is great hope for the future of the UMC as long as God (with our assistance) continues to identify persons with gifts for pastoral leadership in all of its complexity.