What Are We Learning?
Our Partnership for Missional Church longitudinal study begins to bear fruit
By Dr. Pat Taylor Ellison, Managing Director of Research and Dr. Scott Hagley

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The Partnership for Missional Church began over 20 years ago with a cluster of congregations who together learned habits that helped them discern who God was calling their churches to be. Ten years ago we took a hiatus from starting new clusters and commissioned our first longitudinal study, looking at those congregations and determining what differences the Partnership had made in more than 200 congregations’ lives. The results of that study you can find on the CI website by clicking on this link. That study’s findings included growth in worship attendance over 5 year period in congregations who stayed in the cluster, and high correlations between staying in the Partnership and longevity of pastorate, growth in adult conversions, increased lay leadership base, and so on. That study also helped us to think more clearly about the challenges facing local churches, and ways of designing and delivering the Partnership that could be the most helpful to those congregations.

The situation of the church today, especially in the mainline denominations, is different from its situation in the 90s. Today’s church is in the midst of a new era of mission, in which all the gifts of the Holy Spirit bestowed on congregations are needed not simply to sustain the church but to build Christian community with those who may or may not already be Christians, to make disciples in this new missional era. At the same time as we find ourselves in this new era of mission, there have been waves of other anxiety-inflaming changes that churches have responded to in many different ways, leaving the landscape significantly altered and leaving churches wondering where they are now. Since the Partnership is at its core a journey of spiritual formation rooted in God’s mission in the world, it seeks to innovate the capacities of each cluster congregation to grow its very culture toward attentiveness and longing for the mission of God.

So a new longitudinal study of the PMC began this summer, consisting of two parts: 1) gathering the numbers on attendance, giving, and participation for each congregation for the years before and during their work on PMC, and 2) an online or on-paper survey that measures each congregation’s emerging culture around the Word, activities of spiritual discernment about its calling, and engagement in its surrounding community. We began this study in our clusters in the Presbyterian Synod of the Trinity, clusters in Philadelphia and in the western presbyteries of Pennsylvania. It will soon extend to our other clusters in North America.

Preliminary findings? Following the first part of the study, the numbers:

For the most part, worship attendance seems to be holding steady in areas where other churches are losing numbers, and in several cases adult professions of faith and adult baptisms have risen considerably, keeping congregations’ worship attendance steady even as numbers of deaths decrease actual membership figures. It is too early to tell whether there is any correlation with giving per attender. It is also hard to measure, by the available numbers, actual participation levels in the congregation’s life and work.

Following the second part of the study, the survey:

• Dwelling in the Word is an infectious, portable and transformative practice. Congregations who participated in the study report a statistically significant change in the way in which they listened to one another, the Scriptural text, and the Holy Spirit in conversation with one another. People even supplied descriptions of where congregations practice Dwelling in the Word and some of the ways in which Dwelling has shaped congregational life.
  
  
• Dwelling in the World, connecting and building people bridges with those outside the congregation, is more difficult and counter-intuitive for congregations to learn. Dwelling in the World is the place in PMC where congregations begin to look past technical fixes (like programs) for connecting with their neighborhood and instead recognize that life in this new missional era involves learning new ways of creating Christian community. In order to learn something new, congregations must learn the processes of adaptive change, like going to our neighbors to depend upon their hospitality in order to build relationships and learn from them, like hosting our neighbors, and like taking risks in building a bridge-community. So far we’re learning that congregations report less interest in going out to the neighbors than they do in hosting them at the church, but they also report high levels of improvement in connecting with their neighbors and building partnerships with others as a result of PMC. Here again the stories people provide show significant learning through failure and experimentation, sustained partnerships with other churches and organizations, and concise, reflective descriptions of their neighborhood that disclose understanding, compassion, and care for the place in which these congregations are located.

We are working now on improving this end-of-PMC survey and also creating a parallel survey that congregations take as they first begin their PMC journey at their first cluster gathering. Eventually all the data, before, during and after, will be contained and available for study on the Church FutureFinder.

We’ll keep you posted on our learnings as the study unfolds. For now, in these very early days, we can say that the results look promising.