How Do Congregations Learn New Habits?
By Pat Taylor Ellison

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Our Otto Bremer Foundation-funded project of discovery, capacity-building, and community engagement with seven congregations is into its second year of a three year design. Six of the congregations have been working for a year already on assessing their identity and claiming their strengths and their place within their greater community. For them, now comes the interpretive step: what unique work is God doing in their town or place, and what unique gifts have they been given to meet and extend that work? For the seventh church, the newest joiner, their learning phase will begin in January 2010.

What are the six churches in Year 2 doing? Some of them are already busy understanding, learning from, and creating community with immigrants to Minnesota from non-English speaking countries. Others would like to start to engage in such work and are looking for ways to form relationships with newcomers to their communities. Some are wondering how to work more effectively with one another to handle internal questions before reaching out to persons who might be harder to understand. All are wondering what engaging in community issues will do to their own internal programs and processes, and sense of already-existing Christian community.

For those of you who have not read about this grant-funded project, in Year 1 each congregation uses Church FutureFinder to do a self- and community study, and Listening Leaders from the congregation complete Congregational Discovery interviews. As each congregation’s self study raises issues it wants to tackle, they employ the Growing Healthier Congregations habits for Dwelling in the Word and doing spiritual discernment. To date congregations in this Bremer project have used GHC to make discernments about the issues of members leaving, affordable housing, and changes in internal practices that could affect visitors and newcomers. One congregation has even begun a monthly discernment conversation to practice the habits as they wrestle with various dilemmas facing the congregation from inside and outside.

What are we learning about how congregations learn new habits and then learn from using those habits? I think we can say four things:

• If a TEAM of the right people is recruited for the initial work, it can be carried through to completion, and there is enough energy to reflect and build on the learning. If the work is limited to one or two persons, they run out of steam or become overwhelmed with the work. It also must be said that even the best of teams can be beset by challenging life situations, and when that happens, the work, though valued and appreciated, can grind to a halt.
  
  
• Once the initial work of digging, listening, and learning is complete, extending those learnings to others in the church is essential. Where that does not happen quickly, momentum is lost. It can be recaptured, but recapturing imagination takes much more energy from both inside and outside the congregation, and from clergy and lay folks alike.
  
  
• If the pastor and other key leaders can see the value of using any of the processes (Discovery or GHC, for example) on another occasion beyond the project itself, thus making the process a part of “the way things are done” in that church, it rises in perceived value and becomes a go-to process in their culture.
  
  
• If there is peace (a relationship of abundance, shalom) amongst the key leadership in a congregation, they can move ahead with the Bremer project or most others, even if they disagree about or are flummoxed by a particular event. If there is not peace, walls will appear here and there to prevent new habits from forming.

These four notions are being tested in our work with the seven congregations who are partnering with us on this project. Whether they are consistently true remains to be seen. We’ll keep you posted.

Meanwhile, I have been writing a blog, initially aimed toward these good Bremer congregation partners. I have received very few comment posts, but I know it is being read because when I call, they refer to my latest postings. Right now I am in the midst of a 40-day search for peace, abundance, shalom. I am trying to develop antennae for it. After all, if one of our key guesses is that congregations learn and try things more readily when they have this peace, I will be well served to learn for myself how to spot it and nurture it. The blog can be accessed and commented on at http://www.blog.churchinnovations.org.

Peace to your house.

Pat Taylor Ellison, Ph.D., is the managing director of research for Church Innovations.