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Tool Kit for the Church of Tomorrow

- 26 slides

Introduction
to the
Tool Kit for the Church of Tomorrow
by Del Sexsmith; 2010



After the very moving covenant service held at the Annual Meeting in Killarney last May, I realized that I would soon need to develop a theme for the next Annual Meeting to be held in 2011 in Kenora. The words from Isaiah kept reverberating in my consciousness: “Behold I make all things new.” Like many other United Church members, I have long believed that we are experiencing a profound change not only in our church lives but in the ways and means of social connection and understanding. Imagine for a moment the world of the founders of church. As they celebrated the act of Union in 1925, motor cars were scarce, electricity was largely unavailable, and the vast majority of Canadians lived in rural settings. Eighty-five years later, modern transportation, electronic communication, and mass urbanization have changed the landscape entirely.

For years, I have listened to church leaders in Manitoba and elsewhere reflect upon the many issues at stake for congregations and our church as a whole. These are the issues of property ownership, declining membership, the expense of maintenance, financial sustainability, the unavailability of clergy, and the inadequacy of traditional liturgy, just to name a few. Many people speak in confusion and from a deep sense of loss. My paternal grandmother who was born in 1900 and survived farming in the Depression while raising 7 children would often remark to me: “Remember, there was no such thing as the good old days!” She had spent too many hours hauling water and living with firewood in poorly lit circumstances to look fondly upon the past; modern conveniences had provided liberation from a great deal of drudgery. And whether she worshipped in Elm Creek or St. Vital, the United Church was very close to her heart at all times.

I spent my entire professional career working with survey data as it affected communications and marketing trends. In my previous life, it was important to understand that this type of data is merely a mirror to society through which we see people as they are not as we wish them to be. Or more importantly, we see ourselves in this mirror quite clearly. To learn what it is that we need to address the great issues affecting contemporary church life, we need to be more honest in how we see and understand the society in which we live and work and worship, and not hearken back to some mythological time known as “the good old days.” When we listen to the words of Isaiah (65:17) more completely, we realize that he is asking us to let go of the past:

Behold, I will create new heavens and a new earth. The former things will not be remembered, nor will they come to mind.


The Tool Kit was created to help people in congregational life work with the possibility of developing a vision for the future. There is no cookie cutter formula for a healthy, vital church community; each and every one of you is adapting to very individual circumstances. We need to see our United Church then, not as a collection of identical franchises but as a multi-coloured coat of many fabrics, each one as precious as the others.

When I wrote the Tool Kit, it occurred to me more as inspiration than calculation. To be blunt, I woke at 2 o’clock on the morning following the first meeting of the 2011 Planning Committee and set down the twelve tools exactly as you are reading them today. I have set them out in plain language so that they are accessible to everyone and can be explored even without my supporting presence. I have changed and enhanced my remarks to support them many times as my personal presentations to Presbyteries and Conference meetings have evolved more into a living workshop than a set address. It is evident that I have struck a chord, one that resonates strongly with congregations looking to work within the evolving dynamics of our ever changing world.

Through these tools, it is my hope that anyone who uses them will feel enabled to undertake the great process of change, however small, and that you will feel empowered to find new life in the United Church of your own dreams.

I undertook to pose the Twelve Tools as questions to which I do not propose answers, and in concluding this introduction, I would like to paraphrase the prophetic words of Daniel 5:26-28 as these three questions:

Are we weighed in the balance and found wanting?
Are those the armies of time and change at our gates?
Are we free at last from the captivity of accepted church authority?

The answers are unfolding in our time. Feel free to be a part of them!