Coloma United Methodist Church found new life but no quick fix with VCI.
KAY DEMOSS
Senior Editor-Writer, Michigan Area
Eighty United Methodist churches around the United States were recognized in 2016 with a “One Matters Discipleship Award.” Coloma United Methodist Church, Kalamazoo District, was one of those congregations. Conferred by Discipleship Ministries (formerly General Board of Discipleship), the award celebrates remarkable gains in annual baptisms, professions of faith and discipleship implementation.
“The One Matters Discipleship Award is meant to lift up a bright spot in each conference around discipleship,” says the Rev. Jeff Campbell, director of annual conference relationships at Discipleship Ministries. “We are looking for churches that are turning things around with a renewed focus on making disciples.” Each church receives a plaque and $1,000 from Discipleship Ministries to continue their work in discipleship.
So how are such “bright spots” nurtured? According to the Rev. Ron Van Lente, Coloma’s pastor since 2011, the Vital Church Initiative (VCI) helped reorganize and renew the congregation.
Coloma began the VCI journey in the fall of 2012 and fulfilled their final prescription in October 2016. “It was ‘that’ time in the life of a congregation that had been pretty homogenous for 40 years,” Van Lente recalls. “So we used the resources we had available and made it happen.”
When asked how Coloma UMC is different today than it was before participating in VCI, Van Lente cited four aspects of the congregation’s life:
1) “We have a better sense of who we are and why we are here. We ask ourselves, ‘How do we make disciples in Coloma in 2017?’ then bring our gifts and skills to bear in our community.
2) “We have a lot more intentionality about being hospitable and meeting new friends. The church was friendly but that is different than having a system for welcoming.
3) “We have a discipleship path we follow once folks are here, both for those new to the faith and for those more advanced.
4) “We have really worked hard on making worship a lot more excellent.”
Ministries with children is a key part of the church’s outreach. Daisies, Cubs, and Boy Scouts are in and out of the building every week. A backpack program feeds local school children on the weekends. Coloma UMC mentors children through Kids Hope USA. “We are in ministry to about 100 children each week,” Van Lente reports, “but only two children are in church.” He notes that an area of focus for 2017 is to help members see “these are our kids, even though they are not here on Sunday. We are raising up the next generation in the faith… out there. Not only is that okay, it’s what we are called to do.”
Foundational to many of the advances the church has made over the past four years is transition to “single board governance.” VCI source material (Leadership and Organization for Fruitful Congregations by Steve Ross, Oregon-Idaho Conference) helped restructure Coloma’s leadership into a 12-member Church Council. “In our case,” the pastor explains, “12 people have taken the place of 40. Often as a church gets smaller everybody becomes a leader and there’s nobody left to work. Single Board Governance has taken us beyond that.”
The biggest change prescribed by VCI was starting a second worship service. “We took that on last,” Van Lente reflects, “because of the merger.” In 2011 Coloma and Watervliet UMCs merged and time was given to bonding and blending. Sprucing up facilities and doing research on demographics laid important ground work. Then in the fall of 2016 Coloma launched what Van Lente describes as “an Inventive Age service,” informal, shorter and participatory. Their target audience is ages 50-65, “people who aren’t churchy but who are coming to the community to retire and are looking to be part of something.”
Van Lente believes the strength of VCI is the program’s refusal to give answers. “The process is very different from ‘Here are the answers and now you are done and everything will be ok,’” he says. Instead VCI offers processes. “We are now living in the process and are keeping it going and that’s not a quick fix.” Timing can be crucial. It was toward the end of the VCI journey that the leaders at Coloma pulled the pews out of the sanctuary and put in chairs. “That came at the end of three years of discernment,” Van Lente remarks. “We did our homework. We talked to people. We had a town hall meeting and worked through what to do and why to do it. Choices were made and people adjusted pretty well.” That change has allowed the worship team “a wondrous flexibility to create the environment we want. But we could not have done that before we had some prior successes.”
Now on the other side of the VCI experience, Coloma’s work is far from over. “The technical changes are done,” Van Lente says, “but the adaptive changes are just beginning.” What would he say to a church considering VCI? “I would tell them that it is the best, most frightening thing they could ever do,” Van Lente chuckles. He recommends forming a good, solid team. “It requires strong leadership to take a church through a lot of changes very quickly.”
He stresses the importance of intentionality. “VCI teaches that it’s not about us. It’s about them. And that brings a lot of energy with it.” He believes that churches that are satisfied with who they are will continue to “tread water.” Van Lente concludes, “Jesus never said, ‘Buy yourself a building and wait for someone to show up.’ Get over yourself and get hungry to make some new friends.”
That kind of transformation of attitude and practice is what earns nomination for the One Matters Discipleship Award. According to the General Council on Finance and Administration (GCFA), more than 70% of the United Methodist churches in the U.S. did not baptize anyone age 13 or older in 2013; 55% did not baptize anyone 12 and under. In addition, 50% of local churches did not have any professions of faith that year.
“With the One Matters Discipleship Award, we want to lift up the importance of discipleship and help interpret across the connection what zeros in professions of faith and baptism mean and what moving away from the zeros means,” said Jeff Campbell. “Each ‘1‘ in those categories represents a transformed life – a life that matters to God, and a life that should matter to us.”
Coloma United Methodist Church demonstrates how making disciples is much more than statistics. It is about lives, changed by God’s grace and ready to transform the world.
~Editor’s Note: Wisner United Methodist Church, Detroit Conference, also received a One Matters Award at the 2016 Michigan Annual Conference. That story to be shared in a future edition of MIConnect.
Last Updated on December 22, 2022