Drinking From the Fire Hose

Learning to Listen for Who the Church Is Becoming

Three weeks into parish ministry, I have learned that there is a particular sensation that comes with beginning a new call: it feels a little like drinking from a fire hose.

There is so much to take in. There are people to meet and stories to hear. There are things people love, things people miss, things people hope will return, and things people are ready to imagine for the first time. There are systems, traditions, personalities, buildings, budgets, hopes, anxieties, and a thousand small details that make up the life of a congregation. Then there is the question underneath all of it: Who are we becoming?

That question is part of what brought me to the College for Congregational Development this past week.

More tools for the toolbox

The College for Congregational Development (CCD) is an intensive program for lay and clergy leaders. It draws on models from organizational development, leadership, group dynamics, systems thinking, adaptive leadership, and other fields, and then places those tools inside the particular theological and ecclesial context of the Episcopal Church. The goal isn’t simply to make churches more efficient or successful. It is to help congregations become more faithful, healthy, sustainable, and responsive to their particular calling as expressions of the Body of Christ.

That distinction matters. Because the question isn’t simply, How do we grow our church It is, What is God calling this particular congregation to become? And then: What will it take for us to become that church?

I attended CCD as the new Associate Rector of St. Paul’s, along with a long-time lay leader from our congregation. Honestly, we were like kids in a candy store. We couldn’t get enough. Every time someone introduced another model or framework, one of us would turn to the other with the same look: This could be useful.

It’s not that we think a new organizational model is going to save the church. We were excited because we want more tools in our toolbox. We want to become better listeners, better facilitators, better leaders, and better companions to our congregation as we discern what God is already doing among us.

CCD understands congregations as local expressions of the Body of Christ—each with its own history, culture, identity, gifts, challenges, and context. The work of congregational development is therefore not about imposing a universal formula. It is about helping a congregation become more fully itself, faithfully and intentionally. That is a profoundly theological project.

The church is an organization, but not just an organization

One of the things I appreciated most about CCD was the willingness to take organizational life seriously without reducing the church to an organization.

We used models that come from fields outside theology. We talked about systems, culture, and group dynamics. We thought about how people respond to change, how teams function, how leaders facilitate rather than simply direct, how power moves through organizations, and how congregations can become more adaptive and responsive.

At first glance, some of that language can sound decidedly corporate, but there is something deeply Christian about paying attention to how we actually live together. The church is the Body of Christ, and bodies have patterns. They have histories, develop habits, and carry wounds. They have nervous systems and respond to stress. They can become rigid or flexible, healthy or unhealthy. And if we are serious about being the Body of Christ in a particular place, then

we have to be willing to pay attention to the actual body we have been given.

The models don’t replace prayer, discernment, Scripture, sacrament, or the Holy Spirit. They give us another way of seeing, and sometimes seeing differently is the beginning of transformation.

A room full of different churches

Of course, my favorite part of the week was the people. There were priests, diocesan staff, and lay leaders from churches across Georgia, Florida, North Carolina, and beyond, including people who had traveled from as far away as California.

We came from very different congregations: Small churches. Large churches. Rural churches. Urban churches. Churches with long histories and churches trying to figure out what their future might look like. And yet we were there for essentially the same reason: We love the church, and we want to help it become what God is calling it to be.

There was something beautiful about watching that happen. A semester’s worth of material was somehow compressed into five days, and rather than feeling like a marathon of lectures, it became a kind of shared experiment. We learned together, practiced together, laughed together, wrestled with difficult questions, and began to develop a common language for talking about congregational life. The Spirit has a funny way of doing this.

Give a room full of Episcopalians enough time together, some theological reflection, a few organizational models, and a shared concern for the church, and somehow strangers begin to become colleagues, and then friends. By the end of the week, we weren’t simply people attending a training. We were becoming a community of people who could recognize one another as fellow practitioners in the strange, holy, sometimes frustrating work of helping congregations flourish.

And yet, I still don’t know what I’m doing

Here’s the funny thing. I didn’t come home from CCD with fewer questions. I came home with more.

Over these first few weeks at St. Paul’s, I’ve been taking in everything I can. I’ve been listening to people tell me what youth and children’s ministry has looked like in the past, what people loved, and what they hope might happen next. I’ve been discovering what structures exist and which ones don’t. I’ve been hearing good ideas from good people, and all of it matters.

Which means that sometimes it feels like I am trying to hold all of it at once. I recognize the feeling. It reminds me of the data-gathering phase of my doctoral research. There comes a point when you have listened to so many people and collected so much information that you become convinced that if you just analyze it a little harder, you will discover the perfect answer. It’s called analysis paralysis.

And I have to admit: CCD didn’t cure me of it. Maybe it did something better. It reminded me that the goal isn’t to find the perfect answer. The goal is to learn how to pay attention. I want to learn to ask better questions and notice the patterns, to listen for the congregation’s particular vocation and to discern where the Spirit is already moving and where we might be invited to join in.

That feels especially important to me right now because I am eager. I want to do things. I want to help. I want to build, strengthen, create, and imagine. But the church doesn’t need me to arrive with a master plan. It needs me to listen.

Becoming the church we are called to be

One of the great gifts of CCD is that it gave me hope without giving me an illusion of certainty. There is good work happening in our churches. There is hard work happening, and there is still so much work to do.

But perhaps that is not a problem to be solved. Perhaps it is simply what it means to be part of a living body. Congregations are always becoming (I spoke about this in depth when I dove into the work of Father Thomas Keating and his teachings around the Body of Christ as an organism, the mystical body of Christ — see around 20 minutes here). We inherit something from those who came before us. We receive the gifts and wounds of our history. We encounter a changing world. We discover new needs and new possibilities. Somewhere in the middle of all of that, we listen for the voice of the Spirit calling us forward.

I don’t know yet exactly where that will lead our congregation. I don’t know what our children’s ministry will look like a year from now. I don’t know what new ministries will emerge, what old ministries will be transformed, or what ideas we will eventually realize aren’t ours to pursue. I’m learning (slowly; I’m a work in progress), to be okay with that.

Because the work isn’t to make my church into the church I imagine. It is to help us become more fully the church God is calling us to be in this place, among these people, in this particular moment in the life of the world. That is why I went to the College for Congregational Development. Not because I needed someone to tell me how to grow a church, but because I wanted more tools to help us discern what faithfulness looks like here.

And after five days with people who are doing that same work all over the church, I came home tired, energized, full of ideas, and still drinking from the fire hose. But now I have a few more tools in my hands. And perhaps, more importantly, a renewed trust that we don’t have to figure it all out at once. We just have to keep listening. Keep learning. Keep paying attention, and keep becoming the Body of Christ we have been called to be.

Perhaps these are questions worth sitting with:

What is God already doing in your context (your congregation, community, or home)?

What are you being invited to notice?

What old patterns are giving life, and which ones are keeping the body from moving?

Where might you be tempted to rush toward an answer when what is needed first is deeper listening?

And who might your context become if you trusted that you don’t have to figure it all out at once?