The Boston Shuffle

This is a series on church planting in the city. While I am no expert, I hope this series will ask the hard questions about consumerism vs. discipleship, money, contextualized mission, race and the future of American cities. Every Monday a new topic will begin with further posts on that topic posted throughout the week. You can see a rough schedule of these posts here. Links are provided to the rest of the series at the bottom of the post.

The shuffle. Whether you are referring to cards, the iPod or the dance, the idea is the same. You are moving around pre-existing items and in the case of the iPod, you are randomly jumping from song to song until you find one you like. Unfortunately, an analogy can be made to many of our recent church plants. As I talked about in our last post, church planting is often overwhelmed by the consumeristic nature of the American church. Here me out, I am on the side of church planters, I really am. No one starts a church in the city with a desire for consumeristic Christianity. No one ever plants a church with the intention of taking Christians from other churches in the city or merely facilitating a “Christian club” atmosphere with little to no real engagement in mission. However, this is just what is happening and in Boston there is a name for it: The Boston Shuffle.

One reason for this shuffle is financial. Many urban church plants are like “start-ups” and begin with a full operating budget (or at least have their salary covered) from outside supporters for a period of 3-5 years. As soon they hit the ground, the clock towards self-sustainability starts ticking. Planters may have the best intentions to be missional and to reach out to non-Christians, however, to really reach Boston as a pastor means ministering to either disillusioned (by the sex scandal) Roman Catholics, legitimate post-Christians, and (though some camps marginalize this) reaching the immigrant populations. There is now a whole generation of Bostonians whose Baby Boomer parents have chosen to raise their kids without religion. In Boston, it would be wrong to assume an individual is familiar with the basic Bible story of Jonah, for instance. Once individuals realize the soil is slightly rougher than expected, they check the clock find their money is running out and are then left debating whether or not to encourage the addition of the already churched (and already tithing) vis a vie transitioning from a missional based model to an attractional based one.

Another reason for this shuffle is denominational change. According to the Pew Forum, roughly 44% of Americans now profess a religious affiliation that is different from the religion in which they were raised. This is especially true of the Anglican church (the denomination I belong to). We have seen tremendous growth over the last decade from either disenfranchised evangelicals yearning for a deeper understanding of church history or Roman Catholics who desire an evangelical faith with a familiar liturgy. In Boston, the “Anglo-curious”, as I call them, first come to church on Ash Wednesday, Easter Vigil or some other Feast or Fast day that isn’t celebrated in their evangelical denomination. The only problem is that many of these “Anglican converts” are better proselytizers of the liturgy than they are of the Gospel.

The Boston shuffle has actually become so bad in Boston that a well-known senior evangelical pastor and seminary professor does not encourage the planting of churches.  He argues this is because they end up just shuffling people around from church to church. So what is the answer? I think it’s two-fold. First we just need to say no. When healthy evangelicals come knocking at your door looking to switch churches because of preference, kindly say no. Ed Stetzer recently wrote a similar post in which he had no problem saying no to an individual who wanted to join his church. Sure it sounds crazy, but trust me, it’s better than waking up five years later and realizing that your church has had no conversions or adult baptisms in one of the most unchurched areas in the United States.

Second, we need a culture change. Mike Breen writes in his book Building a Discipleship Culture, “If you make disciples you always get the church. But if you make a church, you rarely get disciples.” Our focus needs to be, once again, focused on drawing those who are far from God to God. In Boston, we are transitioning from a Christian culture to a post-Christian one. Pastors are no longer managers and curators, we have to be facilitators of mission (I would also argue that pastors should reflect mission in their own lives- a good question to ask is: Are your pastors on mission themselves?) The only way we can get our core group to be on mission is to encourage in them discipleship and be on mission ourselves. Our end goal shouldn’t be a building, a salary, a certain number of congregants, programs or staff members. Our end goal should be a movement of disciples making disciples which in turn leads to mission.

Posts in this Series

Sex in the City: Do We Still Need Urban Church Plants?
Consumerism, Competition and Celebrities
The Boston Shuffle