Ron Roth, WELS Stewardship and Church Growth Guru, should help this church get four or five pastors, or waste millions on remodeling the structure. Or start a rock band. That's the ticket.
Anonymous has left a new comment on your post "A Home Avoiding Pastor Makes a Church Avoiding Con...":
It saddens and frustrates me to hear people accuse WELS pastors of being unloving and uncaring for not making home visits.
I would ask the people making such accusations to consider things from the other perspective. I can't speak for all WELS pastors, but I can tell you about my situation. I serve a congregation of almost 2000 souls. I literally have a meeting or a group or a class every Monday through Thursday evening. Often times I also have a wedding rehearsal on Friday evening and a wedding on Saturday evening. Most weeks I'm lucky to spend one evening with my wife and kids per week.
I would LOVE to spend my evenings visiting my members rather than listening to the Ladies Aid talk about what kind of coffee to buy or listen to the elders squabble over pennies. But whenever I get the courage to suggest that the pastor might not need to attend every single meeting of every single organization, I'm told that I'm lazy and need to be a better leader and manager of the congregation. Whenever I try to get laymen to assume some leadership to free me up for home visits they tell me they're way too busy to help.
And even if I were to give up everything else in my ministry and visit members at home every single night of the week, every single day of the year, not ever spending a single night with my own family, it would still take almost six years to visit everyone.
Home visits are a wonderful thing in small congregations. But in large congregations like mine, they simply are not logistically possible, especially when congregations are too stingy to have an adequate pastoral staff of 4 or 5 pastors. It's not that I'm lazy, it's not I don't care about my people. It hurts me to hear people accuse me of that when it simply isn't true.
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GJ - Two points to consider - very few WELS congregations are that large. The smaller ones have pastors who never visit. I know one where the pastor was begged to bring Holy Communion to a dying member. He finally showed up, without communion. He could have gone home for his kit, but did not. He was known for not visiting members and he was a fanatical partisan for Church Growth.
I do not know this pastor or his congregation, so I have to give him the benefit of the doubt. If I could wave a wand, I would say, "Evening meetings begone. Just visit people." I am not sure evening visits need to dominate. Hospital and shut-in visits can be done during the day and they usually are done during the day.
Congregations should support more staff, but the stories about pastoral laziness are pretty common. I give all the glory to the Shrinkers who imported management theories and turned pastors into managers. They run the school systems of Missour, WELS, and the Little Sect on the Prairie.
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Anonymous has left a new comment on your post "WELS Pastor Answers Home Visiting Issue":
As the pastor who submitted this comment, I can assure you that I do hospital and shut-in visits during the day. That's just a given. But I don't think that was the issue at hand. The issue at hand was home visits, right? Good luck trying to find 90% of your members at home during the day. (I'm lucky to find 90% of my shut-ins at home during the day.)
I get the sense that you think I'm silly for suggesting that a congregation of 2000 should have 4 or 5 pastors. How many pastors do you think a congregation of that size should have? Please tell me you're not like my members who think one (or maybe two) pastor should be able to handle everything since he only works one day a week (if only!). If a congregation of 400 should have one pastor, shouldn't a congregation 5 times as big have a pastoral staff that's 5 times as big?
I also resent your insinuation that I somehow support rock bands or contemporary worship or the like. I can assure you that I am dead set against rubbish like that.
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GJ - I did not insinuate anything about this pastor. The Shrinkers think the solution is a huge building project and a rock band, dump the liturgy, etc. Ron Roth started that with TELL and continues it with his stewardship business (with Jeff Davis). That is like hiring the founders of Edsel to start a new car company.
I think a congregation of 2000 souls should have five pastors. If a congregation of 100 - 200 has one pastor, a congregation of 2000 should have many more.
I vicared with a pastor who had a congregation of around 2000. I am not sure about the numbers. He did two services per Sunday and had a German pastor doing weekly German services. He had a church administrator and a vicar. He did not like clergy staff. He had very few evening meetings per month. He visited constantly and made sure his vicars visited five days a week. There were various social type gatherings. What made that work was the close relationships within the congregation, extended families, etc.
Many years ago Father Neuhaus made the point that denominations were using up the trust built up by previous religious leaders. He was an apostate, but he made a good point.
