Rebirth through Church Merger
A version of this article was originally published in the 17 March 2023 print edition of The Methodist Recorder.
When my mother was 39 weeks pregnant with me, she was type-cast as Mary for the Christmas pageant in a small British Methodist church. I was still in utero as I participated in leading worship for the first time.
Two weeks later, I came to church in my mother’s arms. I was passed from person to person in that small chapel as the congregation excitedly welcomed a new baby into their midst.
My baptism that Easter season proclaimed that I was part of God’s family, and that this place in God’s universal family was expressed through the love and care of a local congregation. I had been born of both water and spirit.
I know this story not because I continued to worship in this loving community. I know this story because it was told to me over and over again by my parents, who returned to the United States from England when I was a toddler. The only connections I had to the church that baptized me were stories, photo albums, Christmas cards that said “par avion,” and the gifts from my baptism: a Children’s Bible with a handwritten dedication and a napkin ring engraved with my name and the baptism date. They were small reminders, perhaps — and yet, that was enough.
The people in the church that baptized me remained present as the cloud of witnesses. They were part of the communion of saints. When I read that Children’s Bible and traced my finger over the inscription, I felt connected to a place I could not remember. We got out the napkin ring for special occasions, like the anniversary of my baptism day, and when we would host friends visiting from England.
As a university student, I traveled back to England and worshiped one Sunday morning in that little Methodist Church where I had been baptized. Aging members of the congregation took me by the hand and led me to the Cradle Roll hanging on the wall. “We prayed for you before you were born,” they told me. “We have prayed for you ever since.”
The prayers of this small congregation lifted me up as I answered a call to pastoral ministry. I loved the churches I served, but each church struggled in different ways. They shrank in size while the costs of buildings and clergy kept going up. How small would be too small? When would they have to make difficult decisions about their future?
The church I pastored most recently had historically been a very large church. In the 1950s, the youth choir alone had 100 choir members. I’ve seen pictures of them lined up on the chancel steps in robes, long lines facing the camera. Who knew that a few decades later the “youth choir alumni” list would be longer than the number of active members?
The building was designed for hundreds of people, but the parking lot only fit a handful of vehicles. The majority of funds were spent on building maintenance, leaving little for outreach. The ministries depended on countless volunteer hours but few people had any time available. The long-term members were tired.
We prayed and prayed. We tried so many “church growth” strategies. The numerical trajectory of the church kept going down, even as the faithfulness to God kept going up. Eventually, the church gave up its name, its building, and its identity in order to be faithful to God’s call in this new era.
They made the difficult decision to merge with another church. We considered it a rebirth of mission and ministry. We framed our decision to become a legacy church by saying that our original church, born in 1910, was being reborn in 2021.
“Can anyone be born after having grown old? Can one enter a second time into the mother’s womb and be born?” (John 3:4).
Very truly, I say to you, we experienced rebirth. We followed the winds of the Holy Spirit and learned what it meant to be “born from above” (John 3:7-8).
As the congregation concluded ministry in its old building, we invited back pastors, musicians, and members from previous eras. They told the current congregation that they had been praying for this rebirth for decades. It took a lot of prayer for the congregation to be born in 1910. It took just as much prayer for us to experience rebirth 111 years later.
After the merger, the winds of the Spirit blew me in a new direction. I moved to England with my clergy spouse, and a time of sabbatical led to a vocational rebirth with the Good Friday Collaborative.
My collaborators and I see ourselves as midwives for a new form of Christianity. The Christian structures and institutions that have guided us in the past may not be the forms we need for the future. What was born of bricks and mortar must now be reborn from above. We hear the sound of the wind, but we “do not know where it comes from or where it goes” (John 3:8). We just know the confusion of how this new birth will happen. And we know that the rebirth of the church will not be like the first birth.
This past autumn, my parents came to visit, and we journeyed across the country to the community where I had been born and baptized. We drove past the hospital, and then we had tea with my parents’ church friend. In the course of conversation, she reviewed the list of all of the beloved church members who had died over the past three decades. The communion of saints was getting larger.
The Methodist circuit now had several “saint congregations” as well. When my father had pastored on the circuit, he was one of three pastors serving six churches. Now the circuit had one pastor and two churches. The rest of the congregations had closed or merged. Most of the former buildings had been sold.
And even though I hadn’t grown up in these churches, I felt the loss. The community that had been known to me through stories could now only be known that way. Being reborn through water and the spirit came alongside the loss of physical structures and institutions. And yet the cloud of witnesses remains — praying for a future that has yet to be born.
“What is born of the flesh is flesh, and what is born of the Spirit is spirit” (John 3:6).
Do you long for congregational rebirth? Diane and the rest of the Good Friday Collaborative would be honored to walk alongside you. We are praying for your future yet to be born. Contact us for a free exploratory conversation.
