Sullivan UMC—J. Michael Smith
Today wasn’t one of my “in town” days, but I keep track! Bonnie and Chip were practicing music for the 11 a.m. worship. (The Praise Team was there last night working on the 9:30 a.m. worship.) And for too much of the day, Esther was waiting on the copy machine repair guy. Again.
Many of you may already know that our copy machine is…well…if you’re looking for the exact word to describe it, take a peak in my book, “Teaching the Preacher to Curse.” I know that Methodists have been feuding with Baptists now for a couple centuries, but I am officially calling a truce with the Baptists so we can focus all our fight on the Watts Copy Machine Company. I’ll keep you posted.
I met with Denise Williamee from the Moultrie County News Progress. They wanted an interview since I’m the new kid on the block. I tried not to embarrass the church.
Burge Report
Ryan Burge is a church sociologist, originally from Eastern Illinois University. He keeps us up to date with church statistics. The good, the bad, the ugly.
His report this morning used actuarial data to determine how many of us are still going to be alive in the years to come. As a denomination, this is the 2026 demographic distribution of United Methodists, excluding children:
–5% of us are between the ages of 18-29
–11% are 30-44
–21% are 45-59
–43% are 60-74
–20% are 75+
49% of us are Baby Boomers (born 1946-1964)
That’s almost half of all United Methodists, from a cohort that now is only 20% of the general population.
In the average United Methodist Church, when someone looks at a pictorial directory made this year, 30% of us will be deceased 15 years from now, 40% in 18 years, and 50% in 20 years. That’s according to actuarial tables.
How does a Church Council make decisions in the face of such an outlook? Here are a few things I incorporate into my pastoral leadership:
—Finances: the largest cost item of nearly every church is staff (pastoral, music, office, children, youth, etc.) In many cases, replacing paid staff with volunteers not only relieves weight on the budget, but it also frees up funds to fund the efforts of those volunteers. Sharing staff with other churches is also on the table.
—Institutional organization: consolidating boards and committees provides a more efficient way to make decisions and insure common sense management of a congregation’s capital assets. Consolidated administrative committees and boards frees up more people for actually doing ministry with each other and with the community.
—Asking “who” before “what”: helps us focus our ministries on those who are not involved in our current programs—engaging age groups not normally part of the average congregation. When we start with what we want to do, we tend to repeat the same programs year after year for the same dwindling group of participants. But when we start with who, we begin to think about real people (we name names), we learn the holes in their lives, the burdens they carry, and the unfulfilled dreams they harbor. We shift our ministries. Both our members and our neighbors find our church programs vastly more meaningful in their lives.
—Working the Map—we normally think of our “partners” as those who are officially members of our church. But when we look at the whole map of our community, and we begin to list the actual ministry “products” we are offering our neighbors, and we begin looking for outside partners for each distinct ministry product—we find money and volunteer help from all over the community. If we insist that someone must be a member of our church to do something—then those of us already in the church get more and more exhausted, and our funds become more and more strained, and our vision becomes narrower and narrower. But when we “Work the Map,” we can do far more to love our neighbors (and God) than if we stay exclusively within our own membership. We open up a whole new world of financial and volunteer partners—including some of those who are younger.
I look forward to having conversations with you about this data and how we can help our churches navigate through it. Let’s get together and talk.
(P.S. I know that the actuarial tables don’t look so hot for us—but I have a rule: NOBODY IS ALLOWED TO KICK THE BUCKET FOR THE FIRST SIX MONTHS OF MY MINISTRY HERE. No exceptions!)
Repertoire 