Saturday, June 28, 1997

'Big Hairy Audacious Goal' can halt church rot

By Clark Morphew / Knight-Ridder Newspapers

I'm haunted by the presence of St. Brutus by the (Bankrupt) Department Store, a huge, dirty-looking old church with Gothic stained-glass windows and a brilliant, shining past. For the moment, let us not talk about the present or the future, because St. Brutus has become a symbol of how quickly mission disappears and rot sets in.

All around St. Brutus you can see decay. The single-family residences are owned by absentee landlords who wait for condemnation notices before repairs are considered. Much of the core city that once teemed with activity has moved to the suburbs. Now downtown is a series of junk shops, taverns and discount stores with seedy second-floor apartments lingering in filth and neglect.

This is not a place where people with money tend to hang out. Yet, on Sunday mornings the furs and the three-piece-suits appear. The expensive cars pull into the St. Brutus parking lot and sit for a bit over an hour as the Gospel message is dispensed in plain-spoken certainty - he same way each Sunday since 1908.

The average age of the St. Brutus parishioner is 61. The church does not want to die. Its members make decisions to leap out of the rut, but the furrow is deep and the congregational will is weak.

At the moment, St. Brutus has no mission. It is not a church. It is a club. People come to St. Brutus to be entertained. They come out of habit, to see their friends and to maintain a tradition.

A long time ago, St. Brutus had a mission. It was the central institution in the city, and it influenced the values of the entire community.

It was way back in the late '40s that St. Brutus publicly announced that it was a church focused on youth. The members kept their word with two youth pastors and dozens of programs. The church building, with a gymnasium and numerous rooms set aside for youth, was the place young people wanted to be when the church opened its doors.

But along the way, someone dropped the vision, and it appears to be lost forever. Once lost, visions are difficult to rediscover and almost impossible to rekindle.

St. Brutus is an excellent example of a congregation that was not built to last. These once-powerful congregations dot the urban landscape across America like wounded angels, destined for glory but caught in midflight by blurred vision. Suddenly they find themselves in a quandary: Do we deserve to live or is it time for us to die?

It is not surprising, therefore, that pastors of large congregations are asking the kinds of questions St. Brutus should have raised 40 years ago. After the euphoria produced by a rapidly growing membership, pastors with vision are asking if they have created a monster, a useless monolith or a living, ever-changing vehicle for a religion's message.

Visionary clergy say congregations built to last must have a BHAG (pronounced Bee Hag) - short for Big Hairy Audacious Goal - that will drive the congregation into the future. If a congregation has the right BHAG, pastors can come and go, neighborhoods can change, denominations can drift into indifference but the church with a BHAG goes on forever.

NEXT, a magazine of the Leadership Network (P.O. Box 199277, Dallas, Texas 75219-9277; 800-765-5323) offers this description: "A BHAG reaches out and grabs them (members) in the gut. It is tangible, energizing (and) highly focused. People get it right away; it takes little or no explanation."

Sometimes, according to NEXT, the charismatic leader who built the congregation from nothing to a fire-breathing powerhouse, is the first person to resist a BHAG.

That's why church leaders should review and recommit themselves to the core values and purpose of the congregation before BHAGs are even discussed. But in the process of developing a BHAG, every church will discover strengths, weaknesses and the precise location of congregational rot.

(Clark Morphew is an ordained clergyman and is religion writer for the Saint Paul Pioneer Press. Write to him at the Saint Paul Pioneer Press, 345 Cedar St., St. Paul MN 55101.)

(c) 1997, Saint Paul Pioneer Press (St. Paul, Minn.). Distributed by Knight-Ridder/Tribune Information Services.