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From Outreach Magazine 2007, Issue 2

Rev. Amos Glenn

I had no idea what I was getting us into. It seemed clear that General Church Outreach was planning something interesting so I filled out the application, received the good news of our grant, and began planning—all without really understanding what a "campaign" was. The next step was to convince Burgandy Smith to take two days off work, fly to Boulder (my main selling point), and learn how to run a campaign—all without explaining to her what a "campaign" was (not that she didn’t ask). The fact that she actually went told me that we had the right person.

As the training progressed, I would look over at Burgandy and see my own worried look mirrored on her face. We were learning that a "campaign" deserved every ounce of that name. This wasn’t a short series of doctrinal classes or an advertised sermon series. But it was an exciting opportunity to build something entirely new in the Pittsburgh New Church community, something that would not only help us develop new ties to our neighborhood but also strengthen relationships within the existing membership. Our team sat down together and started working on developing a campaign that would work in Pittsburgh. We left Boulder tired but excited about the prospects of being part of a great cooperative experiment.

Upon arriving back in Pittsburgh, we needed to get underway immediately. We started with the campaign as a whole and then worked on specific issues. First, we (new assistant to the pastor Mac Frazier, Burgandy, and myself) went through every aspect of the campaign and stripped away anything we thought would be a barrier to participation, everything from fees to foreign vocabulary in the materials. The whole idea of a campaign was new enough, and we needed to make access as easy as possible.

Brain–storming names of people to ask to serve in various campaign leadership roles came next, and was our first real hurdle. With an average weekly church attendance of 79, the Pittsburgh New Church is not a big church, but it’s not exactly a small church either. Filling all the positions as described in the General Church Outreach material would mean putting a significant portion of our active membership on the leadership team, but cutting out positions would mean significant portions of the campaign would either go un–served or, more likely, fall to the pastor.

We solved this dilemma by creating a campaign leadership system that focused on the unique strengths of the Pittsburgh New Church. We ended up with a Leadership Team made up of Pastoral Staff and Campaign Director (leading the overall campaign together), Enrollment Coordinator (marketing to members and making sure everyone finds a group), Marketing Coordinator (marketing to people not yet connected with the church), Group Leader Coordinator (recruiting, training, and supporting group leaders), and Events Coordinator (planning and executing almost all aspects of the campaign events). This management system worked extremely well for us and we plan on using it again for future campaigns. The most important lesson we learned, though, was that any obstacle can be overcome when the right people are in the right positions.

In one interesting development when staffing the leadership team, we recruited Matt and DeNese Olson to serve together as the Enrollment Coordinator. I wasn’t sure how this was going to work, but it turned out to be a brilliant part of the system. By bringing the strengths of a married couple to the tasks, more was done in better (and different!) ways that we would have thought. We plan on experimenting further with using couples to serve in what we think of as single coordinator positions.

By the end of the campaign, prodded by my close work with these excellent coordinators in a system of shared responsibility, I had begun to redefine my own role as pastor. I was coming to a clearer understanding of the difference between leadership and management. The materials given to us by General Church Outreach clearly defined the pastor’s role as a leader, not a coordinator; as a vision caster, not a boss; as someone looking out for the whole congregation, teaching them about charity within their roles and leading them to see the potential of what we were trying to accomplish. As much as part of me tried to get into a coordinator role (there was lots of work to be done!), my teams would not let me. They clearly saw the need for a leader who spent his time thinking about and working on the biggest picture. They wanted to see how their work served the whole. It was an amazing experience to force myself to let other people do the work I knew they could do—the work they wanted to do! Giving them the freedom and responsibility to do their best from their own affections allowed them to feel they were a genuine part, not only of the campaign, but of the whole church community.

Creating "buzz" and enrolling participants was not easy in Pittsburgh, but we continued to discover better methods as we geared up for the campaign kick–off. In the final week before launch, we had a veritable deluge of people signing up; new groups were being formed daily, if not hourly. Just getting as much information out to as many people as possible seemed the most effective way of marketing to current members and friends. It was during the campaign when the excitement really started. In Pittsburgh, we have never really done anything like this before.

Small groups were very foreign, and lay–led classes happened but not often or regularly. However, during the campaign members of our church who rarely spoke to each other were now conversing weekly about topics important to them. People felt they had something in common with just about anyone. "How are you doing this week?" was a not uncommon question asked around our community. As I and others had hoped, new relationships were being formed and old connections were being strengthened.

Did we grow numerically? Not really. Numerical growth was not the priority goal in my mind for our campaign in Pittsburgh. I wanted this campaign to be an agent of change within our congregation, a chance for us to grow toward being a more cohesive, familiar, friendly, and happy community. Church attendance increased and has not returned to pre–campaign levels. More people were reading the Word regularly. We are re–examining how we open ourselves to newcomers, how we integrate people into our community, and how we serve our larger, surrounding communities. These are all signs of genuine growth.

This fall, 2007, we are again participating in the General Church Outreach campaign. We’ve completed our application, been given a grant, and we’re now making travel plans to attend the training event. We are planning some turnover in the leadership team, but the big difference this time is that there is no question in any of our minds about whether this will work in Pittsburgh. At the end of last year’s campaign, the question asked of me most was "When are we going to do another campaign?". This time, I know what we are getting ourselves into, and I couldn’t be more excited.

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