Spring Mount Mennonite Church

Written by Pastor Michael King

Necessity has been a key catalyst for leadership development at Spring Mount Mennonite Church, where I pastor. In 1997 when I began my role at Spring Mount, then in interim assignment, that my duties might include helping the congregation bury itself with dignity. Years of challenges, including deaths of key members, departures of younger participants, and leadership transitions, had weakened the congregation; its future appeared dim. But as often as we discussed burial in those early days, the congregation refused to die, probably partly because having its back to the wall generated new urgency to work at missional turnaround.

From Duty to Call

And leadership development. During its time of troubles, the congregation’s dwindling numbers had left many participants feeling burned out. They struggled as what had become a skeleton “staff” tried to keep the congregation’s entire range of programs afloat. Leadership development in such a context has turned out to entail two essential ingredients: First, the congregation has worked at reframing service in the congregation from duty to call. Along with other leaders, I have urged that persons not continue in roles that are sapping them if their only motivation is duty—“We have to keep things going even if it kills us!” If some roles or areas of activity die due to lack of people feeling called to maintain them, then we need to accept such deaths. On the other hand, if participants discover roles or activities that are not currently present but to which they feel called, then we work at finding ways to structure the congregation to fit their areas of passion.

Culture of Empowerment

Second, the congregation and I have worked in relation to leadership at creating a culture of empowerment. The goal has been to reframe leadership from an activity engaged in primarily by paid pastors along with a few key lay leaders to an activity everyone in some way engages in. For me as pastor, this has meant learning to conceptualize my own leadership as incorporating areas of hands-on leadership—I do most of the preaching and pastoral care, for example. But I also stay out of the way of others’ gifts and encouraging them to follow their passions rather than slide into doing it for them. Over time, at least as I see it, this has helped generate an ever more empowered team of leaders ranging across many aspects of congregational life.

A recent example: a denominational body wanted to meet in our congregational building during a time when I was swamped with pastoral care crises. I felt overwhelmed by the prospect of helping to host the group. But then I spoke to the head of our hospitality committee and discovered that she’d be happy to take on all the logistics related to the event. Suddenly she was the leader in that area and I was the relieved bystander.

Beyond Ethnic Mennonites

Perhaps our most prominent congregational investment in working at operating by sense of call and empowering persons to fulfill a call has been calling and hiring an associate pastor to work with me as part of a team. Here again necessity helped produce leadership development. When I arrived at Spring Mount, it appeared unlikely this primarily Swiss-German Mennonite congregation could again thrive simply by drawing in more Swiss-German Mennonite members. We would somehow have to welcome participants from our local communities or die.

I worked diligently at this agenda for some five years and believe I helped set the stage for what happened next. But while on a four-month sabbatical I concluded that I had done what I knew to do in that area; other potential directions and leaders needed to be explored.

Connecting to the Local Community

As it turned out, one of our congregational participants, Don McDonough, had himself been testing for years whether he sensed a call to ministry—and had concluded while I was on sabbatical that he did and that he felt called to pursue it in some form, whether at Spring Mount or elsewhere. As we shared our respective visions, we realized we had and exciting possibility to explore and so set out to test the possibility of calling Don as associate. Throughout a year of careful discernment at multiple congregational and denominational levels, Don’s calling was confirmed. In addition, precisely the process of testing the call at so many levels helped Don to feel empowered for the role.

This was also a crucial development in relation to connecting with our local communities, because Don, owner of his own landscaping business and a Mennonite by adult choice who was raised Lutheran, has widespread involvements in a broad range of local networks. This in turn has helped the congregation attract participants from the local community, to the point that some Sundays a majority of worship participants were raised in settings other than Mennonite.

Even now Spring Mount remains relatively small and sometimes frail. We have far to travel. Still we can see the fruits of necessity combined with the promptings of the Holy Spirit as we experience a congregation less driven by duty, more enticed by call, and empowered to serve with passion.

—Michael A. King, Telford, Pennsylvania, is pastor, Spring Mount (Pa.) Mennonite Church; owner, Cascadia Publishing House; editor, DreamSeeker Magazine; and a free lance writer plus occasional seminar speaker. Parts of this material are expanded on in “At the End of Ethnic Mennonite Life,” DreamSeeker Magazine, Winter 2007, www.CascadiaPublishingHouse.com/dsm/winter07/kingsview.htm

Schedule I Models of Leadership Development I Questions for Presenters I Questions for Written Desciptions