Episcopal Church Foundation Vestry Papers - for leading congregations

We’ve been having a great deal of success with our Sunday morning adult formation at St. George’s in Valley Lee, and it doesn’t have anything to do with new people. This year we tried something new, something a little bit bold, but I wanted to see if it’d work. And it has, so far.

A little bit about our immediate past: as is the case at many congregations, a Sunday morning at St. George’s is a busy and wonderful time. There’s a lot to do and catch up on, but save for Children’s Chapel and Sunday School classes for kids and youth, there’s not a lot of intentional formation going on. Worship is part and parcel of formation, I know, and meaningful worship and lively music and rich fellowship remain strong and central to our Sunday morning offering.

In previous years, we tried to offer an adult bible study. Oh, we tried everything: lectionary series, intensive 36-week study of one book, a co-teacher, and various hosts for various sessions of the class. But, year after year, the trends repeated themselves: it’d start off strong in September, maybe 15 people gathered in the conference room, and those numbers and, more so, that energy and commitment kept up through October, and then numbers would start dropping, one by one, leaving only a few really committed adult students a few weeks by the first Sunday of Advent. The week we’d resume in January, most of them forgot all about it – Christmas having erased their brain, I guess – and it’d stall out right then and there.

At some point in the late summer, as I was praying about and gearing up again for this program year, I felt a sudden call – an urge, really. We were being called, I sensed, to put all the energy, all the time, all the resources of our church – or at least what we do, and why we do it – into discipleship making. If those things don’t fit the fairly loose category called “Making Disciples” then we weren’t going to do them, or at least we weren’t going to stress about them. If those things were about Discipleship 101, even if they had the faintest, loosest connection to it, we were going to shine greater light on them and move them to the center.

What this meant, in turn, is that we had to stop doing certain things, and that’s when I realized that our previous attempts at significant adult formation on Sunday mornings were wasted because we laid our programming philosophy at the altar of “there’s a space for everyone here all the time.” Coffee hour and, invariably, endless discussions of one’s football team or presidential candidate of choice were so dominant, so exclusive, so strong that they were squeezing out any chance to develop something alongside of it, something resembling an adult bible study. Even for those souls who wanted to learn more about Paul’s letter to the Romans, they couldn’t, largely because the draw of hanging out with your friends over a cup of coffee was so much greater.

And that’s when we did this bold thing that’s changed the game: we set up tables right there, right in the parish hall on Sunday mornings. Right there where coffee hour happens, we dropped in adult formation.

Now don’t get me wrong: fellowship is wonderful formation, too, as is that Eighth Sacrament – also known as coffee hour. That’s why we let that common space linger and have its time, too. Coffee hour is something I greatly enjoy, as well. Depending on the length of the sermon, coffee hour after the 8 o’clock service can last for a good 40 minutes or so. And then we start the adult forum; most stay, some leave, still others come earlier than they would to participate. A ‘parachute drop’ of serious Christian formation designed specifically for adults (most) every Sunday, and most of them wanted it all along, after all.

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