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2006 End of Year Apportionment List (.pdf format)

By Charlie Parker
Baltimore-Washington Conference staff

'No good tree bears bad fruit, nor again does a bad tree bear good fruit; for each tree is known by its own fruit.'  - Luke 6: 43-44

We have all been hearing a lot of talk about the 'fruits' of the Discipleship Adventure, and I have heard a lot of concerns raised by pastors and churches about being evaluated on these fruits. 'They?re too numbers driven.' 'They don?t capture the work that our church is doing.' I hear these and similar concerns on a regular basis. Let?s take a brief look at these fruits and why they are important.

The first point to make is that these measures are really not simply about meeting arbitrary numerical standards of success; they are about setting goals for ourselves and our churches; they are about giving us some specific objectives to shoot for.

Measuring fruits is a way to get a handle on how we are fulfilling the Great Commission (Matt. 28: 19-20) and the Great Command-ment (Matt. 22: 37-40). Most of our churches set goals that are so vague that we never know if we have succeeded or not.

If our goal is 'to get more young people,' what does that look like? Is it a new youth group? Is it a new choir? Is it people under 35 in our church leadership? How do we measure success?

The first two fruits the churches of the Baltimore-Washington Conference are striving for have to do with attracting new people into our churches: new professions of faith (one for every 25 worshipping members) and growth in worship attendance (2 percent per year over the growth rate in the surrounding community).

Now it is certainly true, that there are all sorts of reasons why a church might not meet these goals in any given year. But if a church (or pastor) goes year after year without seeing new people being brought to Christ (confessions of faith) or new people celebrating God?s work in their lives (increased worship attendance), then it?s time to ask some hard questions.

It?s simply not good enough to say that 'our neighborhood isn?t growing.' The Great Commission is to 'Go, therefore, and make disciples of all nations.' The operative word in that phrase is 'Go!'

It is not enough to sit and wait for 'all nations' to find us; we?re supposed to go to them. And if they?re not around our church, then maybe our church is in the wrong place. I suspect, however, that more often we just aren?t really looking particularly hard. Or maybe the people we?re seeing don?t look quite like us, or don?t worship the way we want to worship.

The third fruit is mission outreach, specifically: 1) starting some sort of concrete mission program (along the lines of Shalom Zones); 2) having 90 percent of our worshipers involved in ministry; and 3) paying our apportionments.

It?s so easy for us to become focused on our own institutional needs, but Christ?s call to us is so clearly aimed at keeping focused outward.

The first of these goals affirms that it is the role of the church to provide the structures for people to live out their call to ministry. It?s not enough to simply say, 'Go on out there and do some good.' We need to provide some concrete opportunities for them to do that.

The second goal affirms that if our brothers and sisters are comfortable sitting in the pew on Sunday and not moving out, then something is not happening on Sunday that needs to. Sunday is when we get to charge our spiritual battery for ministry. If we?re not involved in ministry, then what is the battery being charged for?

The third goal affirms that we are part of a broader connectional structure of ministry, not simply doing ministry on our own. A couple of weeks ago, I was leading a stewardship discussion at one of our churches, and I had the great joy of witnessing a stewardship epiphany.

'We can?t ask our parishioners to make their church giving a priority,' a man said, 'if we?re not modeling that on the church level by making our apportionment giving a priority as well.' Exactly! Apportionment giving is one of the ways that we model that our churches are engaged in mission on a global scale.

The fourth fruit is 'signs and wonders.' That one, we?re not going to try and quantify. But that shouldn?t mean that it?s not a real goal. People came to follow Jesus when he touched their lives in miraculous ways. People joined the Acts 2 church when they saw the power of the Spirit released on Pentecost. Where is the power of the Spirit visible in our churches?

These fruits - these goals of our Discipleship Adventure - are not perfect measures. They are attempts to get us to set real, concrete objectives towards which our churches can work.

They are not intended to be disciplinary tools, but challenges for us in our life together.

Obviously, they cannot capture all of the wonderful work that is going on in our churches; but they are a way to start to see that work. If you have other ways capturing the wonderful work going on in your church, let your gbwc_superuseres and superintendents know what they are. We are all on this adventure together and can learn from one another.

Christ tells us that each tree is 'known by its fruit.' What are the fruits that your church is known by?