Recommending Faith-Specific Resources

How might we live out such a view in the daily work of assisting congregational leaders with resources? When I began resourcing work a few years ago, I found myself stumped by the calls that came in asking for a Lutheran approach to strategic planning, a Methodist approach to making a church accessible, or a Jewish approach to a seeker service (we have received that request).

What do I do with this?

In some measure, it is a question of knowledge and experience. When someone asks for a Methodist approach to accessibility, it is quite often that someone does not yet understand well the world of resources. The person is simply less experienced. I can be confident that, as they work more in congregational life, they will learn better. I know that, if I were to consult with Methodist leaders on that issue, those leaders would themselves advise the person that such resources don't need to be denominationally specific.

Sometimes, I take the question at face value. At least among the larger mainline denominations like the Lutherans and Methodists, the idea that there should be denominationally specific resources on everything is still lively enough that on major subjects like worship or evangelism you can go to the Augsburg or Cokesbury catalogs and find something.

Yet, in referring people to catalogues of denominational publishing houses, I know that it is rare for the denominational identity in those resources to be anything more than skin deep. And it is rare that the denominational resource on a subject would necessarily be the best resource available. All too often denominational resources are knock-offs: a slightly adapted version of an approach whose real source and best expression is elsewhere. Why not read the original?

To take an extreme example, Jewish congregations are increasingly influenced by an approach to outreach that originates in seeker churches like Willow Creek. I suppose I could find resources for Jewish outreach that had the Christian references stripped out and a Jewish veneer added. But, on the whole, I would prefer to send a Jewish leader to Hybels or to the Harvard Business School case study of Willow Creek.

I do this because I think that a synagogue would do well to only borrow from such models after thinking through how they are particularly Christian and how they grow integrally out of evangelical Christian traditions that ought to raise questions for a synagogue. Reading the original, all this will be clear to a Jewish leader. Also, it has a power and a subtlety that a knock-off cannot match. (As an aside, Robert Senge’s book on creating learning communities is a better, more powerful book than any of the books written about how to make churches or synagogues into learning communities.)