Asset Based Ministry

So, is the glass half full or half empty?

The answer, of course, is that it's both -- depending on how you choose to look at it.

We are conditioned to look at the empty half of the glass. We are drawn to see deficiencies, deficits, shortages, needs. Partly, it's human nature. But it's also being thoroughly immersed in a consumer culture which depends on all of us seeing what we need rather than what we have. After all, if we were content with what we have, we would stop buying more stuff and our economy would crash. So we're programmed to be more aware of what we don't have than what we do have.

But what if focusing on deficits prevents us from seeing the unrecognized, therefore untapped and unused, assets, gifts and abilities that are already in our midst?

John McKnight

John McKnight teaches at Northwestern University in Chicago. McKnight has pioneered something called "Asset Based Community Development." It's based on the simple belief that every community, no matter how disadvantaged and deficient it may appear, has a wealth of assets. Community development is a matter of identifying and harnessing those latent assets to build community.


What happens instead is that the people in these communities are turned into needy "clients" who require institutional and professional services to survive. This leads to a cycle of dependency and disempowerment, and the inability of people to take charge of their own lives and solve their own problems.

(You can learn more about Asset Based Community Development by going to www.abundantcommunity.com )

There are so many parallels to the church today. We, too, tell a constant story of deficiency, deficit, decline and impending death. Largely this is because we operate out of a remembered model of church that thrived in the middle of the 20th century when it was created, but that no longer works in today's world. Our vision of what a church is and what a church ought to be able to do is powerfully controlled by this memory, and it always makes us think we are failing in comparison to the church we once knew.

Churches almost always start by talking about their needs -- more people, more young people, more money, more staff. What do we make churches do before they search for a new minister? Complete a "Joint NEEDS Assessment." Our default question is, "What do you need?"

McKnight's argues that the first question in any community should always be "What are your assets?" Assets can address deficits, but deficits cannot create assets. The key question is not "What do you need?" but "What do you have?"

Broadway United Methodist Church in Indianapolis, Indiana is a former tall steeple, big pulpit church that, like many of our congregations, began to decline in the 1960s. Ten years ago, they had a Sunday attendance of 75 in a sanctuary seating 1250. Sound familiar?

Broadway, led by its Pastor Mike Mather, made a radical decision. They decided to scrap all their traditional community outreach ministries like their soup kitchen, their youth program. They realized that they for all their effort, conditions in their community were getting worse, not better. Their programs made them feel good, but did little to improve people's lives.

Instead, they went out into the community and asked questions about people gifts, abilities and assets -- not what they lacked, but what they had. One question they used was, "Tell us about three things you can do that you could teach somebody else."

The results were startling. They discovered that in this lower income, "disadvantaged" community was a wealth of gifts they did not know was there. The church had brought in an "expert" in community development from a nearby university to tell them how to start a community garden. Their survey showed that there were 35 accomplished gardeners living near the church. So they began to tap into their abilities and knowledge.

http://www.broadwayumc.org/index.html
http://www.abundantcommunity.com/home/stories/parms/1/story/20150430_death_and_resurrection_of_an_urban_church.html
http://www.abundantcommunity.com/home/stories/parms/1/story/20150518_from_charity_to_empowerment_interview_with_mike_mather_of_indianapoliss_broadway_umc.html

Moving from needs assessment to asset assessment has completely changed Broadway's understanding of what it means to be a church in their neighbourhood.

So what if we were to make the same commitment -- to divert the time and energy we spend listing our deficits, and began to build on our assets -- and not just those of the congregation, but the community around us?

True, most of our churches are struggling to sustain an aging building, full time paid ministry and the traditional round of church programs. And we see decline, disbandment and death as the only alternative.

I am convinced that, even though our culture is not drawn to many traditional forms of congregational life, there is a spiritual yearning and a movement of the Spirit that the is open to the Christian story in new and undiscovered ways. Our calling is to become communities that are able to share that story in ways that touch people's lives.

I am also convinced that in our congregations, stressed and struggling as they are, we have a wealth of assets we are not seeing and not releasing.

And that's the place to start -- with what we do have, not what we don't have.