Financial sustainability is the leading pain point in the mainline church. How do we maintain these buildings? How do we coordinate ministries without a centralized location? How do we pay for leaders? How do we engage younger generations when it’s clear they  don’t want to come on the Sunday morning?

Inspiring this creativity is the recognition that we are institutional leaders guiding our congregations into an age of collaboration. We run churches that tell people “Come sit  in our pews;” the people in our communities say, “Come meet us in our streets.” Congregations are closed systems. They are systems that you join. You only join one and are expected to make a  long-term commitment to its growth.

Today those kinds of closed systems are dying from their own organizational rigidity and high  maintenance costs. We don’t need congregations to coordinate our connections and communication  anymore. That means people don’t have to spend a few hours on a Sunday sitting in a pew in exchange for community and connection. They can still live out their faith in the community without joining a church.

This creates a value crisis for us.

Convergence assists you in finding creative ways we might amplify our new capacities for connecting people together in groups that support them in becoming more loving humans. We are just at the beginning of understanding the possibilities for  “being church” in this collaborative world. Our financial sustainability must be tied to our courage to imagine new ways of organizing.