Listening and Learning: The Role of Evaluation in Future Church Pilots

by Tim Snyder, PhD
External Evaluator

Almost two decades ago, while in college, I found myself one afternoon skipping class to meet up with a group of community leaders in a coffee shop in San Antonio. They had come from around the United States including places like Denver, Seattle, Minneapolis, and Charlotte. What they shared, however, is that – each in their own way – they led creative ministries that were part of the ELCA. At the time, a group of friends and I were leading an “alt worship” community called Intermission located on the campus of Texas Lutheran University. Though I grew up as something of a Lutheran poster child, by then, I was certain I wouldn’t consider myself part of the ELCA after graduation. Listening and learning from those leaders in the coffee shop that day, however, changed everything for me.

A few months later, a few of us from the Intermission team launched a new mission development called The Netzer Co-op – a community that worshipped together and risked faith-based social action together for the next three years. At the heart of that community was a series of questions about what it meant to be church and followers of Jesus in this time and place. Those questions continued to bother me through my time at Luther Seminary where I first met the Future Church Pilots project director, Christian Scharen. Those bothersome questions took me to the UK to learn from the Fresh Expressions movement, and eventually to write a thesis on House of Mercy, a creative congregation in St. Paul that embodies an ironic kind of ingenuity (as their website says it, “you should come, it’s not that bad”). Eventually, they even took me to Boston to pursue a PhD (I’m a slow learner but committed to the process).

So, when Christian invited me to be a part of this project, it was an easy, yes! Communities like our Future Church Pilots partners have shaped my own spiritual journey and my theological imagination for decades. My role in the project is to give some leadership to our evaluation work. Sometimes “evaluation” can sound as if we intend to put our partners under the microscope or through some kind of test. But the model of evaluation we have adopted for this project is really about better understanding the complexity at play here – especially the complexity that lies between their innovations and the ELCA as a wider system (a system that historically has not encouraged or supported significant degrees of diversity or divergence). Sure, there will be surveys and interviews and the like, but all of that is designed so that we can better listen and learn from our partners. We hope to stir up some questions that will bother some folks and, if possible, point us towards a future church.

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