By Rev. Kathy Neary and Patrick Scriven
Kathy Neary: Hi Patrick, I understand you have an alternative idea to my drastic idea of “close 90% of our churches and turn the other 10% into Discipleship Centers.” Before we jump in, would you please introduce yourself to our readers and tell us a little about why you care about the future of The UMC?
Patrick Scriven: I’d be happy to.
I was raised in the Midwest in a family that attended church weekly. The particular church we attended was often a moving target, as my mother was always searching for something spiritually that felt just out of reach.
So, I was baptized Catholic, confirmed in the ELCA, and later re-baptized by Pentecostals while exploring more Evangelical expressions of Christianity.
After college, I attended a seminary related to the American Baptists and the United Church of Christ, where at least a third of the students were Unitarian Universalists.
In 2000, I graduated from seminary, and we moved from Boston to Vancouver, WA. Soon after, I was hired as a youth director at Vancouver First UMC, and I’ve worked in The United Methodist Church ever since. This is my 18th year working for the conference.
Because my childhood involved close to a dozen churches, I’ve appreciated the consistency of our connection. I also value our desire—sometimes aspirational, of course—to be a place for all.
In practical terms, United Methodism meant my wife, who grew up in traditions that limited women’s leadership, could respond fully to her calling and become a pastor. And yes, that has still meant an adult life spent in multiple churches, because life as a clergy spouse keeps you on the move.
KN: Please tell us about your idea for addressing the decline in our ability to make disciples of Jesus Christ for the transformation of the world.
PS: I’ll grant your fundamental critique. Many of our congregations have de-centered discipleship and spiritual formation. We’ve poured enormous effort into maintaining Sunday worship and keeping the institution afloat, while the slow, demanding work of forming disciples often becomes an optional add-on. In that sense, the alarm is worth sounding.
Where I part company is with the conclusion that the congregational model itself is the obstacle. The problem isn’t that we have churches. The problem is that we have too many churches operating with too little capacity—stretched so thin that “doing church” consumes the energy that could go toward becoming disciples.
If we want to take discipleship seriously, we should stop spreading our resources like butter scraped over too much bread. Instead of replacing congregations with a new structure, we should consolidate for capacity: fewer churches, but well-resourced enough to offer the whole ecosystem of Christian life. Offering, planning, and supporting worship, formation, pastoral care, and local witness requires more than one overextended pastor and a handful of volunteers; it requires a team.
How many fewer churches? I feel like I am naming the reality of needing to close 90% of our churches, while you are skirting the issue.
Moving boldly will require change, and some of that change will involve the closure of existing congregations. Still, this concept would repurpose, reset, and realign rather than close a significant portion of that 90%. I think there is a lot of work, study, planning and prayer that would need to be done before I’d throw a number on it.
So, here’s what this model could look like. If it sounds familiar, it’s because we have flirted with similar ideas, without boldly investing in them.
First, we identify a smaller number of “hub” congregations. These would be places positioned by geography, leadership, facilities, and missional opportunity to be strong centers of worship and formation. A hub should be capable of sustaining the kind of community we say we want, not merely inheriting the responsibilities we’ve always carried.
Second, we stop imagining that every existing property must function as a fully independent congregation. Some sites can become worshiping satellites, still gathering locally, but less frequently, often lay-led, with clergy support in the larger cluster to which they belong.
Third, other sites can become ministry outposts. Their neighborhood footprint would prioritize community partnerships to address and deliver services such as food security, tutoring, recovery support, and immigrant services, without taking on the full weekly workload of congregational programming.
And some properties will need to become mission assets: shared, leased, or sold, so buildings serve the community while generating revenue for disciple-making work across the connection.
Presence matters. But presence doesn’t have to look identical everywhere.
Again, unless we close a significant number of churches, we will still be spreading our clergy too thin, especially those assigned to lead the hubs. Because this job will rapidly morph into running the satellites like the traditional churches we are trying to replace.
That is a valid concern, Kathy, but I don’t think it is insurmountable. Such an approach would demand additional staffing to ensure a new culture takes root. At least some of this work is making space for grief. Letting go is hard, especially when the loss is unnamed or not honored.
At the end of the day, math tells us that a significant number of our churches will close in the next 10-20 years. We still have some agency in deciding how and toward what purpose, but that agency diminishes with every passing year.
We need to remind ourselves that while some will resist change, others will be liberated by renewed purpose and relieved that it isn’t all on them to save the church.
What would keep most of our people from choosing to attend a worshiping satellite on Sunday mornings and doing nothing else?
If we’re honest, nothing “keeps” them. Many people already practice a thin version of church, mostly Sunday attendance (and yep, sometimes not even weekly). So yes, some current members would likely make that choice. And I would argue that this can be a faithful choice, at certain stages of life.
The challenge is to build a system in which satellites naturally feed the hub’s pathway without shaming people or requiring heroics. That means the satellite gathering isn’t an alternative to formation; it is a gateway to it.
With care, a satellite can be a front porch, a place of belonging and worship that stays accessible and local. A shared rule of life is taught and practiced at both the satellite and the hub. Simple, repeatable invitations guide people deeper. Barriers to participation in hub ministries are lowered through home groups, hybrid options, seasonal cohorts, ride-sharing, and childcare support.
The goal with hubs and satellites is to meet people where they are, both in their formation and geographically, without leaving them isolated in either. With reorganization and renewed focus, hubs and satellites can serve distinct yet complementary roles within a shared discipleship ecosystem. Together, they allow us to remain present in communities while also offering deeper formation than many congregations can currently sustain alone.
Change of this magnitude will not be easy, and it will not be embraced by everyone. But neither is the slow exhaustion so many leaders and congregations are already experiencing.
The choice before us is whether we continue spreading ourselves thinner, or whether we courageously realign for capacity, clarity, and purpose. If we choose the latter, we may yet rediscover what it means to be a church that forms disciples together, faithfully, and with hope.
Rev. Kathy Neary serves as Transitional Ministry Developer for the Pacific Northwest (PNW) Conference of The United Methodist Church. She is in dialogue for this series with Patrick Scriven who serves as Director of Communications for the PNW Conference.
I have appreciated this conversation deeply. Thank you, Patrick and Kathy. I serve a full time two-point charge (50/50) where the churches are a whopping 12 minutes apart. While both congregations are “healthy” and “growing” according to the annual statistics I am working on, the facts remain that they are 12 minutes apart, have much in common, and have gifts that complement each other’s growing edges. As I sit here in one church office while a furnace tech repairs an aged heating oil furnace, Patrick’s observation that we have too many churches operating with too little capacity gives voice to my daily frustrations in local church ministry. I often dream of how my churches could make disciples if we (I) were not so busy keeping up the appearances of two distinct UM churches in a single ministry area.
The ingredients are all there for a classic merging of these two churches. But, in my opinion, the inherent problem with the classic merger is that there are winners and losers. Someone is always at risk of losing their identity in the merger. We see this time and time again throughout American Methodism’s history of splits and mergers. Language and words matter. As I’ve began placing feelers with these congregations about “what’s next”, I’ve noticed that conversations which contain any whiff of closing or merging introduces unnecessary anxiety and hedging before the actual vision can be shared. When these conversations are framed as the revitalization of the United Methodist witness in our part of the county (currently taking suggestions for something a little snappier), I’ve found that more people are curious and even excited about the idea of participating in something new: a model for ministry that matters (the entire M.I.L.E, really) in 2026.
Yes, there will still be anxiety, grief, and even anger. And yet, even on my worst days I believe that a change like what is being described in this conversation is possible in my ministry context so long as the churches catch the vision for it and are willing to do the hard work to enact change.
As clergy, I would love to begin playing my part in change by cultivating this vision in my churches. However, I need to go finish my sermon for Sunday. 😉
Thanks for reading and leaving a comment, Gregory. Very happy to hear that our conversation is appreciated.
And yes, you are right to note that conversations about mergers often inspire anxiety, fear, and (maybe the prime driver) grief. I think grief around what we have lost trips up a lot of our thinking. Church members, particularly those who have been in their churches for years, have experienced a lot of change. As odd as it feels to type it, I’m not sure that they get enough credit for their resiliency amid so much change. In mainline churches, unfortunately, much of that change has come alongside congregational decline, for many different reasons.
To my thinking and watching, there are two elements that seem to be helpful for churches navigating big changes. The first, which you mention, is that need for a greater vision. Many of our members have been faithful and some have invested significantly (time, talents, treasure) in their church to keep its ministries afloat amid difficult situations. Survival isn’t a vision but a plan that can empower the church to take a faithful step forward — to know deeply its purpose — with more hands to share the work is different. I think many of the same people can get on board if the plan is purpose driven.
The second element that I think we overlook is agency. It may be counterintuitive, but delaying these decisions, even when a congregation doesn’t want to close or merge, can actually take away agency. When a congregation puts off real conversations about their future until they are forced to by running out of people/resources/etc., they begin that work with incredibly limited options. Starting earlier means more options. It is more likely to lead to scenarios where merged congregations are truly better together, equipped for potential growth rather than with just a strategy to put off the inevitable. And even in the case where closure is the best option, being able to gift another ministry with remaining assets can be a balm, but not if all of the resources are gone.
And I’d be remiss if I didn’t say that these things likely apply to other levels of the denomination beyond the local church. Conferences struggle in isolation with limited resources, trying to manage duplicative work. Boards and agencies trying to resource and solve the same problems, without realizing the needed expertise isn’t engaged because they work in a different silo.
Change will come. The questions we have are, “Do we want to initiate it?” and “Do we love our neighbors enough to get out of our own way to help them?”
Your comment on agency has given me the courage to lean in more today, rather than wait for tomorrow.
I find it interesting that multiple people have been in our conference office for a decade or two, some recently retired for more; yet the fault lies with the congregations who support the conference office financially. We support your leadership in the direction in which we go. At one point I heard we were “only building real churches, no more Aldersgate (Wesley’s that is)” We all had to do three word missions, revise our mission statements, now into the MILE. Congregations and clergy have been following your lead.
In this latest push to merge or close churches, you are combining churches that have different cultures and in some cases lose as many as 70% from one church and 10-20% of the other. Studies show that neither will have 100% when it is done.
Our churches know nothing of how the Conference office is holding on to making Disciples and living out the MILE in their administrative process. I see in both Kathy and Patrick’s models what seems to mirror the worldly process of mergers and closures that leave towns decimated and fewer middle class farmers and shop keepers, the upper 1% is taking it all. Is this a model we really want to follow?
I propose a third way, listen to the congregations and ask them what their missions are. Some are not able to articulate it immediately, but it is recognizable when you see the actual ministry they are doing: education in after school care, music school space, and outreach to parents…. building community through support of foodbank, schools, and ecumenical homeless and advocacy… and the list goes on.
[…] Kathy Neary: Let’s pick up where we left off and finish exploring the alternative approach to centering discipleship, which you shared last […]
[…] as a core feature of United Methodism. The previous posts are linked here: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4. […]