Mennonite church on sabbatical

It's common for clergy to take sabbaticals -- time off for rest and rejuvenation. But can a whole church take one, too?

That's what the Whitewater Mennonite Church in Boissevain is doing. Starting in September 2009, the congregation suspended all its committees and committee work for a year.

"It's been a year of letting go of the assumptions of how we do church" says lead pastor Judith Doell. "We're not sure why we exist anymore. We know the church is changing. This is a way to try to figure that out."

The congregation still meets on Sundays, of course, and members also meet in small groups during the week.

"The point is to rest and get to know each other," Doell says, adding the congregation also gave itself the goal of reading through the Bible.

Church members also meet monthly to deal with any pressing decisions that need to be made. But if somebody comes up with an idea for a new project, and nobody volunteers, it doesn't happen.

"If someone is not volunteering their gifts this year, we assume they need a Sabbath rest," Doell says.

The church decided to take a year off because the way they were structured had become a burden for the small number of people who call it home.

Although the church can seat 300, only about 70 people attend on an average Sunday morning -- and many of those are seniors.

"We needed to evaluate why and what we were doing, and we needed to pare down our structures," Doell says, noting that the church was finding it hard to fill all the committee positions.

Whitewater's situation is not unique, she notes; many small-town churches are struggling to find people to run programs due to rural depopulation. "We were finding it harder to find volunteers," she says.

In deciding to take a year off, the church drew inspiration from the Book of Leviticus, where the Israelites were instructed to take a "year of Jubilee" every 50 years.

During that year they were supposed to let the soil lie fallow, give property back to those who had been forced to sell it due to financial hardship; and free all the slaves -- basically stop their regular work and release themselves from regular activities.

The church also took heat from the story of Mary and Martha in the Book of Luke, where Jesus praises Mary for taking time to sit and listen.

"We are trying to learn what it means to sit at the Lord's feet," says Doell, adding that the year off is a time for members to "to stop our regular church work and seek a new sense of freedom and release in our life together."

And how's it going so far? "It's been challenging," she acknowledges. "We are such a doing society. It's hard to stop and ask who we are, why we are here."

One thing they discovered is that members are already very involved in the community -- involved in sports, gardening clubs and other recreational and social activities.

"We're much more involved in community life than we realized... our members are very involved with their neighbours and friends," she says.

One thing the congregation decided not to do during the sabbatical year was to meet to talk about what they were learning from the experience. That, she says, would sort of go against the spirit of the venture. But in September they'll start getting together to talk about what they discovered about themselves during the year away from regular church life and activities -- and to see how they might incorporate those lessons into church life in the future.

But one thing is already clear to Doell: "Not as much is required (of a church) as we think," she says. "Much of our busyness is just that -- busyness," she says.

Plus, she adds, "much of Jesus' ministry was just hanging out with people."

Organizational guru Peter Drucker liked to say that every business or organization should ask itself periodically: "If we weren't doing what we now do, would we want to start doing it?" If the answer was probably not, he said, "then maybe it isn't the right thing to do anymore."

Not every church can take a sabbatical year. But, for the Whitewater church, it was an appropriate -- and restful -- way to get an answer to that question.

Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition July 24, 2010 H13