By Randy Frazee
What if your church partnered with other churches in your community to read the Bible together? Find out how four churches in a small Midwestern town rallied around Bible engagement.
The idea was simple: all of the pastors and ministers and priests in the town got together and said, “What would it be like for all of us to take our congregations and parishes through The Story? What if we all started at the same time, followed the same schedule, and used the same set of resources to help our people understand the Bible better? What would happen in our families in our churches and in our whole community?”
Well, I had the privilege of helping the town of Frankenmuth, Michigan celebrate their year of doing just that and I got to tell you this has been just about the most fun I've ever had in my time of working through The Story.
Frankenmuth is known as “Michigan's Little Bavaria” where it's Christmas all year round. It’s a charming town of 5,000 people and six churches. In 2013, five of those six churches started The Story and I just want to give you a glimpse into what it was like around Frankenmuth during those nine months.
It All Started with One Pastor’s Idea
Mark Brant, Lead Pastor, St. Lorenz Lutheran Church:
“Somewhere in our planning, part of our church's vision statement popped into my head and that is that St. Lorenz wants to be a partner and a leader in our community.”
Linda Howard, Frankenmuth United Methodist Church:
“All the different churches in town were approached by the Lutheran church. They kind of initiated this and said that they had a 31-week Bible study that they thought would be great for our whole community to do. The churches had never really banded together in a spiritual growth idea. I remember the first time I was in on the meeting with all of the pastors and there was some interesting kibitzing back and forth about the Catholics maybe working The Story into their sermons and then the Methodists were going to preach directly from The Story. So our simple differences in faith, we were sort of tiptoeing [around them], but it was very much in love, actually, because we had not done anything like this before.”
Nathan Mains, Senor Pastor, Hope Community Church:
“Basically, each church decides for themselves how to do it and what they're going to do. All we're agreeing on is let's pick the same schedule and let's do The Story together. How you do your sermons, all the other details were totally within the responsibility and decision making of that church.”
Father Bob Byrne, Blessed Trinity Catholic Church:
“If the pastors got together and said, “Okay, we're going to do a spiritual project together,” I don't know if we'd ever decide on what to do because we'd all have our own favorite programs or processes or our own little particular concerns. We could argue about that for years. Whereas The Story was put on the table as a way for us to work together and it had the support materials, the videos, the package. Those kinds of things were very helpful it was packaged in a very good way. The plan was there and it was something we could all say, ‘Okay, let’s do it.’”
The Elephant in the Room: What about Church Differences?
Joseph Berkobien, Elder, Frankenmuth Bible Church:
“When Pastor Mark Brandt first mentioned that he was interested in having the churches in Frankenmuth join in The Story, in studying through God's Word together, I was actually really excited. I thought that it would be a good opportunity to really partner with other churches. There are a lot of different things that churches believe and a lot of different doctrine and often it divides the church. But one of the things I think that most churches would agree on is God's Word is important. So for me, I thought it was a great opportunity to have a little more ecumenical kind of involvement and to really study God's Word together.”
Pastor Mains:
I would say the differences between churches was deemphasized and the commonality of being followers of Jesus interested in the Bible, interested in the story that God presented to us in his Word was the theme that people were excited about.”
Scot Mueller, Community Services Coordinator, St. Lorenz:
“There were some questions about, ‘Is this going to fit with our theology, with our key teachings?’ and things like that. But when you're dealing with just simply the Word of God—which is really what The Story breaks down, being very simply the key sections out of Scripture—you really can't go wrong. I think very quickly those who had concerns realized, no, we can work with this very well because it's the Word of God and anything that we want to add to it as far as our own individual denominational teachings, we easily could do that.”
Scott Harmon, Pastor, Frankenmuth United Methodist Church:
“What I saw taking place through working with The Story was that walls were beginning to be broken down. And it wasn't necessarily among clergy, it was among our parishioners—that they yearn to be able to work together, to recognize the commonalities and celebrate those that we shared while still respecting the differences that we carry.”
Father Byrne:
“To see the churches are not fighting with each other… That gives everyone an excuse for saying, ‘Well, I don't go to church because those churches don't get along with each other.’ The more we get along, I think it will draw more people into our churches.”
What Was the Impact on the Town?
Pastor Harmon:
“All of a sudden, all the clergy were talking about the same passage, and they were getting together. Not the clergy, but our parishioners from our congregations were getting together and talking about what they had experienced in their own congregations on Sunday morning. It was opening up conversations among the laity that would never happen in other settings. It was just fantastic.”
Father Byrne:
“You don't see people very often discussing, at least in the Catholic Church, scriptural texts in the hallway or after Mass or whatever. So it did create that interest. I heard people talk about connecting with other people, their friends and neighbors who were not Catholic who were also involved in the study program of The Story. That was a good thing, you know, actually talking about Scripture and faith with people instead of just the weather and politics.”
Linda Howard:
“I remember being at the museum membership dinner and talking with one gal, and I don't even remember what the sentence was that was made in our conversation, but she said, ‘Now do you think that would be a part of the upper story or the lower story?’ and right then the light bulb went on as to what this project was doing in our community. It was just right there on the minds of everybody.”
Pastor Brandt:
“I actually talked about it at our Rotary Club as well. We have a lot of our own members and a lot of other congregational leaders from the other congregations in town and said, ‘Hey, this is coming. You guys think about opening a room or something in your business encouraging your employees to take advantage of this opportunity.’ And so we had a number of businesses that did that. And then of course in some of the fast food restaurants or the other restaurants study groups also were meeting. So that really went out into the community in a way that couldn't have happened if we'd have just done it in one congregation. We have a local newspaper and many times the pastors would refer to our reading of The Story. Each of the pastors in town is invited to write a column for the newspaper. It's a weekly paper, and so [The Story] was referenced pretty often.”
Joseph Berkobien:
“I thought it was really great to see people from our church get involved with churches that maybe we normally wouldn't have a whole lot of interaction. But we could really find commonality when studying through The Story together and really have good fellowship and focus on God's Word together.”
Advice for Communities That Want to Do The Story Together
Scott Mueller:
“If you're going to do it as a whole community, I think it's so important to do I think what we did here which is to have those talks, have those relationships with the other pastors, the other churches and share a vision of what can be done and find that common ground. Regardless of what we teach in our denominations, the Word of God should be that common ground for us. If you can come together in that common vision and work together, then that's when the Holy Spirit comes in and takes over and goes beyond anything that you might have, and can make your vision something grand.”
Father Byrne:
“There's an old saying, ‘Don't let the perfect be an enemy of the good.’ Sometimes pastors—professionals, if you will—we're unwilling to move or to cooperate until we find the perfect program that doesn't offend anyone or doesn't ruffle any feathers or fits every one's denominational interests.”
Pastor Mains:
“There's probably not anything less problematic in terms of coming together around one theme than just taking the Bible and saying, ‘Wouldn't it be cool if all of us said together let's help our people learn more about this Bible? And let's do it together so we can present to the world around us who are not followers of Jesus, who maybe wonder what that's all about, this picture of different flavors of Jesus followers choosing to do something together and unifying around a common theme.’ I just think for us in our community, it was a great experience and I can't imagine you couldn't apply it in other settings and have a similar result.”
Randy Frazee:
You know, we think of innovation coming out of California and Innovation coming out of New York. Well I'm here to tell everybody that innovation—God-size innovation—has come out of the little town of Frankenmuth and I've come here today to hear their story. And I promise that I'm going to let the world know about Frankenmuth and how pleased God is. Today, I was in the worship center and we were gathered together singing and shouting and praising God and I just had this enormous sense that God smiled on Frankenmuth today from ear to ear.
Watch "The Story City-Wide in Frankenmuth" video here.