From Competition to Collaboration

Post Author: Rev. Sarah Juist

What happens when a small church decides to stop competing? Everyone wins. 

The small, suburban bedroom community where I pastor is saturated with churches. There is a main road that will take you all the way through town, which begins at a highway exit. In one four-mile stretch, there are no less than fifteen church buildings off the main road alone. 

At least three of those fifteen count as megachurches, with 1000+ members and huge sprawling campuses with gyms and rock climbing walls and whole coffee shops in the lobby. 

My congregation isn’t even the flagship liberal or progressive church – there are two larger progressive churches that were way ahead of us in LGBTQ+ advocacy and justice work, and they have the programs and the staff to match their membership. 

But this town has an open secret: all of these churches are extremely competitive with one another. We do not think of ourselves as one body in many expressions, but distinct brands competing for noses, nickels, and notoriety.

To my knowledge, there has never been a ministerial association. In the four years since I arrived (and probably long before that), there has never been a community worship service of any kind, and no churches seem to be actively working together on programs or even mission projects. 

When I began in 2020, my congregation had 65 people on the rolls and 30-35 in worship. We are Presbyterian, with a pretty traditional, liturgical worship service. A solid 70% of the congregation is over the age of 70, with varying abilities and needs. 

Our members looked around at all of those other churches, with youth groups and mission trips and intricate lighting designs, and felt like they would never compete. One of the core, driving narratives of my congregation was: “Look at everything we can’t do.” 

My question was: so why are you here, and not there? There were a variety of answers, but the main message was the same, “We love these people and this place, and we don’t think God is finished with us yet.” 

So together, my congregation embarked on a long journey of asking questions, throwing spaghetti at the wall to see what sticks, failing, succeeding, and trying again. 

But perhaps the most transformative change we made was deciding not to compete anymore. Instead of trying to one-up the million other churches in town, or copying what’s working well for them, we let them do their thing and focus on what we can add to the conversation. It’s the church’s version of a non-compete clause. 

For example: the church down the road has a free hygiene pantry that sees a lot of traffic and fills a vital need. But it would be ridiculous for us to try to replicate that program and have folks going to multiple places for the same items. So if we want to contribute to that need, we would simply collect items and give them to the other church. 

The same principle applies to local nonprofits, religiously affiliated or not. We don’t need to be replicating programs someone else is already doing (and doing well) just for the sake of getting people in our doors. Instead, we focus on using what skills, gifts, and opportunities we have to partner with and support those organizations and further their good work. 

I began this process by leading by example. I held the first local pastor’s gathering in recent memory when I invited the pastors from the three other progressive churches in town to come over for lunch. Now we meet almost monthly for fellowship and support. This spring, even the local Roman Catholic priest heard about it and asked to join us. We’ve held a couple of cooperative events. 

I also partnered with another young clergy woman from one of those churches, and we asked both boards if we could celebrate Holy Week together in 2022. My congregation hosted Maundy Thursday, and hers hosted Good Friday. Folks from both churches participated in both worship services. This year was our third year doing Holy Week together, and it’s become a beloved tradition. 

Slowly but surely, the congregation has embraced this ethos as well. 

Last year, when another local church in our denomination was closing their doors, the pastor called me to ask my church to collaborate: “We have a small group called the Ruth Circle that puts on this really cool jewelry sale ministry, and we’re hoping to pass it on to another church. Would y’all be interested in talking with the folks who run it?” 

I knew exactly who to call in my church to begin, and after a few weeks of shadowing and talking, the newly formed Ruth Circle from my congregation decided to take it on. The idea is this: a small group gets together twice a month. They get donated jewelry from a variety of sources, including local jewelers, and clean the pieces up, organize it, price it, and store it. Then twice a year, they host a massive jewelry sale. Hundreds of pieces of jewelry go out on tables and stands, most priced between $1 – $8, and they sell a good portion of their inventory. 

But all of the proceeds, every single penny, goes to a local nonprofit called Kids Food Basket. This organization provides sack suppers for food-insecure kids in every school district in 3 counties. They also do nutrition education, local advocacy work for food access and just wages, and they have a massive garden program that provides fresh fruits, vegetables, and herbs to local food pantries. 

Food items donated by church members for summer meals.

This congregation has collaborated with Kids Food Basket for many years in various ways, like collecting fruit cups and snacks in the summer. But when I asked our liaison what the nonprofit needed most to make the greatest impact, the answer was money. They can stretch a dollar further than my well-meaning church ever could, and they can do all of these big-picture, high-intensity things that my small church could never realistically take on. 

So this year, in just four hours, the most recent jewelry sale made more than $1,600. Every penny went into feeding local kids. 

This is truly a best-case scenario: every single person in my congregation is using their gifts, skills, abilities in a way that not only brings them joy, but furthers the core belief of Kids Food Basket – that good food is a right, not a privilege.  

Now, instead of saying, “Look at everything we can’t do,” we say, “Look what we can do together!”