It's not always going to cost money to turn a parish into a more welcoming parish. But it does take a willingness to change a lot of assumptions.

It all begins with acknowledging that we have some very profound challenges, and that we don't have easy answers at hand, things that we know will solve the problems. If people embrace those two facts, then the next steps are a little easier to fall into place.

The church is like any large corporation in one respect. In its early days, either the early church or the early years of Microsoft, you see all kinds of creativity, innovation, invention, people have nothing to lose, they're trying to find what works. Then you wake up and you're a vast enterprise, and it's very hard, when you have all kinds of buildings and structures and hierarchy and so on, to hang on to these very creative impulses that helped you get your great success in the first place. As a church we're going to have to figure a way out from under this.

We need to become a more welcoming church, one that reaches out more to those who have walked away or who aren't very interested to begin with.

It's not always going to cost money to turn a parish into a more welcoming parish. But it does take a willingness to change a lot of assumptions.

To me the church's problem would be a hundred times worse if you felt everyone has written the church off, they don't want to know, there just aren't people to turn to. But it's exactly the opposite: there are such people. We have to find a way in our organizational life to get out of their way, clear the path to find more of these people, and empower them.

In the corporate world you get a report card every quarter and have to talk about it, whereas the church can drip, drip through bad trends for decades and decades.