Releasing Your Church’s Social Capital
Pursuing church growth destroys Social Capital. Pursuing churchgoer and community growth enhances it. Seeking the welfare of a church, its members, and a community shouldn’t be competing objectives. However, if concerns about institutional “success” or “survival” lead to internally-oriented definitions of “church” and its intended “customer”, then Social Capital will suffer for the reasons listed in the prior blog post.
Churches are the ideal source of Relational and Social Capital. No other place, or no technology, can provide circles of familial support for those who otherwise feel isolated and alone. Churches are best equipped to lend a helping hand and walk alongside families most in need of their capital – those experiencing material poverty. Jesus established and designed His Church, in part, to fill the (widening) social service and social networking gaps we’re seeing in America today. Collective fellowship, worship, and benevolence are the Lord’s plan for Relational and Social Capital development. Government and secular poverty solutions are typically transactional, but poverty is relational and spiritual.
Yet the role of churches in poverty alleviation has greatly diminished over the past century. “Outreach” has become seasonal and the word itself redefined, now meaning “marketing”. The prevailing definition of “flourishing” views participation in religious community in a utilitarian sense. According to the Harvard Flourishing Index, church attendance, not faith, correlates to happiness and “virtue”. However, focusing on personal Social Capital derived from “religion” and “community” undervalues and undermines Jesus’ emphasis on discipleship, evangelism, and compassion.
The Church will reclaim its rightful place as the consummate purveyor of Relational and Social Capital when it returns to the biblical definitions of “church”, “customers”, “success”, “outreach”, and “flourishing”. We propose the following blueprint to leverage untapped networks within our pews. This roadmap, if implemented, would unleash the vast capabilities confined within America’s congregations.
Roadmap for Churches to Build Social Capital
Church leaders bold enough to execute this model would transform countless lives and their cities by the power of the Holy Spirit. Each step lays out a progressive phase of Awareness, Awakening, Action, Accountability, and Advocacy related to that church’s Relational and Social Capital…
1. Understand (Awareness)
Question: What is it?
The Open Table defines Relational Capital as “a sustained, reciprocal, social connectedness between people in which each party gives to and receives supportive value from the other.” Social Capital is the “knowledge, influence, resources, and skills of people and those they know that could be invested in solutions to their challenges”. Together they comprise the sum of a person’s Relational Assets. The underutilization of the significant capital base contained within America’s churches reflects either a misunderstanding of those terms, an inordinate fixation on organizational needs, a hesitation to challenge members to step outside their comfort zones, or some combination of those factors.
2. Assess (Awareness)
Question: How much do we have in our church?
Knowing what Relational and Social Capital is, but not how much a church has, is still an Awareness issue. A high-level inventory of the skills, interests, occupations, networks, and willingness to share them would reveal a level of “capital” well beyond the imaginations of most pastors. Why conduct that inventory unless there are ample options to deploy those resources and capabilities? Church “chores”, committees, and occasional “outreach” only occupy a tiny fraction of what members could offer to bless the congregation, city, and Kingdom. As long as “church” is seen as a place and members are treated as “consumers” (rather than Kingdom employees commissioned to pursue the real “customer”), then there’s little incentive to assess the value of its Relational and Social Capital (because it won’t be fully engaged in Prayer/Care/Share).
3. Release (Awakening)
Question: Are we willing to release it – and how could it be used?
Now that the church knows what Relational and Social Capital is and how much it has, will leadership relinquish control over its use, investing it where it’s needed most. Church leaders rarely discuss one the most critical concepts in Scripture, dying to self, because modeling it would require surrendering control of their available “capital”. For a church, dying to self entails rethinking its mission and methods, equipping and empowering disciples rather than attracting and retaining attenders. “Surrender” means prioritizing life and community transformation over institutional objectives. Diverting attention to outlets and opportunities (to leverage Social Capital) outside the “4 walls” would likely hurt attendance in the short term. However, decentralization and multiplication would grow the Kingdom – and that church – over the long haul.
4. Increase (Awakening)
Question: How could we augment our base of Social Capital to meet the growing demand inside and outside our church?
Church members, not just pastors, need an Awakening. Unless congregations resume responsibility for GC3 (Great Commandment, Great Commission, Great Calling), their Relational and Social Capital will remain under lock and key. Church consumers have high performance expectations of pastors yet low tolerance for expectations placed where they belong, on themselves. Scripture calls for Christ-followers to be “pastors” of their families, neighborhoods, and workplaces. To equip churchgoers for that pastoral, Social Capital-building role, church leaders must emphasize Hebrews 10:24 (“spur one another on toward love and good deeds”), and not just their favorite verse, Hebrews 10:25 (“not giving up meeting together”). To augment Social Capital, church members must be more concerned about what they put in than what they get out of it.
5. Leverage (Action)
Question: When and where do we start stepping into those spaces the Lord has called us to address in our church, community, city, and world?
Seasonal events and other forms of transactional outreach haven’t moved the needle on poverty from 1973 to 2023 (still at 11.1%). If poverty and prosperity were simply about lacking or having resources, then giving the “poor” more of what we have would solve the problem. Yet the fundamental issue isn’t about wealth and the ultimate goal isn’t the American Dream. Misunderstanding the root causes of poverty leads to responses that perpetuate it. Poverty is primarily relational, not material. Solutions must be personal, leveraging Social and Relational Capital to break cycles of generational poverty. Churches are the optimal source of the proverbial “hand up” – help, hope, and a home – but most elect “handouts” at the holidays. Christ-centered compassion favors dignity over dependence and empowerment over enablement.
6. Measure (Accountability)
Question: How do we ensure our church remains committed and effective in applying our Social Capital to have the greatest Kingdom impact?
Assuming Jesus’ level of interest in poverty alleviation and adopting a relational approach to addressing it would require a comprehensive reengineeing of conventional church operations, staffing, budgets, and metrics. A well-attended and well-funded church, “lagging” statistics commonly associated with flourishing, aren’t “leading” indicators of health. Healthy churches contribute to flourishing of their communities, producing life and city transformation. Rather than tracking “nickels and noses”, churches should measure deployment of Relational and Social Capital in evangelism, discipleship, and compassion within their congregations’ circles of influence.
7. Teach (Advocacy)
Question: What is our responsibility to help other churches and ministries understand what Social Capital is, how much they have, why they should release it, where to leverage it, how to increase it, and ways to measure its effectiveness?
Church leaders possess Relational and Social Capital that could be expended to convince other churches and ministries to follow their example. Unity across the body of Christ is needed to make a recognizable dent in the spiritual, material, and cultural climate of a city. Investing valuable capital in the pursuit of larger Kingdom goals, especially on behalf of those most in need of Relational and Social Capital, regardless of the impact on institutional objectives, reflects a selflessness rarely seen today among churches in America.
It’s Your Turn…
Are you a “Me” church or a “We” church? Are you a “Come” or a “Go” church? Your answers to those two questions will likely determine your willingness to follow this 7-Step Roadmap for unleashing the vast, untapped networks and capabilities trapped within your sanctuary’s pews.
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