December 2016
By Ramona Tausz
Churches merge, coming together as one congregation can be a daunting challenge. Thanks to the grace of God, however, the congregations of Our Savior Lutheran of Norwood Park and St. John’s Lutheran in Niles—which merged one year ago to form Ascension Lutheran Church—have had great success in the unifying process.
Ascension’s pastor, Pastor Matthew Gunia, says the positive results have actually exceeded his expectations. “Relationships are being built, and names and stories are being learned,” he said. “Things have gotten a lot smoother as people are beginning to know what the new informal and formal ways of doing things are.”
“During the whole merger process, we haven’t lost a member,” he added, praising the grace and relationship-building efforts of the members of both congregations. “Every person was fully committed to the merger. All of them endured the sometimes difficult work of relationship-building. All of them were excellent about giving the other person the benefit of the doubt and putting the best construction on things.”
The idea for the merger first sprung from a friendship between Gunia (formerly the pastor of St. John’s) and Pastor Eric Carlson of Our Savior. As the two talked, they discovered their congregations (Our Savior in the English District and St. John’s in the NID) were in similar straits: neither church had a high enough membership to financially support the congregation.
“It kind of made sense that in a perfect world, these congregations would merge,” Gunia said. “But we both knew no congregation ever wants to close its doors.”
The pastors approached the church leaders with the idea of a merger, expecting the congregations to be hesitant. To their surprise, both Our Savior and St. John’s responded enthusiastically.
“We had a 16-month timeframe for relationship-building, understanding one another’s finances, and a whole lot of preparatory work,” Gunia said. “But it looked as if God had a different timeframe.”
Indeed, things began moving more quickly than originally expected. By the grace of God, within a few weeks Pastor Carlson received a call to the Pittsburgh area, where he is today, and Our Savior received an offer on their church building. It was agreed that Pastor Gunia would become the pastor of the new, merged congregation. And on the First Sunday of Advent in 2015, Ascension Lutheran Church held its first church service.
“Now, a year into it, people are starting to learn names of the people who are sitting next to them in the pews,” Gunia said. “People are working together on projects.”
Building trust and quality relationships, Gunia said, was a challenge.
“It’s not like the people of the two congregations didn’t trust each other,” he said. “They just didn’t know each other well enough to develop that trusting relationship.”
The congregation’s leadership took steps to assist the congregations in coming together as one. This meant being intentional about compromising (for instance, making sure the church council included members from both congregations) and organizing relationship-building activities.
“We’ve made concerted efforts to intermingle the two congregations to work together,” Gunia said. “We do a Sunday potluck, where everyone is asked to sit by someone they don’t know.”
One relationship-building activity included selecting “Ascension” as the name of the new church. Rather than keep one or the other of the old names, the congregation decided to choose a new name in order to foster unity.
According to Gunia, members of each congregation, young and old, were allowed to submit a name along with an explanation of their choice. After receiving more than 70 submissions, local pastors voted on their top five names, narrowing down the list. Finally, the congregations hosted a naming banquet, where final votes were cast.
“It was really a coming together thing, a unifying event,” Gunia said. “It was exciting and did a lot to bring the congregations together.”
Gunia recommends that other congregations considering a merger should “pray a lot about it.”
“Pray and be patient and listen to others’ ideas,” he said. “Don’t rush to judgment, and let everybody have their idea. Some ideas will be good, some will be bad, some will be ugly, but people will be happy that they had their concerns listened to.”
As long-time congregations decrease in size (not unusual in a church’s life cycle without frequent revitalizing) one can expect to see more mergers in the district in years to come.