Episode 99: Ken Crawford on creatively using church space

Ken Crawford is the pastor of a church in Dallas, possibly the oldest existing church in Dallas. To be hospitable to the community around them, they have used their facility and spaces in new and creative ways, welcoming people that wouldn't otherwise step into a church.

Listen here, read the transcript below, or click here for the full video version.

George Mason: All over America, churches are declining, some are dying, and maybe the question is, is there life after death for churches that once flourished? Ken Crawford is the senior minister of Central Christian Church in Dallas. He'll be here to tell us about a new experiment in church life in a church like that. Stay tuned for Good God.

George Mason: Welcome to Good God, conversations that matter about faith and public life. I'm your host, George Mason, and I'm delighted to welcome to the program today my colleague and friend, Ken Crawford. Ken, glad to have you with us.

Ken Crawford: Thank you, George. I appreciate the opportunity.

George Mason: Ken is the senior minister of the Central Christian Church here in Dallas and has been since the Fall of 2016. This church has a real robust history in Dallas, doesn't it?

Ken Crawford: It does.

George Mason: Tell us something about the history and what you found when you became the pastor of this church.

Ken Crawford: So by some historical records, there is a bit of competition for this in Dallas, but it has claimed to being one of, if not the oldest, Protestant church in Dallas. Started in the 1870s-

George Mason: Wow.

Ken Crawford: ... in the West End on the second floor of a blacksmith's shop.

George Mason: Wow.

Ken Crawford: Think about what that must've been like to do that. They moved several times, ended up in a central location in downtown, and in the '40s moved north to the outskirts, what was then the edge of town. A hundred years ago, it was the largest church in Dallas. There were over 2000 people active in the life of the congregation. They moved to their current location in the '50s, built two buildings, 34,000 square feet on three levels on six acres.

Ken Crawford: Over the years, the congregation has ebbed and flowed, and through a series of convergences of some social dynamics as well as some things in life of that particular congregation, it's now not a very large congregation in terms of membership and still has that amazing facility and that fantastic resource.

Ken Crawford: So when I showed up, started interviewing with them in the Summer of 2016, I was struck by the possibility both because of the campus itself and its situation. There are six distinct communities around that particular location. You've got the Park Cities and you've got Uptown, you've got Oak Lawn, you've got the Medical District, you've got the Love Field area, and you've got North Park.

George Mason: Wow.

Ken Crawford: Six very, very different-

George Mason: They really are.

Ken Crawford: ... communities. I was struck by wondering what would it look like to create a space where people from those different areas wanted to come together? I said, "What does our country need? What does the world need?" And one of the things that our country and our culture need is places to come together and find commonality and to find that there is more that joins us together than that separates us, and that the things that join us together matter deeply and that we can build bridges across difference.

George Mason: Okay. Let's pause there before we get into where that took you. Because I think it's important probably for us to recognize that there are about, various statistics say different numbers, but there are about a hundred churches in America closing every week who have gone through a lifecycle that has been tremendously vibrant and that has led to decline. Some of these churches are new church starts that never really got off the ground, but many of them are like yours. What you found was a church on that downside of the bell curve, you might say, or on the arc of the lifecycle.

Ken Crawford: I did, yeah.

George Mason: You like to call this a legacy church. Talk about what a legacy church is in your mind and what factors contribute to it bearing that title.

Ken Crawford: Yeah, definitely. When I use that term, what I'm thinking of is by and large what some folks call big steeple churches. These are churches that have at one time had both big steeples and a prominent place in civic life in their community. Churches used to be at the center of civic life, whether it was in an urban setting like Dallas or in rural communities. That has changed over time when you talk about that particular dynamic.

Ken Crawford: But what's true for these legacy churches is that as their neighborhoods have changed, as their membership has changed, their membership has declined even though the population has grown. So they have very large buildings, some of which need a lot of repair and upkeep. Ours is actually in really great shape. But they've got these buildings that are absurdly large for the number of folks that are part of the worshiping and studying and serving congregation itself.

Ken Crawford: That begs a whole series of questions about what does it mean for us to be stewards of what God has given us? Regardless of why the building was built and why it is where it is and why we've changed, we are where we are now. So how does this group of people take what God has handed to us today and say, "Okay, what does God want us to do? What does God want to do together with us?"

George Mason: Okay, but now you're trying to get people onto a question about the future. That's a hard thing for a church that has once been really vital. You have a dwindling congregation, and it seems that this story is being told over and over again. The first impulse, I think, for many of these congregations is to say, "Who do we blame about the decline of the church? If only we could get a young pastor with a family to attract young adults."

Ken Crawford: Exactly.

George Mason: Or, "If only we could change the music to be more appealing in our worship to the younger generation?" Or if only, if only, if only, right? So you go through that whole thing, and that's even in your congregation that is becoming more innovative about its space, you still have some of that going on, don't you? Some of that sort of longing for the way it was and the struggle with how things are today.

Ken Crawford: Certainly. Certainly. I grew up in the church. I'm the sixth generation in my family to have gone to seminary, and I love traditional church. When I was in high school, I used to go to the early service with all the old people and sing the old hymns. I love that. I understand why people feel continually drawn to that.

Ken Crawford: I recognize that none of us are going to be here at some point, and we have a responsibility not only to have a church that meets our spiritual needs, but that is to the end that we can leave a church for the next generation that serves generations that we will never meet. That's ultimately what I would hope the legacy in legacy church is, is not that we have a great history, but that we position ourselves and live today in such a way that our ministry has a legacy into the future that is not just about what we did way back when, but is about how we offered up ourselves and all that God has entrusted to us and did that in such a way that it became life-giving for the next generations, whatever that is, whatever they're going to need, which we don't even know yet.

George Mason: Right. I was just reading about a church in Arlington, Virginia, a Presbyterian church that was 80 years old and had declined and was in a similar position with this tremendous building. In their case, they decided to sell the property altogether, but only after canvasing the community to find out what was needed. They sold it to a developer who specifically built affordable housing for the low income, for seniors, and for disabled persons. Then they rented the ground floor to continue to have a church that met the needs of their residents. They actually bought property to turn into a park to have some green space in that community.

George Mason: What the current pastor said about that is the church decided not to try to save itself, which was really an amazing statement. She was talking about how using communion language, which of course is strong in your tradition, talked about how in a sense they thought about taking the building of the church and giving it, breaking it, and pouring it out for the community in a new way. It occurs to me that this is a language that is so familiar to Christians, but it's hard for us to get to interpret that for ourselves in that way, isn't it?

Ken Crawford: It is. It is.

George Mason: What are the obstacles you see to people being able to do so?

Ken Crawford: I think that if we attach too much of our own spiritual life and growth to specific people and places, personalities, that becomes problematic. Because then, if that thing goes away, then that raises all kinds of questions about our spiritual journey and maybe even about our salvation, depending on how we think theologically about those things. The church ought to be the means of grace that draws us into community and closer to God at the same time, so that even if the building ceases to exist because of a natural disaster or some other thing, or if the congregation ceases to exist as we have known it because it's just run its lifecycle, that our faith and our spirituality and the work that we've done continues on. I think that sense of inappropriate attachment, which comes along with it, a sense of a lack of spiritual maturity. Paul talks about how we're still on milk when we ought to be on solid food. I think there's an element of that.

Ken Crawford: I think that congregations often get disconnected from their communities. I mentioned these six distinct neighborhoods. The Park Cities is one of those. For those who aren't Dallas folks, think Hyde Park in Chicago or Beverly Hills in LA, it's that kind of a place. We've got four acres. The land is worth over a million dollars an acre. We think that the last thing that God wants in that place is eight or 10 more mansions, that what God wants in that place is a campus where people can flourish and thrive. So what we have done is opened up our space to people who are seeking healing and wholeness.

Ken Crawford: I think self-interest and self-focus is another one of those obstacles. If I'm focused on me and mine and us and ours, as opposed to recognizing that regardless of the fact that we pay the utilities and we paid to build the building, it's not ours. It's God's, and we are just stewards of it. All those stories in the Bible, Hebrews scriptures in the New Testament, and in other faith traditions as well, that say everything we have is entrusted to us. If we forget that, then it's nearly impossible for us to be faithful stewards of today and what God wants of us tomorrow.

George Mason: We are having this conversation during the season of Lent in the Christian year, and we'll be moving into the season of Easter here before long and when probably we'll broadcast this. This movement from the season of death and darkness to life and light is part of what we're talking about here, isn't it?

Ken Crawford: Sure.

George Mason: It's not just what happened to Jesus, but what can happen to Jesus' people, to his church if they will accept this idea that you can't really have resurrection life if you're not willing to die. Sometimes that means dying to self and dying to the familiar, dying to the things that we have held onto as being absolutely necessary for our life. What you're challenging your church to consider is that it may be that as Jesus said, "Unless a grain of wheat fall into the ground and die, it cannot flourish. But if it does, it will bear much more fruit." We want to talk in a moment after the break about that much more fruit that you see beginning to sprout forth and see whether people start getting excited about the possibilities of this new missional idea that you are exploring with your congregation. So let's pick that up right after the break.

Ken Crawford: Sounds great.

George Mason: The Good God program is a project of Faith Commons, a nonprofit organization that I founded in 2018 to promote the common good. Think of a commons on a campus and how you can bring all your faith and people from all corners of the campus together. Think of the city that way. Think of the country that way. Faith Commons aims to bring people together to promote greater understanding and peace throughout our communities. You can find more information about it at faithcommons.org.

George Mason: We're back with Ken Crawford, pastor of Central Christian Church here in Dallas. We were talking, Ken, about the fact that your congregation is no longer a church that fits the culture of what we used to call an attractional model. That is, in the days when you put up a church and you open the doors on Sunday and people come because that's the nature of the culture and the community, and so we'll provide programming for you. All you have to do is show up. And people did show up, they showed up in the thousands, for a season. Some of that having to do with the period of time in the country's life and the region's life and the spiritual mentality of a postwar generation and those sorts of things. Some of it just having to do with the particular neighborhood and place where the church is located. As those things changed, things have changed.

George Mason: Now, you are exploring how your church can be more missional, not just overseas, but to your own neighbors and your own community. You've come up with several really great ideas of how that can be possible. So how are you using the building now and the church's outreach to accomplish that?

Ken Crawford: Sure, sure. The congregation actually took its first big steps into this several decades ago. We had a community theater at the church. The theater that was at NorthPark Center, the director of that was a member of our church, and he had a community theater at the church. So that was an opportunity to do something that wasn't explicitly religious. They did secular pieces, but that drew people to the campus to be able to build a relationship and to express creativity as God has given us the ability to do that.

Ken Crawford: Then 15 years ago, the church took an unused part of the property and put in a dog park. That's been ranked by some in the area as the best dog park in Dallas. We have hundreds of people every week that come there and build their own sense of community. Anybody who has dogs knows that they become a meeting place and a source of connection for people from very diverse backgrounds who all love dogs. So they don't have to talk politics or religion, they just care for each other and enjoy each other's company. That then over time, becomes the opportunity to build relationships and get into those deeper kinds of things that matter more.

Ken Crawford: What we have done more recently, and that some of this goes back to work I've done in other parts of the community, Ken Janke and Matt Smith and Justin Nygren started The Grove, which was a coworking space in the West End. They did that with pastors' hearts, but explicitly did not do it in a church building, because they recognize that so many people, for very good reasons often, want nothing to do with church, want nothing to do with Christians even, because we've been bad actors in a lot of cases. We've done some very hurtful things. They wanted to be able to bless people and help people to experience transformation without having that as a stumbling block.

Ken Crawford: So myself and Daryn DeZengotita and some other folks learned to do that there. Then we went to White Rock United Methodist Church and Daryn led that effort. So I've been at Central for three and a half years now, and we came in not necessarily saying we're going to do a coworking space, which people that don't know what that is, it's...

George Mason: Yes. Explain what coworking is.

Ken Crawford: So coworking is essentially people coming together to share common space and common resources as they do their work, as they pursue their occupations, vocational and avocational, and hopefully build community as well.

George Mason: So many jobs these days are just done online. They don't have an office to go to. Instead of sitting in your bedroom or your kitchen table alone,-

Ken Crawford: Or at a local coffee shop where it's noisy and all those kinds of things.

George Mason: Exactly, you can come to a quiet space, and you can have some community with other people who are doing the same things, have access to high speed internet and all those sorts of things.

Ken Crawford: There are big international brands of coworking spaces, and then they are kind of small mom and pop local sorts of things. So it was less the specific approach than it was this mindset to come in and say, "How can we make use of underutilized space in a church building?" You could do it in any community facility. Underutilized space so that we can provide an opportunity for folks to come together and pursue things that will help them to flourish and thrive.

George Mason: You've had people who you've met in that setting who have never thought that they would be having spiritual conversations.

Ken Crawford: Absolutely.

George Mason: Can you give us an example of that?

Ken Crawford: Sure, sure. So one of the most recent ones, and part of this is that we have as part of our coworking, added a wellness center. So we have yoga and all kinds of other wellness practices and practitioners. One of the women who's come and been a part of that, she and I had some fairly surface conversations. I later found out that she went to somebody she's known for decades and asked very deep spiritual conversations about faith, about Christianity, and about Jesus in particular. She had never asked those, and she specifically said it was because of the initial conversation she and I had and because we had created a safe space for her to begin to open up some things that she'd been kind of avoiding or kept buried, because they had been so painful for so long for her.

Ken Crawford: On the kind of flip side of that, I've had conversations with folks who have been active leaders in their faith community for decades, people in their sixties and seventies, a number of them who have said to me, "I understand for the first time what it means to be a follower of Jesus and what it means to be church. I'd never understood the way that church is supposed to exist for the sake of the world." We talk about Jesus coming for the sake of the world, we miss the fact that the church is the continuation of the incarnation, and therefore the church exists for the sake of the world as well.

George Mason: You mean it doesn't just exist for the sake of the church.

Ken Crawford: It does not. It does not.

George Mason: We lose track of that sometimes, don't we,

Ken Crawford: We do. Yeah.

George Mason: ... in the way we go about it.

Ken Crawford: So from the theater to the dog park to the wellness space, we have 12-step recovery programs, which has been common in churches from the beginning. As we think about providing a space for people to come and experience healing through the 12 steps, the 12 steps is designed to be God-focused, but agnostic, in the sense of not dictating any specific God. We don't ask for people's spiritual credentials when they come in the door. We simply say, "You want to pursue wholeness and wellness and healing, and we want that for you as well, so here's a place to do that."

Ken Crawford: So in our coworking and in our wellness programs, even out in the dog park, in our program that we host for adults with disabilities, all of these things are opportunities for people to move towards wholeness and healing, then we get to show up. Initially, it's just providing good Christian hospitality.

Ken Crawford: I tell people when I'm teaching about evangelism, I say the number one first step in evangelism is don't be a jerk. That's so hard for us. It's so easy for us to fall into these ... We don't think of them-

George Mason: I have something to tell you that you really don't know, and I'm going to offer this to you.

Ken Crawford: Let's make a list of the things that you need to do to get right with God, instead of saying, "Gosh, you've been on this journey of life for 50 years. Tell me what that's been like for you."

George Mason: Yes. Listening and asking questions.

Ken Crawford: We found that people were coming onto our campus, some of them were experiencing trauma just being on a church campus, because they'd been so hurt-

George Mason: Fascinating.

Ken Crawford: ... in the past. Then when were were able to simply say, "You're going to be okay. This is a safe place. Come, do the work that you've come here to do, and then let's get lunch together." Or, "Let's sit down and have a cup of coffee," and be able to have rich conversations. I want everybody to learn to be a follower of Jesus. I want that for them. But ultimately, that's not my responsibility. My responsibility is to live my faith and to be able to have respectful conversations with people regardless of their faith tradition or background. I'm going to learn some things about God and about myself in the process. Hopefully, they're going to learn some things along the way as well.

Ken Crawford: Through that, some measure of those, some number of those are going to go, "Oh wow, this Jesus way, yeah, I want that in my life as well." A lot of folks, as I just mentioned, who thought of themselves as followers of Jesus and were, it's not that they weren't really followers of Jesus, but are able to go to a deeper level because of this shift of mindset to recognize that we are here to pass on the faith, not just to hold the faith and enjoy it for ourselves.

George Mason: That shift of mindset has to happen for the church, but it also had to happen for you.

Ken Crawford: It did.

George Mason: I'm interested. I think others would be as well, especially if there are some who are in a position like yours as a pastor. What has this change been like for you? How has it affected your self-understanding as a pastor, as a minister? Because I think many times people like you and me, we go into this work, and our measures of success are still the tall steeple legacy church being, thriving, and all of that. Here you're having to come to grips with a different metric of what it means to be a successful pastor.

Ken Crawford: Sure, sure. Very, very difficult is how it's been. I did my doctoral work at SMU at Perkins. After a couple of other iterations, my thesis ended up being called Transforming Vocations. It was basically a study of people who entered into the idea of ministry with the expectation of pursuing that traditional 20th century path, which in so many cases has evaporated. One of my friends and colleagues, I just found out last week, has taken a full-time job with Amazon, because he could not find a church within a reasonable commuting distance where he could support his family and do life-giving work. That's more and more becoming the case. I've had to process that for myself. I've had great mentors and colleagues. I count you as one of those, who have been able to help me think through some of that and to recognize that, yes, there will still be, and thank God for it, large, strong, vibrant, healthy churches like Wilshire and so many others in the community.

Ken Crawford: The days of large churches being the norm and most people finding their spiritual nurture in big gatherings in sanctuaries on Sunday morning, those days are drawing to a close. So we have to be active with the Holy Spirit to help people imagine and resource them to create for themselves ... It's presumptuous of us to say, "Here, let me build your next faith expression," but to partner with people as they try to figure out for themselves what that looks like and what they need.

George Mason: I'm thinking, Ken, you say that there are still going to be vibrant large congregations and that sort of thing, ours being maybe one of them right now. But we're smaller than we used to be as well. I think we're all trying to help each other figure out where we are in the lifecycle of our churches and not just do the same thing we used to do, but figure out what's the next way God is calling us to be church. I think that the witness you have for churches like ours there at Central is one that we need to pay attention to also. How can we exercise hospitality in our building, for our neighbors, continue to turn outward and not inward, make sure that we have a sense that our mission is not just to ourselves? It feels to me like there may be an apparent distance or difference between churches like yours and mine, but I think we're actually all on the same continuum here, and we're working to find our way.

Ken Crawford: Sure, sure.

George Mason: Anyway, well, thank you for sharing your journey with us. I hope it'll be encouraging to a lot of churches and maybe actually give courage to a lot of churches to think afresh about the stewardship of their facilities, their building, their assets, the legacy of their church, and look to their neighbors as a place where God may be at work in it. So thank you so much.

Ken Crawford: Absolutely.

George Mason: Glad to have you on Good God.

Ken Crawford: Great. Thanks so much.

George Mason: You bet.

Jim White: Good God is created by Dr. George Mason, produced and directed by Jim White. Social media coordination by Cameron Vickrey. Good God, conversations with George Mason, is the podcast devoted to bringing you ideas about God and faith and the common good. All material copyright 2020 by Faith Commons.