To Purge or Not To Purge

Every year around this time United Methodist pastor's find themselves locked in the horns of a dilemma. It's Charge Conference season and those of us who sit in the congregational oversight seat are faced "auditing" the membership rolls, which includes the possibility of removing inactive persons from church membership, known lovingly at "purging the rolls." It's a tough decision, for on the one hand one wants to help a congregation be honest about those who are truly committed to life together in that place, but on the other hand we don't want to suggest that all hope is lost, and admit that these folks who haven't been in worship for ten years are likely never coming back. In addition to those questions there is always the institutional reality that membership decline doesn't look good on the year end reports, and there is really no particular gain in removing folks from the rolls in most Annual Conferences that don't base apportionments on membership statistics. 

This is one of those ethical dilemmas that call into question pastoral, congregational, and institutional honesty. The fact is, as we all know, there are folks who have simply moved on, and have no intention of moving their membership anywhere else, especially since concepts like "membership" seem to mean less and less. There are also folks who want their names to remain on the roll for all sorts of strange reasons, such as access to the cemetery plots or out of nostalgia, even though they and we know that they will never again be likely to be part of the gathered community, especially when they live many states away. At what point should we acknowledge in a formal way that these folks aren't a part of the community, especially in a system that rewards the dishonesty of padding the rolls, making our churches often seem much better off than they actually are?

The congregation that I serve has had to wrestle with that. At the height of their success in the late eighties and early nineties, they had reached well over 500 members on the rolls (and approaching 300 in worship). However after an unsuccessful pastoral appointment and a great deal of infighting well over half of that membership had moved on to other places, and worship attendance had declined by 120 persons each week. My predecessor, recognizing that he was nearing retirement, decided that honesty was the best policy, and decided to help make the rolls accurate. He started the process the year before his retirement, so when my first charge conference rolled around we removed 180 names from our rolls. What this meant was that rather than having 30% participation of members in worship, we went to having some 70% of members present on any given Sunday. 

I share all this for a rather strange reason. Over the years we have had many folks submit their blogs to the MethoBlog for inclusion. But as I look over our "rolls," I find many blogs that have had no posts in at least the last four weeks, and most likely even longer than that. On the one hand these blogs don't cost us anything in terms of bandwidth or disk space, but continuing to list them does make wading through menus and blog roll much longer. So I am trying to decided whether it is time to have our own MethoBlog "purge" here and remove some of those who aren't regularly (at least once every 8 weeks) posting. 

What do you think? It is time for a MethoPurge, or do you like seeing those names on the right even if they don't lead anywhere?