A few weeks ago, I was interviewing Elaine Heath, a good ministry friend across the years, as she described her current ministry focus. (Click HERE for the episode) As we chatted, it hit me that we may be coming out of the fog of transition between eras, between Christendom and the What Next. The What Next is taking on shape and texture. I would like to take a moment in this year-end reflection to describe the land that is coming into focus - the Church that is Rising.
These days, churches are more sidelined than ever in terms of being at the center of community life. Our children’s Sunday school rooms from the 1970s are mostly empty. Post-2020, the few families with children who regularly attend on Sundays became fewer still. Even some of our died-in-the-wool folks have given up regular engagement. It is a very different world than that in which I graduated seminary 36 years ago.
I was raised in a white evangelical home in America. My family remembered early twentieth century poverty quite personally and were oriented toward social justice in our worldview. Unionization lifted my paternal grandparents into the middle class. In recent years, lots of almost ex-vangelicals, much younger than I am, have redefined themselves as progressive evangelical or liberal evangelical. This has made sense to people who had robust and formative encounters with God in their youth, but whose own education and widening experience of the world beyond their childhood church has pushed them to try to re-frame their faith identity.
Pastors are forever discerning the boundaries related to what they can get away with before their church members become too anxious or oppositional. It varies from one place to the next, from one year to the next. If you are new to a place, or to a denomination, it’s easy to misjudge the boundaries. The electric fences are often invisible and you’d never know they were there unless you bump into one… and then ZAP… you know! Once in a small town I dared to hold services on the church premises the same day as the annual cemetery day, which sent some of the old-timers into orbit. Two life-timers quit their membership over that infraction. ZAP!
I just finished a week-long road trip across Kansas and Nebraska visiting Methodist pastors that I am coaching. These pastors are a sharp bunch. Their churches are faring better than one would expect in 2022. Here is a bit of what I saw:
Here are six critical ideas foundational to ministry in the 2020s, especially as the public continues to sour in its perception of organized religion:
The spring of 2022 is a busy time for me as I seek to play catch-up with on-site church consultations, many of which were postponed during the last Covid surge. I’ve been in 18 distinctive places meeting with churches and leaders in the past 30 days!! As I step into life with various churches for a day or two in each place, two distinctive realities are becoming clear. It is either feast or famine.
As we ride the tail end of the Omicron wave into late winter, we proceed into spring with the highest communal Covid immunity to date. Chances are good that we will enjoy a respite from the pandemic madness for a stretch of time. Who knows what late summer or fall will bring as immunity diminishes? But from Lent to Pentecost, the road is looking mighty fine.
Twenty-five years ago this spring, Ken Callahan came to my church for a local church consultation. I was blown away by his hyper-focus and sense of clarity which came from working with lots of churches. Because he was not so deeply enmeshed in our particular situation with its challenges, he could see things that we could not. It was one of the most remarkable experiences of my life - the sense of Ah Ha that enabled our church to quickly make some strategic decisions that would result in us reaching hundreds of new people. i don’t recall what we paid him per day - but it was worth it!
