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:
