It’s Finally Hip
January 24, 2007Opine all you want, for years even, but you simply wont be taken seriously until its in Christianity Today….
but hey, even if you had to wait for it to be hip… it’s a great, sensible article, and well worth reading; if a bit past the alarm.
[...] (H/T: The Philosophical Pastor) [...]
Read it yesterday. I’ve been doing some thinking about it. I posted some thoughts on my blog titled, “God uses flawed churches (and some whacked ones, too)”. If it is true that God uses our weaknesses to get ministry done, the thorns in the flesh, can’t this be true of churches, too? In our headlong rush to be the professional-kewlest-latest technology-up-to-all-suburban-standards kind of church, have we overreached and lost what makes us effective in the long run? I am wondering.
Read it. Liked it. sadly, people will read it and then try to make a template out of it. But the key statement in the whole piece was that they learned to “To be honest about our current condition.”
Barna, or one of those other “numbers” people, says it takes about five years to “turn a church around.” The reason? It takes the first two for the poor pastor to realize no one’s following. It takes another year to set right all the unhappiness he or she has created, and two more years to find a new group of people (all the original people are gone) with whom to do ministry.
The CT article suggests a better way. What is happening in that church is not so much “Emergent” (which has its own agenda) as it is simply the result of making a decision to stop trying to do church with what you wish you had and start doing church with what you’ve got. Pastors need to stop coming in to a situation they know almost nothing about with a well-conceived battle plan, Emergent or otherwise. Instead, come in knowing you don’t have it figured. Ask questions, rather than give answers. Listen. Don’t preach, converse. Share where you’re coming from, but then give it up. Find out where they’re coming from. Find out where people outside the walls are coming from. Figure out who your people are, what they do, what they love (and waht they don’t). What’s the culture? What are the real needs?
Only then can the pastor invite them (people he now knows and presumably loves, and who love him back) to plan their future as a church, and then help them facilitate it.