The need to reinvent

I was raised in a time when things were fairly stable.  Marriages were expected to last forever.  You went to work for a company, stayed there until you retired, and received a gold watch.  You could attend virtually any church in a denomination and would find the services would be amazingly similar, they would be using the same materials and literature, and offer the same programs.  I am a product of that kind of thinking.  My wife and I have been married for nearly 48 years.  At age 18 I went to work in a factory, worked 30 years there, and when I retired I received my gold watch.  While working that factory job I accepted the call to a small, bivocational church where I served for 20 years before accepting a call to judicatory ministry where I've now been for the past 14 years.  On the surface, it appears my life has been fairly stable, but in reality there have been many changes along the way.

My pastoral ministry looked much different when I left that church in 2001 than it was when I began there in 1981.  When I started it was not uncommon to make visits to church members unannounced, but by the time I left the church I visited very few people without an appointment.  When I started we would go door-to-door in nearby neighborhoods inviting people to worship services or VBS or some other special event we were doing.  We also ended that practice when we discovered that most people considered that an intrusion in the precious few moments they have at home.  My leadership style changed as our church went from being primarily a board-led church to a pastor-led church.  As I earned the trust of our congregation I was given more freedom to lead.  One of my favorite stories is that at my first church business meeting my plan to take our young people to a nearby amusement park was rejected by the members.  Several years later I made the decision, with input from three people who were with me, to purchase a new digital piano for our church.  After the piano arrived I called a business meeting to get church approval for the purchase, and it was approved unanimously.  What a difference a few years make!

I changed my preaching style three different times while I pastored that church.  When I began I stayed behind the pulpit as I was heavily dependent upon my notes.  A few years into the pastorate I began preaching from a manuscript.  That experiment lasted about 18 months when I changed to a simple outline.  That outline also allowed me to move from behind the pulpit so I could freely move around the platform.  I also began to incorporate more stories into my messages as I learned that people could often identify with the stories and connect them to their own lives.  One of my favorite comments people sometimes give me after I've preached is that I make the Bible come alive through the stories I use.  The Bible is alive, and one of my preaching goals is that people experience that.

At a meeting a few years ago with other judicatory leaders I mentioned that I feel that I enjoyed a good ministry as a pastor, but I did not believe that much of what I did during those two decades would be as effective today.  I could not pastor today as I did then; I would have to reinvent myself as a pastor if I wanted to have a productive ministry.

Working with the churches in our judicatory and with various denominations around the country I see many pastors still functioning as they did 20-30 years ago and wondering why their ministries are not more effective.  They're doing everything they learned in seminary in the 1980s not realizing that we live in a much different time.  The expectations people have of church has changed.  People move more often making it more difficult to have a stable membership.  Children's ministries have changed with the increased numbers of single-parent homes.  Children are often with their other parent half the year making them unavailable for your church activities.  As the Builder generation dies off churches see their giving levels drop because the younger generations go not financially support the church at the same level the Builder generation did.  Fewer and fewer people are available for Sunday evening and mid-week services so efforts to maintain those are sure to be disappointing in many churches.  As a pastor, you may need to take a serious look at your ministry and preaching styles and see if you need to make some changes.

The same is true for churches.  I continually talk to small churches who insist they want to reach new people, especially younger people, and yet are unwilling to do anything differently than they did in the 1950s.  Any attempt to try something new is met by a controller who pulls out the church constitution, that was often approved in the 1950s, who insists that their constitution does not permit that to be done.  I'm currently working on a new book with a working title of Straight Talk to Small Churches so let me give you some straight talk.  Your church will either reinvent itself or it will die.  If you are more interested in protecting the way you've always done things than you are in reaching the people Jesus died for, then you are irrelevant to the Kingdom of God, and God will raise up another ministry to do the work you should be doing while he allows your church to die.

Learning new skills and new ways of doing ministry are not easy, but nobody said ministry was supposed to be easy.  Pastors and churches must continually reinvent themselves if they want to successfully impact a changing world for Jesus Christ.