Vision Statement

I currently serve as the Transitional Pastor of Westport Baptist Church in Westport, Indiana. It is a great church with a rich history. We recently completed a process by which we were seeking to discern God's vision for the church as it moves forward. A number of people participated in the process. We had some great discussions as we sought to understand what God wanted us to be and do in the years ahead. As we came to the end of our discussion and discernment process we identified the following vision statement. "Our church will be a vibrant, inviting place to be. The congregation will have opportunity to fellowship with and learn from each other as well as other community members through small groups, outreach and other ministries based on community needs."

This seems like a simple statement, but it is packed with a lot of depth and challenges to our traditional church. I plan to spend several weeks addressing the various components in this statement to our congregation and invite them to begin living into this vision. If we will do so it can have a tremendous impact on our church as well as the community around us.

One of the key items in the statement is its focus on the community. There is definitely a discipleship element in the statement, but it has a major focus on those in our community who are hurting and do not yet have a relationship with Jesus Christ. We will be looking for those existing ministry opportunities that are not being addressed by other churches in the area and seeking how we can bring God's healing to those opportunities.

The challenge for us, as for all churches, is to not allow this to just become another statement of things we should do. Some churches have gone through the process of vision discernment, and when it was completed they had a statement that sits on a shelf gathering dust. A vision only impacts a church and community when the church lives in that vision. My prayer is that we will take this vision and use it as we make decisions regarding ministries, staffing, finances and all other decisions that affect the church. We must come to the place where if something is proposed that fits into the vision it is automatically given a green light. Conversely, we must be able to say no to those things that are outside the vision.

Living into a vision can become very messy. Organizations will always attempt to revert back to the comfort of what they know, and the church is no different. It is vital that churches not allow that to happen. God is doing a new thing today, and churches need to be a part of that. I do not pretend to know what this new thing is going to look like when we come through the other side, but I know church ministry is much different than it was when I began 40 years ago, and I'm excited to be allowed to be part of this transition.

Does your church have a sense of God's vision for your church's future ministry, or are you stuck doing the same things you've been doing for decades? Discerning a fresh vision is not easy, and it's even more difficult to begin living into it, but if we want our churches to have a future ministry it's imperative that we identify His vision. 

Adaptive leadership in the church

 Church leaders are asking why the changes they are attempting to make are not actually producing results. One reason is that we are trying to make things happen that are not going to happen. A church consultant shared something online this week that goes along with what I've been writing about for some time. We have been lying to ourselves saying that people will come back to the church. We said that when our young people started leaving the church. We said it when Covid kept people from attending the services in person. At least then we could point to the numbers of people who began watching online, but many churches now report they are seeing those numbers decrease, and it's not because these folks have returned to the live service. Some have learned they can get by very well without attending church very often, if at all. Most of them will not come back. We can keep trying to make changes in the hope that people will return to the church, but the likelihood is that they won't. 

The second reason our change efforts are failing is that we continue to make technical changes when adaptive changes are required. We make technical changes when we try to tweak a system we already have with things we already know. We might change the times of our worship service, change our committees into teams, change the music in our services, change the format of our services, make changes in the way we present our sermons, etc. In other words, we do what we already know what to do but we dress it up a little different. Technical solutions are fine if our problems are technical in nature, but the challenges I'm referring to are not technical. As you may have already learned, you can do all these things and nothing has really changed in the church.

If we want to respond to the challenges facing today's church we have to adapt to the reality of today's culture. We have to be willing to go on an adventure we had not planned on taking and find new ways to be the church in a new world.

Let me give you an example from outside the church. Last year our state banned public gatherings for about 3 months or so due to Covid. Even when that was lifted limited numbers of people were permitted to gather. When I resumed having auctions it was not uncommon for there to be no more than 20 people attending. That is not good for an auction! A friend of mine told me he was making a shift to doing his auction online. At first I was not interested in doing that. I love auction day. There is an excitement associated with auctions that I felt was not possible online. But, the people were not coming back. Prices were lower than they should be which wasn't good for me or my sellers. Something had to change.

I could have made technical changes. I could have changed my auction day from Tuesday to Thursday to see if people would come back. I could have increased my advertising or held special promotions. However, none of those would have made a difference. So, I adapted to the new reality and began conducting my auctions online. I signed up with an online company and had to learn their program. I had to learn new ways of presenting the items I have for sale at auction. I had to convince some sellers that online auctions were a good way to sell their items. I had to learn new marketing methods and how to effectively ship those items that were not purchased locally. The truth is we are still learning. The adaptive changes I made worked, and this year we will do more auctions than we've done the previous three years combined and new people from across the country sign up for every auction. It has been very successful.

Churches can beat their heads against the wall trying to get the people back who have left or we can accept the fact that most of them are not coming back and renew our focus on fulfilling the Great Commission in our communities. We can become worshiping, praying communities reaching into our neighborhoods to offer healing and hope to those who have been broken by life.

What will this look like? I don't know. What will the adaptive changes we need to make look like? I don't know. I don't believe anyone knows. Let's not wait until someone finds out and offers us a conference. I don't think there is time for that. Instead, let's take risks, let's trust God and launch out seeking to be on mission with Him. No doubt there will be some failures on the way doing that, but it's better than trying to do the same things that haven't been effective in decades.

The joy of pastoring a church

 As I've shared many times in this blog, for 20 years I had the privilege of serving as the bivocational pastor of a great little, rural church. After a few years serving there I was driving out to the church praying when it hit me that God had given me that community to pastor. I was not there just for that congregation but for the community around it. It was my parish, and I was overwhelmed with gratitude that God trusted me with such a responsibility.

My working title for my first book was The Joy of Bivocational Ministry. The publisher changed it to The Tentmaking Pastor: The Joy of Bivocational Ministry. As you can see, I convinced them to at least leave my title in as the sub-title. Some asked me how there could be joy in serving as a bivocational pastor with all the responsibilities I had to juggle. There was joy in that role, and those 20 years were some of the most fulfilling years of my life. I wrote the book so others could hear of that joy and, hopefully, find that same joy in their own ministries.

During my 40 years in ministry I've met many pastors who felt no joy in ministry. After leaving that church for denominational ministry I found many pastors struggling with the challenges of ministry. Their initial excitement and sense of calling had been lost years earlier in the midst of church fights, changes in the culture, lack of volunteers, lack of financial support, and the pressures often found in pastoral work. More than a few were just trying to hold on until they could retire, and some gave up before reaching retirement to take other work.

I've faced my challenges in pastoral ministry, both as a pastor and as a denominational minister, but I have never done anything as rewarding and satisfying as the ministry. People have disappointed me at times, but God has never disappointed me. On the other side of that coin, there have also been people who have blessed me beyond measure. What could be more exciting than to see a person give their life to Christ? What greater privilege could anyone have than to baptize someone into the faith? There are few things in this world that can bring greater joy than to hear someone say that my ministry had touched their lives.

I want to encourage every minister reading this blog to fall in love again with the calling God has placed on your life. There are some challenging times ahead for the church, and I believe that pastors are going to find themselves dealing with issues they have not been trained to address. It's going to require courage and boldness to ride out the tidal waves that the church is facing, but God called you to this role because He knew you could do it.

Love your calling. Love your people, even the difficult ones. If you're struggling as a minister, rediscover the joy your first felt when you began. Don't focus on the difficult circumstances. Keep your eyes looking above when your strength lies and allow Him to empower you for the challenges you face. Thank God every day for the ministry He has given you.

There will come a day when my ministry will end. I do not look forward to that day. If I had my life to live over again, I would not hesitate to return to pastoral ministry. There is no greater calling a person can commit his or her life to. If you are struggling to believe that right now, I encourage you to begin to ask God to help you find that same joy in your ministry.

Seminary didn't prepare me for this

 At gatherings of pastor meetings one will often hear it said, "Seminary didn't prepare me for this." It's usually said out of frustration at the growing number of challenges church leaders face today. Although some claim much higher numbers, actual research indicates that about 250 pastors leave the ministry each month for reasons other than death or retirement. For many of these pastors, the demands and the ever-changing face of ministry made them decide to make a career move. Other data indicates that 29% of pastors considered leaving the ministry in the past year. Some of that may be due to the challenges they faced dealing with Covid, but for many, that challenge was just one more on top of the many other challenges they faced.

It's been said, "What got you here won't get you there." That's certainly true of ministry. Think of all the churches that once saw large crowds, growing ministries and successful programs that are now struggling and even facing closing their doors. They thought they could just continue doing what they had always done and continue to see the same results. Even some larger churches that have known tremendous growth over the past decade are now beginning to sense that things are not well and their effective ministries are no longer providing the results they once did.

Those pastors who pointed at their seminary education were right: seminary did not prepare them for ministry today. Seminary taught them how to preach, how to manage the church structures they were in, how to provide pastoral care and to be the theological and church history experts in their churches. All necessary things to know and sufficient for churches during Christendom, but we now live in a post-Christian world, and it is in this world that we are called to do ministry. The things we learned previously will not be sufficient in this new world. New skills are needed. New ways of understanding ministry must be learned.

One of the problems is that there are no experts to teach us. We are in a completely new, uncharted territory when it comes to doing ministry. I've written before about how the church is in a time of transition, and no one knows what it's going to look like on the other side. So what do we do?

We explore. This is a time when bold leadership is needed that seeks creative ways to do ministry in our world as it exists today, not as we remember it. We take chances and try new things. Each church and its leadership must look for ways to do ministry in the communities in which they were placed by God. We recognize that we are now missionaries called to reach a pagan world. Our churches are not merely places in which to meet but are mission stations where people worship God and then are taught how to do ministry as missionaries. 

Some church leaders and the churches they lead will be unable to adapt to this new way of thinking. They will be convinced that if they just try harder doing the things they've always done that things will improve. They won't. What got you here won't get you there. What you learned in seminary will not be sufficient for ministry in the 21st century. We face too many new challenges that our education and past success did not prepare us to address.

I challenge you to begin to look at ministry with fresh eyes. Ask God to help you with that. Are there new ways of doing ministry that will be more effective? How can you lead your congregation to explore those new ways? What needs to be transformed for your congregation to become willing to take the necessary risks these times require? As a leader, are you willing be transformed first before asking your church to be transformed?

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How elastic is your church?

 When Jesus talks about the problem of putting new wine into old wineskins He is referring to the way the wine expands as it ferments. An older wineskin is rigid and won't expand as the fermenting wine expands.  The result is that the old wineskin breaks and becomes useless. A new wineskin is still flexible and elastic allowing it to expand with the wine. 

For decades the church has operated with an attractional model. We invited people to attend our worship services and tried to provide incentives to get them to come. We might have changed our musical styles, offered new programs, changed the name of the church, and a host of other things that we thought might attract people to our church services. Unfortunately, what happened more often than not was that we were just swapping people with other churches. Our programs often did little more than entice someone to leave the church they were attending to come to ours. When another church began to offer a newer program or ministry, these same people often left to attend that church. There was little impact on reaching persons who were not yet Christians.

People who are not Christians have little interest in our programs or ministries. They could care less what name is on our signs or our musical styles. They are not interested in our branding. They are living their lives without the church and see no reason to add it to one more thing they need to introduce into  their lives. The attractional model of church is seldom going to be effective as we continue into the 21st century. We have to find new ways to minister to people where they are both physically and spiritually.

One of the lessons learned from the Covid pandemic is that organizations have to be flexible if they want to achieve their mission. Schools have had to adapt to online learning forcing teachers and administrators to scramble to provide that education to their students. Many businesses have struggled to have employees, and many have reduced their hours due to manpower issues. Churches who never thought they would have an online presence had to take crash courses in Facebook and YouTube to provide worship opportunities to their congregations. This same flexibility will be required if we want to reach our communities for the Kingdom of God.

If people won't come to our churches, we must go to them. Incidentally, this is what Jesus told us to do in the Great Commission.  We are to go into all the world, not unlock our church doors and ask people to come to us. The question for each church is where do we go? Who are the people God has given us to reach? How do we take the Gospel to them in a way that is relevant to their daily lives, and how do we earn the right to speak it to them? Is our church elastic enough to move from an attractional model to a missional model?

Some churches will be like old wineskins. They are simply too rigid to allow the necessary changes to occur. They will continue to function as they have in the past until the day comes when their doors are locked. Other churches will have the elasticity to allow the expanding changes to occur that will permit their ministries to be more effective. They will find new ways of relating to people who do not yet know Jesus and learn new methods of sharing the Gospel with them. They will try some things that may not work, but rather than becoming discouraged and quitting, they will try other methods of reaching those God has given them.

Your structure is perfectly designed for the results you are getting. If you are in a rigid structure, you will keep getting what you've been getting. If you are in an elastic structure, you can accomplish far greater things than you can imagine. How elastic is your church?

How will your church choose to minister?

 My latest book is titled Is Your Church Ready for Ministry in the Coming Decade?. It addresses some of the cultural issues that the church is facing. Many churches have tried to ignore some of these but to continue to do that is to abandon a lot of hurting people. Most of these are not new challenges, but they are ones a lot of churches are not prepared to address. It's tempting to think that only those persons outside the church are dealing with these issues, but that it not the case. The truth is that many within our churches are dealing with the same challenges. I wrote this book to help church leaders and their churches be better informed about how to serve those in our congregations and communities.

How will your church minister to the individual who may be dealing with gender dysphoria? While this is not a new issue, it is one that seems to be increasing as we continue into the 21st century. How much do you know about the difficulties people face when they believe they were born the wrong gender? While many in our society today encourage those persons to live into the gender they prefer, is this the best solution for them physically, emotionally and spiritually? How do you minister to the other family members? The book provides a chapter to help provide an overview of what science, and more importantly, the Scriptures say about this challenge. You will also find some helpful resources there to further your understanding.

How will your church minister to the person considering suicide as a way to end their pain? More people think about suicide than you may realize, and it is a growing problem among young people. Do you know the signs of someone who is thinking about ending his or her life? How do you minister to the family of someone who has taken his or her life or the loved ones who live each day in fear that the person will? Again, I think this book will help you find some answers and point you to more helpful resources.

Despite what our culture says about same-sex marriage and relationships, what does the Bible teach? Just as importantly, how does the church share that information in a way that is helpful. For too long the church has been seen as hostile towards people in same-sex relationships. Many people today believe the Bible teaches that we are to hate those in such relationships, but that is not what it teaches at all. All persons, regardless of the choices they have made in life, are created in the image of God and deserve to be treated with respect. This book tries to remind us that the Bible teaches us to always speak the truth in love.

If your church is like most, you want to help those who come to you with financial needs. But, how much of that money actually helps them? Are we enabling bad behavior and/or bad choices? Are we helping people remain dependent upon others? How can the church provide help in a way that respects the dignity of the person and helps them become financially wise?

Other chapters focus on different challenges the church currently faces and will likely face even more in the future. If we want to be relevant to the needs of this generation, as well as future ones, we must learn how to best respond to these various challenges. My prayer is that this latest book will provide church leaders with some of the tools they will need to do that. It's only available for your Kindle devices from Amazon.

Covid and family emergencies and change

 I haven't posted anything lately as we've been dealing with health issues and other family emergencies over the past few weeks. I had Covid first, and on the day I was out of quarantine my wife came down with it. She actually had to spend one night in the hospital. After being home for a few days, she became ill again last week and went back into the hospital for three days with some complications they believe is related to Covid. On top of that, another family member contracted the disease and was later diagnosed with some after effects. To say the past month or so has been challenging would be an understatement, but we are pressing onward and upward.

One author recently wrote that the challenges that will face us in the future will be unlike any that have been seen before. In the past, a challenge would arise and we could address it with things we had learned from similar past events. That may not be the case in the future. Just like Covid forced everyone to find new ways of dealing with everyday life, the new challenges that will come will require us to change in new ways to address them. I think of our educators who do know one week from the next what decisions will have to be made to educate our children. I think of employers who are struggling to stay open never knowing if their employees will suddenly be quarantined for two weeks. And who knows what new challenges are out there for us?

Another author I recently read said that churches continue to spend much time trying to get people to attend their services and programs, and the reality is that isn't going to happen. This is an unexpected change for many churches and church leaders to consider. After spending several years pastoring a megachurch in the US he resigned to spend three years ministering in Europe. There he learned how most of the people consider going to church to be irrelevant to their lives. The majority of people there are totally secular with no sense of any need for God in their lives. He warned that the attitude towards church and God in America is fast becoming the same as in Europe making most of our outreach efforts ineffective.

For the past few years we've heard about the "nones," those people who report they have no religious affiliation. There are also the "dones." These are people who are done with the church as it currently exists. They may have been hurt by the church or they may just find it to no longer be relevant to their lives, but they are not going back. The "nones" and the "dones" are raising a generation who are not in church, know nothing about God and the church, and will grow up completely secular in their thinking and their worldview.

Unfortunately, although we know this is the case, much of our Western church world has continued to function as it always has. We keep doing the same things we've done for decades with diminishing returns. We cannot continue to address new challenges with the same tired programs and remedies that haven't worked in decades. We must find new ways of ministering to the world as it is, not as we remembered it. We must become missionaries to our ever-growing secular world and find new ways of connecting people to Jesus Christ and the Kingdom of God.

For years I have been telling churches and other gatherings that the church is in the midst of transition. I do not know what the church will look like when we come through that transition, but I am quite certain it will be much different than it is today. The question each of us must ask is are we are willing to make the necessary changes to be part of what God is doing, or will our churches become like the empty religious monuments in Europe that used to be healthy vital churches?