Importance: 10%
The Big Idea
A basic overview of some areas where mission and visioning can go off track.
Overview
Often times the process of setting vision and mission are exciting but fleeting processes undertaken by churches and schools. There is much excitement, time and energy poured into the crafting of a beautiful and evocative mission and vision statement. Everyone rallies around it and talks about it. The future feels bright, but often times things end there. After sermon series, celebrations, and the ceremonial changing of letterhead and bulletins, community life tends to slowly settle back into the status quo - like the vicious pull of entropy.
When we read the history of the church, rapid spreading of the Gospel often happens during times of severe hardship and persecution. For example, during the reformation, the spread of God’s word in a way that was accessible to the average person took place even in the face of seemingly unimaginable odds. Or, during the plague of Cyprian in the mid 200s, the Gospel spread because of the daring care and love of Christians for the sick in the face of a horrible contagious disease. Yet somewhere along the way, the comfortable organizational processes that govern our congregations have lost the depth of conviction and purpose our ancestors in the faith often felt and lived out so freely. None of our ancestors needed a ten or twenty step plan with a committee and timeline to spread the Gospel in surprising and often unpredictable directions under unimaginable circumstances.
So why do we feel the need for them today? And why are we so lost without them?
More recent attempts to address the underlying issue of stagnation (which has reared its ugly face in the form of nationally dwindling and dying congregations) tend to go in a few different directions:
- Attraction Model churches seek to simply attract people with the best music or programs. This model basically aims to be the best show and marketers in town. Often times, this ends up with very shallow and surface level communities willing to split apart if a better offer arises.
- Strictly Liturgical or High churches return to historical forms of worship and liturgy in the hopes that direct adherence to these historical forms in a kind of copy and paste method will restore a sense of meaning and heritage. Therefore (as it is hoped) leading to the deep conviction of earlier Christians who used those forms. This can be seen in use with very conservative congregations (that usually also have a heavy emphasis on pure doctrine) but also in liberal churches who only have their forms of liturgy with which to hold them together as a group. In either case, liturgy is often expected to “work its magic” at face value without deeper pedagogical or wholistic considerations.
- Personality Driven churches rally around a particularly strong leader who inspires and grabs peoples attention. These kinds of churches are often highly unified and going in a particular direction until the said leader leaves, retires, or dies leaving the church adrift without their unifying force.
An observation concerning all of these proposed remediations is that they are horribly narrow in scope. They single out a particular element in a church’s constitution with the hopes that it will be the silver bullet to put everything else back on track. This has not gone without being acknowledged with still other more general solutions being proposed, such as:
- Renewed and expanded programs as a way to revitalize a particular area of community life, such as youth, young adult, mercy ministries, etc. If done right, these programs can be very successful but take a lot of manpower, money, planning, etc. These kinds of resources are not always readily available in many church contexts. Nor do programs stay successful forever. The loss of key staff, change in community circumstances, the passing of time, etc. can take a very successful program and run it into the ground. In addition, a practical outcome of focusing on programs is the tendency for fragmentated ministries to develop. The danger of this being that particular parts of ministry end up receiving the lion share of resources while other areas languish.
- Alternative Church Organizational structures have also been offered as a way to streamline and improve the internal functioning of a congregation. Examples of this are things like policy based governance, decentralized networks, house churches, missional communities, and many other various approaches to how a church is organizationally set up and governed.
These kinds of solutions get us closer to the ideal of a fully engaged, convicted and lively congregation, but they too suffer from some major innate restrictions such as:
- Reliance on either top down or bottom up leadership exclusively. Rather than a healthy mix of grassroots and leadership led. Another way to state this is that we should rely on both the Pastoral Office and the Priesthood of all Believers.
- Narrow focus and inability to see and start from the whole. Programs fragment ministry. In a world where even the basic family unit is fragmented in so many ways. Why do we willingly contribute to that in the way we structure our community life?
- Trapped in a mechanistic mentality of ministry. A mechanistic mentality is one in which we are perpetually looking for the right “mechanism” that if set up right and put into action right will make everything work the way we want it.
- Many of these solutions are also nonadaptable and context insensitive.
- Balance of ornamentation and pedagogy.
- Efficiency rather than faithfulness being the primary litmus test if something works or not.