The purpose of this entire blog is to help Canadian ministry leaders, of both churches and agencies, lead their ministries effectively. In this particular series, my purpose is to encourage you to creatively rethink how you pursue your mission. It’s time to check our assumptions and challenge our paradigms. Is what we are doing working? Is it effectively moving us forward for mission success?

When I look at survey information about religion in Canada (which seems stalled at best) and hear arguments being made about the place of religion in society (which want to relegate religion to the personal sphere only), it is clear that we have a lot of work to do. God said he would bless Abraham, that in turn Abraham would be a blessing to the world, and that all people on earth would be blessed through Abraham. As Abraham’s heirs, we want to see everyone, every human being, experience God’s blessing.

To play our part, many of us need to hit the reset button to adjust to the world that exists today. Many ministries have already done this and are thriving. Others have yet to seriously address the changes in society that have occurred over the last 50 years.

I regularly hear remarkable success stories from ministries all across Canada. These welcome stories inspire me and greatly encourage me, because they show what can be done when we do ministry well and in a way that fits with where the non-Christian world is at today.

Now is the time we need more than ever to hold on to our historic faith and stay true to our mission, but also to adjust to a changed relationship with the world around us that is new to our generation, and almost unprecedented in the history of the church.

So, let’s get started on developing a fresh way forward. Each post will contribute a small but important part to the overall project of helping the church be successful in our times.

Time to Call It as It Is

Almost three years ago, in what is now the first post of this series, I reviewed Mark Noll’s turning points in Christian history, and gave my opinion that the church is either at a new turning point or is at least experiencing a significant new trend:

Not since [before] Christianity became the Roman state religion in 313 has Christianity been so counter-cultural. In a world that worships ‘me’, ‘my rights’, and ‘my convenience’, the church stands out for holding perspectives and values that are most emphatically not shared by general society.

I now believe we are experiencing more than just another major trend. We are indeed at a turning point, and if we do not do something about it now, we leaders will later be found derelict in our duty by the generations that follow us.

The Turning Point

Christianity enjoyed a favoured status in Western society for almost 1,700 years. Both the state and culture reflected, however imperfectly, a generally Christian worldview.

But Christianity has been gradually losing its favoured status for several hundred years, and in the last thirty years it feels like there has been an unprecedented, aggressive, all-out, sustained assault on the Christian faith and its place in the public sphere. In the Western world, faith is being squeezed into a small box of private belief which is not to be opened except in the privacy of one’s home or place of worship. The result is that society is far down a trajectory based on secular values, and orthodox Christianity today is as counter-cultural as it ever was.

What makes this a turning point worthy of historical note is that, unlike the sometimes severe persecution the church has suffered in specific countries in every century, the change in status is not localized but is affecting the faith throughout the Western world. However well or poorly the church deals with it, the ramifications will be felt throughout the Western world for centuries to come.

We’ve Been Here Before

Today, Christianity in the West is in very much the same place as it was in its first two centuries in the Roman empire: it is a minority religion in a society which is a free-for-all for religious thought, competing against an overwhelming state ideology that stands against it. The Roman state ideology was the cult of the emperor; the Western world’s state ideology is the cult of the individual.

Movements have their ups and downs, but our beleaguered situation today is outside the normal fluctuations of fortune. Only once before, in the 700s to 900s when Christianity was reduced to a rump in western Europe and its future was in doubt (from a human perspective), was our faith in as difficult a spot as it is today in terms of its relationship with the world.

Finding ourselves once more in such a defensive posture is a significant turn of events that warrants serious reflection on how the church thinks of itself and does its work. If the church does deep soul-searching, I believe it will emerge stronger than ever. In three or four hundred years, the 20th and 21st centuries may well be seen as another low point, just like the 700s to 900s, from which Christianity emerged as a healthy and effective world-changing agent.

Looking Forward

In the West, we have been travelling for almost two millennia along a pretty straight road through a society that affirms Christianity, a road which is now taking us from one period of history to another. As we cross the bridge between the old and the new, the road ahead travels through a society that does not give any special place to Christianity. The other end of the bridge disappears into the fog of uncertainty, a shroud of mystery. It’s our job now to discern what God has for us in this new place in which we find ourselves. That’s what this series will explore.

The Problem

The problem that has us stuck is that many Christians still cling to the privileges they once had, grabbing hold of them, trying to reclaim them. They are fighting to go back to something that doesn’t exist anymore. The cat’s out of the bag. The horses have bolted from the barn. Even if we wanted to go back, it is too late.

Instead, we need to have the attitude of Christ, “who, although He existed in the form of God, did not regard equality with God a thing to be grasped.” (Phil 2:6). Jesus Christ gave up his rights and privileges in order to serve humanity, and by making that sacrifice he put himself on a road that inevitably led to suffering and death. We must likewise give up our privileges in order to better serve humanity knowing that God will vindicate us just as he vindicated his Son.

We need some paradigm shifts, three to be exact.

New Paradigms

The three beneficial paradigm shifts we should make are:

1. In the paradigm held by most Christians, the loss of favoured status can only be regarded as bad, as a setback, as a loss. A better, new paradigm is that the loss of status is the start of God doing something new and good. Such a loss could be very good if it forces us to think afresh about the church, how we live out our faith, and how we take our place in society. And if you can’t see the loss of status as a good thing, then be assured that God will redeem our loss in some way for our good (Rom 8:28). Either way, rather than cling to the old, we must let go to grasp the new.
2. Another shift relates to how the church conducts its mission. Instead of expecting institutions of the church to do Christian work for us, we should see Christian work as the collective responsibility of both institutions and individuals. Historians and sociologists agree that in the first few centuries of the church, evangelism was mostly done by individuals in their neighbourhoods and on their travels as they shared their faith. There were evangelists and apostles to be sure, but the driving force behind the spread of Christian faith were the individuals who remain nameless in history. Charitable works were also done by individuals. Lecky, in his History of European Morals¹, wrote that “The active, habitual, and detailed charity of private persons, which is such a conspicuous feature in all Christian societies, was scarcely known in antiquity.” It’s time to reawaken individual Christians to their responsibility and their potential for Christian mission wherever God has put them. Churches and Christian agencies can do a lot of great work, but individual Christians can add significantly to what they can do, because individuals are everywhere.
3. The loss of status could lead to a third beneficial paradigm shift – a redefinition of mission success. There is a tendency to think of success in terms of win/lose, of advance or retreat, We think of success in terms of public life – especially in terms of politics. In later posts I will be exploring what success looks like and therefore what the indicators of success could be in our new world.

Consequences of a Bad Paradigm

As I wrote up above, I travel the country and hear great testimonies of the good things God is doing everywhere in our land, and I rejoice. But then, when I read the stats about what Canadians believe or don’t believe, and even what Christians believe and don’t believe, I have to wonder “Have we really accomplished all that much in the last fifty years?” It sometimes feels as though all the good news reports I hear might be all the good news reports there are.

James Davison Hunter wrote in To Change the World about several spectacular success stories of Christian ministries, but then concludes, “The problem is that these initiatives represent just a fraction of the potential within the church to bear witness to the love, grace, mercy, and truth of Christ.” Why would he think that? Maybe we are distracted from the good work we could be doing, individually and collectively, by fighting too much to preserve what we believe is rightfully ours.

The Prescription

I feel like Dorothy when she first stepped into the land of Oz and said, “Toto, I’ve a feeling we’re not in Kansas anymore.”

We are at a point in time where we must stop and reflect on where the church is at in relation to our society. We can’t go forward if we keep imagining that somehow we will restore the church to its former privileged position.

I’ve just been asked to join a small group tasked by a ministry that is more than a century old to take its mission and, starting with a green field, redesign everything about the ministry from the ground up. If it assumed it had no history but were starting fresh today with its mission, what would the ministry look like and how would it do its work? This is exactly the bold, radical fresh thinking I’m talking about. This readiness to reinvent ourselves and to allow the Holy Spirit to do something fresh in our generation gives us confidence that we can thrive in our new environment.

The way forward is to reflect on Christ’s Incarnation. When he entered human experience, he relied on no earthly power and did not cling to divine power, yet he changed the world by being obedient to his Father. How, then, should the church go forward? Stay tuned.

Key Point: Our world has changed in a very fundamental and historically significant way

The post The Church Is at a Turning Point appeared first on CCCC Blogs.

Turning points are significant events that affect the very long term. They cause fundamental changes to the way things are. Trends do the same, but only over the course of a generation or so. Because a turning point is defined in terms of its future impact, they can only really be seen in hindsight.

For example, someone in the 1950s would likely have pointed to the development of Communist states as a critical turning point, but after less than a century we see it for what it was – an experiment that failed, a blip (albeit a significant blip) in the history of our world.

So history will be the best judge of whether a turning point actually occurred and how decisive it was, but it does appear that some current conditions could be turning points. Either way, they are important enough that if you are not yet thinking strategically about them, you should start factoring them into your mission-related strategies.

Noll’s Turning Points

Noll acknowledges that his choice of 13 turning points for inclusion in his book is subjective and based on what he thinks is most important in church history. (He lists a number of others that he could have written about.)

Some of the turning points were imposed by external forces:

• The fall of Jerusalem in 70 AD and the loss of the church’s Jewish roots
• The French revolution and the first complete secularization of a society in 1789

Other turning points bubbled up from within the church in response to situations that had been developing for centuries:

• Benedict’s recovery of personal piety through his “Rules” in 530
• The Great Schism between the Eastern and Western churches in 1054
• Luther’s rediscovery of salvation by faith in 1521

Some of the turning points came about from conferences, such as the Edinburgh Missionary Conference of 1910 and the Council of Nicaea in 325, both of which deliberated weighty issues. At Nicaea, for example, they tackled two very heady questions:

• How was Jesus both man and God at the same time?
• How is one who is ‘begotten’ also eternal?

Each of these turning points shaped Christianity, for better or worse, for centuries (and even millennia) to come.

Noll ends the book by identifying five current developments that may be turning points (get the book to see what he has to say about each of these):

1. The rise and spread of Pentecostalism;
2. The emergence of women into greater public visibility;
3. The massive production of new Bible translations as an aspect, more generally, of the globalization of Christianity;
4. The survival of Christianity under Communist regimes; and
5. The recent flourishing of Christianity in Communist China.

Our Turning Points?

I have three other possible turning points (or at least significant trends)  that will almost certainly affect our strategic plans.

The Church Is Becoming Counter-Cultural Again

Not since Christianity became the Roman state religion in 313 has Christianity been so counter-cultural. In a world that worships ‘me’, ‘my rights’, and ‘my convenience’, the church stands out for holding perspectives and values that are most emphatically not shared by general society.

We are in a society very similar to that in which the ancient church found itself:

• In the pre-Constantine era, Christianity was just one of many religions competing for attention. Today the mission field has come to us (a positive interpretation of events), but that means that Christianity in Canada is once again just part of the mix.
• While their society had some trappings of a state-based religion (emperor worship), the prevailing mindset was quite secular, the same as in Canadian society today.
• Christians back then were a marginalized part of society without political power. Today, faith (especially the Christian faith) has been privatized and stifled, seen as having little, if any, legitimate role in public discussions. Secular Canadians have morphed the American constitutional freedom of religion into freedom from religion.

Yet, as history shows, this counter-cultural status is not a bad place for the church to be! Sociologists are amazed at the explosive growth of the early church. To go from zero to the state religion of an empire in 300 years is just shy of a miracle. Although women undoubtedly evangelized too, the following quote eloquently summarizes evangelism in the first few centuries of Christianity using the term man to refer to the laity.

The little man, the unknown ordinary man, the man who left no literary remains, was the prime agent in mission.¹

The gospel advanced at an outrageous pace because ordinary Christians like you and me, who had experienced the life-changing power of God, simply shared their stories wherever they went.

Strategic Implications

People working in frontline Christian ministries may already be doing everything I’m about to suggest. I am simply providing some thoughts as an armchair generalist that might stimulate strategic reflection by your leadership team, which has the specialist knowledge in your field that I don’t.

• The strategic implications are most obvious for churches and evangelism ministries. You can no longer assume any biblical literacy among the people you are trying to reach, and you may have to close two ‘sales’ for most people: first, that there is a spiritual reality and a ‘higher being’; and then second, that the Christian faith is the true reality. And you also have to convince people that there is indeed absolute truth and not just one truth that works for me and one that works for you!
• All proposals related to the public realm, particularly legislation, must be made using only secular arguments. This is fairly easily done for social justice issues, but much more difficult in the highly sensitive issues of public morals (most notably in issues related to the beginning and ending of life, and of sexuality). We need to be much more creative and thoughtful in addressing these issues, and far more intentional about long-term strategy in the public realm as opposed to short-term responsive campaigns. On these latter issues, if good laws can be passed, well and good. But given today’s reality, we might fare better by working at the individual level so that even if the law permits something, people will choose the better way.
• We need to make life in the kingdom of God far more attractive to the secular public than we do. I’m thinking particularly of governance, leadership, and human resource matters among all ministries, and congregational life in churches. Church splits are never a good witness to the unity we have in Christ! Acrimonious divisions between directors, or between board and staff, are not good witnesses to the reconciled relationships we are supposed to have in Christ. Caustic work environments don’t model God’s character at all. We must model internally the unity, love, and care that God has commanded of us. In other words, get along with each other and really show God’s love for everyone. That’s what attracted the attention of the Roman world. Emperor Julian complained:

“Why do we not observe that it is their [the Christians’] benevolence to strangers, their care for the graves of the dead, and the pretended holiness of their lives that have done most to increase atheism [by atheism, Julian means unbelief in the pagan gods!]? For it is disgraceful that, when no Jew ever has to beg, and the impious Galileans [Christians] support not only their own poor but ours as well, all men see that our people lack aid from us. Teach those of the Hellenic faith to contribute to public service of this sort.”

The Church Is Beginning to Be the Church Rather than Just Attend ‘Church’

Christians have the bad habit of saying they attend church. This is a horrible mistake because it misidentifies what the church is (and yet I say it all the time myself!). The church is the people whom God has called and the good news is that they are starting to act like the church. I like what F. C. Mather wrote some time ago in The Layman in Christian History:

“We have come to see that the task of Christians, whether clerical or lay, is not to do something for the Church but to be the Church. The peculiar privilege of lay Christians is to be the Church in diaspora, the Church [dispersed] throughout the world in every social class and every just vocation.”

Pastors are more and more seeing their role as it is described in Ephesians 4:11-12: equipping God’s people for works of service and then sending them out to serve. This trend has been developing for several centuries, but it gained fresh traction in this generation as several important books were written, including:

• Unleashing the Church by Frank Tillapaugh in 1985
• Unfinished Business by Greg Ogden in 2003, and
• Great Giveaway, The: Reclaiming the Mission of the Church from Big Business, Parachurch Organizations, Psychotherapy, Consumer Capitalism, and Other Modern Maladies by David Fitch in 2005. ( I do take issue with David in my book, The Church at Work, regarding his view on ‘parachurch’ ministries, although I understand his point and his heart in this provocative book.)

Christians want to be more actively engaged in frontline ministry than ever before. They are frustrated with organizational bureaucracies and are willing to ‘just do it.’ They certainly are not content to simply give their money and sit back to watch what others do with it.

Strategic Implications

• The demand for accountability for results and transparency in operations has never been higher than it now is. For most of Christian history, individual Christians have been relegated to the role of “pray, pay and obey” and they no longer accept that. A ministry that isn’t thinking about its accountability reporting to donors and the public is missing the boat and is likely to see its donor base shrink as older donors (who were willing to pay and trust) die off and are not replaced by younger donors (who want to inspect, pay, do, and inspect again).
• All ministries should be reviewing their operations to see how they might incorporate volunteers into their work. They should be making use of the professional and personal expertise of their volunteers and not just using them to stuff envelopes. Volunteers today want to gain experience from volunteering that they otherwise might not get. Many see volunteering as a form of professional development. They often want to (temporarily) be part of your team on the field and they all certainly want to make a real difference by contributing their time. A good many want to de-professionalize Christian ministry. How can you take advantage of this?

I just saw an interview with a script writer for Star Trek: The Next Generation who said that they were the only show in Hollywood that encouraged unsolicited scripts from its fans. The basic script for one of the most touching episodes of the series, The Offspring, was written by René Echevarria, a waiter in New York City aspiring to show biz. He was later hired by the show as a story editor and ultimately became its Executive Story Editor! What possibilities might your ministry have if you opened up more to outside contributions?

The Church Is Focusing on Lasting, Significant Change

This is already a well-established principle in many overseas mission organizations, particularly those in the relief and development sector. There are several aspects to this trend:

• Don’t do for others what they could be doing for themselves.
• Move beyond immediate needs to long-term solutions.
• First World ministries are willing to be equal partners with Third World organizations.
• There is an eagerness to work with other ministries to accomplish common goals, rather than trying to do everything independently.

People are tired of just putting another plate of food on the table. They want the underlying issues solved.

Strategic Implications

• Churches should shift from thinking about events as a series of one-offs, to events as a part of an intentional strategy to effect change in people’s lives. In other words, design a larger program that makes use of events but that otherwise has the potential for continuing contact. Perhaps this means training your congregation so they can develop the relationship instead of relying on church programs to do that for them.
• Shift from thinking annually or programmatically to thinking strategically. Develop your team’s strategic thinking skills. You’ll be thinking larger thoughts!
• Review all your programs with the intent of finding ways of empowering others. What could you do to leave other ministries and people stronger and better off than they were before they worked with you? How could you introduce true, equal, collaboration with others into your programs?
• Which Canadian ministries might you partner with?

Conclusion

What other trends or strategic implications do you see? What are the key trends affecting your ministry?

“Book has been provided courtesy of Graf-Martin Communications, Inc. Available now at your favourite bookseller.”

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