Can’t Find Your Church’s Magic Key to the Future? Hallelujah!

Given the complexities and challenges facing faith communities, it is understandable that pastors and lay leaders look for a magic key that will open a clear path to the future.  The temptations around this are legion.  The expanding job descriptions for clergy, especially post-pandemic, make the search for short-cuts almost inevitable.  Faced with a declining volunteer base and burn-out among those who do still volunteer, church leaders naturally yearn for a way to automate the work of ministry or at least simplify it.

The magic key doesn’t exist—and this is profoundly good news for faith communities in the 21st century.  Reliance on program-centered ministry does not fit well in today’s ministry landscape, if it ever did.  Folks are not seeking churches these days for social respectability, or for social activities that culture offers in abundance (ski-trips for youth, book groups, game nights, etc.)  If people are looking for a faith community today, chances are their spiritual needs are driving them in that search … and there are no simple approaches to addressing that need.

In an interview last year with Todd Ream for his “Saturdays at Seven” podcast, Willie Jennings observed a “failure of imagination” with how we understand our project:

We don’t understand that we are in a project of becoming with God.  There are so many Christians that have never gotten a memo – excuse me – on that becoming.  So that’s the failure.  It’s a failure in the way we understand the story we are inside of.

Mention “project” to most church folks and images of to do lists and task forces beckon.  But the project here is the project of becoming – which we cannot do without God, and we cannot do without each other.  Ministry today that is relational, nurturing, and imaginative, stands ready to welcome people at every stage of life who are seeking meaning and hope.

In The Message, Eugene Peterson renders the first part of Romans 5 like this:

By entering through faith into what God has always wanted to do for us—set us right with God—we have it all together with God because of Jesus. And that’s not all: We throw open our doors to God and discover at the same moment that God has already thrown open God’s door to us.  We find ourselves standing where we always hoped we might stand—out in the wide-open spaces of God’s grace and glory, standing tall and shouting our praise.

There’s more to come: We continue to shout our praise even when we’re hemmed in with troubles, because we know how troubles can develop passionate patience in us, and how that patience in turn forges the tempered steel of virtue, keeping us alert for whatever God will do next. In alert expectancy such as this, we’re never left feeling shortchanged. Quite the contrary—we can’t round up enough containers to hold everything God generously pours into our lives through the Holy Spirit!

No short-cut we take or “magic key” we invent can “round up enough containers to hold everything God generously pours into our lives.”  Only God can do that.  And that is all we need for thriving, relational, nurturing, imaginative ministry.


Questions for reflection:

  1. What would it take for your congregation to focus on “becoming with God”? What might stand in the way of that?

 

  1. What is the risk and the opportunity to, in Peterson’s translation of Romans 5, “throw open our doors to God and discover at the same moment that God has already thrown open God’s door to us”?

 

  1. What would have to change in your ministry setting to focus all your work on building relationships and nurturing imagination?
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