Another around 1500, 5-6 minute read … don’t miss it … and pass it along
Two weeks ago, I shared with you the 5Rs that surfaced during our LeadWell Accelerator When Normal Isn’t Normal conversation with Ashley Anderson, Church in the City New York, Jon Torres, Timberlake, and David Grant, 12Stone|Home. You can check out that post here.
Today, I want to share with you 5 trends that should be shaping your conversations about the now and future of your church. Wish I could claim them as my own, but they are directly from the mouth (and heart) of Kadi Cole.
Hold on to your hat! The highlights follow and you can watch the full presentation here.
Every Church is Now a Global Church
We have actually been seeing this trend even before the pandemic, particularly in multisite. There was a morphing of church planting and mission work with multiple campuses and international church plants. And when everyone went online in March 2020, you began to connect with a family member in another state, a friend that is traveling, or someone who happened into your church's online campus from the other side of the world.
Kadi noted the implications not only for reach but for assimilation. Assimilation in general always happens faster with pre-assimilated people. However, we tend to think of them as individuals as if they're coming to church and we put them in “the process” and stick them around the table and put them in a small group, and then they'll have community. However, most people come to church knowing someone and if we can ink into the relationship that already exists and then expand it, we have much better longevity in our assimilation process.
So how is that finding its expression today? Manna Church in Fayetteville, NC has a vision to launch microsites and campuses, and churches near every military installation around the world. Why? Because they are leveraging their learnings on how to grow a church in a community that turns over multiple times a year as military personnel are deployed and they are expanding their vision from North Carolina to the world.
How might you expand your reach globally?
Connection is the New Excellence
We used to think that excellence was the thing that kind of set us apart … at least from our parents' church. But today it has to be connection. We are just seeing the beginning of the tsunami of mental health needs coming our way. We have often developed our messaging and communication around the intersection of the gospel with felt needs. But we are in a new place. We are no longer simply addressing felt needs like having a better marriage or improved finances. Those aren't felt needs, those are actual needs, and the pandemic has accelerated and intensified these needs. Over the last 15 years, a major trend in churches has been to drop their counseling and pastoral care programs. Most senior pastors brag about the fact that they have no counseling skills and don't have gifts of mercy. This is tragic. People are looking for help and hope. There is the opportunity for a great awakening around this topic. We cannot separate spiritual formation and emotional development. We must care for the whole person.
Where are you doubling down on care?
Leadership Agility is the New Baseline
The idea of leadership agility involves a combination of great strength and great flexibility. Prior to the pandemic, churches were often characterized more by one or the other. Some saw themselves as strong on convictions, tightly defined culture, detailed strategies, and plans that led to scalable multiplication in a connected fashion. Others operated from a position that was highly flexible - when a new idea of opportunity surfaces, there was a willingness to rearrange everything to be able to rapidly respond.
Today churches must integrate the strengths of both. They must navigate the tensions of having a really strong culture, really strong conviction, a really clear vision and plans with the importance of also being flexible and adaptable. More than ever before, leaders and churches must be committed to mission over model. There will be additional political unrest around the next election and the racial tension will likely swell again. We must make sure as we teach leadership, we're not going back to books from the nineties or even early this century, but rather to some of the new resources addressing this need.
Which muscle do you and your church need to flex?
Two more trends after the break!
Generis just completed and released the findings of an Executive Pastor survey conducted last fall. There were a number of interesting findings but the one that was most exciting to me was the fact that 30-47% of churches, in every size strata, plan on launching a residency program this year. Other research from recent years reported that 74% of growing and healthy churches have a residency program. In fact, they attribute much of their health and growth to this ministry.
So what about you? Is your leadership residency ministry non-existent or perhaps in need of an overhaul to address the new realities associated with leading in the church? If so, we can help. Dave and I have developed a process that we call “The Leader Advance Framework” to help you succeed.
Every leader in training deserves a high-quality experience that propels them to their next step in leadership. And every church needs to develop high-quality transformational experiences to train up the next generation of church leaders.
We help you avoid the three reasons that residencies fail including:
Unclear desired outcomes
Wrong leadership
Inadequate financing
You need a good map, clear navigation, and an experienced guide. We would love to help.
To schedule a free roadmap consultation, schedule some time here.
Remote Work is Here to Stay
A lot of churches have reopened, but I don't think that churches have fully embraced the digital age and the great resignation. This is a significant cultural shift. And the great innovation around remote work may not be as much about our staff as it is about igniting a volunteer revolution that we have yet to see happen in our generation. For example, there are lots of people in your church that love the church, have a lot of experience, and have a lot to offer. They want to be involved but for some reason (travel or other) they can’t make it to the Sunday night leadership rally, or can't do a small group at the place or time you want. We have created a time and location-based discipleship structure that makes it impossible to be engaged.
We must be willing to think more in terms of remote and flexible staffing organizations and less in terms of our staff running the church. We have to think more about our role as gathering the church and releasing our people for ministry and leadership. This is a biblical mandate, the Ephesians 4 call to equip the saints for works of service.
What does this look like? Kadi shared a bit of her own vision in the following comments. “What would it mean to take someone like me and give me a 10 hour week assistant from the church and the responsibility and authority to run a ministry for women or to run a small groups ministry or to lead a leadership development initiative, I could do that through a virtual assistant and a virtual team. In fact, it would be more significant to make that commitment than it would be to commit to even leading a small group of eighth-graders that I had to give up because my travel schedule kicked it again. I would love to do that. But I can't do that.”
What options might open up, what ministries might you be able to grow if you could flex a little bit and embrace remote work to engage volunteers?
Fight for Diversity of All Kinds
Finally, we have to fight for diversity of all kinds. We have to fight for racial reconciliation but not just race. We must challenge the status quo related to gender inequities, physical ability barriers, and ageism. For a season, the church got away with making sure our postcard and our website demonstrated some diversity. Maybe the worship leader was a person of color or you provided ministry options for families with kids with disabilities. None of these things are wrong. They just aren’t enough and the culture will not tolerate it anymore. The number of people looking for churches with diversity at all levels is astronomical. And the number of options are minimal.
We must move from an opportunistic posture of attempting to engage and assimilate folks that show up to a proactive stance. You have to fight for it. You have to go after it in your congregation. You have to recruit differently. You have to operate your leadership development pipelines differently.
What will your first step be?
The messy middle
We are really seeing the church reinvent itself. Throughout history, the church has typically reinvented itself every 500 years. The next iteration is underway but it won’t be quick. It typically takes 20 to 30 years. It also won’t be easy. We have to walk through the messy middle and we must “steward the mess well.” There are three things that we can do to accomplish this with strength:
Stay informed. Our tendency will always be to go with what we know because it's easiest, and it makes sense to us. So we have to stay informed by exposing ourselves to the leading voices in the church and other sectors.
Stay connected. Don’t go it alone. Connect to a life-giving network or cohort of peers that are committed to the same end game and open to the movement of the Spirit as models morph.
Stay calm.
The messy middle is just that - messy. As long as we focus a little less on success and being the one with the new book out or the new strategy and a little more on faithfulness and love of our people, we will make it just fine.
Don’t navigate the messy middle alone. Consider joining a LeadWell Cohort. You can learn more here or simply schedule a time to talk with me here.
Email me your innovation experiments and stories at greg.ligon@generis.com.