Tomorrow's Pastors, Tomorrow's Church
/I'm more than aware that greater folks than me have been humbled when making predictions about the church of the future. There are so many unpredictable factors, I generally have taken the stance that leaders of the church are better off trusting the Holy Spirit day by day rather than worry about what will come tomorrow. I think I may have been paraphrasing Jesus' advice there....
With that said, one thing that always seems to come up whenever I bring up this website is the fact that the church truly is facing a rapidly changing landscape. In fact it is due to these rapid changes that our previous ways of calling and preparing pastors and church leaders are becoming obsolete. More and more congregations no longer need, nor can they afford, a full time minister carrying at least three years worth of graduate degree debt, not to mention a large staff full of such ministers! And this is because fewer and fewer congregations come about as they did a generation or two ago, when it was possible to show up in a city and find a ready supply of Presbyterians, Baptists, Lutherans, and Methodists all looking for First _____ Church of Yourtown, USA.
All this to say: any plan to seek, call, prepare, and support the next generation of leaders of disciple making communities must take into account this changing landscape. The church of tomorrow cannot depend on the seminary (model) of yesterday.
So how to move forward? Three preliminary thoughts:
We the Church (thank you Toronto Raptors) need to explore more deeply the bi-vocational ministry model. Sure it's great to have a full-time staff to meet all of our spiritual needs, but there are some very serious negatives that go along with this model of ministry. I'm not saying that it's never the right way to go, simply that it may be very rare moving forward. Paul both supported fully supporting ministry leaders, but himself was a self-supporting missionary who made and sold tents (imagine him in an REI sales clerk vest...).
Community, community, community: I know it's an overused word, and every church wants more and better of it. Nobody hates community. But do we truly understand it theologically and sociologically? When I was leading a ministry, I used to be a little impatient with congregants who criticized our "lack of community": I was a little too quick to quote JFK and encourage them to be the solution to the problem they were seeing. I now understand more clearly that while we can't seek to build a social club, the Body of Christ lives and breathes through the relationships in it. What's making this abundantly clear to me is now being in more of an observer/member role. Now that more detached from the day to day operations of a ministry, and more plugged into the 9 to 5 world, I can see how spiritually dry life can get, and how that can lead into a slow spiral of spiritual and emotional bleed out. The church of tomorrow will not depend on programs to try and create community. It will be a radical alternative to life as society knows it.
We cannot see social justice as a "program" of the church. I heard someone once ask, "What will the church do when justice is no longer cool?" I think we're finding out as we speak. Christ's daily walk with the most oppressed in Israel is quickly forgotten in a 5,000 seat air conditioned mega church sanctuary with plush seats and smoke machines. This goes with the previous point. Real community means justice will be sought for all of our neighbors, and we will show our love with our whole lives, not just once a week or one week a year.