Facing Changing Times in Ministry
We live in a time where change is exploding dramatically. The Web (which hardly existed 10 years ago) is as necessary to most of us as the telephone. Those blogs on the web (some 2 dozen in 1999) now number over 11 million. My car is made in Japan; my next television will be made in Asia, and most of those cell phones in Asia or Europe. The cars that we build our interstates to run on now burn expensive gasoline that has become less affordable when driving in crowded cites.
Churches, mission agencies, and other parachurch organizations are realizing that the way they use to run their organizations and even their “church” vocabulary is not relevant to the contemporary Man, yet as we are caught up in this change we are more spiritual than ever as we struggle to find that Garden and intimacy with God that we lost thousands of years ago.
DAWN (Discipling a Whole Nation) just sold its Colorado Springs base and moved to Orlando, focusing more on a distributed organization. A church near me, instead of building a larger facility, decided to buy a second facility in the same suburb to reach the neighborhood near that facility. One church, two buildings. As the DAWN magazine said, we are much like the Apostle Paul with the prophetic warning Paul gave. The sailors on that ship dropped four anchors. These were symbolic of the presence, power, purpose and peace that God gives if we look to him to help us.
Dr. Roger Parrott, President of Belhaven College in Jackson, Mississippi spoke to this recently in saying we are more like trying to navigate powerboats in our culture when we should be learning how to sail with billowing sails under the wind of God.
Our own base of operations has been moved from a large house where we helped launch five ministries in just over ten years to a small condo where we are focused on one ministry and praying to make it go financially. Of those five ministries, all but one are still active and one of them in an extremely dynamic form. The others are still there, and refocused strategically; i.e.., they changed to focus more effectively.
Where are you in this sea of change? Where is your church? Our mission is to provide resources for those that need help in their revisioning.