One of the biggest challenges of our current context is congregations’ capability to function innovatively. This is obviously a difficult challenge as congregational ministry is in actual fact people ministry. The ability of people to adapt to new ideas in a church is also hampered by a growing resistance to change – because the tempo in which the world currently operates has become astounding. Yet some new trends exist that, if it is approached with great empathy, can result in breakthroughs for the proclamation of the gospel of Christ. Below we can list four:
Church Services as Opportunities for Corporate Worship. The focus of a church service falls less on preaching as the opportunity to equip or teach. According to the stories in Acts 2-11 there is a growing conviction that the corporate gathering of a congregation is more appropriate of viewed as an event for meeting God. From the beginning of the service to the benediction at the end, the intention is to allow congregation members to stand together in the presence of the living God where they can worship and meet Him. That is the reason for the shift towards more informal – spontaneous – church services with an obvious break from formal liturgies. It is also the reason why praise and worship songs get a more prominent place in contemporary worship services. More importantly, the intentional incorporation of a congregational prayer moment where church members can kneel together before God and place the needs of the community before God is needed.
The congregation as mission station. In his classic work on the Christendom Paradigm, The Once and Future Church, Loren Mead showed how the contemporary church has been reduced to a cultural phenomenon. People belong to the church because it is part of the upbringing and cultural identity. In the mean time, the world wrote off the church. However, congregations still minister from the premise that the people within their borders are Christian and that they should only reach out to their own (members of the denomination). The growing consensus that the church should function missional necessitates the leap towards a focused approach that transforms every congregation’s calling within its specific community into a missionary calling – in other words, specific outreach to every person to proclaim the good news of Christ’s redemption in a fresh new way.
A New Focus on Spirituality. The popularity of the spiritual among non-churched people opens the door wide for the church to present the gospel of the risen Christ. However, this openness to search for God doesn’t translate into growth for the church as official religious organization. George Barna wrote in his book, Revolution, that a growing amount of believers maintains their relationship with Christ outside the walls of any church. This trend translates into an innovative search for ministry structures by congregations to take the practices of Christianity into the marketplace and sports arena. Discipleship and spiritual formation is becoming crucial elements of a church’s ministry strategy.
A Fresh Telling of the Gospel Story. The last trend that asks a paradigm shift in ministry which we discuss here, is the growing conclusion that the traditional proclamation of the gospel no longer reach twenty first century people. This is essentially a theological question, interwoven with the way we read the Bible. Ron Martoia said in his book, Transformational Architecture, that we reduced the Bible to a set of propositional statements that explain salvation and that we further on focus on the communication of information. We miss the reality that the Bible testimony is of God’s work on earth by way of a collection of stories. This is why no less that four accounts of Jesus’ earthly ministry exist. The challenge to the church lays in giving greater detail to the so-called metanarrative of the faith – a becoming busy with the Bible itself to find the depth dimensions and nuances of the Biblical narrative, and thereafter retelling it with greater honesty.
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