Deep Dive into Church Ministry Issues

 

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The Church Today

 

Challenges Facing the Church

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There have been many suggestions concerning the church’s greatest challenges today. Some say it is racism (Smith and Emerson). There is a spate of literature on the race issue facing the white evangelical church in America. Some say it is the rise of secularism and pluralism leading to individualism (Trueman). Some point to the powerful influence of social media and the crisis of in-person fellowship, with the COVID pandemic providing an excuse to stay home (Root). Some attribute it to the shallowness of church worship, theology, and practice, pointing to the resurgence to Catholicism from Protestants to find structure, spiritual enchantment, and liturgical substance (Smith). We can find numerous cultural shifts, generational gaps, and unrelenting digital transformation shaping our world.

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I will focus here on three urgent challenges the church faces today—polarization of society, cultural influence, and the church’s failure to reach younger generations.

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Polarization of Society

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More than ever, we are a country of division. Our division splits to drastic, even violent, extremes. Things like censorship and the shameless acceptance of violence to advance an ideology were the anomaly in America’s past. Today, it is becoming the norm, and even celebrated. The media on both sides of the political spectrum encourages division on every level, normalizing hatred and intolerance.

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This creeps into the church. More than ever, Christians confuse their political identity with their Christian identity. We have more emotion over our political stances than we do toward our own sin or toward God. The polarization of society will continue to promote polarization within the church. We must guard against this as a church and show an alternate way forward.

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Cultural Influence

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In another section I discuss some of the cultural influences facing the church today: LGBTQ+ movement, pornography addiction, racism, Israel, Christian nationalism, etc. Other cultural influences we face could include the influencer culture, the prevalence of screens, and the rise of artificial intelligence.

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Many in the church do not know how to respond, partly because many of these issues have risen quickly to the forefront of our culture in recent years. It is more important than ever that we are addressing these cultural issues from the Bible, both as the word is preached and in other ways as a church. Pastors and teachers of any church should stay up to date with the cultural influences bombarding Americans today so that we can equip God’s people with a solid framework to live counter-culturally in our present context.

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Younger Generations

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As I mention below, we are in the largest religious shift in America’s history, where people are walking away from the church. This is especially true of young people. Unlike before, we have the massive challenge of competing with social media and the screen to capture the minds and hearts of the younger generation. How do we compete with imparting and influencing young people only a couple of hours a week to many hours a day? The screen, not the church, has the attention of the younger generation.

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Church Growth

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The Context of Decline

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A recent book estimated that we are in the greatest religious shift in America’s history with over 40 million Americans walking away from the church (The Great Dechurching by Davis and Grahm, 2023). This amounts to about 16 percent of our population. Davis and Graham call these people the “dechurched”—people who used to regularly attend church but now come less than once per year. Their study found that right-leaning, Bible-belt believers had some of the highest percentages of those leaving the church (!), with an average age of mid-30s to 40s.

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Among mainstream denominations, Presbyterians (PCUSA) lead the way, losing “about 45 percent of their attenders over the last twenty-five years.” However, Baptists are losing a whopping 29 percent at the same time. A recent study shows that “Eighty percent of churches in America are plateaued or in decline” (xv). “Out of the 20% left, only 7% grew by planting new congregations to carry the torch into the future,” making it that “93% of the church is no longer reproducing itself.” Yikes.

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Every church should be concerned about growth. By growth I mean whether a church is growing in new converts or growing by planting other churches and sending missionaries. Not every church will plant new churches, but every church should make more disciples, raise up more leaders, and impact its community in tangible ways.

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 The question of growth is complex. It is important to look not only at a particular church’s decline to target areas for growth, but also see what is taking place across America. We must analyze how current nation-wide trends relate to what is happening at church X.

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The starting place for addressing any growth relates to examining and honing its purpose. One church’s purpose statement I know is this: “to know Jesus Christ as Lord, to grow as His disciples, and to share His love in word and deed.” When developing a church growth plan for this church, we should ask: How well is X carrying out each of these purposes? How can X improve on implementing this purpose in each area of its current ministry and developing new ones relevant to the cultural context and needs of the local community?

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 Areas of Decline or Areas for Improvement

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Age distribution is weaker in the younger decades in most churches. Targeting these younger age groups is crucial for the church to sustain itself and grow into the future. For example, if Generation Z reflects an extremely low demographic in some churches, this would be an area of priority to formulate a vision of growth for, as well as, and especially, targeting their parents rather than simply Generation Z.

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 Many churches focus on membership numbers to evaluate their church’s impact miss their true disciple-making purpose as a church. Care is needed to avoid obsession with numerical growth but to focus on imaging Jesus to the world. Sometimes, however, numerical data carefully used can help us to assess how we are doing as a church. Ideas for growth in impact for church X would include targeting specific age brackets in its community, revitalizing its resources for those generations, and developing ministries to better disciple those age groups.

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Growth should include strengthening and utilizing the church’s current leadership model. There are many biblical models for church government. I have an aversion to the celebrity pastor mentality, and a safeguard is that the senior pastor is one leader among many. I think that a strong leadership model is necessary to effectively grow as a church body as multiple giftings collaborate and develop a strategy to tackle all the areas of growth God calls the church to.

A 2020 Lifeway survey showed that 65% churchgoers attend for community and relationships. Sunday morning Bible studies offer a place for community and relationships, and a quick glance through the descriptions of various Sunday morning Bibles studies reveal that.

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Because of this, I believe Sunday morning groups can be another ministry area to bolster for growth. This is especially true since relationships are one of the major factors the dechurched are willing to return to church. A church growth model would include examining the strong ministry areas and considering how these elements can be implemented elsewhere in the church and crafted to reach the weaker demographics.

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For most churches discipleship is an urgent area for growth. Discipleship is broader than making new converts, although it includes this. It includes the responsibility to see all believers, however young or old in the faith, grow and mature in their walk with the Lord. Examining all of these areas from outreach efforts to mentorship and spiritual growth should be central in seeking how God would have a church grow as a light in its community. However, the issue of reaching the lost and the dechurched in the community should also be a top priority. For me, it is extremely exciting to think about a renewed passion for a church to think deeply how they can reach more people in their community who need to know Jesus.

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 Other areas I could discuss are membership, community engagement, marketing, budgeting, and missions. And many more can only be discovered with the staff and the people of a particular church. All in all, growth should be seen as something exciting and hopeful because he is the one who will build his church.

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Church Vision

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Analysis

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Most churches have more people in their membership role than regular attenders. One goal is to see that reversed: that there would be more people attending on Sunday than people already on the membership role. The church should be actively pulling in both the lost and the dechurched (Christians who have fallen away from attending church). For this to happen, a robust and strategic vision that includes every area of the church is needed.

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In my opinion vision formation and implementation can become one of the most exciting, enriching, and God-honoring experiences for a church to collaborate on. Creating and implementing a vision hones your church’s unique identity and mission both locally and globally. It gives a confident sense of where we fit and how we function in the kingdom of God. For theologically minded congregations, this is an exciting journey for the congregation, assessing together what is currently working and what is currently not working for the health of the church body. 

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Because the task is an all-encompassing church project, creating and implementing a vision will take patience, humility, and an eagerness to grow, both from the congregation and the staff. More than anything, it is a collaborative process. It is not the senior pastor’s job to create the vision and dictate it from on high; it is his job to work with the staff and congregation to define that vision and to implement it with dependence on God.

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How would I go about including the congregation and the staff in creating and implementing vision? Here are some practical steps. 

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Clarification of Vision

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First, congregational surveys are very helpful. From those we have a lot of information to evaluate and discuss as a staff. One of my first goals as a new senior pastor of any church, as it relates to vision, would be to establish trust with both congregation and staff. True, this can only happen with time, but building relationships with both the staff and church members will be paramount. Also, the kind of sermons, applications, and tone I would begin with in my preaching is crucial in establishing trust in order to successfully develop and implement new vision as a congregation. Meeting with the staff to talk about sermon history and current church struggles would be first on my agenda.

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Evaluation of Vision

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Next, there is the prayerful evaluation of the church’s purpose as a local church body. I realize the staff may have already done some of this during pastoral search committee meetings. Either way, navigating this stage together as a staff is crucial. Together we do the deep dive into your purpose(s) as a church. This phase is about asking and answering questions: if church X is about ___________, how well is X accomplishing _________? How do we know X is accomplishing __________?

Evaluation may include the need to refine, reclarify, and recast the church’s purpose statements in specific ways.  I may suggest the staff to go through a resource together that relates to vision during this process.

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Implementation of Vision

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Next, we implement the church’s vision in each area of ministry. This is a crucial step and requires creativity. For example, if the church wants to see growth in discipleship, a purpose statement would be “to grow as his disciples”. Implementing that purpose of growing disciples will require examining each area of ministry: Is the church strong in new converts? How are we discipling the younger ages? Are our outreach efforts focused on making new disciples? Etc. 

 

Obviously, there are many more tasks to be done. It is impossible to know what to include in the creation and implementation of vision for a church I know nothing about first. Implementing vision and discovering a church’s God-given purpose is necessary for every incoming senior pastor.

 

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Top Issues the Church Needs to Get Right

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There are so many topics I could talk about here. I could mention the need for compelling, expository preaching that reaches a culture with the attention span of a goldfish (8 seconds). I could mention the need to rediscover a strong theology of social justice. I could mention the importance of getting the gospel in its entirety right including understanding Jesus’s rule and reign over the earth (Matt 28:18), believers’ liberation from idolatry, ethnic reconciliation of all peoples in Christ, the hope of the new heavens and the new earth, eternal life with God in resurrected bodies, and so on. There are so many topics that I believe are crucial for Christians to get right today.

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But there are three issues I would emphasize as especially foundational for the church in its current cultural context to really get right. 

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Love

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We are a nation of division. Violence is out of control. Suicide is rampant. Drugs are ravaging our communities. Prostitution is everywhere. Kids and children are angry. Terrorism is cool. Mass shootings continue. In large part, we are confused. Many preachers say we should preach more on God’s holiness. Some say we need more activism. Some say we need more forgiveness. Some say we need more substitutionary atonement and imputed righteousness. But more than all of these, I believe we need to work hard to get the self-giving love of God right in every area of our lives.

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With love, there is a lurking danger of sounding cliché or sentimental, teaching this fundamental Christian concept in a shallow, worldly way. Our current social landscape screams out their counterfeit definition of love. As a word that describes the very nature of God himself (1 John 4:8) and sums up the entire law and the prophets (Matt 22:37-40), the immense importance God puts on getting “love” right is often underestimated by many Christians. 

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Saying that we need to preach more on God’s love is like saying we need to remember to brush our teeth before bed. “Of course, of course. We always need to remember to brush our teeth. I got it. That’s important for the health of our teeth. I know how to do that. Thanks.” But what I am advocating is a complete makeover in how we understand and communicate the nature of God’s love in Christ.

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In Ephesians 3 Paul prays that believers have strength to understand the incomprehensible love of Christ. It is concerning to me how few sermons center around Christ’s love, especially in some quarters of the church. And in other quarters of the church love is talked about superficially as an accept-everything type of love rather than a transforming love. We must work to get this love right.

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I am convinced that a cruciform understanding of love—God’s love revealed at the cross—should undergird all Christian theology. All Christian living should be motivated by the cross—a self-giving God who calls us to live out this self-giving love toward others. I believe the love of Jesus is the answer to many of our cultural problems. In our church culture today, I think we have lost some of the ability to see and apply the biblical love of Jesus in our world today. With all the mangling that the word “love” has gotten in our Western culture, Christians need to recover the true biblical meaning of God’s love in Christ and its centrality in our lives.

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Grace

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We need to get grace right as Christians. We need to understand grace as God’s unearned kindness and favor that transforms all people, regardless of social status or ethnicity.

In the first century world, grace was brought to a new radical meaning in Jesus. In the Greco-Roman society, it would have been unacceptable to give “grace” to someone who was not worthy to receive it—who did not have a worthy social status. In Christ, Paul flips this social structure on its head. Instead, God gives his favor or kindness regardless of social status, often to the one’s society deems unworthy. Grace elevates the most unlikely. This kind of grace was a key characteristic of Jesus’s earthly ministry and should be a key characteristic of our lives as Jesus-followers. Grasping God’s grace toward us should make us of all people the most gracious to everyone around us (see Matt 18:21-35).

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When we truly grasp God’s grace, we are empowered to live as new human beings in Christ. Far from grace being a license to continue a sinful lifestyle, true grace transforms us to live reconciled with God, extending His kindness to a world in need.

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Fresh Language

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The last thing I believe Christians today need to “get right” is biblical language that is fresh, accurate, and meaningful when it comes to explaining the Bible. We need to communicate the story of Scripture and the good news of Christ with language that modern people can understand. Christians should not resort to sentimental cliches and worn-out religious phrases to speak of their Christianity. Christians today need to be true to Biblical Christianity while using fresh, concrete words and ideas to communicate it. We need to tell the story of Jesus in a fresh way.

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We are losing people because they are hearing the gospel told in an unbiblical way. Sometimes it’s because we have gotten the truth itself wrong. Other times it’s because we are using old words and religious phrases that have lost their meaning in our culture. Christians today should regularly ask, “What does this actually mean?” (Sometimes we may find that we don’t even really understand what we are saying ourselves!) We should be able to communicate even the most profound biblical truths in every-day, simple English that even the most un-churched people can understand.

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As Christians we should approach God’s word with a teachable attitude, acknowledging that the NT was birthed in a world different than our own, in a language different than our own. We must approach the Bible with a hermeneutic of humility, absorbing its truth and carefully putting that truth into modern language our generation cannot misunderstand. In short, we need to make the story of Christianity attractive, compelling, inviting. We need to work hard at communicating the matchless Jesus story in a life-altering way. It is not easy, but if we “get right” HOW we communicate the good news, we will better reach the rapidly changing culture we belong to. 

 

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