The Discipling Minister: You can’t Restructure your way to Renewal
The single greatest determinant of the future of the world Christian movement is its capacity and commitment to making disciples. And aside from crises like scandal and disaster, capacity and commitment to disciple-making will determine the future of your church, too.
In reaction to the steady decline in church participation following a Western-world peak around 1960, debate has proliferated over church style and structure: attractional vs missional, congregational vs community, big vs small, contemporary vs traditional, addition mindset vs multiplication. While some of the debate has been useful, much of it has been at the level of how we organise and operate, rather than the deeper level of who we’re serving and who we’re becoming. Meanwhile, waning church participation in the West has continued.
Having spent much of my adult life working in and on Christian organisations to help them fulfil their calling to further the mission of Jesus, I’ve become convinced that you can’t fix heart-level problems with structural solutions. I’ve worked with churches embracing the very latest missional community trends. Some have flourished, some have floundered. I’ve served very conventional and traditional churches that steadily grow, and others that continue to shuffle toward oblivion. Style and structure matter, but they're not the primary determining factors for effectiveness.
Jesus seemed unconcerned with style and structure – There’s certainly no record of him teaching about such matters. He issued or re-issued a small number of commands about whom we should love (God, neighbours, enemies and each other – i.e. pretty much everybody) and a commission to go make disciples. Disciples, it seems, are those who embrace his commands and commission as their way of life.
Paul advocated the appointment of various oversight roles in the church, but was concerned more about the character of such officers rather than mandating a structure. The fact that adherents of congregational, presbyterian and episcopal models (i.e. the structural designs, not denominations) all claim biblical mandate for their governance structure suggests that the bible mandates godly governance rather than a particular template for an organisational chart.
Conversely, Jesus spoke a lot about discipleship, sometimes using extreme terms like ‘take up your cross’ and ‘hate your own life’. While we can explain the force and extremity of his language as hyperbole – more a cultural peculiarity than a literal directive– Jesus’ employment of such a device it telling: being a disciple of Jesus means a comprehensive and costly commitment to a set of priorities identifiably at odds with the values system of the surrounding society.
Therein lies the single greatest challenge for the church. Can we make disciples who embody such a commitment? Or will we settle for mere adherents who comply with a generally-agreed expectation to behave nicely and help out if they can?
Written by Ken Morgan. See original post and other material here.