Receive Free Monthly TeachingQuestion:
Evolution of Ministry
How are you doing ministry different than you were ten years ago? How has your style and structure changed with time? How do you see your ministry changing in the next ten years? Do you have a succession plan in place, and if so, what is it?
Responses:
Pastor Sam Smucker – Lancaster, PA
When we pioneered our church 33 years ago, we had fast growth for the first 20 years and then we hit a plateau. After not growing and starting to decline for several years, I got my team together and we evaluated everything including our style of ministry. We realized we needed to connect better with our culture and that we were not ministering effectively in a relevant way.
We have not changed our beliefs in The Word of God. We are doing our weekend services in a more purposeful way. We have a service planning meeting each week where we review the previous weekend and plan for the coming weeks. I plan my message series 4 to 6 months in advance. I am always open to making last minute changes as The Holy Spirit directs. We use more sermon helps such as video clips, short dramas, and recorded or live interview testimonies in our messages. We are now seeing our congregation grow again. I also brought some younger men and women on staff and on our board of directors. I am 63 years old and I am concerned about reaching the emerging generations.
We are seeing many new young families and singles coming to the church, which is awesome. My goal for the future years is to stay updated as a church and do our best in reaching people where they are.
This year I will begin working on a 5-7 year succession plan. I have several individuals in mind to succeed me, but I don't know which one is the one yet. I will put together a team to help me prayerfully put together a succession plan.
Pastor Stan Saunders – Chillicothe, MO
I discovered years ago, after much frustration, my mission as a pastor. For many years, I whipped and drove people to hook up with my vision for the church. I believed my job was to recruit people and money to support the vision God gave me for the church. This put much pressure on the people and on me. I believe that this drove people away from the church and from me. I later discovered my mission is to help people discover the vision God has for their lives. Vision is the picture God shows a person about their future that causes them to become passionate. The Lord gave me a vision of a community of Christ-followers doing the works of Christ in our everyday lives and developing ministries to bless people. Too often in the past, our church members thought they needed me to assign them duties, give my approval to their ideas, or grant them permission before they would do anything. Without realizing or intending so, I was limiting growth in our people and in our church. I now believe the only permission people really need is found in the pages of their Bibles. People do not need my approval to do the Bible!
Ten year ago, the style of our church was much more radical than today. Now, our services are more mainstream, much more reflective of the personality of our community. We reach people from every demographic group in our community. We had to change style to do so. I do not believe we have compromised doctrinally as we have changed our approach. We simply eliminated unnecessary distractions. We reach people from every denominational background, from Amish to Catholic, from Baptist to United Pentecostal, and many others. Our services are much shorter than ten years ago, from around two hours down to about 70-75 minutes. We change the look and sound of the services often. Change is the spice of life. My preaching is much tighter. I focus on one thing each message. I ask myself when preparing each message, "What one thing do I want people to remember; and what one thing do I want them to do about it?" This method has increased my effectiveness by about 50% in my estimation.
The changes in the next ten years will come about in the same manner they have during the past ten years. Our leadership team constantly discusses how we need to make our church younger. While we are getting older, we must force ourselves to have a younger appeal. Our church will become old and obsolete unless we purposefully reach down to the next generation. We will continue to make our church kid-friendly.
At 48 years old, I do not have a succession plan in place yet. We do have a procedure in place in the case of my untimely death or moral failure to search for my replacement.
Pastor Thom Fields – Kennewick, WA
I believe that it is paramount for the Church to recognize the changing face of our culture. It is my opinion that we can change the method without changing the message, if we’re willing to work at it. We are very much a “Word of Faith Church”, even though we are completely Independent. We worship in spirit and in truth, teach faith, pray in tongues and heal the sick. We also sing one song, set a five minute timer and share a bottle of water and a cup of coffee during two of our three weekend services (by the time we reach our third service we are just too tired of cleaning up after the people!). I am extremely aggressive when it comes to addressing God-Life and how we choose to live as Followers of Christ. We’re a long way from perfect, but we’re seeing great results. My daddy would be proud of us…as soon as he got over being totally freaked out by how we do church!
Leading a growing congregation demands that attention be giving to the dramatic cultural changes that are taking place within our society. It isn’t always necessary that the Church react to every individual bent of a society, but it is vital that the relevant Church be fully aware of these shifts.
In a recent demographic study, I read some very interesting information that stated that today’s culture, for example, considers themselves to be totally committed to a local church if they attend at least one or two services per month. In the same study, it was stated that a majority of responders also consider themselves committed attenders, even though they did not attend services at “the same church” every month. In other words, they attend several churches and are not truly loyal to any one church in particular.
Whether or not we agree with these mindsets (which I don’t!) is not the bottom line issue. The issue is that this current culture thinks along these lines and to be effective we must understand their thought patterns. Understanding these and other cultural beliefs has greatly impacted the way we “do church” at The Garden. We are NOT a seeker-friendly church; however, we choose to grapple with these issues in our attempt to lead people towards true spiritual growth. We’ve elected to tackle some of these belief systems head-on by teaching a series I developed called “The God Challenge.” In this series I challenge the people in four basic areas of Church Life. I pound in the idea that the culture that is being built at The Garden is one where we have committed to: Church Attendance – Tithing – Daily Prayer – and Daily Bible Reading. We also explain that the process of our Church is to move people from “Connected to Committed” and then from “Committed to Completed.” We then work to move them from “Completed to Compelling.” We are attempting to change the way our local society thinks about and values the Church. It’s hard work, but it’s paying off. Attendance at our church is on the upswing. We continue to see new people visit, but we’re also seeing an increase in the weekly attendance of our regular members.
We’ve relaxed the dress code at The Garden to fit in better with our local culture. We just don’t see many people anywhere in town doing business in suits and ties, so we elected to stop wearing them at church, as well. Our worship style is as contemporary as I can handle it, realizing that in order to attract the younger generation we’re going to have to offer something that seems relevant to their generation.
Our service times are another area where we’ve invested great discipline. After MUCH prayerful consideration, we’ve come to realize that people who are achieving greatness in life WILL NOT allow you to waste their time. So we “make the most of time” by conducting each of our three services within a 90 minute timeframe. God continues to move, lives are changed, and people are motivated to grow. We have refused to soften on the issues of The Word or the moving of the Holy Spirit. We had a healing service just a couple of weekends ago and had over 50 instantaneous healings in our three services – but we still push to end the service “on time.” We’ve learned that people in this area simply disconnect after a certain period of time and when we go too long it costs us our effectiveness.
Pastor John Grunewald – Bonn, Germany
Like everyone, I wish I knew 20 years ago or 10 years ago, what I know today. Today we do ministry much different than even 10 years ago and we do have a succession plan, in fact, every area of ministry/team leader has a succession plan. I have always believed that whenever possible, we should work ourselves out of a job. If we do it right, there is always a promotion waiting. If we don't do this, we may miss the purpose for the next season of our life and ministry.
With the three main parts of a Spiritual Leader’s job being the Word, Prayer and Spiritual Formation or Discipleship, I was always searching for ways to get into position where I could do these three main things. The simple answer was instituting a discipleship plan where everyone in the church that wants to be discipled can be a part of it. This isn't just classes, but the interaction that comes from working in a team, reflecting, solving problems together, valuing every team member’s input, becoming better at delegating, coaching, teaching, training, mentoring and learning how confrontation and conflict resolution works to disciple. This has taken us years to be better at ourselves and to train others how to be better also. Once it is working, a succession plan is almost automatic because everyone is training someone to become who they are. It all starts from the time someone walks in the door of the church for the first time. We have not mastered this but we are seeing good fruit today.
Our responsibilities have us traveling quite often. This year I have been out of the church pulpit almost 1/2 of the year and the church is still growing. This is only possible with a great team. Our leaders are strong and they disciple their teams. We've learned how to turn dysfunction into discipleship, and we all like where we are going.
This is the short version of course.
Pastor Doug Foutty – Parkersburg, WV
I think I was looking for a more immediate change in people after ministry time rather than trusting that God got his point across and that each seed would have an opportunity to produce a harvest in the lives of those who received ministry. I think I was trying to validate my ability to minister rather than allowing the anointing to flow through me.
It is a more peaceful life when I prepare my heart and cast the care of ministry onto Jesus and enjoy being used of God. I have tried to mentor more people in the last 5 years. I believe in giving people opportunities to minister and allow them to have hands-on opportunities during a service. I hope to continue to help groom young ministers and help them find the outlet for their gifts. I hope to one day be able to pass the pastoral duties off to whomever God has chosen for the job. I want to remain teachable and hungry for God’s best. Also, if the rapture occurs in the next ten years, I plan on retiring without notice.
Pastor John Lowe – Warsaw, IN
We have always been people-driven; meaning that the reason Jesus has us here is to introduce people to Him. What is different thus far is lights, music, length of the message, a more streamlined service cutting out dead time, and being more purposeful in what we do and the way we do it.
I still teach 2-3 minutes to receive the offering – not much more than that. I have always taught in series pretty much to build the truth in the people. We are working at making this more projected so other areas of ministry can complement the message and build the truth in the people deeper at every contact point, such as having music supportive to the message, graphics, etc... We are really working on these.
There is some concern I have and I am being sensitive about. I am distinctly charismatic in our community. We are not in Tulsa or other cities where there are several charismatic works (for lack of a better term). I do struggle with the way the Word of Faith or Charismatic churches are going where there is no place for the Gifts to operate, even hardly from the pulpit. No prayer for the sick is offered, so we are attempting to continue these needed ministries to the Church. I still believe the dinner bell to the sinner is miracles and that the Holy Ghost does not drive the un-churched away but brings them in.
Pastor Al Jennings – Ft. Wayne, IN
What a great question! I'm doing tons of things different than 10 years ago in two main areas:
1. Social media
&offerings, request prayer and keep a prayer list, keep a journal, and more. This tool also enables us to communicate information to the congregation throughout the week rather than having to wait to announce things on Sunday morning. We can post short video messages and volunteer opportunities. Through this tool we can communicate with people in real-time.
2. Technology
Again, to become relevant to a 21st Century culture, we are using technology to make Church more attractive to people who are unchurched. We did a major facelift a few years ago to our sanctuary. We added stage lighting, intelligent lights, a haze machine, flat screen TV's, and a big screen. We upgraded our sound system and hired musicians to give us a concert sound. We also added a cafe.
These changes have helped our ministry to stay current while at the same time keeping the message the same. I like to call it a re-packaging of the ministry to fit the current culture.
Pastor Ray Almaguer – Glendora, CA
I think the biggest change I have made is shortening the time I preach and the length of the service. Ten years ago I preached an average of 45-50 minutes and the services lasted 90-105 minutes. Today, I average 30-40 minutes preaching. We have an early Sunday morning service that is 60 minutes start to finish. Our second morning service averages 75-80 minutes start to finish. Of course another change over the past 10 years has been the use of technology. The changes I see in the next 10 years will probably be even more use of technology, and probably musical style.
