What's Working Today in Ministry [EP:110]

<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Are you spending time on things that are working in ministry or are you building structures, programs and paradigms that simply just don’t work anymore?</span></p> <p> </p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">This is a question that continues to come up in conversations with pastors and leaders around the country. We are all feeling the loss of community. We are grieving what church once was or what we hoped it would be. People have drifted away. Others remain on the sidelines. The programs we did and the way we did them don’t seem as effective.</span></p> <p> </p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Some of these shifts are temporary but many of these trends may be here to stay. The church has changed. The truth is, it was changing before COVID and now the pandemic has accelerated trends that were already unfolding. And it has become incredibly difficult. </span></p> <p> </p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Our tendency is to try and figure out how to get people to come back. How do we fill the room again? How do we get people back to what used to be? It’s exhausting. It’s painful. Because of our own fatigue we are defaulting to what we knew, what worked or sort of worked before. And it is running us ragged. </span></p> <p> </p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">We strategize and plan and promote activities and opportunities that we think will appeal and draw in those who have not come back...or we decide that we are going to go back to pre-covid church and count on things eventually getting back to normal.</span></p> <p> </p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">And if you can identify with this struggle you are not alone. This is the reality, the struggle in almost every single church, especially in the western world. It’s new territory and it’s difficult, overwhelming. We can get stuck trying to solve a problem that may not be solvable...therefore chasing trends and building models that no longer effectively share Jesus and spread the Kingdom of God.</span></p> <p> </p> <p><