Trends in the 21st Century Church
Last night, we had a Spoken concert at our church (by the way, Chris and Todd did a fantastic job organizing this whole event - thanks guys) and I had a moment to chat with another local area pastor. He shared a few of the transitions his church is going through and I told him that I am hearing that kind of stuff more and more. They are trends of the 21st Century Church.
First, he told me that 6 local churches are merging together their assets and leadership to form a new identity. They will continue at their present locations, but they are going to develop one creative team that writes the messages. They will have one lead communicator that will present live, by video feed or by DVD. They will have different worship bands and styles of music based on their demographic. They will have one new name. The offerings will go to one place.
These churches are creating a shared, networked environment where they believe they can be better and reach more together than they can separately.
The other trend is that this opportunity gives all their pastors a chance to specialize. For so long pastors had to be generalists; be somewhat good at a lot of stuff. But now, they can be on the creative team, or the business team, or the pastoral care team… they can do the stuff that they feel they are uniquely gifted to do. These pastors then become site pastors and the pressure of communicating every week has been lifted. They are free to care for the body and be good pastors.
You see a lot of this even more in large churches. They are staffing with specialists. Often the guys up front communicating are not the ones running the business affairs of the church. There are executive teams and there are pastoral teams.
I told him that we are living in exciting times and they are living on the edge of what the 21st Century Church will look like.