The Present Future: Six Tough Questions For The Church
By Reggie McNeal
Jossey-Bass. (2003)
Wrong Questions:
“The wrong questions reflect an approach to the future that focuses on solving yesterday’s problems. In my observation, most church leaders are preoccupied with the wrong questions.” (Page XVI)
Models:
“I believe the search for models can often short-circuit a significant part of a leader’s journey into obedience to God. The Bible is not a book of models; it is a record of radical obediences of people who listened and responded to the direction of God for their lives. The quality of leadership we need for the renewal of the orth American church required that we have people who are operating from a well-thought-out approach so they will know why that are doing what they are doing, not just copying someone else’s cool idea.” (Page XVII)
REALITY #1: The Collapse of the Church Culture
“The current church culture in North America is on life support. It is living off the work, money, and energy of previous generations from a previous world order.” (Page 1)
“…church culture has become confused with biblical Christianity, bith inside the church and out.” (Pages 1)
“… the world is profoundedly different that it was at the middle of the last century, and everybody knows it. Even the church culture. But knowing it and acting on it are two very different things. So far the North American church largely has responded with heavy infusions of denial, believing the culture will come to its senses and come back around to the church. (Page 2)
“… the number of Americans who have ‘no religious preference’ has doubled from 1990 to 2001, reaching 14% of the population.” (Page 3)
“Thom Rainier of the Billy Graham School of Evangelism at Southern Baptist Seminart reports some disturbing responses to the two frequently asked Evangelism Explosion questions (‘Do you know for certain that if you died today you would go to heaven?’ and ‘If you were to die today , what would youo say to God if he asked you why he should let you into his heaven?’). The interview included about 1,300 personal of each of four generational groups that Rainier identified and investigated (5,200 in all). Analyzing the responses for evidence that the respondencets were born-again (the evangelical definition of one’s being a Christian) yielded the following results: builders (Bornbefore 1946) – 65 percent; boomers (born between 1946 and 1964) – 35 percent; busters (born between 1965 and 1976) – 15 percent; bridgers (born between 1976 and 1994) – 4 percent. Those interviewed in the bridger category were at least seventeen years old.” (Page 4)
“Dawson McAlister, national youth ministry specialist, says 90% of kids active in high school youth groups do not go to church by the time they are sophomores in college. One-third of these will never return.” (Page 4)
“A growing number of people are leaving the institutional church for a new reason. They are not leaving because that have lost faith. They are leaving the church to preserve their faith. They contend that the church no longer contributes to thewir spiritual development. In fact, they say, quite the opposite if true. The number of ‘post-congregational’ Christians is growing. David Barrett, author of the World Christian Encyclopedia, estimates that there are about 112 million ‘churchless Christians’ worldwide, about 5 percent of all adherents, but projects that number will double in the next twenty years!” (Pages 4-5)
“The culture does not want the powerless God of the modern church” (Page 6)
WRONG QUESTION: How Do We Do Church Better?
“Church activity is a poor substitute for genuine spiritual vitality.” (Page 7)
Wrong Responses: Refuge mentality
“Evangelism in this worldview is about churching the unchurched, not connecting people to Jesus. It focuses on cleaning people up, changing their behavior so Christians (translation: church people) can be more comfortable around them.” (Page 9)
“Occasional when I do consulting for congregations I insist that the church leaders meet off-campus in a restaurant during Sunday church time. I ask the group to look around and then pose the question to them: ‘Do you think these people struggled with a decision this morning of whether to attend church or to for out for a sausage biscuit?’ Are you kidding? The church is not even on their screen.” (Page 9)
“You can build the perfect church – and they still won’t come. People are not looking for a great church. They do not wake up every day wondering what church they can make successful.” (Page 10)
“The church needs a mission fix.” (Page 10)
TOUGH QUESTION: How Do We Deconvert from Churchianity to Christianity?
“In North America the invitation to become a Christian has become largely an invitation to convert to the church.” (Page 11)
“People may be turned off to the church, but they are not turned off to Jesus.” (Page 12)
“Church people sometimes get excited by this but fail to understand that people in the nonchurch culture don’t associate Jesus with the church. In their mind, the church is a club doe religious people where club members can celebrate their traditions and hang out with others who share common thinking and lifestyles. They do not automatically think of the church as championing the cause of poor people or healing the sick or serving people. These are things that associate with Jesus.” (Page 12)
“We need to recapture the mission of the church. In both Old and New Testaments we encounter a God who is on a redemptive mission in the world.” (Page 12)
“The church was created to be the people of God to join him in his redemptive mission in the world. The church was never intended to exist for itself.” (Page 15)
“The church is the bride of Christ. Its union with him is designed for reproduction, the growth of the kingdom.” (Page 16)
“The movement Jesus initiated had power because it had at its core a personal life-transforming experience.” (Page 17)
“They don’t trust religious institutions because they see them as inherently self-serving. So they are off on their own search for God.” (Page 18)
“The North American church has lost its influence at this critical juncture. It has lost its influence because it has lost it identity. It has lost its identity because it has lost its mission.” (Page 18)
“The correct response, then, to the collapse of the church culture is not to try to become better at doing church….The need is not for a methodological fix. The need is for a mission fix.” (Page 18)
“That’s the church’s mission: to join God in his redemptive efforts to save the world. People all around us are in darkness. They are going to die unless someone finds a way to say they. Trouble is, the church is sleeping on the job.” (Page 19)
REALITY #2: The Shift from Church Growth to Kingdom Growth
WRONG QUESTION: How Do We Grow This Church? (How Do We Get Them To Come To Us?)
“A Lilly study released in 2002 found that one-half of churchgoers attend churches in the top 10 percent if church size.” (Page 24)
TOUGH QUESTION: How Do We Transform Our Community? (How Do We Hit the Streets with the Gospel?)
“Churches that understand the realities of the present future are shifting the target of ministry efforts from church activity to community transformation. This is turning the church inside out.” (Page 26)
“The North American church culture is not spiritual enough to reach our culture.” (Page 27)
“The Pharisees’ evangelism strategy sounds eerlity familiar. Their approach to sharing God was, ‘Come and get it!’ In addition, that had contorted God’s message to moralism: ‘ You people ‘out their” need to straighten up!” (Page 28)
“Jesus’ evangelism strategy directly challenged the Pharisees’ approach. Instead of ‘Come and get it!’ it was ‘Go get em!’ Instead of withdrawing from people for fear of contamination, he ate with them” (Page 28)
“Jesus’ strategy was to go where people were already hanging out. This is why he went to weddings, oarties, and religious feasts day celebrations. Jesus loved being around people who were having fun!” (Page 34)
“What are we so afraid of ‘out there?’ … I think we are afraid of not knowing hoe to engage people in genuine conversation. I think we fear rejection. I think we don’t know what to say. I think we are unsure of what we have to offer to people. I think we are not that enthusiastic about being evangelistic because we feel we don’t have a compelling story. The power of the gospel is lost on church members who can sign off on doctrinal positions but have no story of personal transformation.” (Page 36)
“I am a disciple of Jesus. I am serving him bu serving you, because that’s what he came to do.” (Page 38)
“We need to go where people are already hanging out and be prepared to have conversations with them about the great love of our lives.” (Page 42)
REALITY #3: A New Reformation: Releasing God’s People
“The first Reformation was about freeing the church. The new Reformation is about freeing God’s people from the church (the institution). The original Reformation decentralized the church. The new Reformation decentralizes ministry.” (Page 43)
WRONG QUESTION: How Do We Turn Members into Ministers?
“This myoptic vision has resulted in ministry being defined largely in church terms and lay people often being viewed as functionary resources tog et church work done.” (Page 45)
“They have not been exposed to church leaders who are leaders of a movement, Instead, they are familiar only with institutional managers.” (Page 46)
“We have failed to call people out to their true potential as God’s priests in the world.” (Page 48)
TOUGH QUESTION: How Do We Turn Members into Missionaries?
“Nonbelievers are already worshiping, because people are built to worship something. Out challenge is to upgrade their worship to worship of the true God.” (Page 51)
“Only people without a missiology disdain attempts at being culturally relevant.” (Page 51)
“The point is not to adopt the culture and lose the message; the point is to understand the culture so we can build bridges to it for the sake of gaining a hearing for the gospel of Jesus.” (Page 51)
“You cannot be faithful to the Great Commission without being culturally relevant.” (Page 52)
“The reluctance to connect with people outside the church is just further evidence that the church culture in North America is a cultural phenomenon in America that is more about a particular religious culture than about Jesus or his mission.” (Page 52)
“Missiologist know that people must worship God in their own heart language.” (Page 52)
“Just when the church adopted a business model, the culture went looking for God. Just when the church embraced strategic planning (linear and Newtonian), the universe shifted to preparedness (loopy and quantum). Just when the church began building recreation centers, the culture began a search for sacred places.” (Page 59)
“The problem is that when people come to church, expecting to find God, they often encounter a religious club holding a meeting where God is conspicuously absent. (Page 59)
A MISSIONARY MOVEMENT
“What you must do is two things: create a culture informed by missiology and create venues where people can practice being missionaries.” (Page 61)
“This new Reformation, turning members into missionaries, will precipitate a crisis, both in individuals an din a congregation. Member values clash with missionary values. Member values are all about church real estatae, church programming, who’s in and who’s out, member services, member issues (translated: am I getting what I want out of this church?). Missionary values are about the street, people’s needs, breakibg down barriers, community issues (translated: am I partnering with God’s work in people?). One of these value sets will triumph over the other.” (Page 65)
“Persecution of church leaders in the North American context does not come from outside the church. It comes from inside the church.” (Page 66)
“Adopting a missionary approach will require changing the scorecard.” (Page 67)
REALITY #4: The Return to Spiritual Formation
“…we have turned our churches into groups of people who are studying God as though they were taking a course at school or attending a business seminar. We aim at the head. We don’t deal in relationships. And we wonder why there is no passion for Jesus and his mission?” (page 70-71)
WRONG QUESTION: How Do We Develop Church Members?
“We have made following Jesus all about being a good church member. The scorecard is all about church membership, church participation, and church support.” (Page 72)
TOUGH QUESTION: How Do We Develop Followers of Jesus?
“What percentage of your congregants feel they grew more like Jesus this past year?….How is God at work in your people? Or Where do you see Jesus bustin’ out?” (Page 74)
“I am recommending that churches provide like coaching for people. We need to view this as spiritual formation.” (Page 77)
“There is hardly anything more evangelistically powerful than a group of worshiping believers.” (Page 81)
“The devil knows more Bible than most church members in North America and can sign off on our doctrinal statements, but this knowledge has not transformed him.” (Page 81)
“Evangelism that will introduce Jesus to this culture will flow from people who are deeply in love with Jesus.” (Page 82)
“Jesus facilitated spiritual formation in his disciples by introducing them to life situations and then helping them debrief their experiences.” (Page 85)
“In the new world the place of learning has shifted from the classroom (academic model) to the living room (life learning).” (Page 86)
“The community of faith should be an environment where the number one pursuit is the development of human beings created in the image of God and redeemed into his family through Jesus.” (Page 91)
REALITY #5: The Shift from Planning to Preparation
WRONG QUESTION: How Do We Plan For The Future?
“I am not against planning. I am just suggesting that there is a dimension beyond planning that is critical for us to understand.” (Page 95)
TOUGH QUESTION: How Do We Prepare for the Future?
“Spiritual preparation has the goal of getting God’s people in partnership with him in his redemptive mission in the world.” (Page 95)
“The five elements of a spiritual preparation architecture are vision, values, results, strengths, and learnings.” (Page 96)
VISION
“.. people tire of visionless activity and organizations…” (Page 96)
“Vision captures commitment among people. It generates energy, fires up the imagination, and inspires excellent.” (Page 97)
“It is our job to discover what he has in mind, not to invent something he can get excited about.” (Page 99)
“To move beyond a program-based, activity-based approach to church life, church leaders increasingly will need to be able to cast a compelling vision of kingdom growth.” (Page 101)
VALUES
“Make no mistake about it: competing values sets do not coexist peacefully.” (Pages 102)
“How do you know what someone’s core values are? It involved more that what people say their values are. It’s what people do that counts. Values are demonstrated by behavior.” (Page 102)
I suggest to congregations that they can discover their values from three sources. 1) Start by asking people in the community to identify what the church stands for. 2) Ask people who have been part of the church for three to six months. 3) Rent some non-church people unfamiliar with the church to visit for two to four weeks, then debrief their experience. (Pages 102-103)
RESULTS
“Effective congregations keep score and they play to win.” (Page 105)
“I am convinced that the reason for much burnout, lack of commitment, and low performance in our churches among staff and members is directly related to the failure to declare the clear results we are after. We don’t know when we are winning.” (Page 106)
“What gets rewarded gets done.” (Page 108)
STRENGTHS
LEARNINGS
REALITY #6: The Rise of Apostolic Leadership
WRONG QUESTION: How Do We Develop Leaders for Church Work?
“We need transformational leaders who will help the church find a new expression in the emerging world.” (Page 125)
Apostolic leaders – They are:
è Missional
è Visionary
è Entrepreneurial
è They plant churches in teams
è They release ministry to people and people to ministry
è They are genuinely spiritual
TOUGH QUESTION: How Do We Develop Leaders for the Christian Movement?
Areas of leanring:
1. Paradigm issues (How do you see your world?)
2. Microskill Development
è Vision cultivation and casting
è Communication
è Team building
è Change and transition leadership
è Mentoring and coaching
è Corporate cultural management
è Conflict management and resolution
è Networking
è Project management
è Systems thinking
è Interpersonal relationships
3. Resource Development
4. Personal Growth
“It takes enormous courage to give spiritual leadership inn the North American church culture, because the church is increasingly hostile to anything that disturbes its comfort and challenges its club members paradigms.” (Pages 145)
