I see a major shift in how my students see church and it isn’t in musical styles or starting little anti-church gatherings meeting in homes. Those kind of “revolutions” might be the talk of aging and burned out boomers like George Barna but not my students. The revolution they seek has more to do with Bono than Barna. It is to make a serving church.
Let me tell what got me writing about this. This week I finished up the “administration” unit in my church leadership course. Teaching church administration to 22 year olds can be difficult. Many hope to “just minister” to people by “hanging around and relating to them” as they practice an “incarnational lifestyle.” They see little value in paper work or budgeting, planning, organizing or checking out things like zoning codes. To help these students see the value of administration I require them to conceive and write up a complete Church Planting Proposal to be presented to a district. My theory is they’ll come to see that even the wonderfully romantic idea of church planting takes more than “hanging around with people” but also requires hard planning and administration. It has been an excellent project to illustrate the importance of lining up the administrative ducks before “doing my dream.”
This weekend I am reading seven church planting proposals from seven different groups, each of whom worked independently. They are exciting! One thing I’ll say about ministerial students these days—they are anything but lazy. In the last two weeks they’ve toured the city with realtors, got rental rates for movie theaters, met with zoning officials, checked out food handling regulations among a hundred other things like developed mission statements, made strategic planning documents and produced comprehensive three-year budgets. They did all this with no guidance whatsoever from me, it is pure “Problem Based Learning” with them discovering from real people what a “church planting proposal” might include. It is “Problem-based Learning” at its best by dumping them into the deep end of planning.
The reason I mention this is because of what happened this week. All seven proposals are identical in the kind of church they want to plant—a serving church. These seven groups working independently all came up with similar plans for a “unique” church—one built on serving the people in their town. They had special spins, of course: one focused on single mothers, another on the hungry, or unemployed or on mobilizing Christian young adults for service, but they all claimed their church plant would be different from other churches because they would focus on serving those outside the church, not on serving each other inside the church.
They were willing to match their budget to their rhetoric—one even designated 30% of all church income as “pass through” money for the needy. Not a single group budgeted for a full time salary for the minister, assuming they’d serve as bi-vocational ministers for several years while they funneled money to needy people rather than into their own pockets. In the ideal situation (which is what a church planting plan often reveals) all of these students saw the church primarily focused on serving others outside the church more than serving those inside.
Is this a sign? Sure, this is anecdotal, but I’ve seen a similar things each semester for about four years. But this semester it was unanimous—all seven groups had the same orientation. These students want to pastor a “Church for others”—a church that is a conduit to the world. Their ideal church had less to do with guitars and drums and snappy worship styles as with food pantries, pregnancy centers and job training. It was as if they all wanted to plant a Salvation Army Corps.
So, that is my question: Is this an indicator of anything for our future? How will this generation affect the church? They graduate in about six months. Some will go to seminary but many will be working beside you next year before going to seminary later. What will they face when they take these values into the church? Will they change the church or will the church change them?
So what do you think?
During the first few weeks click
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n ot easy.