“50% of pastors would leave the ministry tomorrow if they could. 70% are fighting depression and 90% can’t cope with the challenge of ministry…..
1,500 pastors walk away from ministry every month because of moral failure, burnout, conflict, discouragement or depression. He was also shocked to find that 80 percent of seminary and Bible school graduates will leave the ministry within their first five years”
Those are the stats Jonathan Falwell, son of the late Jerry Falwell said at their recent ReFuel conference a week ago.
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This continues the March 8th post on 3 things I remain convinced of…
1. here
2. The best ways of doing ministry have yet to be found and we are in an “idea” crisis
Idea crisis, creativity dearth, innovation desert. We have to own that part of what we are called to do is design, create and come up with better ways of doing it.
We have to own this one deeply, passionately and relentlessly. This is not because we have to be innovative or don’t like the way we have always done it. We have to own this because God is always doing a new thing and inviting us into new territory and terrain.
I am convinced the best ways are yet to be found and furthermore am totally convinced by my experience that some of those “best ways” are actually in the ideas that will come from people who we don’t know yet and who don’t follow Jesus yet.
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Well if you hit this site periodically you will notice a new graphic to the right of this post. We are very excited about our new e-learning section of this website. We are a couple months out from launch but the site is under serious construction as we get ready for our initial offering.
We have been trying to figure out the best way to broker the work I do that is shared with the churches I work with monthly, the conference speaking and writing I do. There is a small body of growing work that we want to make more widely available and this seems like the perfect avenue to make it happen.
If you want to be aware of the details, special offerings and the contours our approach to e-learning please visit the Morph 2.0 page by clicking here or on the image to your right and submit your email address and go through the confirmation process. This is going to be a pretty incredible venue. Videos, pdfs, podcasts, forums, calls, free one day conferences… get ready for 21st century learning at it’s very best.
I feel like three things are more clear to me after being gone 37 days in South Africa and Namibia. I will unpack these over the next three posts. But here they are briefly.
1. Spirituality will be more relational, creational and communitarian into the 21st century
I have mentioned this before but haven’t much unpacked it. I need to. I am more convinced than ever and I see these yearnings and core longings from the Nassau to Namibia and Stellenbosch to St. Louis. If we can break the textual addiction we have the relegates formation to bible study we are going to be dead in the water in the postmodern world. (and obviously I love the bible my latest book released 8 days ago is about the good Book)
2. The best ways of doing ministry have yet to be found and we are in an “idea” crisis
This was one of the core values we as a staff owned at the DNA level of our being when I was a local church pastor. We need church leaders that continue to think into new frontiers and arenas.
3. People aren’t craving church, or sermons or bible study…the are dying to be in small community where real dialogue and doing life together happens.
Many of us as leaders in the church still don’t seem to get this. We have been so conditioned by the old modern world where obligation and belonging were premium values we don’t seem to heard the wake up call of the information age…. it is ubiquitous therefore our brokering of it is of little value to this world. We will have to broker much more.
More ruminations to follow.
I continue to be struck by how we live in in between times; in between modern and after-modern worlds, in between Christendom and after-Christendom worlds, in between Gutenberg and after-Gutenberg worlds, these are a few of the in betweens we are navigating.
The church is in between these and other things as well. What kind of leadership is called for in in between times? What kind of spirituality will nourish this new leadership? What kind of user generated content will change the outcome of the experience for those involved in meeting we call “church?” What will the navigation of these in betweens mean to how we architect new meeting spaces for the new ways of gathering as the people of God.
I have been a part of conversations over the last month where we have probed and discussed all of these in depth. In 61 different sessions over nearly 30 days we have bumped up against these questions and more. But I wonder if all of these things will only be answered when a key shift within the church’s self understanding happens…the shift from belonging to transformation.
For a long time we have trumpeted the need for the church to be a place of belonging, and while that is true I am not convinced that is the biggest need, calling or commission we have. The church has people belonging but not being, people being informed but not transformed.
I am willing to admit I might be wrong and maybe I don’t have the best vantage point. But I wonder what might happen if we in the church started shifting the questions we are asking from how people connect, to how they change, from how they belong to how they become.
