Reimagining Ministry
Eight steps to transition your church to a Jesus-centred pattern of shared ministry.
We believe the Spirit is calling churches to rethink the relationship between clergy and laity and to transition to a new pattern of ministry rooted in a shared relationship with Jesus, in which lay ministry is no longer seen simply as ‘helping the clergy’ but lay people take their rightful place as leaders of their churches with clergy oversight.
This involves a profound change of culture, and you can expect the eight Steps of Reimagining Ministry to take up to two years to complete. For each Step, there is material for clergy and potential leaders to work through together and follow-up suggestions aimed at involving the whole congregation in the process of transition.
You can expect the outcomes of Reimagining Ministry to be:
· lay people confident in their call to serve Jesus, not just in church but in all the spheres of everyday life
· churches led by teams bound together by friendship and common purpose
· clergy equipped to oversee the leadership teams as well as freed to focus on their own gifts and calling.
and as a result, churches energised by the Holy Spirit and confident in mission.
Steps
Introduction
With gradual decline of Christendom and the decline in clergy numbers, the Church’s traditional patterns of ministry are increasingly becoming unfit for purpose and impossible to maintain. In this new and challenging situation, what is the Spirit saying to churches?
Step 1: What is ministry?
What do we mean by ‘ministry’? And how will our ministry reflect what it means to be a Christian and a follower of Jesus?
Step 2: what is the church for?
Maybe you want to turn a hobby into something more. Maybe you want to launch a business. Maybe you want to turn a hobby into something more.
Step 3: living as followers of Jesus.
What does it mean to be a follower of Jesus in a post-Christendom age?
Step 4: what is leadership?
What do you think of when you hear the word leadership?
Step 5: how can churches work well together?
Step 6: conflict: friend or foe?
This step is addresses the subject of conflict, a subject few people find comfortable.
Step 8: from dependence to interdependence.
In this step you are encouraged to apply all that you learned to your own situation and to discern how you will work together to take your churches’ life and witness into the future.
Step 7: what is oversight?
What, then, is to be the role of the clergy?
Course by the Revd David Heywood