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.
Introduction
With the 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 the churches?
There is a video to accompany each of the Steps of Reimagining Ministry. It is perfectly possible to use the course without them, but they will be a help to those who learn better through listening than reading.
The Course Overview Leaflet button provides a downloadable overview of the whole course: the aims, core Scripture passages, individual and group work and follow-up ideas for each Step.
Step 1 - What is Ministry?
The purpose of Reimagining Ministry is to prepare all who take part for ministry together. Some will discern God’s call to play a part in leading their local church. Others may discern a different call. But whatever the outcome, all will end up serving God and the local community together as partners with God in a shared enterprise.
But 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?
Our church buildings stand as symbols of the place of the Church as an institution in the life of the country. But the era of Christendom, in which church and Christian faith were central to the life of the country, is now coming to an end.
How is God calling us to be church in the twenty-first century? Our society is changing rapidly and the local church also needs to change – not simply to keep up, but to be in a position to share God’s love with each new generation in a way they can understand and respond to.
Step 3 - Living as followers of Jesus
What does it mean to be a follower of Jesus in a post-Christendom age? In the traditional pattern of church life, following Jesus has been understood in two ways. First, deepening our relationship with him, through Bible reading, prayer, attending church and often through meeting in small groups to care for one another and study together. Secondly, following Jesus has involved identifying the gifts through which we may play our part in the work of the church and so help to support its life and further its mission.
However, when we look at the New Testament, we see that, although both these aspects are present, they are not the centre. The New Testament understanding of following Jesus is much more far-reaching than this. At its core is the idea of both outward and inward transformation of life into the image of Jesus, a transformation that affects our relationships in every sphere of life – our family, our workplace, our voluntary activities, our leisure pursuits.
Step 4 - What is leadership?
What do you think of when you hear the word leadership? We all experience leadership in a variety of situations, not only at work but in our leisure activities, like the football coach, the conductor of choir or orchestra, and at church, in persons of the clergy and churchwardens.
in Step 4 we begin to look directly at leadership. What is it and how is it to be exercised? We begin with the example of Jesus. What did he have to say about leadership? His answer subverts the way much of the world thinks about leadership. Jesus shows that the leader is not the one who seeks status and privilege, but the one who serves, as he modelled when he washed his disciples’ feet.
Step 5 - How can Churches work well together?
As is well known, the Church of England is organised by parishes. The parish system first came into being in Anglo-Saxon times, so it is well over 1,000 years old. However, we are now seeing the parish system gradually breaking down.
Mainly because of the reduction in clergy numbers, the Church is beginning to look for ways to adapt to the new reality and one of the most common and favoured strategies is to group churches together in teams or multi-parish benefices. The latest figures suggest that at least 70% of Anglican churches are part of multi-church groups of one kind or another. This adaptation is designed to preserve the idea of a Christian presence in every community. But it poses a challenge. To fulfil its potential, the multi-church grouping requires a different way of working for both clergy and lay people.
Step 6 - Conflict: friend or foe?
As Christians, we are called to love one another. In fact, as we discovered in Step 1, love for one another is to be a defining quality of Christians. Unfortunately, many Christians think and act as if loving one another means that we never engage in conflict. Or that, if we could only love one another as we should, there would be no need for conflict. In many churches there is a culture of ‘niceness’, which acts a cover for conflict avoidance. Then, when differences arise, people don’t know how to respond and often leave.
Step 6 addresses the subject of conflict, a subject few people find comfortable. But we do so in the conviction that the church that knows the secret of healthy conflict has discovered one of the keys that enables us to love each other. In fact, those who know how to approach conflict with confidence are often better able to live out the fruit of the Holy Spirit in their lives and act as peacemakers.
Step 7 - What is oversight?
The Church of England’s structures and finances embody the assumption that the standard form of ministry is full-time stipendiary ordained ministry and that all other forms of ministry are auxiliary optional extras. But during this course, we have discovered that in the New Testament the standard form of ministry is the ministry of the whole church and that ordained leaders exist to resource, enable and connect the ministry of all God’s people. We have seen that the role of the vicar as the focus of leadership and pastoral care in every parish is becoming increasingly unsustainable and we have explored the idea of churches led by lay people.
What, then, is to be the role of the clergy? How does the leadership of the clergy complement or dovetail with the lay leadership of the local churches?
Step 8 - from dependence to interdependence
In Reimagining Ministry, we have been exploring what it means to become a lay-led church. We have been discovering that it requires a seismic change in the way we are used to thinking about church and doing church. For centuries, the Church of England has expected the clergy to supply all the leadership in their parish and to take all the key decisions and shoulder all the responsibility. Now, however, we are rediscovering the truth that all God’s people are called to work with him in mission, and this means a move from dependence on the clergy to the much more mature position of interdependence.
In Step 8, you are encouraged to apply all that you have learned to your own situation and to discern how you will work together to take your churches’ life and witness into the future.
Course by the Revd David Heywood