When you look around on a Sunday morning – from inside your sanctuary or on your couch – do you wonder, or worry, about what’s next for your church?
In Becoming a Future-Ready Church: 8 Shifts to Encourage and Empower the Next Generation of Leaders, I tell stories of churches that have changed the way they do worship, ministry, and community work to pave their way into the future.
The churches represent the shifts my co-authors Daniel Yang, Warren Bird, and I believe can help churches move from operating less like they were in 1950 and more like they may be in 2050.
These congregations and their leaders demonstrate several overarching themes, including innovation through community responsibility, the value of small groups, and the changing perceptions of membership.
Innovation Through Community Responsibility
The Rev. Carl Johnson, lead pastor of Faith City Church in St. Paul, Minnesota, has been known for his work distributing hot meals to hundreds of hungry families in his state. But the former grocery store employee turned what he learned from the past into a new ministry to address food insecurity in a different way: He founded Storehouse Grocers, and placed discounted staples such as cereal, eggs, and canned goods in a section of the 2,200-square-foot space where his Black-led, multicultural congregation of dozens gathered for worship. Volunteers help run the store, which offers handcrafted espressos in its coffee shop, providing a means for community transformation by not only filling stomachs but also restoring a sense of dignity to neighborhood residents – including the youngest customers.
“Them being able to pick something off the shelf changes the power dynamic, in which they take control over their food choices,” Johnson elaborated, describing often heartwarming experiences as “one of the most beautiful things” about the store inside the missional church. “We would often see families come in with their children, and they would grab something off the shelf and their mom would not tell them to put it back.”
Another example of unique community outreach is one at Midtown Church in Sacramento, California. Rev. Susie Gamez, co-lead senior pastor, said the need for justice is evident right outside her church’s building in the downtown capital city. On the front steps and the sidewalk are members of “the displaced community,” who represent how the homeless population has surged in the region in recent years.
Partnering with other congregations, Midtown Church has sought to help their unhoused neighbors.
“We do sack lunches, and we’ll bring them down to the different communities – but we’ll also collect laundry, wash it for them, and return it back,” Gamez said.
Some of the church’s offerings are used to help a nearby elementary school whose student population is at the community’s lowest socioeconomic level. Midtown, an intergenerational and multiethnic congregation, funded field trips and transportation after learning the outings would have been canceled when the school couldn’t pay for them. In addition, staffers and congregants helped renovate the school’s teacher’s lounge, stocking it with snacks and supplies. Midtown also aids its own members by keeping gift cards on hand if they need assistance in purchasing their week’s groceries.
Value of Small Groups
Megachurches have long been seen as role models for other congregations of a variety of sizes, but some of the most innovative churches are those that are thinking small. Their leaders see the value of small groups, no matter the numbers that may gather en masse on a weekend.
Coastal Church in Vancouver, British Columbia, has fostered its regular gathering of small numbers of people, using Alpha, the longstanding but still-effective 10-week evangelistic course that bills itself as featuring “no pressure, no follow-up, and no charge.” The groups that meet for Alpha include people of a mix of faiths, experiences, and ages, although people in their 30s tend to predominate. Many have no religious affiliation, reflecting about 50 percent of people in Vancouver.*
Pastors David and Cheryl Koop say the gatherings, whether at a church location with high schoolers dining on pizza or a dinner “with a nice touch” in the common room of a high-rise building, meet a key need in their city.
“The number one need in our city is loneliness,” said David. “One of the reasons Alpha works is because it’s a meal and there’s small groups.”
Some of the attendees become Christians; others take part in Coastal Church’s service projects in Canada or abroad; still others join different small groups at the church or take the Alpha course again – and sometimes a third time.
While the Koops’ church features about 70 nationalities meeting across its 10 physical locations, Imagine Church, a mostly digital church, is using small groups as its primary means for congregating.
The church’s digital “communities” are usually eight to 12 people meeting, as Pastors Janae and Justin Klatt like to call it, “face-to-face” – generally by seeing all the faces on a screen without needing to scroll up or down to view everyone.
“After nine boxes on a screen, it’s just too much,” said Justin, “and then it’s not real community.”
The predominantly white and multiethnic church includes members who meet in half a dozen community groups totaling about 100 people.
The online boxes of each group are filled with people who live in different parts of the country but who are committed to meeting at a particular time, whether it’s midday Saturday or one of several weekday options. The age range is from young adults to people decades older – including Justin’s grade-school teacher.
These communities find their participants do not have to be in the same location to accompany one another through major life events. When one man’s wife died, his community held an online memorial service and a flight attendant in the group arranged her schedule to deliver a gift card to the home of the bereaved husband after pooling their resources to pay for the card.
“This did not come from Justin and I,” said Janae, in a follow-up interview, of the modern-day meal train. “It actually came from the people within their weekly community, which is just the beauty of Acts 2 in practicality.”
Changing Perceptions of Membership
Church leaders also are rethinking what membership should mean – or whether the term should be used at all – and are refocusing on a sense of belonging.
When Life.Church began in the mid-1990s in Edmond, Oklahoma, it had a tradition of asking members to commit annually to a covenant that indicated they would attend, give, and serve the congregation and participate in a small group. But as it became a multisite church, its leaders decided to take a different ministry approach that moved away from traditional “membership.”
Pastor and innovation leader Bobby Gruenewald says the church leaders now believe “the key is to meet people where they are and help them find the best next step in becoming a fully devoted follower of Christ.”
The goal, they say, is to help people move from being consumers of church to contributors, through service, giving, or evangelism.
“Engagement is the desired outcome of the terminology of membership,” said church consultant and early Life.Church leader Kevin Penry, recalling the church’s hope for the people that show up for weekend services and other activities. “So why not cut straight to what it is that we’re looking for? We want you to be engaged in the church.”
Likewise, Church Project lead pastor Jason Shepperd has moved away from the long-used term for individual affiliation with a congregation.
He says the church he founded in The Woodlands, Texas, is truly modeled on the traditional church, created by Jesus when he preached to thousands – before the term “megachurch” became common parlance – and continued by his disciples who met in house churches.
“We take a teacher, a Sunday school teacher, or a small group leader, and we elevate them and make them a pastor,” he said, of some of the more than two thousand people in his church who are involved in house churches. “And we take a class or a group and we elevate it and we make it a church.”
The unpaid lay leaders who guide the house churches, which include people of different racial, ethnic, and economic backgrounds, are officiating at weddings and funerals and meeting other needs of their community but they are not called ‘members’, Shepperd said.
“Our goal is not membership,” Shepperd asserted. “Our goal is full engagement in the life of the church.”
When the leaders of these and other churches have tried new approaches to faith and fellowship, they say the steps they have taken have fostered a greater sense of belonging. Some say their congregation is no longer just made up of families – from traditional ones to single mothers, single dads and multiracial families – but is truly a family itself.
The next generation of ministers will help Christians understand that the church cannot be all things to all people but that it can still be more things to more people.
What story of change made by your congregation will you be telling in the next months and years that might inspire others to take an innovative step in their own churches?
This material is adapted and excerpted from the Exponential NEXT book, Becoming a Future-Ready Church: 8 Shifts to Encourage and Empower the Next Generation of Leaders, by Daniel Yang, Adelle Banks, and Warren Bird, copyright 2024, Zondervan, used by permission.
NOTES
*See the Vancouver section in “2021 Census of Population,” Statistics Canada, November 15, 2023,https://www12.statcan.gc.ca/census-recensement/2021/dp-pd/prof/details/page.cfm?Lang=E&SearchText=vancouver&DGUIDlist=2021A00055915020,2021S05100973,2021A00055915022&GENDERlist=1&STATISTIClist=1&HEADERlist=0
Statistics Canada. 2023. (table). Census Profile. 2021 Census of Population. Statistics Canada Catalogue no. 98-316-X2021001. Ottawa. Released November 15, 2023. https://www12.statcan.gc.ca/census-recensement/2021/dp-pd/prof/index.cfm?Lang=E (accessed October 10, 2024).
