What is 'Cage Free' Ministry? 🐣

If you’re a minister - lay or ordained - who feels how the church is stuck, and you’re longing for the freedom to share Good News without the fear and stress of the collapsing institution, or the worry about how you’re going to pay your bills, you’re ready to go ‘Cage Free’.

Cage Free Ministry is the framework I’ve developed over 25 years of ordained ministry - ten of those as a Free Range Priest.

People always joke with me: ‘Free Range? Like the chicken?’

And I say, ‘YES’.

Because it’s still ministry. It just tastes better.

Cage Free Ministry brings more joy. The joy of sharing the love of God in Jesus Christ.

The joy of shedding a system and a mindset that there is only one way ministry can happen (here’s the church, here’s the people…), and discovering that we live in an amazingly creative world, full of tools and patterns we can follow to bring new life to our ministry.

And it’s a lot like the world that the first disciples found themselves in, interestingly enough…

Here’s some blog posts that share what Cage Free Ministry is like:

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One ministry, served in several ways

The 'special sauce' of thriving church

What Suze Orman taught me about ministry and money

What Church Can Learn from Prison

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Serving your ministry ‘Cage Free’ isn’t about giving up on the church. And it’s not about remaining in denial about the collapse of mainline denominations, whistling in the dark as we ‘keep on keeping on’ the way we’ve always done it.

It’s recognizing that our calling is about sharing the love of God - love stronger than death - and the life transformation of following Jesus.

And being willing to create new, thriving systems for doing this - for the sake of the church and the world.

It’s about moving from (trying to) bring people to church ———>

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to learning how to bring church to people.

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We all know what ‘the cage’ is…

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The Four Areas of Cage Free Ministry:

1. Understanding systematic institutional change: we're not going back to the glory days of the mid-20th century.

2. Re-imagine the relationship between clergy and congregations. I call this Sustainable Part-Time Ministry (though it works for full-time as well!)

3. Create ministry that is a business. I don't think it's true that the church doesn't have a product to sell! We're selling whole life transformation. We're selling the path to everlasting life and love. We have a priceless product - and we mostly give it away for free (so know one wants it, because they think it's not worth anything).

4. Technology as the base. Not 'have a church website no one looks at and an anemic social media account'. But using today's digital tools the way a business would - to connect with people, know them, and guide them on their spiritual path.