Church doesn't work like it use to.
The institution can't reform itself.
The system of the mid-20th century institutionally organized church. The system of meetings and commissions and committees. The system of very heavy bureaucracy, organized around aging properties and entrenched leadership.
Free Range Priest ministry is for those …
inside, outside, and alongside the institutional, denominational church who want to find their way back to serving their true calling - sharing the love of God, feeling the energy for building faithful communities - and who want the burden of dying church lifted from their shoulders.
I don’t think we can rely on a new diocesan program or a new commission report or a new youth ministry initiative to change the tide of church decline.
So what do we do?
We can ‘keep on keeping on’, doing things like we’ve always done them, whistling in the dark, telling ourselves it’s going to be okay despite the evidence (I think mostly that’s what’s happening now).
We can live in denial. ‘Well, my church is growing’, I hear over and over - even though the amount of growth in a few congregations is not enough make a difference in the overall system. People still try to debunk the church decline statistics, even though the trends are abundantly, consistently clear.
We can try programs that are just the same thing in different form - house church, pub church, garden church, even online church - that still presume the structure of a professional, salaried clergy person, a single gathered community, some buildings, or other gathering spaces, all sustainable only through the donations of people in the congregation (or a grant).
We can give up hope. We can give up church altogether - and many are. Clergy are leaving ministry in droves, echoing the leaving of people in the pews. We can prepare to shut the doors when the last member dies.
OR….
There is another way.
You can’t rely on the institution for it. It’s not going to be a class at seminary or a program of your diocese or conference. In fact, it will probably be opposed by many in institutional leadership (because we haven’t done it this way before. Because institutions can’t reform themselves).
The other way is to start somewhere other than the system.
To consider ourselves back in the days of the Acts of the Apostles, when the only thing that really mattered was sharing the Good News of God’s love, and how it transforms our lives.
Those apostles were organized, but not an institutional system of denominations. They were guided by the authority of Scripture, baptism, and wise leaders.
They let themselves be led by the Spirit to discover the best, most effective and most sustainable ways of doing ministry.
Just like today, the earliest church was also concerned about money - how were they going to pay for ministry in order to keep sharing it?
Paul took up collections for the churches, and he also had wealthy patrons. These days collections from our members is no longer supporting ministry.
The ability to look at money and ministry is central to finding new ways to thrive in ministry. Re-imagining what ministry can look like outside of - or alongside of - the institutional church is just as important in terms of bearing the faith in the world today as it was at the time of the Acts of the Apostles.
In fact, I had a seminary professor who used to say that we are living out the 29th chapter of Acts - it isn’t over yet!
The way of re-imagination can be radical - it can also be subtle (or subtly radical!).
It doesn’t have to mean leaving the institutional church, or starting your own ministry from scratch - though it can mean those things.
It can be as simple as looking at your day-to-day ministry and asking the question, ‘does this have to get done?’ or ‘Is this currently serving God the way I/we are called?’
It can mean NOT doing a lot of things that currently take up our typical day in ministry (how many meetings must we have…?)
It can mean thinking of congregational ministry as intentionally creating a path for spiritual growth and life for members, rather than focusing almost exclusively on Sunday worship for most, along with a handful of programs.
It can mean utilizing today’s technology to make the administrative and the formational aspects of ministry easier to manage and more affordable.
It can look like getting paid for and sharing ministry in more sustainable ways.
These possibilities and more are not going to come from an institutional program or initiative. They are going to come from new church leaders like you.