Your church will not be here in 2031

At least not the way it always has been

I heard a confession via Face time last night.

• Not from a member of ‘my’ congregation, but from someone I’ve known a long time, who lives in another state. And serves with several churches there.

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I’m praying for someone who filled out a form on my church’s website.

• The whole congregation is praying - even though we’ve never met. And even though that person belongs to a church, where they are also praying.

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I’m preparing a Lenten retreat for members of an Episcopal organization.

• They found out about me through a recommendation from their priest, and they’re paying my ministry - not me.

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The community I serve with is planning a Shrove Tuesday Pancake Supper with another congregation.

• I won’t be there, and I had nothing to do with planning it. They have their own life and ministry, and they contract with me for the ministry they need.

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I’m teaching seminarians in the spring.

• In another diocese, not my own. They’re learning ‘Cage Free’ ministry from the beginning, as they go out to serve a new church landscape.
  

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I’m writing this post.

• It will show up in a thousand email inboxes, and be posted on social media. People will (hopefully!) read it and engage with it. Consider what it might mean for their ministry.

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Not one of these things, all by itself, is remarkable these days.

Together, though…

I believe this is the shape of the Future of Church.

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The institutional church is collapsing. The typical mainline congregation is struggling.

But we mostly don’t know why. We just know there’s tons of stress, and things don’t work as well as they used to.

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Lots of people at this point say to me: ‘My church is actually growing! We’re doing all sorts of innovative things.’

But if I scratch the surface - and that’s my job! - I find that they are usually not that involved in the actual workings of the congregation, so they don’t see the struggles. Or they are part of the leadership, and once they start talking, they just pour out how hard it is to keep everything going.

I don’t say all this to be negative, or not to value the good work so many churches are doing. I say it to acknowledge what’s true: no one’s congregation is doing well these days in terms of growth or sustainability.

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But something encouraging is happening:

The church is becoming a network of Christian worship, practice, service and hospitality.

The traditional congregational model assumes independent ‘islands’ of full-service, in-house religious ecosystems.

That’s not the way the world works anymore. That’s not the way the church works anymore.

So keeping up the ‘island’ mentality - and structure - is not working anymore.

The Good News: we can join the archipelago!

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What I’m seeing:

• Small worshiping communities, organized around Christian practice, treated as a shared Rule of Life, not as programs or committees.
  
  

• Congregations not as a closed systems with one clergy person/group of people who sustain it (and get all their religious needs met there).
  

  … but as an interconnected hub that contracts with multiple ministries (and community members belong to multiple hubs).
  Ministers run one hub - or several.
  These ‘hubs’ can look like typical congregations, online ministries, or ‘faith practitioners’ who specialize in one particular type of ministry (pastoral care, Sabbath-keeping, etc.).
  
  
  

• All of this is kept running with powerful online platforms (I use a combo of Substack, Planning Center, and Google Workspace. Every ministry would have their own ‘tech stack’). These are the core of keeping each hub - and the people in them - connected and informed.
  
  And connecting them with one another! This is the core change for today’s congregations. Every little last thing is not your responsibility to do alone.
  

  This creates a web (or an ‘archipelago’. Pick your metaphor!) of Christian community - both online and in-person - connected with each other, grounded in following Jesus.
  

Agile, networked, technology-based, focused on Christian practice and small worshiping communities.

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Everything I just described is already happening - in small pockets, in a few places. Innovative, ‘connecting’ ministries are often struggling themselves - ‘where do I plug in?’ ‘What congregation/ministry will want to work with me?’

Now is the time to move towards each other.

It’s my own ministry vision to be a ‘connector’:

• To make this shift in ministry more apparent

• To help us find each other - innovative ministers, typical congregations ‘doing everything’, denominations struggling to keep a dying system going.

• To help intentionally develop an ‘archipelago’ of connected ministries

• And to help congregations/denominations get rid of the ‘island’ mentality and structure that’s holding them back.

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’Even as churches and denominations acknowledge institutional decline, most still operate as if institutional stability is the norm.’

• Loren Richmond Jr.
  

The biggest obstacle I see to the church moving forward is denial.

I make my pitch every day, to organizations large and small:
let’s think about church as:

Agile
Networked
Technology-based
Focusing on Christian practice
and small worshiping communities.

‘That’s not how we do things,’ I hear - again and again.

Exactly. That’s that the death-spiral of the institution.

It’s no longer a choice - not for mainline Christian churches.

Not If we want to live into the Future of Church.

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At Free Range Priest, we’re reimagining ministry in the digital age.