Becoming a Future-Ready Church: 8 Shifts to Encourage and Empower the Next Generation of Leaders
For five weeks, pastors and church members in Highlands Presbytery joined via Zoom to discuss, and be encouraged by, Becoming a Future-Ready Church: 8 Shifts to Encourage and Empower the Next Generation of Leaders, available in paper and digital versions. Written by three authors with different fields of expertise — Daniel Yang, a pastor and student of church mission, religion journalist Adelle Banks, and Warren Bird, a church researcher — the book offers not only information and experience, but perhaps most importantly, new questions for any seeking session or church to ask themselves.
Led by Pastor Sarah Green (Wharton United Community Church) and sponsored by the Presbytery’s Church Development Team, those gathered unpacked the book’s content in the context of their congregational experience. This is not a text for theorizing as much as a lens by which to look at our churches, and an opportunity to apply what is discerned.
The emphasis on new questions is intentional. The authors name what they call the “dated questions” that churches commonly ask, often as they look back in comparison with their ideal past. But they don’t stop there, suggesting what they believe are better questions for a growing present and future. Whether a church finds them “better” or not, the questions and the chapters are certainly thought-provoking and worthy of study and discussion.
For example, Chapter 2 is entitled, “From Attendance to Attachment; Why Church Membership is Losing its Appeal and What’s Replacing It.” Immediately the reader is posed the “dated question” that makes up so many church discussions: “How are we growing church membership and attendance?” Is there a more common question in the church? But directly after that is the authors’ recommendation for a better question: “How can we help more people develop healthy spiritual relationships to their complex lives?”
The volume’s format then follows a pattern of dated question, better question, a trend born out by research, and then a “shift” from how people once thought to how recent generations now do. In this particular chapter, the trend is
Experiencing an increased sense of belonging through new pathways where people explore their identity in Christ with others.
while the shift is
For most, becoming a church member means exclusively attending and giving to a particular church. But for more recent generations, church membership doesn’t always generate feelings of being known and seen. Going forward, church leaders should prioritize not only giving their members a sense of community, but also providing a welcoming space that shapes their sense of identity and belonging (17-19).
After setting the stage, a personal or first-hand account is provided, giving a concrete example to what can sometimes be harder to pin down. This is interspersed with data and charts, to make the matter even more concrete, and more narrative descriptions of the subject at hand.
Each chapter then takes up the story of one particular church that has gotten a better handle on the issue than many, for example a church that doesn’t have membership at all! As mainline Protestants, that would be challenging for all kinds of reasons, something the authors recognize, but even so, the material does provide different ways of looking at an age-old issue, and invites us to explore new skins for the 21st century’s new wine.
Instead of asking people unaffiliated with your church questions like, “Do you enjoy being a member at your church?” the responsibility is placed on you, the church member, the congregation, the session, to ask yourselves, “What are we doing knowingly and unknowingly to create uncomfortable insider-outsider dynamics?”
Each chapter concludes with “One Degree of Change,” reminiscent of the proverb, “The longest journey starts with a single step.” Noting that if a plane is off by just a few degrees in its flight pattern that it will land far from where intended, they invite readers to identify one small change. Nothing that disrupts your church’s life dramatically, but affects your trajectory in a way that you think might be helpful; it’s an experiment. Readers are asked to identify their place on a spectrum of responses, and then identify one change of their choosing. On a scale from strongly disagree to strongly agree, where do you stand on the statement,
Our membership process results in people having a strong feeling that ‘I belong here.
Is “becoming a member” simply a matter of one class, sign on the dotted line, and here are your offering envelopes? Or do you make sure those considering membership find ways to meet people with similar interests, as well as ways to plug into your mission and ministry?
Becoming a Future-Ready Church: 8 Shifts to Encourage and Empower the Next Generation of Leaders is not a perfect book, but it could be a very helpful one for those looking to start new conversations in their church, instead of always asking the same old questions, that generally get the same old answers.
