"It is not so much that God has a mission for his church in the world, but that God has a church for his mission in the world." - Tod Bolsinger
Have you ever thought to yourself, "I wish I owned a cruise ship..." No? Just me? Well in case you've ever asked yourself that question, it IS possible to buy yourself a decommissioned cruise ship! In fact, you can find places like Aliaga, Turkey, which is known for its boat graveyard. But what's the point? These ships still have lots of life in them! The reason places like this exist is to make room for new models of cruise ships. The church can take a lesson from this.
A few years back, a friend in ministry shared with me the analogy of the boat. A good boat does its job and helps you sail to wherever you want to go all while staying dry. But over time, the condition of the boat begins to show. Maybe it slows down a little bit or even gets a few holes. Now you are faced with a decision: Do you fix this one up? Buy a new boat? Or let this boat sail off into the sunset and admit your sailing days are done. Let's view this in the lens of the church.
Ministry programs (boats) can be found in almost every church. Whether it is a women's Bible study or a mid-week Children's program, churches create opportunities for people with a mission in mind. Ideally, the mission would be to help people learn about God and grow closer to Him, but they could also help accomplish other goals like building community, improving Biblical literacy, and serving as outreach. When the program is achieving its goals, it is like a boat gliding on the water. However, conditions of the ministry can change. A key ministry leader transitions out, demographics change, the mission is no longer the focus, or maybe time changes everything but the ministry. Whatever the reason, you are left with the same decision as the boat. Do you make some changes and repair the ministry? Do you pray for new vision and create something new to replace it? Or is God leading your church in a new direction and it's time to acknowledge that while it was a great ministry in its time, it is time to dock that boat for good.
We can probably think of a time when a church (maybe even yours) kept going in a boat that is basically Rose's "life raft" at the end of Titanic. Making the decision to change or end a ministry can be difficult. Sometimes, people can resist making the call because of the people it will upset. Other times, it doesn't achieve its original mission, but we justify it by saying it still does other things. I have been no stranger to making both tough decisions and excuses. The first ministry program I can think of was our Wednesday night kids program.
This program was around longer than I had been at the church. It had a fantastic director, a clear mission, leader/church support, organization, and lots of participation. Over time, the director transitioned out along with some other key leaders, our main goal multiplied into 5-6 goals, and our core group of students had graduated. Our church does not host any events directly tied to the denomination, but we had also switched our in-house written lessons and used a curriculum that was distributed for free from the denomination. All of these factors (and probably more) led to me and a few others sitting in a room with a whiteboard listening to the boat analogy figuring out what decision to make. We made the difficult choice to shut down the program. We beached the boat. This decision was met with push back and hurt feelings. People didn't understand the decision to shut it down because it wasn't like the program was a complete failure. However, it wasn't achieving the main goal and was using a lot of energy and resources to do so. Update to this: About 3 years later, we were able to identify this was a felt need in our church and community so we were able to build it back.
One example of buying a new boat is with our Summer programming. Our goal for summer has always been to be intentionally focused on outreach and sharing the Gospel with those who wouldn't normally attend church! This took us about 8 years of trying VBS camps, home programs, game nights, and more, until we finally landed on Backyard Summer Nights. Each Summer brought lots of listening to what people were looking for and debriefing conversations once we tried something. We could not just pick one thing and jump on auto pilot. Tod Bolsinger says, "To live up to their name; local churches must be continually moving out, extending themselves into the world, being the missional, witnessing community we were called into being to be: the manifestation of God's going into the world, crossing boundaries, proclaiming, teaching, healing, loving, serving and extending the reign of God. In short, churches need to keep adventuring or they will die." In order for us to keep our strong community presence, we needed to listen for what the community was looking for. After trying a few things, we finally found our new cruise ship which we will ride until it's time to get a new one.
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