The COVID-19 pandemic has challenged many influential pastors to courageously claim their strong sense of calling and purpose to adapt to rapidly changing circumstances. The latest challenge calls less for churches’ vision and pastors’ motivation of their church members. In contrast, church folks were more attentive to their lead pastors and ever more concerned about the future of their churches. The biggest challenge is that we are all in uncharted territory. The uncertainty has crawled into every aspect of ministries. While the digital revolution has disrupted churches by migrating people away from the church to thrive in the world with technologies at its center, the pandemic even forced churches to migrate into this world. This new era demands new perspectives. You must test new approaches to ministries. Unlearning is crucial because humans quickly abandon a new way to the old familiar ones that are not working anymore in this emerging culture. Managing diverse perspectives and combining a broader range of experiences and resources will help you navigate the volatile ministry conditions ahead of you. It would help if you learned to collaborate with community connectors since churches are not necessarily equipped with the cultural competencies required for the expedition to new ministry opportunities.
You might need to hire a ministry strategist and get some coaching and consultation if you don’t want to fail this journey to an entirely unknown world to churches and, especially, waste your time and energy while onboarding your stakeholders to this great mission.
It would help if you avoided the old tactics for your new strategic approach to this new ministry challenge. A new approach to navigating ministry strategic uncertainty is to:
- Leave the church folks alone: let them do what makes them enjoy their community
- Do pilot projects with a minimal number of ministry team members: Rapid Programming for Ministry (“RPM”)
It is a two-track approach based on the uncertainty matrix used for strategic planning in times of uncertainty. Let’s go deeper into the two-track process in the following posts.
