PRESENT UNCERTAINTY AND FUTURE CHURCH - WILL MANCINI

will mancini

present uncertanty and future church

More than anything else pastors are telling me these days, I hear uncertainty about the future.

For many pastors, uncertainty began well before March 2020 when COVID froze society. Worship attendance was already plateauing or declining thanks to a solid five years of diminishing frequency of regular participants' attendance. Pastors were navigating a confusing debate about the pros and cons of online church. And they were grappling with stubborn divisions in American society that members brought with them into church, threatening to divide it.

Then COVID hit. Attendance frequency dropped to zero. Online church rose to 100 percent. And the divisions in society and church gaped into open wounds.

Pastors are leading churches in crisis. Most know that when the pandemic ends, things aren't going back to what they were, not all the way. And many wonder what inperson attendance will look like in the future.

Naturally, the uncertainty felt by pastors runs alongside the loss felt by the people they serve. Over the last year, people have lost more of what they consider normal in one blow than they ever have in their lives. In addition to loss of contact with loved ones, job and financial security, school routine, shopping and dining patterns, and national stability, people have lost a paradigm of church that they were used to and largely liked.

This loss produces grief, anger, and the compulsion to assign blame. Pastors have witnessed people blaming the government, conspiracies, foreigners, neighbors, and, with respect to what the church should and shouldn't be doing, pastors themselves. This blame is caustic spume on the bitter wave of misunderstood, mishandled loss. This is a very rough time to be in ministry, and in many ways the future of Church As We Know It really is uncertain. But be assured that some things from the past will remain in your future:

• The mission of Jesus to the world • The depravity and lostness of people around you • The values that motivate your church • Your local cultural context • God's special calling upon each unique individual • Your capacity to imagine a preferred future • Your ability to focus resources • The reality that God leads his people through leaders

As a church and as a leader, you still have what matters most. You have everything you need for life and godliness. You have the presence and authority of Jesus. You have the power of the gospel. COVID didn’t take any of those things away.

But COVID has taken away something we were ripe to lose—reliance on models of church inadequate to the methods of Jesus.

It's helpful to picture every church as a two-story house with a lower room and an upper room. The Lower Room contains four elements that draw people in: place (building), personalities (leaders), people (friends), and programs (activities). The Upper Room contains God's unique disciple-making vision for the church; it's supposed to draw people up. Everyone's primary place of emotional attachment to their church is one or the other.

COVID caused such turmoil in churches because it wrecked the Lower Room with the force of a hurricane. It revealed what had been true long before the pandemic struck: most people with a church home—and probably more than pastors suspected—are emotionally attached to the Lower Room, not the Upper Room. The Lower Room's demolition sent leaders scrambling to build some kind of shelter.

Yet COVID didn't only reveal truth about churches. It also uncovered just how much pastors are attached to the Lower Room. As I detail in my book Future Church with Cory Hartman, pastors are under enormous, constant pressure to spend all their energy on the Lower Room and to define success in Lower Room terms like worship attendance. Today's miserable Lower Room scorecard makes the COVID crisis a personal crisis for many pastors even if they never get infected or lose a job. Yet in the same stroke, COVID also greets pastors as a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. The pastors I know didn't get into ministry to run Lower Room programs but to make Upper Room disciples. The breaking of church norms now heralds the chance to break attachment to the Lower Room. This is the golden moment to recenter the church around God's vision of disciple making, expressed in the Seven Laws of Real Church Growth:

• Real church growth starts with a culture of mission, not worship. • Real church growth is powered by the gospel, not relevance. • Real church growth is validated by unity, not numbers. • Real church growth is local, not imported. • Real church growth is about growing people, not managing programs. • Real church growth is led by calling, not celebrity. • Real church growth is energized by shared imagination, not shared preference.

Before people will move to the Upper Room, pastors need to move there too. Most pastors' intentions have long been there already. But their minds have been baked in an inferior, intangible paradigm of church that keeps them trapped in a Lower Room system without wanting it or knowing it. The Seven Laws summarize the unlearning and relearning that pastors have to experience personally. Then they need to paint a picture for people of how life in the Upper Room is better than life in the Lower Room— that even the brightest glimmers of God they've gotten in the Lower Room are nothing compared to the splendor higher up. Pastors need to demonstrate through stories and experiences that no matter what Lower Room elements have been lost, what is most important is alive and well—indeed, that a reimagined future centered in the Upper Room will ultimately be better than what anyone knew before.

The last year has been foundation-shaking for many pastors. Yet maybe we needed to experience that shaking to drive us from where we’ve been to a future more authentic to Jesus' intent for his church. As painful as the process has been, let’s not waste it! Let’s embrace this time of disruption as a gift from God—an opportunity to forge a better future.

Will Mancini is a church consultant and ministry entrepreneur. He is the founder of the Future Church Company, which is three interconnected organizations that help the church more closely embody the movement that Jesus founded. Three facets make up the church of today—individuals, local churches, and networks/denominations. Future Church Co. is three organizations, each intentionally designed to serve one of these three facets of the church. Each of these organizations— Younique, Pivvot, and Denominee—delivers practical tools and interactive processes that empower followers of Jesus to design the future. Will has written six books, including Future Church, Younique, Clarity Spiral, God Dreams, Innovating Discipleship, and Church Unique. He enjoys speaking and writing about how to live a life of more meaningful progress. Will lives in Houston with his wife Romy and has four children.