Dr. Pete Menconi
Provided by CN Building Adult Ministries Resource Center (a book review)
As Baby Boomers search for significance, meaning, and purpose for their lives, the local church is one place they will look. Today, local churches and the worldwide church are going through profound changes. In order for churches to minister effectively to Boomers in their search, pastors and church leaders must understand the changing spiritual dynamics confronting the church and our culture.
In his book The Present Future: Six Tough Questions for the Church, Reggie McNeal (2003, Jossey-Bass Publishers) gives us six new realities confronting the church:
New Reality #1. The Collapse of the Church Culture
“The point is.. all the effort to fix the church misses the point. You can build the perfect church–and they still won’t come. People are not looking for a great church…The age in which institutional religion holds appeal is passing away.”
“Church leaders seem unable to grasp this simple implication of the new world–people outside the church think church is for church people, not for them.”
“The church was created to be the people of God to join him in his redemptive mission in the world. The church was never intended to exist for itself. It was and is the chosen instrument of God to expand his kingdom. The church is the bride of Christ. Its union with him is designed for reproduction, the growth of the kingdom. Jesus did not teach his disciples to pray, ‘Thy church come.’ The kingdom is the destination. In its institutional existence the church abandoned its real identity and reason for existence.”
New Reality #3. A New Reformation: Releasing God’s People
“The time is ripe for recapturing this original appeal of the gospel. People are interested and searching for God and personal salvation through a relationship with him. Increasingly they are not turning to institutional religion for help. They don’t trust religious institutions because they see them as inherently self-serving. So they are off on their own search for God.”
New Reality #4. The Return to Spiritual Formation
“I am recommending that churches provide life coaching for people. We need to view this as spiritual formation. We cannot take the approach that we just need to teach people the classic spiritual disciples, assuming that a person already has a developed center. We must use spiritual disciplines to help people form the center. We must attend to their self-awareness and life relationships.”
“Faced with diminishing returns on investment of money, time and energy, church leaders have spent much of the last five decades trying to figure out how to do church better. Emphases have come and gone in rapid succession. Church and lay renewal has given way to church growth, which has given way to church health. The results beg the question.”
New Reality # 6. The Rise of Apostolic Leadership
“The appropriate response to the emerging world is a rebooting of the mission, a radical obedience to an ancient command, a loss of self rather than self-preoccupation, concern about service and sacrifice rather than concern about style.”