I feel that too often we, church leaders, are really good at what we do without knowing why we do it. Sure, we have a super cool motto for our ministries that reflect our purpose within our ministries, but how do we form those purpose statements? What thoughts, principles and concepts are we drawing from in order to create our ministry purpose? Do we even know what the role of our ministry is (outside of the super cool purpose statement)? Do we even know what the role of the church is?
In my extremely limited experience, I have not seen someone who truly understands the role of the church, or even their own ministry. So those are my current soul searching questions. What is the role of the church? How does my ministry fit within that role?
At my church we have adopted Rick Warrens 5 purposes of the church to become the purpose for our church. I have a problem with this for two reasons. I feel when you limit the purpose of the church to a checklist you limit the potential of the church. This is why I believe the Rick Warren 5 fold-purpose of the church (and other models like it) is inadequate. The church is more organic in nature (as opposed to mechanical) and its stated purpose should reflect this. However, this does open up the possibility of not emphasizing enough structure within the church you can again miss the purpose of the church. Even organics have structure within them.
As church leaders it is our responsibility to discover what the purpose of the church is, and then we must see how each ministry of our particular church fit within that purpose. I believe the specific purpose of each church is different, but the general purpose of the church is universal. Just as everyone has a different body, but we are all supported by the same skeleton. Taking someone elses purpose statement for the church makes life too easy for you - you have an answer to a question but you aren’t able to fully understand the answer since it isn’t your own.
Universally, I feel the Church has a unified purpose. Jack Cottrell, in his book “The Faith Once For All” (a theology text book), states there is a two-fold purpose for the Church. First it is to display God’s glory on earth and second it is to be the means which God shares his goodness with man. I feel this is accurate to scriptures, and is a great summation of the purpose of the Church. With this foundation, we can easily form our own unique purpose statements for our own unique churches.
This allows for a lot of flexibility and creativity to create a purpose statement for your church. It also requires a lot of wisdom, discipline and accountability. You cannot create a purpose statement that is so structured that your ministry becomes nothing more than an equation. Conversely, you cannot create a purpose statement that is so laid back there is no direction for the church to grow. This is a great opportunity for church leaders to reexamine what they wish to accomplish, and will give them the focus the need to accomplish their dreams and goals.
With this in mind, we must identify what ministries will bring about the purpose statement each individual church. For example, does a ladies workout ministry, complete with its own budget and everything, really help bring about the purpose of your church? You must find the ministries that do accomplish the purpose of your church and keep them. You must remove those that suck time and resources with purposes other than the one you stated and remove them. This will leave you with ministries that are effective, and have the ability to accomplish the purpose you have set out to accomplish.
The hardest part (for me that is) is to see how your own ministry accomplishes (or doesn’t accomplish) the church purpose. You have to be honest with yourself with this one. You might have to cut out some of your favorite programs in order to accomplish your church wide purpose, and you might have to add programs you loathe in order to accomplish your church wide purpose. The important thing to remember during this process is that the ministry and the church is not yours. The church is headed by Christ, and the ministry is headed by the church. You are accomplishing Christ’s will, not your own.
I feel this is the most effective way to find purpose, clarity and effectiveness within a church. I am very confident that I have not presented any new ideas for finding the purpose within a church. For me, this blog post was a way to organize my own thoughts. I felt it would be important to share with the world in the hopes that my thoughts might spark a few thoughts of your own. I also accept that what I have written may not be completely accurate and it may not be the best way to find purpose within a church. This was just for my benefit, but I felt I would be remiss not to share it with you. Please fee free to leave any comments (preferably constructive). We are in this ministry/life thing together, so lets work together to change the world for Jesus.
