New Congregations
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Why are new congregations, new initiatives and new forms of church important?There are a lot of reasons, including:
The context the church operates in has changed and the church needs to respond to those changes by working out what of the existing church needs to change, what needs to stay the same and what needs to be re-presented for the new context.
The missional task of sharing good news and making disciples is increasingly incomplete in Western society.
There is a practical need for new churches to be built in new housing areas.
Increasingly, we need to develop new congregations alongside existing congregations that have lost touch with some or all of their communities.
People of other cultures and their children also require new congregations that meet their particular needs.
More about the context the church finds itself in.
How has the context changed?
There are a lot of ‘post’ words tossed around to describe the context. Here is an attempt at a translation of some of them…
Post-Christendom
– no longer a “Christian country” – could be described as post-Christian. The Church has previous experience of operating within contexts where the dominant culture was pre-Christian, “Christian”, pluralistic or non-Christian. But for possibly the first time in the history of the faith, the church in the West now finds itself in a situation where the dominant culture is post-Christian. Currently, the emerging consensus among theologians around the world is that the Western church needs to become “missional” – that God sends the church to engage and transform the post-Christian culture around it through mission. Crucially, the church itself will also be transformed by God, through this missional engagement with the culture. However, no-one is quite sure how to do this, or what it might look like because the church has not found itself in a post-Christian context quite like this before.
Post-modern
– humanity is going through a period where the common people have lost some trust in the idea that experts and leaders of our society have the solutions to our problems and know what they’re doing. While in an earlier time there was a tendency to optimism and faith in humanities capacity to make the future a better place has been undermined by scepticism and “realism”. This reduction in trust also extends to institutions and companies, such as banks, government, the legal system, churches etc. Increasingly, trust is something to be earned through experience rather than granted by position. In the public domain, “public opinion” is increasingly the final arbiter in determining who leads and in what direction and the media – with their tendency to prefer bad news to good news - have a dominant role in shaping and influencing public opinion. In the private domain, individual choices based on personal values and objectives have become more influential.
Post-denominational
– the loss of faith in established leadership and experts and the “taste and see” approach to determining what works extends to the religious realm. This post-denominational environment has little to do with ecumenism. In general, the established institutional denominations have lost a lot of ground in both the wider society and also the religious life of the community. Local congregations that meet the individual “needs” of attenders are now a more important part in the religious landscape and the denominational allegiance or loyalty of the congregation or individual attender is less important. At the same time, smaller congregations have found themselves less able to meet the “needs” of their attenders and larger congregations have emerged that provide more contemporary and better resourced experiences of church, especially worship. Many of the charitable and service activities of the church that used to be delivered through centralised denominational structures are now delivered by specialist charities, government organisations or large individual congregations often belonging to less centralised “denominations” that are more congregationally focused and operate more like networks than institutions.
It is now crucial that the churches work out what has to change, what has to stay the same and what has to be repackaged for the church to re-present God's message of hope to the world