Ed Stetzer: Four Steps to Community Engagement

How Churches Can Impact Their Community 

I've said many times before that if the 1950s were to make a comeback, there would be all too many churches who could go on without missing a beat. The good news is that they found a ministry strategy that works. The bad news is that the people they reach are now seventy years old.

Many of these churches have succumbed to this tendency: when something works, people work it. This backfires because the more they "work it," the more they get trapped in it. Before long, the ministry strategy is sixty years old and the church that once thrived with innovative ways to reach their community has now shriveled to a handful of people that has completely lost touch with the surrounding neighborhood. In their well-intentioned but often insular focus on strategies and programs within their own walls, they have stopped knowing the people around them in their neighborhood.

Those that are leading local church bodies today know that there is more to pastoral care than simply caring for the needs of the local congregation. While that is certainly a part of it, the church also needs to have an effective connection with the community outside the church. There should be a difference in the community because the church exists, and if it left for some reason, there should be a void that's felt. Unfortunately, that's not often the case. We become more about church preservation than community transformation.

When we took on the comprehensive study at LifeWay Research known as the Transformational Church Initiative, we surveyed over 7,000 churches and conducted hundreds of on-site interviews with pastors. We wanted to change the scorecard from strictly looking at numbers to one that really asks if churches and people are being changed. We found that the churches that could be known as "transformational" had a number of characteristics in common. One of those traits was that transformational churches engaged their respective communities on mission.

We found that the common thread was that these churches were willing to invest deeper in the mission than other churches. They wanted to move the mission forward. The priorities were engaging the lost, winning the lost, and maturing believers to repeat the process. What does that process look like? Four steps are clear. Read more

Ed Stetzer's observations about churches with defunct ministry strategies are particularly relevant to the churches in the Continuing Anglican jurisdictions in North America. They may also be relevant to a number of the newer congregations in the Anglican Church in North America in which the tendency is to fall back on ministry strategies of the past.