Join up with others

There can be three dangers when a church develops its programme.

Don’t be a Slave to Programme

The first is to think that in order to be a ‘proper’ church, you have to have certain ministries running in your programme - even when you don’t have any people in that age group or with that need. Very many churches feel less than normal because they don’t have a children’s work or a youth work – even though the demographic of their area or their church is ageing.

(As a bit of an aside, many churches think they can’t start a children’s or youth work because they don’t have any youth. They don’t recognise that what they do have is a plethora of grandparent figures. This is an influence that many in our communities lack - and long for. Of course, to engage in this way requires certain safeguards both for the potential ‘grandparents’ and those they’re reaching. But this shouldn’t put the church off having a possibly significant part to play in families’ lives.)

Don’t Compete

The second danger is the temptation to compete with what others are doing. This can be due to a lack of imagination, or a lack of research as to what other needs are ‘out there’. It can also be due to a ‘maintenance mentality’, which believes that only the few are interested in church, and that all the churches in the area are competing for the few. This is proving not to be true.

Those churches that are identifying opportunity, building relationship and engaging with people’s real lives, are discovering that there’s no end to the opportunities or the interest in church.

Please note: this doesn’t mean that we can’t become involved in an area of work because someone else is already doing it. It maybe that we can go into partnership; it may be that there’s something they’re not doing that you can. The important point here is not to compete - but to partner.

Don’t Reinvent the Wheel

The third danger is that often churches think they must start from scratch and invent their own material, event, network or resources. This can be out of economic necessity, arrogance or impatience. But it’s better to buy something off the shelf and adapt it to suit your situation. This saves time and money, and it makes the most of resources that have often been worked on over years and great cost.

By all means make up your own if there’s nothing out there that does what you want. But there’s nothing new under the sun. It may be that what you want to do is out there, and you just don’t know about it yet. Rather than reinvent the wheel, ask! There might be just the sort of thing you are looking for just around the corner.

Last Updated 03 December 2010