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Consider your church as an organization. How are decisions made and implemented, especially those that involve your church’s outreach
What resources does your church have to work with?
5. What are our relationships like? Examine the congregation’s relationship with God. What is the role of the Bible, prayer, and the Holy Spirit in decision making, in outreach activities, and in other aspects of congregational life? Are people growing spiritually? How are members’ spiritual gifts recognized and used to build up the church?
What are the characteristics of relationships within the congregation? Do members of the congregation live within the same neighborhood or see one another outside of church activities? Are there small group opportunities for church members to get together regularly on a more intimate basis?
How does the way you answer the question, Who are we? influence your answer to the question, What kind of ministry should we do? Nor can a church work on everything at once.
3. What are the church’s strengths and weaknesses for holistic ministry? Most congregational characteristics can be an asset and/or an obstacle.
Congregants may have only a vague sense of what the church’s mission is and why they should support it. This may call for further teaching and training or for a demonstration ministry project to educate and unite the church body.
5. What might hold back the church from moving forward in mission?
Every change and innovation comes with a price.
Trying to do holistic ministry without carefully studying the community context is as unwise as interpreting a particular Bible verse out of context, without regard to its setting within the book and the Bible as a whole.
Surveys: Written or oral questionnaires ask residents to identify local needs, issues, and assets.
A holistic ministry vision builds on a congregational identity to respond in a specific way to the needs and opportunities in the community context, out of a desire to share the love of God in word and deed.
“vision path committee.”25 These people must be mature Christians, dedicated to the congregation, and open to the Spirit’s leading (1 Tim. 3:1–13).
The most effective way is to expose them to what others are doing in holistic ministry. Seeing and experiencing transformative ministries in action help people develop a taste for holistic mission that cannot be generated through words alone.
overall holistic theology of mission that helps people understand what the Bible says about evangelism and social action and how they fit together. The second level is a congregational sense of mission that describes the church’s purpose and identity, including its calling to holistic outreach, captured in a mission statement. The third level is a specific visionary plan as to how the congregation will apply its theology and mission in its community of ministry.
Leaders can be intentional about conveying a holistic theology through implicit as well as explicit channels. One important way to do this is to tell stories. As with Jesus’ parables, stories communicate theological truths that impact people’s hearts as well as their minds. David Frenchak explains the value of storytelling: “Stories open options and energize people to do new things they previously had not imagined or sometimes even resisted.”
Let’s think of the church as a garden (as does Paul in 1 Corinthians 3). How do we get tomatoes from the garden? By rushing out on the first day of spring and throwing seeds out onto the ground? No, we must prepare the garden carefully for the seeds. . . . In the same way, ministries of mercy will only spring up if the church is prepared for them. We cannot emphasize this too much. Fertilize and “dig up” until the congregation is ready!
Long-term transformation of the congregation and its community of ministry are more important than flash-in-the-pan projects that prove unstable and ineffective.
Ronald J. Sider, Philip N. Olson, and Heidi Rolland Unruh, “Connecting the Dots: Assessing Your Congregational and Community Context to Develop a Holistic Ministry Vision,” available from Evangelicals for Social Action (800-650-6600, esa@esa-online.org).
For helpful guidance on launching new ministry projects, see Carl S. Dudley, Basic Steps toward Community Ministry: Guidelines and Models in Action (Washington, D.C.: Alban Institute, 1991); Carl S. Dudley, ed., Next Steps in Community Ministry (Bethesda, Md.: Alban Institute, 1996); Mark R. Gornik and Noel Castellanos, “How to Start a Christian Community Development Ministry,” in Restoring At-Risk Communities: Doing It Together and Doing It Right, ed. John Perkins (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1995); Emily Demuth Ishida and Y. Franklin Ishida, To Serve as Jesus Served: A Guide to Social Ministry for
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