A searchable, downloadable PDF of the original article, including the inverted triangle diagram, appears below. Rev. Chuck Congram is pastor of St. Andrew’s Church in Belle River, Ontario.
“Having lost sight of our goal, let’s redouble our efforts” is a time-worn adage that has taken on increasing relevance of late. My work in both congregational as well as more broadly-based workshops has highlighted the lack of clearly-defined purpose as the context in which most of us minister. With this absence of purpose, activity and programme have become our all-consuming passion. Perhaps an even greater danger facing ministry in which a defined statement of purpose has become lost or at least blurred is the tendency to confuse pattern with principle, form with function or method with message. At no point has this become more obvious than in the explanations given as to why the normative pattern for worship is eleven a.m. Sunday. There may be a greater readiness to defend this pattern than the deity of Christ!
Perhaps a diagram will help in describing the dilemma. (See PDF page below.)
I. ABSOLUTES
At the base of the inverted triangle are those things we believe which are not open to change because to eliminate them would be to undermine our ministry. Examples of these are beliefs such as the deity of Christ, the Scriptures as the Word of God, etc.
II. PURPOSE
This is pivotal to our entire discussion. Do we have a clearly-defined yet simple statement of why we exist in this time and place. In the confines of the Presbyterian Church in Canada, the vast majority of our congregations have existed thirty years or more. In all likelihood the purpose around which the congregation was formed no longer has relevance. In the case of the congregation which I serve, 130 years of history has erased the need for which we were formed, namely that of providing a worship and ministry centre for Scottish immigrants in a predominantly French Roman Catholic settlement. Though purpose will not change all that frequently, periodic checks of it help to ascertain its ongoing relevance.
One major challenge faces those who seek to define purpose for their ministry. That challenge is to keep a statement of purpose sufficiently simple that it can be committed to memory and becomes useful as the reference point to which we keep coming back.
III. GOALS
Arising out of a statement of ministry purpose come those long-term, five-to twenty-year goals around which we build. This represents the point at which we can best combine the needs of the people in the area in which we minister with the purpose to which we believe God has called us in order to gain focus for our next generation of ministry.
IV. OBJECTIVES
Now we become more specific as we target objectives which are achievable within the next two years of ministry. These will provide us with criteria by which our ministry can be measured in the short run.
V. METHODS (The “How”)
When the rest is in place, we can begin to talk about programmes, forms, organizations, methods, activities and leadership that will incarnate all that has gone on ahead. These items will be the most volatile and most frequently open to change.
THE DANGER
Study of the scriptures reveals that God wanted to provide us with function, principle and message while we seek to find security in form, patterns, programmes and methods. That desire causes our triangle to become reversed from time to time with the tendency to absolutize the “what” of our ministry rather than the “why”.
Recently, at a regular meeting of the National Church Growth to Double in the Eighties Committee, Dr. Jim Sauer reported on the factors which could be used to identify congregations with high potential for growth. The document which he provided contained two sections. The first outlined the contextual criteria – those factors we would normally refer to as demographic i.e. age of congregation, geographical location, and length of pastoral leadership. The second section outlined what Dr. Sauer referred to as “values”. Among the items on this list were factors such as 1) orientation to the present and future over against the present and past, 2) an awareness that problems exist, 3) a focus on people and ministry over against survival and institutional maintenance as well as 4) a high acceptance of an openness to change. At that point, I became intensely aware of how often I had been invited to present workshops which offered “how to’s” only to fire up people into “doing” when their reason for “being” may never have been clearly defined.
The “why” versus “what” tension will always exist. Such is the nature of ministry in the Christian context. Effective and productive ministry will result in the context in which the “what” we are doing does not have dominance but is rooted and grounded in clearly-defined purpose.