As Stanley Hauerwas says, when you meet a church in paroxysms about “the family”, you have met a church which no longer believes in God. What about the Church agonising about its ministry to the individual?
“Go to a coffee shop, laptop in tow, and buy coffee for a stranger who is willing to poke around your website.”
How do priests end up where they end up? How well is the deployment process working? How could it be improved? And, as a favor to this former Roman Catholic, can someone discuss the pros and cons of relying as heavily as we do on interim rectors, priests-in-charge, etc.?
Neither the board nor the personnel committee should ever be responsible for the performance evaluation or goal setting of employees below the senior pastor level. The governing board is responsible for the performance evaluation and goal setting of the senior pastor. The senior pastor is responsible for the performance evaluation and goal setting of his or her direct reports
A church serving a university community has its particular challenges, not the least of which has been social media and its effect on Millennial-generation thinking.
“It has some nice features — French doors — a very typical house of the time and it’s fairly well made, but it would take the right place and the right person”
Because ministry is about people, we often neglect seeing people themselves as resources for ministry. People, of course, are the recipients of ministry, and a changed person is often the goal of ministry. But ministry is done by people who also need to be seen as a primary resource for doing ministry.
What do you do when you’re a thriving resort town with plenty of faithful people and no place to build all the churches you need? You build together, of course, in one spot, offering one model of architectural and communal integrity. That’s what Vail, Colo., based Vail Interfaith Chapel has done as it has sought to serve the spiritual needs of its residents.
Nuclear families—with housewives who could offer abundant volunteer labor to a church—no longer characterize the demographics that define congregational reality today. But Merritt points out that there is cause for hope: “New opportunities, tools, movements, missions, and passions cascade through our wilderness landscape bringing vital ways of organizing faithful communities, communicating prayerful longings, and seeking social justice.”
… a young man hangs up his new Ph.D. in his boyhood bedroom, the cardboard box at his feet signaling his plans to move back home now that he’s officially overqualified for a job. In the doorway stand his parents, their expressions a mix of resignation, worry, annoyance and perplexity: how exactly did this happen?