The Challenge of the Church in the 21st Century

Our action reflects our vision.

Our vision reflects our view of God.

In a migrating, multicultural, innovative, fast-changing, urbanized, global environment where the world is facing never seen mega problems, the church is a static, monocultural, rigid, slow-changing, suburban, closed entity driven by small, narrow visions focusing on shamefully ridiculous issues and on micro problems, not even dreaming about helping and collaborating to ease the pain of the mega sufferings of the world. The church got paralized by these gigantic problems, instead of getting empowered by our magnificent God who is bigger than these problems are. We talk about a big letter GOD, but our action, vision and life reflects a small letter god.

The 1st Century church was a multicultural, migrating, moving, fast-changing, city-centered, innovative, radical, Spirit-filled community of believers who turned the world upside down. They were led by 12 + 1 (with Paul) Spirit-filled, apostolic, radical and empowering leaders who took it seriously who Jesus is and their calling to go to the whole world. Their view of God was reflected in their actions. Such is ours. The difference is embarrassing.

 

What does the Church need now?

 

SPIRIT-FILLED, COLLABORATING, VISIONARY, PROPHETIC, EMPOWERING LEADERS WITH WORLD-VISION. The Church through her history had been mobilized and empowered through such leaders. Nothing substitutes the envisioned, mobilized, empowered, Spirit-filled multitudes of believers. That always happened through such leaders.

INNOVATIVE LABORATORIES. We need to form “laboratories”, think-tanks, with people who will do research, try new things, experiment, fail and succeed, etc.. We need to accelerate the “Acts 15 moments” where the Body of Christ came together to recognize that God is doing something new. We need more of these moments that God is doing something “new”. If we don’t expand the borders of the church now than the world will expand his. The world is winning by being much more aggressive and innovative.

DIVERSITY. Diverse teams need to be put together with the best innovators, who already built new models and are called to be on the very frontline of the ministry. These teams need to have members who truly embrace this cosmopolitan world and are willing to become “Greek for the Greek, and Jew for the Jew”. Apostle Paul built a diverse team which was very innovative, fast, and led a major paradigm shift in many ways.

CITY-FOCUS. Such teams need to be placed into potential and influential cities – that is influential in education, media, economy and arts and which cities are diverse.  The church needs to collaborate to put those teams together. Apostle Paul went to key cities of his age.

The church needs to form Paul-like teams with Paul-like leaders, vision, innovation-capacity, flexibility, with Paul-like focus. That is absolutely essential for the future of the global Body of Christ.