Planning, Proclaiming, Adjusting: Preaching the Gospel in a VUCA World

After a rather long while doing church in the middle of a pandemic, it might be natural for us to ask, “What next?” In a time in which it is increasingly more difficult to predict what the future holds in the next month much less inside the next year or three years, it is quite likely that a question like “what next” creates a feeling of anxiety or even fear. How in the world can we begin to answer a question like that when the world is becoming more and more volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous? Even more challenging is to answer the question a church who is still trying to see what the total impact of the pandemic is going to be on our shared life as we strive to move forward in mission and ministry while also doing our very best to avoid overburdening ourselves with yet one more thing to try to get done in a way that reflects success as defined by the world around us.

            Once we get through the machinations of talking ourselves into (or out of!) doing the work of planning, we might feel overwhelmed and frustrated to the point that we want to throw our hands up in exasperation. But, before we do that, we might want to remember the story of the early church as told in the Book of Acts. After Christ was crucified and raised from the dead, the church was scattered and certainly felt like the world was crashing in on top of it. Instead of packing up their things and giving up on spreading the Good News, the church began to preach…and preach…and preach. Followers of Jesus went out into a volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous world to share the Good News of Jesus Christ with any who would receive it.

            For many months now, people have compared to where we are with where the early church was back in the formation of what the church would become. In some sense that is true, but in a completely different sense, we are in a completely different place than the early church because we have millennia of faithful practice bolstering our efforts to continue sharing the Gospel with the world around us. We have the benefit of the faithful cloud of witnesses that continues to surround our work. So, while it is still volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous, we also know that we can invite the Spirit into the work of sharing the Gospel, and we know that we can create plans for doing so through the ministries of our own parish.

Sure, we might have to revisit those plans as things change. We have had enough experience with that over the last year or two!

Now, we are in a position in which we can set out bold goals for our parish and begin working towards those goals. We can look at the needs of our parish and begin to ask how we return to the essentials of Christian ministry, and we can focus our efforts on those essential ministries for the next 18 months. We have the opportunity to come together in community to create plans for ourselves and for the ways that we will preach the Gospel using word and deed to proclaim Christ Jesus in every street, every valley, every mountain top, and every home. We can take bold steps for moving forward in mission and ministry, but we cannot do that without the most important variable of all: You.

In Christ,

Hunter+