As the year winds down, church leaders have a unique opportunity to pause and focus on their ministry, seeking divine direction through prayer, obedience, and visionary dreaming for 2024. This season of reflection is essential for aligning your mission with God’s specific calling for your congregation.
- Focus on what works locally.
When planning for the future, do not allow another leader’s success to dictate your own definitions. It is easy to look at a neighboring church’s social media and feel a sense of envy or inadequacy, yet God has not forgotten your local church. He has called you for a time such as this to lead your congregation from a period of decline into a season of spiritual reawakening. For more insights, you can learn how to start your new ministry year with a clear and healthy perspective.
Understand that strategies effective in one context may not yield the same results in your current assignment. Instead, focus on assessing the specific needs of your church family and neighborhood. While you may desire a multigenerational demographic, lean into the strengths you currently possess. For instance, if your congregation consists primarily of seniors, strive to become the best senior-focused church possible by improving accessibility, hosting hymn sings, and creating age-specific small groups. Staying informed on new year church trends can help you adapt these local efforts to broader cultural shifts.
Churches get caught up trying to catch the younger group and miss a large swath of the population that needs a substantial church home. If you have a younger age demographic in your local church, you might lean the other way with new playground equipment, incredible children’s wings and classrooms, and creative outreach activities geared towards the younger set. Either way, find out what is working and focus on that.
- Focus on who you are trying to reach.
The preparation season is as important as the promised season you hope to lead the church into. Preparation is foundational work that strategically positions the church for future advancement and creative opportunities that will impact the community and ministries of the church. As you narrow your focus on who you can reach today, begin to lay the groundwork for a future shift that will help the church move toward a more multigenerational model. That may mean saving funds for a future remodeling of currently utilized areas—setting aside funds for a forthcoming children’s pastor or senior adult pastor, depending on what side of the generational gap your church is on and to begin to dream dreams again of what the church could be in the future.
Many churches get into trouble because they lean too far to one side of the generational gap and are unable or sometimes unwilling to progress toward the middle to find balance. Use the final weeks of this current year to rethink strategies that will lay the foundation for a future realigning of the church. Do not rush this process, and make sure you include multiple layers of staff, board members, and lay church members in the dreaming process. Evaluate the community demographics, neighborhood needs, future desires and vision of the church when you are thinking through the following steps. Keep an eye on what could happen twelve to twenty-four months from now. Plan what resources must be brought forth, setting aside funds, space, and other resources to move the idea into action and be prepared for what God will do with the church’s faithfulness.
- Focus on the core values of the church.
Who the church is today is as important as who it will be tomorrow. Knowing God’s call on the church, the community it was birthed into, and the reality of the ever-shifting landscape within a community’s social, economic, and spiritual fabric is a crucial component to living out the core values found in the statements of belief of the church. The church’s values are as important as its mission and vision statement. The statements provide direction, but only the values lived from them clarify the call God is leading the church. As change happens in and out of the church, there could be a tendency to retreat from the value set found in God’s Word. Do not shrink back from the church’s biblical mandate to lead others to Christ by preaching the gospel, seeking God’s forgiveness of sin, and allowing the work of the Holy Spirit to work in the lives of those in and out of the church.
God has an incredible plan for the local church. As the world moves closer and closer to a post-Christian world, the local church will have to adhere to its core values to stay true to God’s Word and the calling placed on the church’s mandate from God. As you help the church walk through these final days of the year, help to reinvest in the values found in scripture by praying, seeking God’s will, working together, and investing in others outside the church’s walls.
2024 can be an incredibly fruitful year of ministry if you help the church refocus now to believe again tomorrow.