The Church in the Postmodern World

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Recommended: Essays on congregational transformational leadership

The Pastor’s Role

I must say that I learned a lot from this class both through the readings and through class discussion. I really, honestly do not have anything that I starkly disagreed with in either. I found it all to be very valuable information for me and this class was extremely helpful in assisting me to better understand the current paradigm shift the church is going through. There are three take-a-ways in particular that helped me to better understand the post modern shift in the church and my role as a minister in this changing paradigm. The first take-a-way is the understanding that there is a shift occurring towards focusing more on the congregational life of the church with more attention on the laity and its formation. Second, is how to plan, as a church and as pastors, to adjust to this shift towards congregational life and how to be better prepared as a postmodern church to be relevant in this changing time. Lastly, I received a better way of explaining the meaning of what truth is in this post modern time.

I agree with Kitchens, Mead, and Roxburgh who all basically say in their own way that one change in ministry that we need to focus on more is the congregational life of the church. However, I think Mead explains it best when he says that the future church must be more intentional in the spiritual formation of its laity (Mead, location 919). According to Mead, the church is moving towards becoming a more missional institution that cares for the needs of the community. Therefore, oftentimes laity will be the ones on the front lines and will need the capacity to minister to people on their own without the help of clergy. In order to do this they will need more directed and intensive training to deal with...

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...t. Now I realize that the entire universal church is going through a change and that God is doing a new thing. It appears right now, in this post modern time, that God is showing us that he is more concerned with transforming lives and making his people whole. I agree as we said in class that we are moving from orthodoxy to orthopraxy and I for one think that is a great thing. Now maybe we can move closer to becoming what God called the church to be and that is to be living vessels of his light and love in the world.

Bibliography

Mead, Loren B. The Once and Future Church Reinventing the Congregation for a New Mission Frontier . The Alban Institute, Inc., 1991. Kindle eBook file.

Roxburgh, Alan J. Missional Map-MakingSkills for Leading in Times of Transisition. San Fransisco, CA: Jossey-Bass, 2010. Kindle eBook file.

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