Institutions

What trends are shaping the future of Christian ministry?

Wise leaders know that it’s important to pay attention to deep trends shaping society and its institutions. These trends give leaders the raw material that enables them to retrieve key insights and practices from their traditions, tinker with new ideas and solutions in their organizations, and adapt to substantive cultural changes.

In an essay on Faith & Leadership, L. Gregory Jones and Nathan Jones describe seven “deep trends” affecting Christian institutions: the digital revolution; a multimodal world; reconfiguring denominations and emerging forms of congregating; the questioning of institutions; economic stress; shifting vocations of laypeople; and the lure of cities.

The challenge, they write, “is to cultivate patterns of discernment, guided by the Holy Spirit, on how to adapt faithfully and creatively to them rather than to pretend they don’t exist or to acknowledge but ignore them.”