Ministries That Promote Personal Change
Church members have tended to fight about institutional change, as a way to avoid substantial personal change. A fight about liturgy or polity can deflect attention away from our personal need for transformation. That explains why those conflicts tend to last so long: if the fight were to end, then the challenge to deal personally with God would come back into focus.
Best practice is to confront personal transformation head-on as a primary -- some would say THE primary -- mission of the church.
Some believe that the need for transformation starts in sin. We are fallen, therefore we need to get right with God, and to do that we need to change. Some look at personal potential and believe we consistently fall short of our full humanity unless we "let go and let God." Some take a communal approach: to form truly effective and creation-fulfilling communities of faith, we need to do our part to become "new creation" in them. Some focus on ethics and justice and believe that we must let go of old attitudes toward wealth and power, step beyond barriers of prejudice and privilege, and learn the humility of sharing and doing without.
Most Christians probably don't think systematically about the need for personal transformation. They just sense that some amendment of life is required if they are to live more fully.
Whatever the theology, certain ministries tend to promote personal change, or at least present the challenge to deal with change. Those ministries include:
Mission Work
A healthy congregation constantly gives its life, resources and people away. Some people go overseas, some go to disaster sites, some build houses in the neighborhood, some serve food or provide shelter. In these and other mission works, the constituent faces the discomfort of dealing with the "least of these" and discovers the joy of giving.
Smart churches bring missionaries (of all kinds) in regularly, give them opportunities to speak, and raise money for them. They form mission teams of varying degrees of commitment. They make sure to engage children and young adults in mission.
To see whether yours qualifies as a "missional" congregation, measure how much of your budget you give away, how much air time you give to mission, and how much time is devoted to mission. If the proportions are low -- say 10%, or in the views of some church leaders, anything less than 50% -- then take conscious steps to raise mission's profile. Young adults especially say that a high mission commitment is the number one attribute they look for in a congregation.
Stewardship
Church leaders must get beyond seeing stewardship as fund-raising. Stewardship is about confronting our addiction to control, our fear of trusting in God, our over-reliance on wealth as a guarantor of personal well-being, and our tendency to be minimalist, rather than generous, in our giving.
Jesus spent two-thirds of his teaching on wealth and power, because those physical assets tend to stand between us and Godly living.
Spiritual Disciplines
(We deal more fully with spiritual disciplines in the section on Spiritual Development.)
The point of spiritual disciplines like prayer or confession or worship isn't to meet certain standards of personal perfection. The point certainly isn't bragging rights about "spiritual growth." The point is to find the venue and the tools to engage in personal transformation. Out of confession comes humility; out of prayer comes a new sense of self; out of worship comes connection with other pilgrims.
Spiritual disciplines can set a believer free from burdens -- guilt, shame, remorse, arrogance, bigotry, fear -- that prevent being fully human and fully alive. Spiritual activities like working with a spiritual director and going on retreat can help a believer make strides in accepting transformation.
Leadership
Taking responsibility for some portion of the congregation's life and being held accountable for seeing it through can profoundly change one's life. As we note in Leadership Development, church leadership requires a unique set of skills and attributes -- all learnable, all quite different from worldly leadership skills -- and acquiring those skills and attributes requires becoming a new person.
