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Four Strategic Challenge Facing the Church Today

In our context of deep and rapid chance the most important challenge the church faces is developing leaders in the church that can do the following:

• Discern the times: With multiple challenges confronting a local church all at once which are the key ones to focus on and prioritize?
• Engaging the culture narrative: Where specifically does the gospel engage the culture of your cultural/regional/ethnic/national context and have you developed the language to speak in a clear and compelling way?
• Disciplining new believers into the new Christian identity paradigm: Are you as the point leader doing basic evangelism and discipleship and bringing in new members to your congregation? If you are not doing this yourself you probably can’t lead your people into them doing it themselves. In many congregations even if only the lead pastor is doing it with a handful of people a year by virtue of the new people that those people will bring it you may be able to grow your church fast enough to keep it afloat.
• Raising up new leaders and working with regional peers help the fleet rise together: What are you doing to develop new church planters and to develop the younger and older pastors in your classis or cluster or region so that they too will be fruitful? A seminary trained point leader must leverage their costly and exceptional educational opportunity to develop their peers and raise up those beneath them that will never be able to afford a seminary education. These will be future ministry leaders and church planters in the region.

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