Most of us are welcoming 2021 into our lives with a special enthusiasm, eager to say good-bye to a 2020 filled with pandemic pain and inconvenience as well as political, racial, and economic turmoil. We are all ready for a fresh start.
But of course fresh starts are birthed out of past experiences. We are often made ready for the future by the stretching, growing, and learning that took place during our immediate past.
I’ve been watching our new grandson and granddaughter go through this process, almost daily it seems. As they learn to eat, and grasp, and hold their heads up, and roll over, they are allowing their outside world and those in it to stretch them into uncomfortable places. There are plenty of tears along the way. Yet in the process, they are growing, and learning, and being prepared for their future.
Certainly churches, pastors, and church members have been stretched significantly throughout 2020, perhaps more than any year in recent memory. We mustn’t merely lament the discomfort of the stretching. We must embrace the learning and the growing that can prepare us for the future.
In fact, the theme of IBSA’s upcoming 2021 Illinois Leadership Summit is “Future Church: Leading the Church Through COVID and Beyond.” We are in a key season for pastors and church leaders to ask how church life and church leadership may need to adapt to be more mission-effective in the future.
As a network of churches, IBSA is also engaged in a strategic planning process that asks questions about future effectiveness. For example, we have asked, “If the churches of IBSA were to create our network from scratch today, what would it look like? How might it be different?”
We have already made structural and staffing changes at IBSA acknowledging that what churches need from their network in the future will be different than what they may have needed in the past. We are discovering that churches are far less driven by uniform programs than in the past, and that program providers can often now service churches more directly. A network like IBSA can best deliver value to its member churches by focusing less on programs and more on overarching processes that can adapt to the specific needs of each church.
IBSA’s future focus is now on the fundamental processes that we simply call health, growth, and mission. These are the primary needs that churches are expressing. And as a statewide missions strategy, we believe that healthy churches will grow (through growing leaders), and that growing churches and leaders will be on mission, and that on-mission churches will in turn invest in the health and growth of other and new churches.
While we believe focusing on these three strategic processes will be helpful to all the churches in the network, we are also seeking to grow in our ability to engage each individual church where it is, and to ask how the network can help that church in its next step of fulfilling its unique vision and mission.
Throughout 2021, I will be writing more about IBSA’s future focus. Of course, it is still a work in progress. I mention it now mainly to emphasize that all of us—from babies to adults, from church members to pastors, from individual churches to church networks like IBSA—should be asking how the year we just endured may have been intended by our loving God to prepare us for the year ahead.
Nate Adams is executive director of the Illinois Baptist State Association.