Recently I was introduced to this book,” Rebooting Church”, by Walter Franklyn Davis on Amazon. It is about how the church can access the current technology to attract more members and also to deepen its relevance in a world which is seeing a decline in church membership by 20 percent over the last two decades. Davis sees the threefold goal of the church in pursuing this path of becoming more technologically astute as, Re-thinking, re-imagining and re-booting.
For Davis, re-think is to sound the alarm and provide a wakeup call to all church leaders, to rethink their perspectives concerning the realities of the 21st century and for the need to create what he calls a “roadmap-to-relevance”, to help the churches align with the rapid changes occurring in technology and culture which threatens to make the church irrelevant at best or ignored at worse.
We cannot keep burying our heads in the sand concerning these realities. Our churches, JBU and the mainline churches in Jamaica are aging. Our members 55 and over are in the majority. This has many implications for the ongoing growth of the church. Secondly, there is a growing number of persons in the group we refer to as ‘nons’, that is persons who have no church affiliation. This number is growing in Jamaica. This group is neither interested in virtual or face to face church. It is over 22 percent and we cannot ignore this number.
The other goal cited by Davis is re-imagine, and that is to help church leaders to re-imagine the future of their churches over the long term, and through bold, open-minded discussion, about the importance of aggressively adopting both existing and future technologies, help churches become more productive, efficient and effective, in meeting the needs of its members and the larger world of the un-churched and under-church ‘seekers’ beyond their wall.
If there is anything that has forced the world to rethink its future long term, it’s the COVID-19 pandemic. What I’m still a little concerned about though, is that too many people are viewing this pandemic, not as a life changer, but as a minor, inconvenient interruption that will soon disappear. This is far from the truth, and Davis is suggesting that we need to talk about the churches future, now identify the technologies that can help us stay on track.
The third goal, is to inform, inspire and motivate church leaders to reboot, their churches, by transforming them through “digital transformation” to better serve a 21st century digital world. Rebooting means challenging the status –quo and rigid thinking and the adherence to blind traditions for tradi-
tion sake that may be holding their church back from reaching more seekers, and then to take immediate action to enact the cultural and technological changes necessary to fulfill the “great commission”. Basically rebooting means changing the way we do things. I’m appealing to our church, to look critically at how we think. Our pattern of thinking makes us comfortable, but God has not called us to be comfortable. He has called us to reach the loss. Let us work together to find a way.
Thanks to Davis for these insights, and I encourage us to think on these things. Talk about them in your classes; your men’s group, your women’s group, among the deacons, in Sunday school, and let us share the thoughts.
Thanks and God bless you.
Your Pastor
July 2020