Nearly 20 years ago, the Church of England published Mission-Shaped Church, which introduced the idea of “fresh expressions” of church. The idea was that the traditional, parish-based model of ministry needed to be supplemented—some would say replaced—by new models of ministry that were shaped by mission. It is here that ideas like Messy Church, Cafe Church, network churches, and others really took off.
The parish system is deeply rooted in the Church of England and there were many who looked none too kindly on this idea of fresh expressions of church—the parish is the locus of ministry and mission, thank you very much! The report introduced the phrase “mixed economy” to describe the hybrid that was envisioned: a combination of parish ministry and fresh expressions of church in a harmonious whole.
I’ll leave it to others to decide if it’s been successful in England, but the idea of a mixed economy is one worth holding onto as we look to a post-pandemic church. Here’s why.
As many have noted, the end of the pandemic is not going to come all of a sudden. It’s going to be like snow melting away. Patches of green start showing through, then driveways and south-facing lawns, and soon it feels like spring—but there are still piles of snow in parking lots or shaded corners. It’s hard to imagine that even when a church decides to re-open, it’s going to immediately return to its pre-pandemic Sunday attendance levels. Different people will have different risk tolerances and make different decisions about what to do in person. The church will not automatically be able to turn off the remote worship switch and turn on the in person worship one overnight.
That might actually be a good thing. Since the start of the pandemic, people in churches have become used to things they never once imagined. Some people like online worship! Others have found that gathering for, say, a mid-week prayer service or Bible study is something they never would have imagined doing before the pandemic but is now such a part of their life that they don’t want to let it go. Who is ever going to want to get in a car to drive to a church meeting on a snowy weeknight when it could all be done on Zoom? This goes back to my earlier post: what have you started doing as a result of the pandemic that you don’t want to stop when the pandemic is over?
Here’s where the idea of a mixed economy can be helpful. As we think about what the life of our churches might look like after the pandemic, we can think of a mixture. Or, “Have some of column A, try all of column B,” in the immortal words of Aladdin’s Genie.
Here’s what it might look like:
A church that returns to Sunday morning worship in person but makes provision for streaming this online. (Technically challenging!)
A church that returns to Sunday morning worship in person but maintains an online mid-week service as well.
A church that has Sunday morning in person worship and online worship at the same time. (Challenging in terms of personnel!)
These are very basic mixing examples. If we can discern what it is that we are looking forward to returning to after the pandemic as well as what we want to hold on to from the pandemic—that was what the matrix from last week was all about—we can start thinking about how to mix these two things together. No church will look quite like any other. It will take time and resources to find the right mix and make it work. We’ll need to use our existing resources—certainly our time—in different ways to be creative and mix things together. (That’s part of the reason it’s so important to figure out what we want to say “no” to in the life of the church as well.)
What might the mixed economy look like in a ministry context with which you are familiar?
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