What do we need to do to ready ourselves for the digital revolution? 

First up, we need to recognize the utter importance of powerful, transformational preaching. And we need to create systems by which those with such preaching ability and gifting can be widely available. Why restrict a gifted preacher to one community? Lifechurch.tv lead the way in making resources, including preaching, available to more than those who turn up in person for the service.

We need to move from appointing leaders based on them completing the right degree to giving more weight to discerning their ability to complete the leadership task.

We need to create the opportunity for people to ‘be at church’ or part of a community at any moment in the day/week. Setting a special time on Sunday morning is artificial and limiting.

We need to re-consider our geographic mindset when it comes to church governance. The notion of us belonging to a village based church, of walking to church, bumping into the vicar at the shops and so on is for most a thing of the past. The local parish may well be replaced by more of a network of like minded people joined together by mutual interest from across the world. Such networks will have associated with them tags that define their uniqueness. Theological positions, social justice expectations, demographic descriptors and so on. And to find a church network that suits would be a matter of conducting a simple search using your preferences.

We will need to explore the nature of church leadership. There is a shift happening from the model of a few leaders setting the direction for many followers, to the model of the followers being much more involved in setting the direction. The growth in collaborative leadership models and the ascendancy of what Pew Internet Research calls the, ‘surging wisdom of crowds’ is pushing forward the importance of the collective. In this instance the role of the leadership is to create the environment for collective decision making and then get out the way!

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