Pause … and trust God for whatever happens
For example: The minister could take on most of the midweek teaching, one evening a week, with a daytime version of the same material on a different day. The minister is usually the person with the gifts and the training to lead the teaching ministry within the church, and this would provide a context in which the minister appointed to teach can teach.
For example: The minister could teach in areas that are often neglected in today’s churches, that have been a staple part of the spiritual diet of christians across the world in earlier centuries: The Lord’s Prayer, the Creed, and the Ten Commandments. It is easy enough to imagine a ten month teaching programme, with seasonal breaks built in, to teach through these three great statements of Christian faith and life.
There are other areas where clear Christian teaching is needed, on topics that are hard to handle well on a Sunday, within the natural constraints of a main service. Most ministers would value a month long series of meetings to provide a rich vision of the gospel, or a suitable analysis of the cultural context in which we now live, or a detailed discussion of key ethical or social issues that trouble our society and touch every family.
In many churches it would be helpful to articulate and to discuss a vision of the ‘normal Christian life’ for the church family, and for the individual believer in different circumstances and at different stages of life. It would be valuable to describe and discuss and to anchor in scripture the ‘normal Christian calendar’, and ‘the way we do things around here’. The way that a particular church family does the ‘one anothers’ of the NT would be helpful in many churches, so that everyone knows what happens where.
A year of central meetings, led by the minister, would provide opportunities to hear testimonies from church members. Each week, someone could be interviewed about the dynamics of their christian experience, at home, at work, within the family, in the face of suffering, and bereavement, and through different seasons of life.
A year of central meetings, led by the minister, would enable the use of different styles of teaching and learning, month by month, or topic by topic. The use of drama, music, and art, might be appropriate in ways that would be harder to handle within a Sunday service. On drama, for example, it would be easy enough to create a sketch where someone thinks aloud about Proverbs 26:4-5, seeking God’s wisdom on how best to respond to a typical situation at work, or within the family, working out what kind of fool this is, what sort of situation it is, and therefore what answer is going to be appropriate. On art, for example, it is not difficult to teach through the Creed, using a painting or several to illustrate each sentence of the Creed, and to spend time thinking together about which aspect of the truth the artist has chosen to highlight within the relevant sentence.
On music, for example, here is a YouTube clip from the Christian band Skillet. During the last few years it has been viewed 457m times. The track is called ‘Monster’ and it’s about the feeling that there’s a monster inside of me. You can listen to the rest. It’s not very heavy metal although it is probably not ideal for a Sunday morning in most churches. But it captures the way many young people feel about themselves. Many adults feel the same. Here is another version of the same feeling. Both songs would be valuable for any group to hear, to compare and contrast and to discuss, to set alongside scripture, and then to pray in response.
A significant pause could provide an opportunity to bury some of the groups, reset some others, retire some of the leaders, rest others, and develop and deploy new leaders?