by Jordon Cooper, Teaching Pastor, Lakeview Church

A new identity – For years Lakeview was known and saw itself as a Free Methodist Church.  The leaders, pastors, and members were Free Methodists.  Our theological distinctives, hymns, writings, heroes, and other stuff was because we were Free Methodist.  It was on the door, the letterhead, and on the newspaper ad.  We knew who were.  Then about 15 years ago the transition was made to a seeker church.  A change of thinking was made so that when I came here, a huge percentage of Lakeview’s leaders saw the church as a Willow Creek Association church and they saw Bill Hybels as much of a leader as they did our Bishop.  We had moved away from our association and our connectionalism with the Free Methodist Church in Canada and had become a church that saw itself as a growing WCA church.  Even last year one of our leaders said that we need to strengthen our relationship with Willow if we are going to be successful in the future. 

Since then, Lakeview has made some significant changes.  We started to transition from hypermodernism to postmodernism.  We started to make critical decisions on our own without studying what other larger churches had done and then adapting it.  Hard questions were asked and we looked for the answers ourselves.

After asking around and talking with other leaders of churches like ours, we all seem to be at the same point.   We our asking ourselves who we are.  The generic evangelicalism that characterized the early 90s doesn’t seem to fit anymore and what does “Methodist-ism” (or a plethora of other traditions) look like in 21-C.  Until we figure out who we are, we all will have this strange drifting feeling.  Are we Methodist or are we a Willow clone or are we a generic evangelical?  I do know that until we all understand that, we will face a rough ride in the future.

Where does one find a good postmodern mentor?  We have a lot of people that want to mentor at Lakeview.  Some of the boomers have educated themselves, been mentored by others and have developed a passion for the younger leaders.  I appreciate everyone of them and they have a lot to offer.  The only problem is that they look at the world a lot differently than I do.  My boss and senior pastor at Lakeview tells of being at a mentoring session where the mentor reminded him that when he grows up, Dean will do church like he does.  I hear that lots around Lakeview.  I am not questioning the fact that I need to learn a lot.  I just want more leaders that can understand what a lot of us are seeing. Whether it be by a postmodern boomer (they are out there) or a modern leader who is willing to accept my stance and my worldview.  I will take either.  As soon as I find some… 

A couple of years ago when we released Lakeview Online, having a web page was enough.  More and more people now think web first.  While this may not be new to you.  It is to a lot of our staff and ministry leaders.  

The move to an online community will be another important shift that we and other churches need to make.  The web is more than content and graphics.  It is community.  Finding a way to merge our online presence with what happens in our brick and mortar building with require new thinking on how we see community.  We had someone visiting Lakeview from 500 miles away and got saved.  Now they use our site to keep in contact and to keep growing.  We have people from as far away as Cuba keep in touch online.  While it creates new opportunities, it creates new challenges.  If we can not meet people’s online needs, they may go elsewhere.  For all the stir over Navigator and Internet Explorer.  Most people that I know who left Netscape behind left because of Outlook Express and better e-mail.  Browsers are not the “killer app”.  Community is.  Helping ministries to develop online community to go along with more traditional forms will be one of the measuring sticks of the future church.  If you want to see some in action, check out www.ginghamsburg.org and Ginghamsburg Church’s online forums.  Community has alive and well in several of them.  Looking outside a several thousand year old box will prove to be difficult for some.  Ask any youth leader how many of his or her kids go home after school and are on AIM or ICQ until they go to sleep.  The argument has always been that it is not real community.  Try telling that to the people who are online.  If we want to reach them, we have to go find them.

The reason that political parties don’t govern forever is that they lose touch, irritate the people, and get tossed out of power.  Inevitably they start on a grassroots renewal where they tour the country and listen to the people.  On the weekends, I pastor a small rural Saskatchewan church.  It is easy to listen to the people.  There is only 45 of us and even though I live 2 hours away from them, I know almost everything that goes on.  At Lakeview, I live and work and serve with our church.  The problem is that there is over a 1000 of us.  Things go on at Lakeview that none of us know about.  It is very easy to keep the circle of influence to those I work with.  We end up living in a small church sub-culture of leadership and staff.  We need to expand that intentionally to the far reaches of the church and to the people outside. 

I find it ironic that we would have to appoint someone to take a look at culture to find out what was going on.  We live in culture. We should be apart of it.  More and more, I see leaders who get more and more immersed in church sub culture.  Not only don’t they laugh at The Simpson’s anymore, they expect people to act like us.  Finding ways to keep ministry leaders in touch with culture will be the battle that all of us face.  Culture is changing faster than ever before.  We can see what happened to churches that haven’t even changed to reach the boomers.  The problem will be magnified that much more, if we don’t figure out better ways to keep on the edge.  For lack of a better phrase, cultural product cycles are so much shorter now, that we will always be behind if we wait for Ginghamsburg, Willow Creek, Mars Hill or whoever to react to culture and then wait for the conference to go to.  In many cases it will be too late.  We need to be able to take our future into our own hands and make our own calls.  Before we can do that, we have to look outside and at ourselves and find out what has to change.

There are a load of other shifts and challenges that we all have to make as we strive to build the church in a postmodern age.  I haven’t even scratched the surface.  It is a perfect time for those of us who hate to be bored and an ideal time for those of us who love a challenge.