Equipping a New Kind of Prevailing Church

During our recent strategic planning process we came to a point where we had to call a “time out” and address the fact that something fundamentally had shifted in the local church in recent years.

As a ministry we always have been, and always will be, about equipping leaders to build an Acts 2, “prevailing” church. But what we were recognizing was that God was doing such a new thing in the local church that the very definition of what it meant to “prevail” was changing.

Not long ago we would have identified the hallmarks of a high-impact church as one whose various sub-ministries were firing on all cylinders. We would look for a church where the children’s ministry was rocking, where the youth department was leading kids to Christ, where small groups were flourishing, and so on.

And while we still want to see these things happen, something has changed.

Here’s the way we articulated this change in our planning process:

The local church in Canada is reaching her full potential not based solely on having robust ministries, but more so by virtue of her robust leaders, on mission, wherever they are.

What does this mean? Well, for one thing, it means that one of the indicators of a prevailing church is that her people are living life fully on mission for the King in the workplace, in their neighbourhood, at school, wherever God has placed them. In other words, that person might very well be living out their Kingdom call not by serving on the finance committee of the church, but by impacting the lives of the finance department in their office.

It’s a new day for the local church. And we’re re-calibrating The Leadership Centre Willow Creek Canada to help church leaders build a new kind of prevailing church.

How do you think the “missional movement” will impact the local church in Canada?