Harold Lee has a vision of how the church will look in 2025. You can find that post at the AdventistReview site. All of this information available on the web makes me wonder if we are nearing a proposed major structural change in the Advnetist church.
In another article, Less gives several proposals for restructuring the Adventist church.
The first of Lee’s proposals is the centralization of services. He notes that the technology that is available should reduce the amount of personnel needed for paperwork, accounting, and even mangement in our church. One wonders if much of the Secretary/Clerk work could be done by some excell macros.
Another proposal is the hiring of bi-vocational pastors. Lee notes that the Potomac Conference has 19 bi-vocational pastors right now. In this setup the church would give a stipend to a “part-time” pastor who would have other employment. My concern would be that we not expect that the bi-vocational pastor does as much as the full time pastors, but that concern does not do away with the validity of attempting such a change.
Lee also talks about creating resource centers. Becuase the internet has made it much easier to move information around, we can create websites and the like to help people with their problems. Instead of having a Stewardship director in every conference why not have a Stweardship resource center that would make pertinent information available on the topic to the world church?
Lee also speaks of networking ministries that are small and nimble that don’t have the encumbering components of a larger organization. He notes that the church should prmote such endevors.
Interestingly Lee notes that the NAD in 1995 voted to request that the union and the conferences restructure and cut out departments to save money. One wonders if this happens as more and more personnel are being hired by some conferences to work in their office.
An important idea of Lee is metropolitan area collaboration. Why would you have 3 adventist churches in 1 city with 3 pitiful community service programs when you could unify them and create a larger better one. It would require working together across churches and accross conferences.
There are a few more interesting ideas like direct delivery training where we train people through the web an the like. To put it bluntly, we cannot continue to do what we did.
We will continue looking at these subjects on the blog so stay tuned…