Next Generation Taskforce Update (2/27/06)

Greetings everyone!

Even though our attendance was a bit low this last meeting we actually made a lot of progress towards a strategy. Here is a quick update:

1) We realize we need to raise awareness across the association of the need of reaching a next generation. We know this will be challenging, especially for churches that see themselves as struggling for survival. We are excited for the March 27^th meeting to be interpreting the theme of “Preparing Now.” We are planning on a worship set by Immanuel Baptist Church, preaching on a passage that emphasizes our commitment to sound biblical doctrine and grounds reaching the next generation in the text, and a vision casting session that uses multimedia, testimonies, and statistics to help people realize their great need.

2) We intentionally balance our passion for creativity in outreach with a deep commitment to biblical evangelicalism. Because of that, as a taskforce we are planning to read, critique, and discuss core philosophical writings that impact the emerging church and post-modern Christians. We will be starting by reading and critiquing: A Generous Orthodoxy by Brian D. McLaren

3) We hope to create networks around the city for those ministering to the different age clusters in the next generation. We are convinced that children’s workers in our various churches would benefit from knowing each other, the same for youth workers, the same for college ministers, and 20-something pastors. These networks can serve are resources for people who are looking for new ideas in reaching the particular age group. These networks will also have to form dialogue between themselves to ensure a smooth transition of discipleship as young people graduate from one group to another.

4) Clearly the task of reaching 500,000 college students in this entire region is beyond our current resources, let alone the 1.5 million people below the age of 30. We need to narrow that focus to pilot some programs, events, and communities that will serve as laboratories for us to implement findings across the city. Thus, we hope to mobilize all of our networks in working on a small set of projects that can help us overcome our current learning curve. For these projects we are setting the following parameters:

a) We will focus on college students: Youth workers can refer students as the graduate. We loose a vast majority of them as they go off to college.

b) We will focus on congregation planting: By starting congregations (as opposed to campus ministries) we can avoid loosing the students as the graduate from college, and we can help them become more involved in the communities around the campuses. This also would help with dealing with the commuter issue.

c) We will focus on the schools in Chicago’s loop: The loop has ties both to the city and suburbs. There are 50,000 college students in a variety of campuses in the loop. This gives us a highly limited geographic area to focus on, which is deeply unchurched, easy to access, recognizable by all, etc. This center city approach will easily allow us to spread the movement from that bull’s eye out into the rest of the city and suburbs.

5) In order to accomplish this outreach strategy we will focus on the following mega-steps:

a) We will identify 4 semester missionaries to research the different campuses in the loop. They can stay at ThePoint/C3 in Lakeview. They will research demographics, philosophy, student ministries, the student bodies, the community, etc. and turn those studies into 4 detailed reports by the end of the semester.

b) We will then form a planting team of 4 consultants. These are to be full-time roles. They will be funded by dividing up the 1 full-time role for college ministry we have approval for from the IBSA/NAMB into four quarters, putting them through assessment and seeking church planting funding for them, and looking for college ministry funding from the IBSA. Income beyond that they will be expected to raise on their own from their support network. They will be intimately connected to an existing church as a branch or daughter church, and will receive discipleship from that pastor. Their goal will be to form a cluster of congregations in the loop focused on reaching out to the particular schools the semester missionaries researched. We will seek support from all of the networks we form for these new roles.

c) They will present their discoveries in a way that can be used by all of networks involved in support them. They will help us to find ways to multiply their works out into the rest of the city and suburbs.

We still have a lot of details to resolve, but that is currently how far we have gotten. Thanks for your patience with us. This is a very daunting task. All of these plans are VERY tentative, please give and input or suggestions you have. Also, for those in the taskforce who were not there, this is the first you are seeing these suggestions, anything you see here is still in the dream phase… please help us to mold these dreams.

Following Jesus,

Pastor Jon Pennington