Everything is Subject to Change...

...that is not clearly prescribed by the Word of God.

 One of the scary thoughts about doing ministry and then writing my thoughts about it, is that ministry changes constantly. With our constantly shifting culture, to meet people where they're at or as Paul put it, "Become all things to all men," your ministry must be in constant transition. Thus, most likely I'll be writing against some of my best ideas in the future. Or if I fail to continue to "become all things to all men," I'm sure someone else will point out my stagnation as I've done to others.

In a recent blog post by Steven Furtick, he wrote this:

Any ministry paradigm that is not clearly prescribed by the Word of God is subject to change: by the Holy Spirit, increased revelation, or cultural shifts.  We reserve the right to disagree vehemently with ourselves if and when we learn a better way to do something.

This realization should fill us with a great deal of humility towards whatever we've done in the past and what we're doing right now. It's unlikely we've got it all figured out and even if we do, we're going to have to re-think things in the near future anyway.

Now I don't mean for this to come off like I'm a change addict or ignoring historic Christianity entirely. There's certainly a great deal to be learned from history. However, to borrow a metaphor from Mark Driscoll, it's vital that we're sure we hold certain non-negotiable doctrines and practices, which are clearly from scripture, in a closed hand. We hold everything else in an open hand. As the culture shifts, things in the open hand will change.