A Congregational Life website designed to support congregations and agencies in areas including worship, pastoral care, discipleship and faith teaching, outreach and church planting, and community service is being developed by the church.
As an outcome of a recently released report addressing the LCANZ’s ongoing ministry challenges, including its pastoral supply shortage, the website will help equip faith communities as they adjust to the church’s changing context. To be launched later this year, it will offer relevant resources and raise awareness of learning pathways that are currently available or being developed.
The website was recommended in the summary report of the Ministry Future project, which was received with approval in May by the General Church Board (GCB). Led by Victorian District Bishop Emeritus Greg Pietsch, the project was established by the College of Bishops (CoB) in 2022, with the support of GCB, to ‘consider and develop a coordinated response’ to the decreasing number of pastors in the LCANZ and the changing nature of its communities.
The report contains a multi-faceted approach to tackling what Pastor Greg says are ‘clearly evident’ difficulties facing the church. The three-part response developed to address these challenges is:
- a regional rather than solely congregation or parish approach to organising pastoral ministry,
- suitable pathways into general and specialised service – both lay and ordained, paid and voluntary, and
- a regular way of ordering the service of lay people involved in word and/or sacrament ministry, in addition to the existing preparation and call of Specific Ministry Pastors (SMPs).
‘(We have) a large number of pastoral vacancies, long periods in vacancy with frustration over the call process and communities struggling to afford a pastor’, Pastor Greg says in the report.
‘Yet ministry needs and mission opportunities still continue in the Lord’s harvest field.’
Pastor Greg says the Ministry Future project ‘does not pretend to be every answer to the changes we face’, but rather that it hopes to be of help. He also asks LCANZ members to commit the church, its communities and the project outcomes to prayer.
Read more, download the Ministry Future report and access a question-and-answer document about the project at www.lca.org.au/ministry-future
