Trends in Black Churches

Hey everyone, welcome to Made for Mondays. It is July 3rd and we're on here today. Gonna have some fun today. We're talking about one of my favorite subjects and we engage with trendspotting and trendspotting minority based churches. So really excited to engage with this today and looking forward to talking with you and engaging with you about trends in minority based churches. Trend spotting and seeing about six or seven things that I see in the future based upon some trends happening right now and let's see what's gonna happen. So welcome to Made for Mondays. You own your Mondays, Mondays don't own you. Let's see what God has to share with us today. Well, hey, let's jump right into Made for Mondays today. So today we're talking about trends in minority based churches and let's see what we have to say. I'm one of the reasons I love doing this is I don't like being policed by others. I'd like just being kind of really face down and focused on what I sense my calling to do. And so these are not really prophetic or it's more intuitive and based upon some research I've seen based upon some research, based upon some things I've tried, based upon things I've heard from others. And I'd love to hear your your thoughts in the comment section on YouTube or the Q and A poll on Spotify or if you want to email us at our email address on JR Lester.com so let's have some fun and trend spotting in minority based churches for the next 10 to 20 years. The sons of Issachar, 1st Chronicles 12 and 32 saw the signs of the time times. I love it because the signs of the times they saw really was the way to prepare the way for the Messiah. And their responsibility was to ensure the Messiah have an easy landing space. And that's where they saw the signs of the times to keep the people from, to make sure they avoid certain things and to do certain things. Ezekiel and Ezekiel 22 and 30 said he would stand in the gap, meaning that he was looking for those who would stand in the gap with him. And he no one would. So he was looking for people to stand in the gap for the community. And even Jesus said in John 14 that we would do greater things. So consider this for the next couple of years and some trends and let's have some fun. So the first trend I see happening in minority based churches, number one, is women in leadership. I have a feeling that by 2030, nearly 60% of the world's wealth will be owned by women. And that's a very low projection. I believe that right now for black and brown churches that women must be in leadership positions. If you want to see your churches expand, you have to start positioning people in leadership beyond their sexual organs and now guarantee the entire dynamic of your church will change. When women are making decisions. The future is female. I think the church has to get around to it, especially minority based churches. So it's time out for the chauvinistic patriarchal stuff. The future is female. We got to get ready for it. Number two, black and other race churches will grow. Multiracial churches driven by white preachers will not. We have this movement right now where a lot of these multiracial churches, black churches driven by white preachers. I don't think that's going to be something we're going to continue to see. Multicultural churches are normally just like some promotions with black and brown people on it where it's black people assimilating to white culture. That's where we get the CCM stuff for the white hymnity. I had a colleague tell me once that said, you know, members of my church asked me to sing CCM because I think the spirit is in the white music more than gospel music. And honestly, CCM represents privilege. CCM represents authority, CCM represents power. And I sense over the next couple of years we'll see that black and brown people will leave white preacher led churches for black and brown churches because there's this false sense of unity and anti racism in a lot of these white churches without an effective reading of scripture. And it's exposing communities and cultures who want colorful bodies for promotion and not engagement. And I believe that for black churches then we're not just going to get the overspill of people leaving white churches, but for black churches we have to begin to ask ourselves the questions of what it means to be a part of our communities and what it means to be a black church. What does it mean to be black in your community, not black nationally before your community and what it means to be with people who we disagreed where they came from while they were attending our churches. Number three, I believe there's going to be a massive increase in conversions. Now prophetically, I will say this. I believe from the months of August to December there's going to be a massive influx of new souls in our country. I truly believe that. I truly believe worship is going to look different. Now on an intuitive level, I believe there's going to be a massive increase in conversions. I don't think we're going to see people coming to the altar as much as we normally did, but we've seen people come in droves and leave out the back door. And so what's happened beyond Covid is I believe there's now a hunger now for the local church. And that hunger is going to be for those who are not saved, those gen zers who are making money and looking to find themselves. And the church is going to have to be a safe space for them. The church will only expand at the pace of Christ, though, not at the pace of our marketing. The church only expands at the pace of Christ, not the pace of your marketing. Number four, I believe giving will be down 20 to 30%. Many churches have already expressed the feeling with this with multiple pastors and leaders being fired or having their salaries cut without loss. I believe with the loss of jobs, the back end of a recession, and then if we're looking at minority based churches, it happens at the white level first and then it gets to the black and brown level last. So with the increases of cost and living salary rates decreasing, charitable giving is always the first thing to go out the window. So giving, I sense, will be down 20 to 30%. Number five, I believe that people, pastors especially, are going to leave church completely. Time with their children and spouse and without having to worry about board intervention, whether or not you're going to get paid when members are going to be mad at you this week to not help pay things, people that are going to hold your salary over their heads. I think you're going to see a great mass exodus of great leaders from churches who will lead nonprofits. And this to me is a very scary trend. I believe we're going to lose phenomenal leadership from the Christian community not because of moral failure, but purely survival. And we're going to see great community leaders and great politicians, great nonprofits start because we're going to lose really, really great pastors. Number six, I believe less people are going to ministry long term. This is a much longer range projection. But looking at the amount of smaller seminaries that have been closing and the amount of people who are no longer going to smaller local seminaries, I believe that this longer range projection for me is the pulpit prepares you for politics. So instead of going to the pulpit first, I believe that they're prophetic individuals who will use their prophetic gift and just jump right to politics. One, because of financial instability that we just spoke about. Number two, because of theological normativity, I believe we'll see A lot less of the 20 to 30 year pastorates and 50 year pastorates and see a lot of 5 to 10 year pastorates in black and brown churches where people then will use 5 or 10 year pastorates as bivocational and then jump into the professions that are intentional with their skill sets. We'll see some really great leaders. Unfortunately, I don't think the church is going to benefit from them. Number seven, digital ministry is another church. Now, those of you who've been in tune with this podcast know I love digital ministry. I think digital ministry though, you have, we have to understand that it's not just live streaming your church, throwing an iPhone up and getting the five or 10 people that are your family on Facebook or the people who don't go to your church to tune into you. This is a group of people who because of what we experienced since 2019, will never return to church, period. We must enrich and stabilize online ministry, namely making sure that that online worship experience is own pastor has his own leader. Using an iPhone without house audio is not sufficient. You need to enhance our digital ministries. Number eight. This is more of a Justin projection, but virtual reality, augmented reality and artificial intelligence. Now these things, I'm not saying they're going to overtake, but if you don't do them right and don't do them well, I believe the local church will fail. Artificial intelligence, augmented reality and virtual reality are allowing us to do things that would take us a week and like two days would take us a year. Matter of fact, in like two days, it's changed how people shop, how people live. And if you want to learn more about what we think about AI and AR and VR, go back a couple of podcasts from a couple of months ago. We actually took a whole month to dive into artificial intelligence and for virtual reality, augmented reality, what it means for the church. Churches have begun to experiment with this. But the same way that we saw Facebook as far off as we saw live streaming, very far off as we saw digital marketing far off. Those are all just thoughts that those rich churches did, that now led screens were thoughts that rich churches did. And now they become complete realities. So either we're going to get hit by these three things or we engage it. I believe number nine, that boomers and millennials will drive churches. Boomers and millennials are the two largest generations in our country. Boomers are getting placed to a place of retirement and some are retired, meaning their availability is drastically increasing. Millennials are beginning to have the earning potential, at least reach some of their Peak earning potential. This means millennials earning will be at an all time high, but their volunteering is going to decrease. But the boomers giving will not increase. Some will decrease, but their volunteering will increase. I believe it's imperative for us to have cross generational ministry in collaboration with consistent language. The dynamics of our churches I truly believe are going to shift drastically. So casting out one generation will destroy our churches. Not to mention Gen Z and Gen Alpha are coming in to run our teenagers, to run our tech, to run our adult ministries. With two years where they didn't have to worry, where all they did was culturally engage with technology. And now we're going to make church the area where they're going to engage with it fully. It's going to be very interesting to see what boomers and millennials will do as we drive churches number 10. I believe there's going to be a need for churches to to engage with secular theories with scripture. I recognize that we can fight them all. We want to like critical race theory and sexuality, we can fight them all. We want to say it's secular, say it's the world and say we're in the scriptures. But the fact is these things are in the world. And one of the amazing things about scripture, even Jesus, is that Jesus engaged it. Now he may have been very satirical, he may have been very funny and sarcastic, but he engaged with it theologically. Engaging these secular thoughts is extremely important to me. It gives us a chance to contextualize scripture to our context. So I believe it's imperative for us to have conversation with people and make sure that we're engaging scripture in all of the areas, even the areas that are uncomfortable for us, which means, pastors, you have to be lifelong learners. I really, really challenge and implore us to make sure we're reading and engaging because I don't want us to lead leaders and thinkers because the full picture of Jesus means having difficult conversations about how we show Jesus in our world. So Those are the 10 trends I believe are coming. And so what? Pastor Justin? So if you're going to survive as a church, if these are the trends that you see coming down the line, then what are the things we want to do with some trends that you see coming? Well, number one, I believe we have to look for giving from community businesses, local community organizations and businesses, have charitable and social innovation grants and monies available. So take a look at your budget, talk to the members of your church who can write grants and build relationships and take advantage of that situation. You'll be Surprised how much money's out there. Number two, be mindful of what you ingest. You know, consider this. A lot of the preaching and teaching that we have in our pulpits today, especially older pastors, came because of what was available to them back in the 70s, 80s and 90s, the prosperity preachers, when that live streaming and VHS were only big for those massive pastors. So you have TD Jakes and the John Hagees of the world, right? And it's spilled over to a lot of our churches where a lot of the things that we share with our members are, are things that older pastors have quoted and quoted because they got it from rich white pastors or heard of the convention. Now that everybody is live streaming, you can get your favorite pastor without having to go to a conference and buy their tapes. The churches with the best cameras, though, with the most money, are the ones driving theology. And a lot of times it's incorrect theology. It's very easy to succumb to what's popular. So I truly believe this will be an increase in popular preachers and simultaneously an increase in heresy. Be mindful pastors of your time in prayer and preparation to not fall into the trap of popularizing the gospel. Because if you lift Jesus, he'll draw. Number three, diversify your skill set for co vocational and bivocational ministries. Now this may not sound like a fun one, but with the lack of giving, with the lowering of giving, with the lack of work that was done with millennials, the money and the time lack of work that was done with Gen Z, and the loss of a lot of our best givers, which are boomers and builders, we got to be really, really intentional about our skill sets. With co vocational bivocational ministry. I believe the pastors and staff will need secular work to offset giving. We've seen that a lot of churches have have only experienced minute growth over the last five years. And this is a challenge to seminaries and divinity schools as well to encourage students to make sure that they have two things. One, if you're going to be fully in time with as a pastor, to make sure you're learning finance classes and learning grant writing courses and learning social work and social good, learning law. Like there are things that I wish I knew, that I wish I took classes in when I was in school on law and social work and business simultaneously, I truly believe that this trend of having pastors to give full time work with pastors paying part time is just not going to continue. And lastly, I want to challenge you with collaborative Ministry without denominational guidelines, if this era of life has taught us anything, is that denominations are so much more constricting than they are liberating. On matters of race and health care and preaching, denominations have been outgrown for years. I believe we have to consider cross denominational work. Really? That's Jesus work. Because remember, these denominations were just a byproduct of somebody's theological fight with somebody else. Cross generational ministry and work is important. We're not a monolithic people. We can't make our churches monolithic. That's my thoughts. I believe that we've seen a really interesting last 5 years of ministry. I believe the next 10 years of church is gonna be very, very interesting. I don't think the local church is dead and I don't believe the future is gonna kill the local church. We have an opportunity to seize this moment, to be critical about ourselves, critical about our context, and critical about our motivations. Those of you who are church leaders on here, I'd love to hear from you. And those of you who are are part of church, I'd love to hear from you as well. Go ahead and write something in the comments on YouTube or send us a message on our website. I'd love to connect with you and love to get to know you as well. Thank you to all of you who've listened. I've gotten a couple messages from some of you who have been impacted by our AI series. Thank you so very much for reaching out to us and prayerful that Made for Monday is going to just to impact you. So today I'm changing a little bit. In doing some trends like this, we'll do some leadership things here and there. But to me, I think this is very important. And I promise you, mark my words, about seven or eight years will come back and be like, wow, there's some trends we're seeing. So seize it now, for it seizes you. Let's say your affirmations today. Would you say I made. Oh, my gosh. Say I am me, I can be me, and no one will stop me from being me. Go have an amazing Monday. You were made for this. Mondays don't own you. You own your Mondays. Now go and win the day. Have a good one.