By Aaron Weaver

DECATUR — Cooperative Baptist Fellowship state and regional leaders, staff and members of the Ministries Council met in Decatur, Ga., this week to discuss and plan for the future of the council. The group gathered as the Ministries Council, which was formed last year as part of CBF’s new governance, begins its work.

Dave Odom, executive director of leadership education and associate dean for centers and initiatives at Duke Divinity School, facilitated the discussion. Greg Jones, senior strategist for leadership education and professor of theology at Duke Divinity School, offered a presentation titled “Developing Strategy in the Midst of Change.”

Jones, who served as dean of Duke Divinity School from 1997 to 2010, is a widely recognized scholar on subjects including Christian vocation, leadership and strengthening the church and its ministry. His presentation focused on deep trends affecting Christian institutions from the “digital revolution” and the growing lack of trust in institutions among Americans to “reconfiguring denominations and emerging forms of congregating.”

Jones emphasized that the challenge for Christian institutions is to “cultivate patterns of discernment on how to adapt faithfully and creatively to [deep trends].”

“We’re in the midst of undergoing change that is dramatic in terms of its need for reconstruction and new imagination,” Jones said. “We live in a very different world today. It is also an incredible opportunity, especially for a young group like [the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship], if we probe deeply enough to get ahead of trends instead of react to them.”

“Knowledge is less reliable. If that’s true in medicine, it’s true in other arenas of our world. What we have assumed is now up for grabs,” Jones said. “The old ways we’ve thought about doing strategic planning, that knowledge is reliable if you just applied what you’ve known in the past — the trouble is that the smartest people in the room recognize that what worked in the past is not likely to work in the future.”

Jones highlighted economic stress as a deep trend that Christian institutions will continue to confront.

“Economic stress is not a result of 2008,” Jones said, referring to the global financial crisis that triggered a recession in the United States. “[Economic stress on Christian institutions] was intensified and exposed in 2008. The economic stresses that were already emerging and existing had been masked by some run-up in the economy and hid the stress that was existing. It exposed and intensified the problems, but the problems were already there for a variety of reasons — including the scale of institutions.”

Jones stressed that Christian leaders must begin to think theologically about why institutions matter and not shy away from thinking and talking about money.

“By describing anything by what you are not is a really poor way of figuring out what you are for,” Jones said. “And, we’ve tended to associate being nonprofit without ever thinking about money. Because of the scale [of institutions] and because of bad theological thinking, we had a perfect storm where we were spending a lot of time just trying to keep things afloat and survive, rather than thinking about what we’re about, what we’re for.”

“Vibrant institutions are characterized by traditioned innovation,” Jones said. “They continually engage their traditions in ways that create space for innovative engagement in the future.”

Jones pointed out that innovative leaders do not rely solely on their intelligence or creativity, but also pay attention to their contexts and deep trends shaping Christian institutions, American society and the world.

“These trends give leaders the raw material that enables them to retrieve key insights and practices from their traditions, tinker with new ideas and solutions in their organizations and adapt to substantive cultural changes,” Jones said.

CBF Ministries Coordinator Bo Prosser expressed his appreciation for Jones and Odom and their efforts to help the Ministries Council think strategically about its work.

“The Ministries Council is beginning from a point of a new strategic vision. CBF staff and state and regional leaders want to be in sync with our council,” Prosser said. “In order for this to happen appropriately, we must have ‘outside voices’ to challenge us with current data. Greg Jones and Dave Odom are in the midst of strategic innovation and collaboration. Their voices challenge us to think in new ways.”

“Status quo is no longer acceptable,” Prosser said. “We have an opportunity to think with some of the best minds in our field, to arrive at new and inspiring approaches for enriching the ministries of our Fellowship.”

Michael Cheuk, chair of the Ministries Council and senior minister at University Baptist Church in Charlottesville, Va., agreed with that sentiment.

“Greg Jones’ presentation was a clarion call for the Ministries Council to embrace the reason why we exist,” Cheuk said. “Our purpose is to work with churches and Christians to discover and fulfill their God-given passion. The local congregation is at the heart and center of the council’s purpose.”

“Very helpful to me was the concept of ‘traditioned innovation.’ Traditioned innovation honors the past but is not imprisoned by it. Neither does it innovate by making things up as we go along,” Cheuk said. “Traditioned innovation seeks to experiment with ways to bring the life-giving aspects of our tradition into the present and the future, so that we can better fulfill our mission in a changing world.”

“We can’t be afraid to experiment, and we can’t be afraid to fail in those experiments,” Cheuk said. “We learn from those failures so that future experiments will have better outcomes. That’s how we innovate and change.”

Visit http://www.ministriescouncil.org to learn more about the CBF Ministries Council and to keep up with its work. For more information about Greg Jones and the deep trends affecting Christian institutions, read this article.