The Issachar Factor

Understanding Trends That Confront Your Church and Designing a Strategy for Success

Glen Martin, Gary L. McIntosh

• Publisher: B&H Books
• Year: 1999
• Print ISBN: 9780805420173
• eBook ISBN: 9781433670978
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Church

How to meet the needs of a modern congregation by transforming troubling social trends into opportunities for ministry.

1

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To prophesy is extremely difficult
especially with respect to the future.

––Chinese Proverb

[The] Men of Issachar,… understood the times
and knew what Israel should do.

––1 Chronicles 12:32

MINISTRY

When Charles Haddon Spurgeon first went to Park Street Church in London, he was nineteen years old. There he found a church with a seating capacity of fifteen hundred but with an attendance of under two hundred. Nine years later the Metropolitan Tabernacle was built to accommodate the crowds which came to hear him preach; his sermons were published in newspapers around the world; a school had been established to train pastors; and a Colportage business was started to print evangelistic booklets. It is said that over 23,000 people had heard him preach during those years.

During Spurgeon's thirty-eight years as pastor of the Metropolitan Tabernacle, his congregation included six thousand worshipers and added fourteen thousand members. Clearly the Metropolitan Tabernacle was one of the most influential churches of the nineteenth century.

In 1972, however, seventy-five years after Charles Haddon Spurgeon retired, some pastors visiting his church counted only eighty-seven worshipers present for the morning service!

What had happened to this once great church? In simple terms, it hadn't changed with the times. London had changed; people had changed; but the church's approach to ministry had remained the same. Gradually, people left and fewer people came until the Metropolitan Tabernacle was no longer effective in reaching people for Christ.

We live and minister in changing times. The following comments, which pastors have made to us in seminars throughout the United States, illustrate the changing times in which we live:

• People are coming and going in my community so fast that I feel like I'm preaching to a parade.
• I'm faced with co-dependency, divorce recovery, blended families, and all kinds of physical and emotional abuse issues. Seminary didn't prepare me for this. I need help!
• When I finally feel like I make the ends meet, someone moves the ends.
• How can I meet people's needs when I don't even understand their needs?
• We say we've got the answer, but they're not even asking the question.
• I seem to be able to touch people's heads but not their hearts.

We do live in changing times, and, for better or worse, church ministry isn't what it used to be. Dramatic changes in our society are forcing us to re-examine how we do ministry. In bygone eras we conducted ministry in one basic way; today, it's literally a whole new ball game. What are some of the changes that have taken place in our society which have affected our churches? And, most importantly, what can we do to be more effective in finding, keeping, and building people for our Lord Jesus Christ?

Before we begin to address individual areas, it is necessary to indulge in a bit of groundwork. What happened in the last quarter century to even make changes in ministry necessary?

Changing Ages

Social scientists have identified three distinct ages which serve as a brief outline of history: the agricultural age, the industrial age, and the information age. Roughly each of these ages spans a period of time when families, work, and society shared essential qualities.

The agricultural age refers to the time period which spanned most of known history to about 1860. Named for the main occupation of over 90 percent of all workers—the main context was the small rural town. The key unit was the extended family.¹

The industrial age covers the time period from 1860 to about 1956. With the rise of industrial factories, the main context was the city. The key unit was the nuclear family.

The information age began about 1956 and continues to the present. Named for the rapid increase of information, the main context is the world. The key unit is the fractured family. (See fig. 1.1)

Comparison of Ages

Agricultural

Industrial

Information

Dates	? to 1860	1860 to 1956	1956 to present
Context	Town	City	World
Work	Farm	Factory	Office
Job	Farmer	Worker	Manager
Family	Extended	Nuclear	Fractured

Figure 1.1

During the last half century, we have lived in a virtual explosion of information. More information has been produced in the last thirty years than in the previous five thousand. Today, information doubles every five years. By the year 2000 it will be doubling every four years! For example, note the following signs of the information explosion experienced since the 1940s.²

• Computers: Between 1946 and 1960 the number of computers grew from one to ten thousand, and from 1960 to 1980 to ten million. By the year 2000 there will be over eighty million computers in the United States alone. The number of components that can be programmed into a computer chip is doubling every eighteen months.³
• Publications: Approximately ninety-six hundred different periodicals are published in the United States each year, and about one thousand books are published internationally every day. Printed information doubles every eight years. A weekday edition of the New York Times contains more information than the average person was likely to come across in a lifetime in seventeenth century England.⁴
• Libraries: The world's great libraries are doubling in size every fourteen years. In the early 1300s, the Sorbonne Library in Paris contained only 1,338 books and yet was thought to be the largest library in Europe. Today several libraries in the world have an inventory of well over eight million books each.⁵
• Periodicals: The Magazine Publishers Association notes that 265 more magazines were published in 1988 than in 1989, which works out to about one a day if magazine creators take weekends off. Newsstands offer a choice of twenty-five hundred different magazines.⁶
• Reference works: The Pacific Bell Yellow pages are used about 3.5 million times a day. There are 33 million copies of 108 different directories with 41 billion pages of information. The new second edition of the Random House Dictionary of the English Language contains more than 315,000 words, has 2,500 pages, weighs 13.5 pounds, and has 50,000 new entries.⁷

All of this information is good. Right? Wrong! Today we must deal with new challenges like overload amnesia, which occurs when an individual's brain shuts down to protect itself. Did you ever forget simple information like a friend's name when trying to introduce them to another person? That's overload amnesia. Or have you ever crammed for an exam only to forget what it was about less than one hour later? That's “Chinese-dinner memory dysfunction”—an undue emphasis on short-term memory. Or have you ever read about an upcoming event in a church program only to forget about it later? That's a result of “informational cacophony”—too much exposure to information so that you end up reading or hearing something but not remembering it. Finally, consider VCRitis—buying a high-technology product, getting it home, and then not being able to program it.

Exposure to this proliferation of information has created a generation of people with different needs, needs which require new models of ministry. The problem is that many churches continue to use models of ministry which do not address the different needs people have today. Examine the following effects of the information age. Ministry must change to meet people's needs today.

• People have less free time, and are more ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Full Title
• Copyright
• Preface
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Chapter 1
• Chapter 2
• Chapter 3
• Chapter 4
• Chapter 5
• Chapter 6
• Chapter 7
• Chapter 8
• Chapter 9
• Chapter 10
• Chapter 11
• Chapter 12
• Chapter 13
• Other Able Assistants
• Back Cover