Adapting to Your Church's Environment
Raymond Bakke
We specialized not in prescriptions but in diagnosis.
—Raymond Bakke John Wooden, the successful basketball coach at UCLA for many years, can teach us something about pastoring. When Wooden began his "ministry" of coaching, he won a national championship with a team whose tallest member was only six feet five inches. He had a fast-guard offense, a high post, and a lot of backdoor plays and quick screens. Wooden kept his players moving all over the court. Then he was fortunate enough to recruit a couple of seven-foot centers, so he totally changed his system. He went to a low-post and strong-forward system. And he kept winning championships. For Wooden, the goal was to win, not to run a particular offense. He changed to incorporate the gifts of his players. Pastoral ministry demands similar flexibility. If Wooden was a pastor, he wouldn't insist on preaching the same way everywhere. He wouldn't try to run the same church program in every context. Pastors need to understand the environment in which we're called to preach the Word. We need to exegete both the Word and the world. Exegeting my church
If we don't take time to understand the environment of our ministry, we're in danger of franchising it. Instead, we need to custom-build each ministry—move into a community, exegete the context, exegete the Scripture, and bring the two together. I pastored ten years in the inner-city Chicago neighborhood of Humboldt Park. To exegete the culture the first thing I did was get to know the loyal core that had kept that church alive over the years. Their urban church was now declining. It was losing touch with its community and prided itself on programs that ran every night whether anybody needed them or not. Meanwhile houses on the block were ...
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