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Why Doing the Right Thing Isn’t Enough for a Healthy Church
Have you been struggling to lead your church to health and strength, but can’t seem to get there?
You’re doing what you believe God is calling you to do and you’re taking wise counsel from others, but there’s very little, if any progress being made? Not just numerically. But in health, discipleship, worship and the other essentials.
This post might be for you.
There are four ways to lead:
1. Do the right thing in the right way
2. Do the right thing in the wrong way
3. Do the wrong thing in the right way
4. Do the wrong thing in the wrong way
Only one of those combinations will produce a healthy church. Let’s take a look at all four and see what happens with each one.
The ABCS of Church Change (Always Be Changing Something)
Change is healthy. Change is good. Change is normal.
All living things change. Or they die.
The church is no exception to that.
No, we don’t change the essential doctrines. They are our foundation. Messing around with the foundation doesn’t bring change, it causes collapse.
As I outlined recently in Kill Your Church Traditions Before They Kill Your Church, everything but our biblical essentials must be subject to change.
Just as churches that change the essentials will collapse, a church that isn’t willing to change on non-essentials will die.
But how do we implement change in a church that has always resisted it? That is one of the great challenges of pastoring.
One key element in that is what I call the ABCS of change – Always Be Changing Something.
Here’s an example.
Do Ministry FROM the Church, Not Just IN the Church
If your church is blessed to own a building, everything you do with it – and especially outside of it – tells people something about your church’s priorities.
For example, last week I was at Starbucks with a church member when he introduced me to a friend. The friend asked me, “so what church do you pastor?”
Me: Cornerstone.
Him: Where is that?
Me: Just around the cor-
Random guy coming up behind him: The one with the skateboard ramps.
Yep, that happened.
If your church is blessed to own a building, everything you do with it – and especially outside of it – tells people something about your church’s priorities.
Our Church Is Too Small
Why is our church known as the one with the skateboard ramps? Because ministering to the youth of our community is a high priority for us. There are a lot of skateboarders around us, but no other skateboard parks in town.
Your see, our church building is too small to hold all the ministry the Lord wants us to do.
Every church building is. But it’s especially true in churches with a small building. Or no building.
If you were to visit our church and sit in the last row, there would be no more than five rows ahead of you – with all the chairs set up. It’s a small room.
For years, I butted my head against a wall (sometimes literally – ouch!) trying to trying to get a bigger building for our church to worship in.
But we live in an expensive city. If we sold our current church property of less than one acre, we could get an easy $3 million for it. But it would cost us an extra $3 million to buy a property double this size, $6 million to triple our size. And we’d still have less than three acres. If we could find three acres – and that’s a big if.
So we started asking ourselves a few questions. If we could find such a facility and if our middle-class church of 200 could somehow raise the extra $6 million, would that be the best use of all that time, energy and money? We decided it would not be.
Church Buildings Should Serve People, Not Vice Versa
Our church building wasn’t designed for type of ministry God is currently calling our church to do.
If your church has that challenge, this post is for you. The answer our church found is something I call hauling rocks in a Volkswagen. (Keep reading. It’ll make sense, soon).
This year marks the 50th anniversary of our church facility. That’s not old as far as church buildings go, but it’s old enough to matter.
Back when it was built, most people came to church three or four to a car, wearing suits and ties or dresses. They sat politely in the choir loft or the pews, singing from hymnbooks led by an organ and piano.
Wednesday was family night. Mom and dad sat in the main room hearing a bible study, while the kids went to the back rooms for flannel-graph bible stories and the youth memorized verses for the upcoming Bible Quiz contest.
On Thursday morning, the women met for a quilting club to send blankets to missionaries. On Saturday morning the men met for a prayer breakfast.
Not anymore.
Today, people come one or two per car. Some arrive on bikes and skateboards. Everyone is dressed casually. They bring a coffee cup into church with them, sing worship songs led by a band with drums and guitars, reading the words off a screen. During the sermon, they follow along in the Bible from their phone or iPad, tweeting or Facebooking sermon points as they happen. Those who are sick or travelling check in to our live stream of each service.
Today is better.
Why? Because yesterday is gone and today is happening now.
But today has challenges my predecessors never dreamed of when they built our tiny, landlocked building.
Don’t Let Your Church Building Kill Your Church
The church in North America is getting smaller.
No, I don’t think we’re going to say goodbye to the megachurch any time soon – at least I hope not. By all indications, the biggest churches will become even bigger.
But, according to many church trend-watchers like Ed Stetzer, even megachurch leaders are understanding the need for multiple smaller venues instead of bigger and bigger megabuildings.
The era of the mega-church-building, even as megachurches keep growing, may be over.
This is just part of an overall societal trend towards more personalization. The one-size-fits-all era is gone.
For instance, in the last few decades we’ve gone from the big three TV networks, to hundreds of cable channels, to online TV and movie queues tailored to each person’s specific watching habits. The same has happened in radio, automobiles, musical genres, books… you name it.
I think this tendency towards smaller, bistro-style niche tastes leaves the church in North America with a choice.
Fight the tendency towards smaller and lose out, or do Small Church really well and lead the culture into a better way.
The Best Welcome for Easter Guests? Ask Them To Serve With You
(If you’re a NewSmallChurch.com subscriber and the title of this post feels like deja vu, here’s why. The original version of this post disappeared. Woosh, into the emptiness of the internet, never to be retrieved. Thankfully, I always save a copy, so here it is again.)
In a few weeks, my church is doing our twice-yearly Share Day. (Click here for a video of how we do that.)
On that Sunday, we will gather for church in the morning, then divide into groups to go throughout our community helping people. This Spring, the events include repairing & beautifying two rescue homes for abused women and children, and ministering to residents at a home for the mentally disabled.
This week, on Easter Sunday, we’ll encourage people to sign up for these events, and/or sponsor them financially.
Yes, that’s right. We’re going to spend several precious minutes of prime Easter service time asking everyone, including all the Easter-only people, to step up and serve with us.
How Pastors and Congregations See Sundays Differently – And How It Changes Everything
“Why can’t I get more people to volunteer on Sundays?”
It’s one of the most common frustrations I hear from pastors – especially pastor of Small Churches.
Over the past few years, I’ve tried to offer a few ideas to help get volunteerism up. But today, like a blow to the back of the head, it hit me why this challenge never seems to go away.
Pastors and congregations see Sundays in opposite ways. And this affects everything.
Here’s the difference.
Sunday is their day OFF!
But Sunday is the pastor’s biggest day ON!
No wonder we’re not seeing eye-to-eye.
Sunday is their Sabbath. Their day of rest and worship. But Sunday isn’t the pastor’s Sabbath. Yes, it’s a day of worship, but it’s not a day of rest. Because it’s our biggest day on, a lot of us think it needs to be our church members’ day on too.
4 Steps to Find, Support & Grow Your Church’s “Hidden” Ministries
Are you frustrated with trying to get people in your church to step up and do ministry?
I know there are churches with bad histories (and a bad present) where this is a legitimate issue. In fact, I pastored one. But in many churches, there may be more ministry happening than many pastors realize.
Pastors must learn to see, then support and promote ministry that’s already occurring within the church membership. But we often miss it because we have a far too limited view of what ministry really means.
Here’s an example.
Pioneers, Settlers & Mavericks: How to Lead Them Well For a Healthier Church
here are three kinds of people in every church. Pioneers, Settlers and Mavericks.
Depending on which point of its life cycle your church is in, these three will interact in different ways that can either benefit your church or threaten to tear it apart.
One of the primary tasks of a church leader (usually the pastor) is to utilize the gifts of all three, while keeping them in balance.
First, some definitions:
Pioneers are those who want to go where no one has gone before. These are the church planters and ministry starters.
Settlers are the people who keep a healthy church humming along. They form your tithing base, your teaching core and your administrative backbone.
Mavericks often feel like Pioneers, but they differ in one significant respect. They don’t start new things, they change old things. While Settlers comfort the disturbed, Mavericks disturb the comfortable.
A healthy church needs all three types of people. But each serves in a different way at different stages of your church’s life. Depending on what stage your church is in, different types of people will predominate in leading, supporting, or being at risk of leaving.
Strong leaders learn to distinguish between these stages so they can guide and utilize everyone and their gifts properly at each stage.
