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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.
Done With Church? Don’t Quit It, Change It
There’s a large and growing number of people who say they’re done with church.
These aren’t the Nones – those who who are increasingly checking the box marked “none” on religious affiliation surveys – these are people who often self-identify as Christians, but have intentionally stopped attending church.
According to several recent writings, including The Rise of the “Dones”, by Tom Schultz, the Dones are a growing percentage of society. Many of them have come from the clergy.
Yes, I know what many of you are thinking. This is just more evidence of our entitlement culture that doesn’t want to make commitments or be held accountable. I have to admit that thought occurred to me, too.
Certainly there are people leaving the church who fit that description. But there are regular church attenders and leaders who fit that description, too.
The Dones aren’t like that. They’re not lazy, apathetic or self-serving. Often they’re just the opposite. As Shultz says in his post, “To an increasing degree, the church is losing its best.”
Many of them may be like the kid in class who’s acting up and getting bad grades, not because they’re not interested in learning, but because their learning style doesn’t fit in a classroom setting. They want to leave, not because they don’t care, but because they hate having their time wasted.
Almost everything I’ve read from within the church about the Dones (and it’s a lot), has been written from one of two standpoints: 1) What can we do to win them back?, or 2) An attitude of “good riddance”, with an underlying, sometimes directly stated attitude of “they’re just lazy people who want everything done their way.”
I think that second attitude is inaccurate, dangerous and arrogant. But the first attitude may be missing the point too, since it feels a little like a salesman trying to woo customers back with a semi-annual sale. Either way, we don’t get it.
But everything I’ve read by the Dones (including conversations I’ve had with them) tells a different story. They’re not lazy or self-serving. And they’re not looking to be won back. They’re tired, frustrated and hurt. And they truly are done.
So this post isn’t written to church leaders to offer ideas about what we can do to entice the Dones to come back. Today I’m talking to the Dones or almost-dones, maybe even to fellow ministers in one of those groups, with a simple message.
If you’re done with the way we do church, don’t leave it, help us change it.
10 Reasons I Don’t Use Negative 10-Point Lists In Preaching or Blogging
A lot of bloggers and ministers like using negative 10-point lists as the basis for blog posts and sermons.
Some that I’ve run across include:
10 Reasons Your Church Isn’t Growing
10 Practices Healthy Pastors Need to Avoid
10 Habits of Highly Ineffective People
10 Attitudes that Will Ruin Your Marriage
10 Ways to Raise a Boy You Wouldn’t Want Your Daughter to Date
There’s nothing inherently wrong with writing or speaking that way, but I’ve never been a fan of it.
Here are my 10 reasons why.
Never, Ever Say This To a Struggling Pastor
“If you do what I did, your church will grow.”
If you’re the pastor of a healthy, growing church, please stop saying that to struggling pastors.
Even if you’ve never said those exact words, stop implying it or assuming it. Even if you believe it. For one simple reason.
It’s not true.
It’s not that struggling pastors of struggling churches don’t want to learn from you. It sure isn’t that we don’t want our churches to grow. Of course we want our churches to grow. If we didn’t, there’d be no struggle.
The problem comes when pastors of growing, healthy churches assume that what worked for them will work in the same way everywhere else. The truth is, it won’t.
Sure, there are universal principals for church leadership and health. But there are no one-size-fits-all solutions for church growth. What worked for you won’t work for someone else – at least not on a one-for-one basis.
