8 Reasons Your Church is Stuck
A couple of weeks ago, I released my newest eBook, The Leisure Suit Trap: 8 Reasons Your Church is Stuck. As I’ve had the opportunity to interact and work with churches over the last several years, there are some common themes. These are the challenges that churches typically face when ministry starts to plateau or decline. Here are…
8 Reasons Your Church is Stuck
- You lack a leadership empowerment plan. We have failed as leaders in the church if we do not embrace the unique gift-mix that God designed. And we won’t fully know the power and impact of the local church until people are empowered to be the people God wired them up to be.
- You are unclear about your vision and mission. There are lots of churches with vision statements, but I don’t think there are very many churches that really have a vision statement that clarifies who they are as an organization. A clear vision that is properly communicated will both rally and repel people.
- You blame outsiders and external factors. Victim-thinking will only lead to bitterness and competition. Leaders who blame outsiders and external factors actually are confessing their own failure to think creatively and inspire their team.
- Your structure inhibits growth. One of the attributes of a church in decline is a complex structure. The natural tendency of organizations is to add complexity to their structure and systems. The longer an organization exists, the more complex it typically gets.
- You worship your past success. Our past successes can be one of the greatest contributing factors to our future demise. When organizations stick to “the way we do it,” the safe approach of avoiding innovation and change becomes the riskiest approach.
- You focus on activities instead of outcomes. While many church leaders are full of vision and passion, they lack an effective strategy to accomplish their mission. That leads to a feeling of disorganization, and ultimately they become stuck.
- You fail to equip God’s people. For whatever reason, smaller churches I work with have a tendency to rely on the pastors and paid staff to carry the ministry load rather than equipping lay people.
- Your ministries ignore people outside the church. When churches become inward-focused and start making decisions about ministry to keep people rather than reach people, they also start to die.
In addition to going into greater detail about the reasons why churches are stuck, the eBook features discussion questions to promote conversations with your staff and lay leadership teams. With that in mind, I wanted to make it as easy as possible for you to both read and share the contents of this eBook. Thanks to my partnership with Church Community Builder, you may download the full eBook for free.
When you do that, you’ll also be supporting a great cause. I’m foregoing any financial gain from this project. In exchange for their sponsorship of The Leisure Suit series, Church Community Builder has made a very generous donation to Engage Burkina.
Burkina Faso, located in west Africa, is one of the poorest and most illiterate countries in the world. Engage Burkina has three primary initiatives right now in the areas of water, education, and churches. As needs arise, the non-profit also responds to people who have medical, nutrition, or other needs related to the poverty and living conditions. By reading and sharing the eBook, you’ll also be supporting these initiatives.
I challenge you to read the eBook and start a conversation with your team. God wants you to have a healthy ministry that helps people experience life change through a relationship with Jesus. There are hurting people in your communities that need what your church can offer. Don’t settle for anything short of that.
Congratulations on the publication of The Leisure Suit Trap! This is a very exciting accomplishment, and you should be very proud of yourself. And, furthermore, it looks like something that I desperately need to read. The church I work with is in something of a rut, and just from reading this blog post, I can see that your eBook can be of great help to us. Thank you so much for sharing!
Good stuff. Can you talk further about how church structure often inhibits growth? Do you mean the church has too many policies and procedures or employees?
Just preach the Word and let the chips fall where they may.
He will work with that in His way.
Thanks.
If we just preach the Word and that’s it, we’d have to disobey the Word.
Principle 9: you don’t stick at it. This is kind of a corollary to number 6 – the activity never gets worked through long enough to give it a chance of bearing fruit.
On principle 7: some of this is down to pastors waltzing in and saying, “this church has failed, let’s give it a healthy dose of Toronto blessing* and it will grow again”. They don’t bother to engage with the congregation they have who might, despite falling numbers, have something worthwhile to offer. And it leads you into number 1 – the whole thing turns into a one-man band.