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Identifying a dated strategy is easy if you’re a new leader who has taken over from someone else. It is much harder when you’ve led in a context for more than five years.
Make sure you understand where the next generation is heading in terms of their strategy. Better yet, get them around your table.
Are we on top of the constant change in our culture?
Are we focused on unchurched people or on ourselves?
Left unattended, your church will become a place where the preferences of the members trump passion for the mission.
In every decision, focus on who you want to reach, not on who you want to keep. Commit to losing yourself for the sake of finding others.
People who focus on helping others and honoring Christ soon discover that their needs are met far more deeply than they ever experienced otherwise.
Growing
churches have often embraced the following characteristics:
Your main services engage...
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As a rule, if you can design services that engage teenagers, you’ve designed a church service that engages unchurched
people.
You’re good with q...
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Embracing the questions of unchurched people is a form of embracing them.
You’re honest about your struggles.
You have easy, obvious, strategic, and helpful steps for new people.
You’ve dumped all assumptions.
Your outreach isn’t just a program.
You are flexible and adaptable.
Internal dysfunction that is sapping the community of its life, such as conflict; wrong people in wrong places; unrealistic expectations of staff, boards, and volunteers.
Structural issues, such as boards that micromanage or pastoral care being vested in one or a handful of leaders.
An inward focus that refuses to acknowledge the need to change to be eff...
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They don’t all have big “problems.” If you’re waiting for unchurched people to show up because their lives are falling apart, you might wait a long time. Sure, there are always people in crisis who seek God out. But many are quite content with their lives without God. And some are quite happy and successful. If you only know how to speak into discontent and crisis, you will miss most of your neighbors.
Most are spiritual. Most unchurched people believe in some kind of God. They’re surprised and offended if you think of them as atheists.
They are not sure what “Christian” ...
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You can’t call them back to something they never knew. Old-school “revival” meant there was something to revive. Now that we are on the second to fifth generation of unchurched people, revival is less helpful, to say the least. You can’t call them back to something they never knew. This should cause us to radically rethink our assumptions about ministry and culture.
Many have tried church, even a little, but left.
They want you to be Christian. Unchurched people and people on the fringes of your church actually want you to follow Jesus authentically.
you don’t alter the content of your services for unchurched people, but you should change the experience.
Empathizing with irregular attenders is not that hard to do if you realize you probably have an attitude about other organizations that mirrors their attitude toward your church. Take going to the gym, for example. I have a gym membership. Truthfully, as I write this chapter, I haven’t been there in two and a half months. My attendance at the gym is less than stellar. But my goal isn’t actually attendance at the gym. My goal is fitness.
Somewhere along the way a lot of us end up confusing the mission and the method. Your mission is to lead people into a relationship with Jesus, not to get people to show up for an hour in a box every Sunday. Please hear me—I value our time together on Sundays
this attitude shift will help you run offense instead of defense on the issue of declining church attendance.
The problem with many churches is that they’re resistible. Our experiences aren’t compelling enough to draw people back. Some of that is clearly related to us not loving people deeply enough or connecting people well enough relationally. And those should be among the things church leaders value most.
While measuring outputs will take some time to develop, it begins with a paradigm shift. What if the church became as much a sending organization as
receiving organization?
When things are changing this rapidly in the culture, it’s critical that church leaders develop approaches that respond just as quickly. Any gap that emerges between the outdated methods of church leaders and the changing pace of culture produces one thing: irrelevance. Rather than seeing this as an obstacle that’s difficult to surmount, try to see this as an opportunity. The first-century church formed and spread rapidly in an environment that was more hostile to Christianity than the one the early twenty-first century offers.
the demands of leadership will push you toward unhealth.
Your motivation is fading. One sign of burnout is that the passion that once fueled you is gone.
2. Your main emotion is numbness. You no longer feel the highs or the lows.
People drain you.
4. Little things make you disproportionately angry.
1. A great daily time with God:
2. Exercise:
3. A healthy diet:
4. Proper sleep:
5. Intentional white space in your calendar:
6. Healthy friendships:
7. Margin:
8. Hobbies:
9. Family time:
