More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
3. Read Philippians 2:5–11 and compare the attitude of Christ with the attitude of a selfish and entitled church member.
The cycle was predictable. The church was declining. The church would call a new pastor with the hope that the pastor could lead the church back to health. The pastor comes to the church and leads in a few changes. The members don’t like the changes and resist. The pastor becomes discouraged and leaves. In some cases, the pastor was fired. Repeat cycle.
The more I study the phenomenon of pastoral tenure, the more I am convinced there are distinct stages with clear characteristics.
Year 1: Honeymoon. Both pastor and church have a blank slate and they enter the relationship hoping and believing the best about each other.
Years 2 and 3: Conflicts and Challenges. No pastor is perfect. No church is perfect. Each party discovers the imperfections after a few months.
Years 4 and 5: Crossroads, Part 1. This period is one of the most critical in the relationship. If the conflict was severe, the pastor will likely leave or be forced out. Indeed, these years, four and five, are the most common years when a pastor leaves a church.
Years 6 to 10: Fruit and Harvest.
A church is likely to experience some of its best years, by almost any metrics, during this period of a pastor’s tenure.
Describe your prayer times, I requested. That’s where the revelation would come. That’s where we discovered together the question behind the question. As they began to describe their prayer times together, they began to understand more clearly.
Do you really think that was a meaningful time of prayer? Do you think that’s how the New Testament churches prayed?
Not coincidently, prayer and the health of the church went hand in hand. When the church is engaged in meaningful prayer, it becomes both the cause and the result of greater church health.
Prayer was not an add-on to give them permission to eat a meal. It was serious stuff for a serious group of church members. Prayer was the lifeblood of the early church.
We stopped taking prayer seriously. And the church started dying.” No prayer. No hope. And the church started dying.
Do you get the picture? The church was not really a church. It had no purpose. None of the members talked about fulfilling the Great Commission. None of the members spoke about carrying out the Great Commandment in the church. None ever came close to speaking with a burning passion about making a difference in the community. The churches were purposeless.
the dying churches, at some point in their history, forgot their purpose. Rarely could anyone point to a singular event or historical moment where the purpose was forgotten. It was a deadly and slow process.
One church split and eventually died when the old pulpit was replaced with a new one.
Indeed the so-called inactive members often became active for a contested business meeting in the dying churches. Their presence ended abruptly once the vote was over.
The point is not the memorials themselves; the point is that memorials became an obsession at many of these churches. More and more emphasis was placed on the past, and the future was neglected.
Dying churches, more often than not, experience severe battles over facility obsession before their demise.
The twelve responses I offer over three chapters are not a recipe to create or repair the perfect church. To the contrary, they are more of a cry to God to intervene, and to create a willingness on the part of the church members to be obedient.
if we were to estimate the number of churches in each category, I would offer the following: Healthy: 10% Symptoms of sickness: 40% Very sick: 40% Dying: 10%
There are probably over 150,000 churches that fit this category. Though the process is imprecise, one of the signs that sickness might be taking hold includes a pervasive attitude in the church that the best days are in the past.
If you were to ask longer-term members about the best days of the church, very few would recognize the present in that light.
The primary reason those programs and ministries are continued is simply because “that’s the way we’ve always done it.”
The first mandate is to impact your local community.
In most of these churches, the members are involved in ministries for themselves, often to the exclusion of ministries beyond the church.
as churches become ill, they are more likely to use funds for their own members rather than reaching their community.
develop specific and concrete plans to impact the community.
if the church waits until it’s very sick, it is extremely difficult to get better.
what are some of the indicators that a church is very sick?
here are some of the more notable signs:
The current reality is that most of the churches in this category are headed for dying and death. Again, the process may be long, but it seems so inevitable for many.
What are, then, some responses church leaders and members can have in their church if it is very sick? Again, I offer four broad categories.
