As a veteran of thirty years of pastoral ministry, I was privileged to begin ministry as an associate in a church that was in a growth pattern in which the church doubled in size. As a senior pastor, I led two congregations that had been in decline for years. In the course of our ministry, God was to bless and both congregations experienced turnaround and dramatic growth. Through the years many have asked me, "What is the key to turning around a declining congregation?" In the article below I have tried to take a very complex subject and reduce to it's simplest elements what I believe were the keys to turnaround, at least in my experience. I hope you find it helpful.
Randall Spence
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To take a church that is plateaued or in decline and to help it experience turnaround and revitalization is no simple matter, nor is it a matter of following a set of rules or steps. While it isn’t rocket science nor next to impossible to do, it does require hard work on the part of the pastor and leadership along with an unrelenting commitment to do so. It is not unlike swimming against the current as there is never a time when one can cease the effort.
The primary reason every church plateau’s and eventually enters into decline is because in time every organization tends to turn inwards on itself. That is, churches stagnate and decline when the focus becomes on the members rather than on those outside. When the primary ministry question becomes, “What ministries best meet the needs of my family and me?” rather than, “What ministries will reach people estranged from God and bring them to faith in Him?” then that church has begun to travel on a downward slope whether they know it or not. Anytime the membership becomes the primary focus of the church’s ministry, that church is on the road to death.
What is described below is not an attempt to reduce that which is complex and unique to every situation into a simplistic formula. Rather it is an attempt to take my personal learnings from having led two congregations in turnaround and reduce it to some simple principles that I believe need to happen and in the order given. This is one pastor’s experience that has been informed not only by that experience but that of others as written in books and articles. I’ve tried to be an apt learner as I’ve asked the question, “What does it take to turn a plateaued or declining church around and for that church to experience revitalization?” Below are my conclusions:
The Plan & the Priorities
1. The critical first step is that the pastor must clearly see his/her need for personal transformation and the congregation’s need for the same. John Maxwell, Robert Quinn and others tell us that a changed organization begins with a changed leader. All organizational change begins in the leader. Until the pastoral leader is convinced that the Great Commission forms the marching orders of the church, we will go about church business as usual simply tending to the needs, demands and expectations of our flock. And unless our theology is that Jesus is “the way” and the only way to God and that lost people are doomed to an eternity apart from God, we will lack the evangelistic zeal necessary and the fire in our bellies to do the hard work of transformation.
Os Guinness writes of meeting a Chinese businessman. In the course of the conversation the man said to Guinness, “When I meet a Buddhist monk, I meet a holy man. When I meet a Christian minister, I meet a religious manager.” All too readily we move from being a “holy man/woman” to a “religious manager.”
2. The pastor as the spiritual leader must define and enunciate the congregation’s reality. If the congregation is plateaued or in decline, he/she must help them see this and come to the conviction that this state is not acceptable to God and that if not corrected will eventually lead to death. It has been said that the chief task of leadership is to define reality. If so, the pastoral leader must define that reality and create a sense of crisis and urgency. This can be done through sermons, in board meetings, and in congregational planning sessions. Jim Collins says that great organizations and leaders are those willing to face the brutal facts of their realities while not succumbing to them.
3. The pastor must lead the church in doing things to create momentum. One of the laws of science tells us that the most difficult part of getting an object moving is breaking inertia. It takes far more energy to do so than to sustain movement. If there is movement in the congregation in a negative direction, it takes all the more effort to stop the negative direction and to get the object moving in a forward direction. Here it is important to help the congregation begin to feel different about itself by getting a few small wins under their belt. Critical to transformational change is helping the people believe they can change and then in leading them to do so. I suggest starting this whole process through sermons in which the possibility of a new day is expressed and followed up with a visioning day or two in which anyone interested in the congregation’s future is invited to come and participate. The goal for this day is simple—to create an action step or two the congregation can take in order to alter its current reality and to create momentum.
4. Three teams should be created---a Visioning Team, a Prayer Team and an Implementation Team. The task of the Prayer Team is to pray that the Lord would give the church a new burden for reaching out beyond its walls to people who are disconnected to God and to ask for guidance in the whole visioning process. The prayer’s focus should be on the congregation once again returning to its first love and to becoming attuned to the heartbeat of God and to winning people estranged from God.
The Visioning Team’s task is to dream and to strategize together what God would have them do to reach lost and disconnected people. In the language of Henry Blackaby, the intent here is not simply to create activity but to discover where God is at work in His world and to join Him there.
The Implementation Team’s task is to help in the implementation of the things the congregation should adopt as steps towards turnaround.
This could be a time in which to invite in Ohio Ministries for a Coaching Weekend. There are several values to doing so. First of all, outsiders can see the church as visitors see it. Secondly, the coaching team will lead the leadership in identifying the congregation’s strengths, their challenges (weaknesses), and some initiatives the congregation can take to move from where they are to the next level.
In some cases all the above may necessitate putting in abeyance the sections of the congregation’s bylaws that speak to how ministry gets done. It may also mean revisiting the church’s budget to place the dollars in those areas where it is needed to carry out the new plans. Don’t make the mistake of creating plans for turnaround and then not funding it. That is to set it up for failure.
An important part of this is for the pastor and the leadership to work with a coach in helping to implement the plan for transition. There is great value in having an outsider who understands congregational turnaround walk with you as you seek to implement the plan to lead the church to obedience to the Great Commission.
5. The pastor, leadership and congregation must make lost people the priority in all the congregation does. This represents a philosophical stance, an attitude that must be adopted and that must prevail in the church. As stated above, the biggest reason congregation’s plateau and enter decline is because the priority of the church becomes the membership and their needs and wants. A trend in every organization is to turn inwards to serve the current constituency. Knowing this to be true, and given that the members screams of “serve me” are loud and demanding, the bias must always be towards reaching those on the outside. While the church exists for both the believer and the sinner, the bias must be towards reaching the sinner.
As a part of this, it is necessary that the congregation embrace the attitude that the pastor’s priorities and theirs are to reach people for Christ. An interesting study of church plants revealed that those congregations that grow have a pastor and people who busy themselves with inviting people to church and looking for ways to serve people outside the congregation. Those church plants that have minimal growth have pastors who focus more on the membership and who are not busily inviting others to the church nor their members. It’s not rocket science but simply a matter of the answer to the question, “Where is your focus---on the inside or the outside?”
6. The pastor must make sure the leadership and major stakeholders are with him in charging this hill. To fail to do so is suicide. A failure of many leaders comes from impatience and from failing to get “buy in” from the key stakeholders.
7. Develop and implement a comprehensive strategy to reach new people and to assimilate them into the church. This is where the Implementation Team comes into play as they seek to carry out the plan that has come out of the visioning sessions and the Visioning Team.
8. Make the necessary changes to attract new people. This may mean things like cosmetic upgrades to the facility, service times, the kinds of programs/ministries offered, etc. A bias should be towards reaching families with children and youth.
Nothing good ever comes without a cost and endeavoring to lead a church through transition comes with a heavy cost. Here are some of the kinds of costs involved in leading change:
What To Expect (the Cost of Change)
1. Resistance to the changes proposed. It has been observed that the church is the most change resistant organization in the world. In proposing change leaders must be aware that change will always bring conflict. Every church says they want to grow but few really do. We all want to lose weight or to get in shape until that demands that we push back from the table, put on the running shoes or to hit the gym.
One of the questions I asked my people to ask of themselves whenever a change was proposed was this: “Is this change a violation of my personal preferences and wants or a violation of scripture?” I also taught them the adage, “Methods are many, principles are few, methods always change, principles never do.” Our principles are the unchanging Word of God. We don’t mess with the message. How we package that message, however, must change. That is our methods of presenting the unchanging message must change with changing times. The problem with most is that they cannot distinguish between the message and the method. As pastoral leader I sought to teach them how to distinguish the difference.
2. An exodus of people who cannot embrace the change. While change will result in an exodus, if God is in those changes more will come than will leave. Good and God fearing people can unwittingly become roadblocks to progress and to accomplishing change. The pastoral leader and the congregation must adapt an attitude that it is okay to lose people. Until and unless they do, they will always cave in to the demands or the desires of those who resist the change. Too often God’s plan is thwarted by churches being held hostage to the preferences of a few.
3. A cry to go back to the way things used to be. We must be aware that change is physical and can happen in a moment. Transition, however, is psychological and takes time. For example, you could move to a new house tomorrow. That would be a change. Transition has occurred, however, the day you look around that new house and can say, “This feels like home.” No two people transition at the same pace. Some very quickly and readily while at the other end of the spectrum are those few who will never transition. They will never get used to the change.
A good example of change and transition are the Hebrews in the wilderness. The change took place when Moses led them out of Egypt. However, every time they got hungry, thirsty or afraid, they railed against Moses and cried out, “Why did you lead us into this wilderness to die?” Every pastor and leadership team must know that it is the nature of human nature to want to go back to what was even if that was not the preferred. We human creatures tend to prefer the familiar to the unknown even when the unknown will be better.
4. The need for the pastor and leadership to stay the course and to keep pushing. It takes time to create a new culture and it takes a mountain of energy. Getting the church to keep an outward focus in tantamount to the fish that continually swims upstream. It must be continuous and unrelenting. It’s not unlike trying to overcome gravity. The pressure to turn inwards never goes away.
NOTE: Unless the pain of remaining the same is perceived
as being greater than the pain of change, permanent and transformational change
is not likely to happen.
Randall Spence
Director of Ministries
Fantastic article Randy. Thanks!
Posted by: Jerry | April 20, 2010 at 10:27 AM