Chances are you didn’t get into leadership to see your church stop accomplishing its mission.
One of the primary missions of the local church is to reach new people with Christ’s love, which, naturally, implies growth.
But almost every church (and almost every organization) faces seasons in which growth stops. Some haven’t seen growth in years…or decades.
I was on a call with some leaders recently from a large growing church who told me that last year was the first time in 15 years they hadn’t grown. They’re addressing it and are back on track, but it was a tough year.
I can relate. I have been in church leadership for 19 years. We seen growth almost every year (the majority of which has been from previously unchurched people), but there were two periods in which we stalled out. Those are tough seasons for leaders.
What was effective before has stopped being effective now
A malaise sets in that’s difficult to describe
As a leader, you’re not exactly sure how to get things back on track
Ideally you’d be asking questions before you hit a slump, but life isn’t that simple, is it?
So if you’re in a slump or see one coming, what do you do?
One of the best things any leader can do when they’re in a tough spot is to stop making assumptions and start asking questions. Our assumptions got us to where we are, but they won’t necessarily get us where we need to go.
Here are 5 telling questions every leader can ask when their church stops growing:
If your church isn’t growing, stop making assumptions. Start asking questions.Click To Tweet
1. Is our sense of mission white hot?
Effective churches have a white hot sense of mission. It’s far more than a piece of paper on a wall or something the board recites at annual meetings, it lives daily in the soul of countless people in the congregation. It motivates all the action in the organization. It consumes people.
Often a church that has stopped growing has lost the urgency behind it’s mission. This is doubly sad in the case of a church because our mission is actually Christ’s mission…it’s the spread of the Gospel into the world for which Jesus died.
Leaders and congregations that are effective in accomplishing their mission are consumed by their mission. It always burns white hot.
Leaders and congregations that are effective in accomplishing their mission are consumed by their mission. It always burns white hot.Click To Tweet
2. Are we focused on unchurched people or on ourselves?
So there’s a tendency you and I have as human beings. Our natural drift is to focus on ourselves. Not on Christ. Not on others.
The gravitational pull of any church is toward insiders, not outsiders.
Left unattended, your church will become a place where the preferences of the members trump passion for the mission.
There are two primary ways to address this drift:
In every decision, focus on who you want to reach, not who you want to keep.
Commit to losing yourself for the sake of finding others.
I completely understand that people automatically respond with “well what about me and my needs (or the needs of our faithful members)”?
I believe Jesus said something about finding your life in the process of losing it. People who focus on helping others and honouring Christ soon discover that their needs are met far more deeply than they ever experienced otherwise.
3. Has our strategy or approach become dated?
What got you here won’t necessary get you there.
While the mission of the church is eternal, strategy should shift from generation to generation. This day it needs to shift even faster than that.
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 5 years.
The challenge in long term leadership is that the changes that you introduced may have been novel and effective when you introduced them, but it’s not 1995 anymore, or 2005 for that matter.
How do you tell if you’re strategy is dated?
When it stops being effective.
When you see very few people in the next generation adopting the approach or strategy in question.
If you want more on how church is changing, here are a few posts that can help:
10 Things That Ain’t Church (Some Thoughts On Irregular and Non-Attendance)
5 Reasons Charismatic Churches Are Growing and Attractional Church Is Past Peak
The mission of the church is eternal. The method is temporary. The challenge, of course, is it’s easy to love the method more than the mission.
But in the future church, churches that love their method more than they love the mission will die.
In the future church, churches that love their method more than they love the mission will die. Click To Tweet
4. Are we on top of the constant change in our culture?
While you’re studying your strategy, you might also want to study culture. It’s changing, radically and quickly.
I believe when historians look back on our generation, they will see it as a crack in history. We now live in a post-Christian, post-modern world. That’s true in Canada. It’s increasingly true in the United States.
In my experience, many of us in church leadership don’t really grasp the enormity of the change going on around us.
Change is hard. But irrelevance is even harder. Unimplemented change becomes regret.
Change is hard. But irrelevance is even harder. Unimplemented change becomes regret. Click To Tweet
5. When was the last time I personally invited someone to church?
This is a tough one.
The reality is many Christians, for a variety of reasons, don’t actually spend time with that many non-Christians.
Sometimes it’s fear based. That’s a shame, because Jesus seemed to like outsiders even better than insiders. He had no problem hanging around people who didn’t want to hang out at church. Jesus had no problem loving people who didn’t yet love him.
Sometimes it’s calendar based. The church runs so many programs that Christians are at church 5-7 nights a week. You don’t have time to build relationships with anyone outside, let alone be a family. That’s why at our church, we only do community group one night a week. For the rest, we want our people to be home with their families as well as involved in local sports leagues, involved in their local schools and active in the community building friendships with people Jesus loves but who never attend church.
Sometimes it’s just a practical issue. If you’re on church staff, unchurched people rarely ask you for time. Churched people call you all day long and ask for your time and attention. And so you find yourself so absorbed with the work of the church that you miss the mission of the church.
If almost no one at your church knows any unchurched people, it’s no mystery why your church isn’t growing.
So why not go build some real friendships? And before you say we should be ‘in the world but not of it’, please read the Gospels again.
Jesus had no problem loving people who didn’t yet love him.Click To Tweet
Want To Reach More People? Last Day to Get Special Pricing On the Church Growth Masterclass
Getting a stuck church growing, or helping a church that’s reaching new people grow even further can seem daunting.
It doesn’t have to be.
Whether you’re a church that isn’t growing, has plateaued, or whether you wish your church was growing faster than it is, I’d love to help you break through. That’s why I created the Church Growth Masterclass.
The Church Growth Masterclass is everything I wish I knew about church growth when I got into ministry more than 20 years ago.
Naturally, I can’t make a church grow. You can’t make a church grow. Only God can do that.
But I believe you can position your church to grow.
You can knock down the barriers that keep you from growing. You can eliminate the things that keep your church from growing and implement some strategies that will help you reach far more people. That’s what I’d love to help you do in the Church Growth Masterclass.
In the Church Growth Masterclass I’ll show you:
The 10 reasons your church isn’t growing
Why even committed church-goers aren’t attending as often as before
How to tell if your church leaders are getting burned out
The 5 keys to your church better impacting millennials.
What to do when a church wants to grow … but not change
5 essentials for church growth
5 disruptive church trends to watch—and how to respond
How to increase church attendance by increasing engagement.
The Masterclass includes a complete set of videos that you can play with your team, board or staff, PDF workbooks that will help you tackle the issues you’re facing, and bonus materials that will help you navigate the most pressing issues facing churches that want to reach their cities today.
Hurry…and get special introductory pricing before it disappears in a few days.
You can learn more and gain instant access to the course today.
Got Any Questions You’d Ask?
There are probably some other questions you’d ask too. I’d love you to add to this list in the comments section.
So how about you? What questions have you asked when your church has stopped growing?
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Source: 5 Key Questions You Should Ask If Your Church Isn’t Growing