Mar 20, 2018
by John J. Pethtel
Chances are you don’t want 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. What was effective before has stopped being effective now. A malaise sets in that’s difficult to describe. What do you do?
One of the best things any leader can do when he is 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 you can ask when your church stops growing:
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 souls 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 of its mission.
2. Are we focused on unchurched people or on ourselves?
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.
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. It may even need to shift faster than that.
How do you tell if your strategy is dated or needs to be evaluated? When it stops being
effective.
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. We now live in a post-Christian, post-modern world. That’s true in Canada. It’s increasingly true in the United States. Churches need to grasp the enormity of the hole that the church leaves in culture by not knowing it or speaking into it.
5. When was the last time I personally invited someone to church?
Ouch! The reality is many Christians, for a variety of reasons, don’t actually spend time with that many non-Christians. There are many excuses why.
But if almost no one at your church knows any unchurched people, it’s no mystery why your church isn’t growing. Go where people are. Love them. Engage them where they are. Invite them to know Christ the way that you know Him. Encourage them to belong to the community that you have in your local church.
