4 WARNING SIGNS FOR CHURCHES IN TROUBLE

Most of us love lists.  The 50 Greatest.... or Your 100 favourite....I am a minister. I also work with churches (Anglican, Baptist, Free and others) and para-church bodies to help them to overcome obstacles and to find new direction for growth. If asked, most of us could come up with a list of pitfalls for churches to avoid. Here are just 4 from my perspective. They are not exhaustive, nor would I claim them to be ‘right’. But if they help you to reflect critically and constructively on your church or charity then maybe they will serve a useful purpose.

1.  Finance is at the top, or near the top, of every agenda

This cleverly masquerades as sound management or good stewardship.

Now, of course, churches should manage their affairs well. But elevating money to the prime position then defines all other matters in relation to it. It is then finance rather than faith and vision that shapes what can or cannot be attempted. In this kind of agency, the treasurer – and quite often the other trustees too – will see themselves as custodians of limited funds rather than those who resource the church's work. They bury their one talent in the ground out of the fear of loss because they do not really believe that God will provide more.
 
There is another insidious outcome of putting money first.  The trustees and the church will come to believe that the church’s assets are those listed on the balance sheet of the charity rather than the total of all Christ’s assets held in trust by the members (income, houses, savings, cars, household goods).  What in our programmes would not be possible if we used that as our gauge rather than the few thousands held in a bank account in the church’s name?

Monitor your finances but make sure the financial report on the agenda comes way below what the church is actually here for: discipleship, mission and community.

2.       The church has more meetings than new disciples of Christ.

Jesus could not have made it any clearer. We exist to love God and to love others as we love ourselves. We are to help others to find and to follow his way. Writer G.K. Chesterton wrote, “The church is the only institution that exists solely for the benefit of non-members.” Jesus connected with those on the outside and those who follow him do the same.  

However, if too much energy is focused on internal gatherings and processes rather than spending time building friendships with people outside the church then how can we truly say that we are following him?
 

3.       There are too many ‘Safe Pairs of Hands’

In a great many churches you will find key voluntary leadership roles filled by people who are thought to be ‘Safe Pairs of Hands.’  They get the work done.  They are dependable and unflappable and the backbone of the church. They keep the machinery of church and para-church agencies well-oiled.  They chair committees and help the church to steer a sensible course. They produce decisions, properly made with proposers and seconders, leading to crisp sets of minutes.  They are usually good people.

The downside of having ‘Safe Pairs of Hands’ in key positions is that their churches will tend to end up serving internal processes rather than living as a counter-cultural guerrilla movement co-operating with the invasion of Jesus in society.  They pursue moderation. No one rocks the boat.  Any new idea is seen as too risky or even dangerous. The main 'opposition' to new direction in churches comes from the comfortable and confident.

Get the ‘Safe Pairs of Hands’ out of the key seats. They are often a sign of a slow death to a missional church.  Embrace the messy and uncertain. If these ‘Safe’ people really are effective, get them working on the front line of mission rather than a back-office function.

4.       We prize church as it has been over church as it needs to be now

Throughout history the church has been reinvented from time to time, to be able to speak the unchanging truth of the good news about Jesus to a changing society and culture.  However, much of what people prize in our churches and how they gather and act is relatively recent.

A worrying number of people continue to believe that we are just one more prayer meeting away from ‘revival’.  Revival, in their minds, means a wholesale conversion of the nation to being followers of Christ, when our churches will once again be full (they almost never were in the past, by the way), filled with people who end up looking and thinking like us.

Spoiler alerts!  I do not know what God will do, except that I am clear that he will not be compelled to do just what we demand.  And sometimes he chooses to allow his followers to face exile, powerlessness and even extinction (Have a read in the Old Testament before you tell me that I’m wrong.  Or the Methodist Church and the Salvation Army, now just a decade or so away from disappearing from the UK?).

On the wall of a church I visited last year was a poster with a slogan claiming to be a Puritan saying:  “The task of the church in every generation is to discover what the Sovereign Lord is doing and to join in.”   

Anything else, however useful or loved it has been in the past, is baggage. We must be willing to leave it behind.

If this article has raised questions about how your church can avoid some of the more common pitfalls, why not contact me for a conversation about how I can help?   There's a link through here:  www.parsonking.co.uk