Three Reasons Churches Resist Change

We often hear that people resist change. I’m not sure that’s entirely accurate.

We’ll tackle that partial truth another time. For now, let’s focus on why pastors and churches are so resistant to change.

Some Background:

Every organization (church, business, non-profit, and all the others) struggles with change. Change moves people from a state of known to a place of unknown. Known is comfortable, and the unknown is far from it. Organizations exist because leaders need to bring order to the chaos of creative activities. Order allows for scale and predictability, all of which are essential. The bringing of order created the organization and simultaneously slowed the creative, leadership elements of change. This happens in every organization, but for churches, it seems worse.

Obviously, a complete lack of order isn’t the answer. Churches need order. The cyclical nature of what we do (is it already Sunday?) requires organizing our work, staff, and volunteers. This is a tension: Order produces resistance to change because change provokes disorder in the organization.

That’s a problem that desperately needs a solution. The church is the hope of the world. We’ve been given the saving message of the Gospel to share and spread across the globe. But the world is continuously in a state of change. Culture changes. Openness to truth changes. Consumerism has changed how people look at products, organizations, and churches. Expressive individualism has changed our response to authority (like God and his church). Moving from a Christian to post-Christian culture has dramatically affected the church. There are generational effects.

These current changes aren’t the only changes that we’ll face. These are just the recent changes. There’s more on the way, because change is the only constant in life (that’s from the ancient Greek philosopher, Heraclitus – 500 BC). If the world we serve is ever-changing, that leaves us with only one choice:

Only a church capable of changing can maintain influence in an ever-changing world.

Why do churches resist change?

The One Challenge Facing Every Church

I’ve decided to start something new. If you don’t mind, here’s some quick background and an announcement of sorts. First, some background. A decade ago, I stood in the North Point Community Church hallway, watching thousands of church leaders walking to the parking lot. Our DRIVE Conference had just concluded. Inspired, encouraged, and probably challenged, […]

3 Reasons You Should Learn From People Different Than You

Here’s a questions I’m working through:

Does the breadth of your learning impact the depth of your learning?

I know… I think in tweets. But to say it a little less 140 character’ish: How much more could we learn by expanding the context of our education? And I don’t mean studying more people in your current industry. Granted, it’s not natural to study other industries and organizational leaders unlike us, but I think finding breadth could be a hidden ingredient to accelerated growth.

This idea hit me recently while at a conference. It was a great conference full of wonderful leaders – who I’ver heard from too many times to count. I saw an advertisement for another conference. Guess who was speaking? Basically the same people. Don’t get me wrong. I love and respect these leaders. They’re my mentors – some directly. But I wonder – does a homogenous learning community stunt growth at some point?

As a pastor, I primarily learn from other churches, church leaders, and church models. As a younger leader, that was a great place to start. Seeing other perspectives and approaches to church helped solidify how I wanted to create and lead a local church. There was great clarity found in watching those who were already doing it. Yet, the more comfortable I got as a leader in my church, the more critical I became of leaders in the church. I accidentally replaced learning with critiquing.

Of course, that’s not a healthy dynamic, but it is a natural progression. When we visit other organizations within our industry, we are hyper-critical of what we understand (or think we understand).

Unplugging the Microwave of Success

Have you heard the soundtrack to the hit broadway musical “Hamilton?” If you’ve seen the actual musical, just keep that to yourself — intentionally causing envy is tantamount to envy, itself.

The music is quite spectacular. And historically insightful, too. My kids are way more knowledgeable about the Founding Fathers due to our time in the car together. It makes me question everything about my school upbringing! Hip hop trumps note-taking all day long.

Production aside, Alexander Hamilton was quite an amazing guy. He accomplished much, including establishing one of the first banks in America, the Bank of New York. Here’s what made me take a step back while jamming along to the soundtrack — it took Hamilton seven years to establish the bank’s charter. I know, the local community bank went up in a months time, and that seemed like forever in today’s world, but think about that for a moment. Seven years. That’s a long time to focus on something. Anything.

The Multisite Mistake Nearly Every Church Makes

I love being a part of the multisite church movement. And it’s certainly a movement!

According to the most recent research I’ve seen, this movement in the church has grown from 100 to 8,000 since the year 2000. That’s explosive growth. All the cool kids are doing it, right?

Of course, with any rapidly growing phenomenon, there will be issues and problems to navigate. The multisite movement certainly isn’t immune to issues. We should probably come back to this topic a few more times, but for now, let’s take a moment and address one specific tension between existing locations and newer campuses.

For background, I am a Campus Pastor. We call it Lead Pastor, but that distinction deserves its own post. I’ve been leading at Woodstock City Church, a campus of North Point Ministries in Atlanta, for nearly seven years. In this time, we’ve experienced a great deal of change in attendance, meeting locations, and staff just to name a few. All along the way, one of the greatest tensions we’ve navigated was learning to act our age.

Here’s what I mean specifically.

6 Questions That Will Help Your Next Sermon Reach Everyone

This is about removing assumptions in our preaching and sermon content, so ironically, we need to begin with a few assumptions.

When you preach, I assume your hope is to reach every person in your audience, connect them all to a new way of thinking, and lead them all to apply a new way of living. That’s the basic idea preaching, right? Provide true information that compels helpful application.

If we hope to lead everyone in the room to the truth of our message, we must start by connecting everyone in the room to us and our message. That’s not a simple task.

For instance, if you only had an audience of one, developing a message that will accomplish your connecting goal would be relatively simple. To grasp where one person is in their faith, understanding of God, and engagement in a Christian worldview is likely. Not necessarily easy, but certainly possible.

With an audience of 10, the task gets more complicated — potentially 10 times more complicated in fact. A larger audience brings a larger diversity of backgrounds, understandings, willingness to believe, and willingness to apply ideas or new truths.

Grow the audience to 100, or 1,000, or 10,000, and the task gets exponentially more complex.

In the face of this complexity, there is one preaching mistake I see more than any other:

Too many sermons are crafted around unshared faith assumptions.

The One Church Leadership Mistake You Cannot Make

I bet you and your team have annual goals or focus points. It’s always healthy to have a few things in focus as the year begins. It’s like an organizational resolution, but much easier to keep. I recently saw Chick-fil-A’s organizational focus for 2018. One item on their list stood out — food safety. When […]

4 Steps to Not Overreact to the Disgruntled Attendee

As a leader you are forced to make decisions, and if your church or company is bigger than you, these decisions will inevitably be upsetting to someone. Decisions have a way of upsetting the status quo. In many cases, the lack of success or progress with the status quo is why decisions are necessary.

Not to oversimplify it, but when decisions are made, the response seems to come from two separate categories of people:

1. The vocal disgruntled
2. The quiet supporters

The first category causes us to question our decision. The response (at leas the vocal response) seems disproportionately in one direction. And this disproportionate response can be unnerving.

The second category really does bring balance to the conversation, but their quiet support doesn’t ring as loudly as the disgruntled.

Facing this seemingly unbalanced response, leaders begin to either question their decisions, or worse, seek to make decisions that are more “vocally” supported.

But vocal support can feel like an organizational oxymoron. You’ve never called your local pizza delivery chain to thank them for your delivery, but you might have called to complain when your pie is late. People never call our church to tell us we’re doing a great job, but they do call (or post on FaceBook, which is so much worse and socially unaware) to complain about a decision that creates an inconvenience.

So what should we do when the vocal disgruntled feels like the vast majority?

50 Shades of Theological Gray

How comfortable are you with theological unknowns? My church upbringing formed a belief system that did not allow for any theological variance. There was black and white and not much in between, and a “lukewarm” verse taken out of context was always used to substantiate the point. If you ever hinted at a middle ground […]

Could Your Growing Ministry be Responsible for Your Shrinking Passion?

What do you do when your pastoring passion is declining?

It happens to us all, so we better have some answers.

Unfortunately, too many of our answers involve walking away from ministry, from our current churches, and from even our families, friends, and ourself.

A loss of passion can happen for many, many reasons. I’d like for us to consider one of the most common and equally hidden of them all. I stumbled upon this truth a year or more ago. I was in a funk. I was partially questioning my role, my responsibilities, and even ministry as a profession. I considered reentering the marketplace. As I began contemplating how I arrived in the funk, I realized over time our church (and everything around it) had grown somewhat substantially. Initially, this realization didn’t connect any dots. But, it did begin to launch a discovery process.

To go back in time a bit… A few years ago we would have our staff meeting in my car on the way to lunch. We were a much smaller church with way fewer resources. The entire staff served as the president and the janitor. We were all needed for basically every element of ministry that happened in and through our church. As we grew, we added staff. We added complexity. We added complications. We added a building. Throughout the change, our roles and responsibilities also changed. As the Lead Pastor, I continued to function as the president, but the janitorial elements the I often did in the past faded away. We had other staff to handle some of the things I used to do.