Sit in enough staff meetings and the same sentence eventually surfaces.
Group sign-ups are flat. Serving teams are thin. Giving is not keeping pace with the budget. Attendance has gone soft, and the people you counted on six years ago now show up twice a month.
Then somebody says it out loud. “People just aren’t as committed anymore.”
Everyone nods because it feels true, and the meeting moves on to the next agenda item.
I have sat in that meeting, and I have led that meeting. For a long time, I accepted the diagnosis, largely because the diagnosis let everyone in the room off the hook.
Run the Test Before You Accept the Diagnosis
Write down the behaviors you want from your congregation this year. Most churches are asking for some version of four things:
- Attend consistently
- Get in a group
- Serve somewhere
- Give generously
That list is already in your sermons, your online bulletin, your membership class, and your fall campaign. You have said it so many times that you probably stopped hearing it.
The Room Where the Complaint Started
Now apply that same list to the people who were sitting in the room when the complaint was made. Your staff. Your elders. Your core volunteers. The ones setting the culture, whether or not you ever assigned them that job.
Three questions will tell you almost everything:
How many are in a group they did not start and do not lead?
How many serve outside their own department?
How many give a percentage of their income to the church that pays them?
Most pastors have never asked. Some have quietly decided they would rather not know, which is understandable and also expensive.
Your church will not out-commit its leadership.
Moral Authority Cannot Be Manufactured
Moral authority is permission to ask. You earn it by going first, and you spend a little of it each time you make a request.
It does not transfer from your title, and it does not accumulate through study. A sermon cannot create it, and a well-run campaign cannot cover its absence.
Your people are reading the gap between what you preach and what you practice, and to some extent, they are reading it accurately. They have more data than you think. They see who is at the serve day and who sent a text about the serve day.
When you stand up and ask the church to join a group, the congregation hears one of two things. They hear a leader describing his own life, or they hear a program pitch from somebody with a Sunday quota. They can tell which one they are getting, and so can your staff.
You Are Building the Consumers You Complain About
What the Building Learns From the Front Row
Consumerism usually gets blamed on the culture, and the culture certainly helps. Your leadership team finishes the job.
When the people closest to the mission participate the least, you are operating an audience with a payroll. Everyone in the building learns the actual expectation by watching the front row. Show up when it is your turn to be on stage. Give when there is a campaign. Serve inside your job description, and only inside your job description.
That becomes the standard your church absorbs, no matter what the membership class says.
The Multiplier Nobody Planned
Every unengaged staff member is a live demonstration that engagement is optional. One of those is a personnel conversation. Twenty of those is a discipleship strategy running against you full-time, funded out of your own budget.
The math is unkind here. Your engagement systems can only carry people as far as your leaders have already gone, because structure amplifies whatever example is already in the room.
Run It This Week
Here is the move, and it takes one meeting.
- Write down three behaviors you are asking your church to adopt this year. Three, not eight. If you cannot name them in under five minutes, that is your first finding and it has nothing to do with commitment.
- Take the list to your next staff meeting. Not to an offsite. Not to a retreat you will schedule in the fall when things settle down, which they will not.
- Answer first, out loud. Name where you are participating and where you are not. If you go second, this turns into an audit and people start managing their answers instead of giving them.
- Go around the room, then name what changes and set a date. Somebody joins a group this month. Somebody starts serving in student ministry in September. Somebody begins giving in October. A change without a date is a feeling.
One caution. Do not send this as a survey. Anonymity protects the problem, and you did not call the meeting to protect the problem.
Some of your team will be relieved that you finally asked. A few will not be, and that tells you something you needed to know anyway.
The Fastest Win Available to You This Year
Think about what you would otherwise spend the next two years doing. Better group launch systems. A cleaner serving pipeline. A generosity campaign with real production value behind it.
Those are good investments, and they will still cap out at the level your leaders are living. You will spend two years and a meaningful portion of your budget lifting a ceiling you could have raised in a ninety minute meeting.
The alternative costs no money and no calendar space. A dozen people decide to do what they have been asking three hundred people to do, and the ceiling moves that same month.
Your church has been waiting to see whether you meant it. Write the three. Take them Tuesday.
Quotes to Share
- “Your church will not out-commit its leadership.”
- “Moral authority is permission to ask. You earn it by going first, and you spend it every time you make the request.”
- “Structure amplifies whatever example is already in the room.”
Helping You Add More Intention To Your Mission,
Dr. Gavin Adams
