Systemic Church Challenges

Part 3 of the Why Isn’t Church Working Anymore? Series.

Credit: Patrick Fore on Unsplash

This post will cover three key systemic areas: why the later stages of faith aren’t a good fit for current church models, pastors’ no-man’s land, and the need for organizational skill sets within the church.

Here’s why these issues are systemic and important. Historically, Christianity flourishes when it is the minority or under persecution and when Christians focus more on how they love the people around them than on what being part of a church body looks like.

One only has to look at the progress of the early church, growing from a small group of people to around half the Roman Empire by the mid-fourth century. Another example is the Chinese Church, which grew from less than a million after World War 2 to over 100 million in 2020.

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Series: Why Isn’t Church Working Anymore?

Part 1: Why Isn’t Church Working Anymore?
Part 2: Church Wheel Spinning
Part 3: Systemic Church Challenges (This post)
Part 4: What Actually Shifts the Needle in Church Leadership?

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Therefore, while Christians have flourished when loosely being part of an organic expression of faith in trying circumstances, when the churches they belong to try to formalize and operate at scale, things really get tricky. Let’s break it down.

Organizational issues distract from discipleship

Churches have four focal groups of people:

a) The new believer: people who have just found Christianity.

b) The transferring believer: people looking for a new church.

c) The committing believer: someone who will attend more activities, like prayer meetings or home groups.

d) The volunteering believer: a person who commits to volunteering or leading activities.

However, this group of people largely falls into the first half of the journey of spiritual development.

As I’ve mentioned before, John Mark Comer notes that people of a certain grouping (older with kids) don’t seem to be enjoying church anymore. He references a piece of work called The Critical Journey: Stages in the Life of Faith. Comer breaks it down in this hyperlinked clip below entitled: Why Church is Underwhelming.

Clip Time: 15 mins, interview time: 1 hour 34 minutes.

The people who are opting out of church

The Stages of Faith model breaks the Christian Walk into six stages, and Comer argues that the first three work particularly well for the believers who: are new; are in home groups and volunteer or are leading. The remaining three stages — 4. The Inward Journey, 5. The Outward Journey, and 6. The Life of Wisdom—are all more reflective stages.

Comer thinks that most people attending local churches are in stage 1-3. Many people in stages 4-6 are generally opting out of church.

There are strong correlations with James Fowler’s Stages of Faith and Robert Kegan’s theory of adult cognitive development. This also aligns with the transition from fluid to crystallized intelligence as unpacked in the below clip. Here Arthur Brooks explains the two types of intelligence and how our brains change in mid-life. Fluid intelligence is a problem solving, purpose driven kind of outlook. Crystalised intelligence involves application of knowledge and wisdom around choice making. This kind of intelligence is shown in stages 4-6.

Clip Time: 5 mins, video time: 60 minutes.

What’s effectively happening is that the people best suited to running discipleship (stages 4-6) and answering the harder questions of faith are not hanging around in church anymore.

In an organizational attempt to meet the needs of the four focal groups of people, leaders haven’t been able to give much attention to these groups of people who have deeper questions.

Let’s unpack this further…

Pastors caught in the triangle of no man’s land

What the four focal groups of people has done is lead some pastors into a no-man’s-land triangle made up of:

a) The new sheep

In one corner, we have new believers who are just coming to grips with the gospel or may need a metaphorical hospital given what they got saved out of. They are new on their journey and need care.

b) The experienced campaigner with strong opinions

In the other corner, we have the experienced church attendee. In the other corner, we have the experienced church attendee. This is the person is found in group d) above. These people have generally bought into the organizational structure and model of their church and range from well-intentioned people to those who have very firm opinions about what the optimal church experience should look like.

c) The pastor trying to be in the 30% of pastors who finish strong

The third point of no-man’s-land consists of the needs of the pastors, who have families, sermon prep to do, church administration needs, and ministry decisions to make.

This leaves pastors caught in the middle between the people they are trying to help, their ministry responsibilities, and their leadership responsibilities.

As a result, demands invariably exceed resources, and pastors implode, burn out, or find other jobs, with only 3 in 10 finishing their careers as pastors. Refer back to what I wrote here.

Running churches as organizations

My carefully constructed breadcrumb trail is designed to lead you, dear reader, to the above uncomfortable headline. We need to separate out organizational responsibility and spiritual responsibility to free pastors up and give them more margin and reduce their workload,

Running churches as organizations can be off putting for many believers. When we think about organizations, we often think about companies we have worked for, bad bosses, shareholders sucking value out of businesses etc and then we think surely, we can’t bring that into the church. It’s one of the reasons we think about church in family metaphors, even though we have ample evidence that churches as organizations are complicated.

Let’s now throw the baby out with the bathwater though. In terms of good organizational model, if you’ve ever been to a restaurant with great waiters, been well looked after by a team of air hostesses, found a company with fantastic customer service etc. you have experienced well architectured organizations, which have the right skillsets in the right places.

One of the best people to talk about this is Horst Shulze. He has written the book Excellence Wins and if you go an listen to him talk about customer service and his faith across multiple podcasts, you’ll get a real sense of what I am talking about here. Shulze shows how the correct application of skillset and getting the details right for the people we are serving makes a massive difference in any organization. In the below clip, he talks about how he launched the most highly rated hostels in the world in the clip below.

Clip Time: 5 mins, interview time: 1 hour 30 minutes.

Most pastors aren’t trained in this way

The challenge for most pastors is they’re not trained in organizational structure or best practice, they’re trained in things like preaching, counselling, and theology. And when pastors are stuck in “no man’s land”, its hard to see the wood from the trees in trying to figure this stuff out.

Managing a small church with several hundred thousand to a few million is one thing. But I was looking at a megachurch in America’s audited financials across multiple sites (they publish them on their website). The annual budget was US$76.5 million or R1.4 billion, not including assets.

The practical reality is that megachurch-sized organizations require leaders with executive experience (CEO, COO, CFO, etc.) and employees with strong skills in finance, HR, project management, event planning, hospitality, etc. Whether churches employ these skillsets or ask them to share their knowledge and even volunteer, they really do need them involved.

Unfortunately, not a lot of churches of size are run with employees with strong organizational skill sets, and small churches don’t have the budgets for such staff.

Birds eye view

In the case of the pastor caught in no-man’s-land or in the case of churches that are wheel spinning, there’s a simple phrase from business that I’ve found very useful to create perspective: does doing X shift the needle or not? If not, then we need to stop doing it.

This means getting out of the no-man’s-land triangle and really coming to grips with the things that will create margin (time, capacity) and momentum for the pastors, staff, and volunteers. Jesus showed the way here by primarily focusing much of his time on a few people who would radically impact the kingdom as opposed to the general masses.

Video time: 1 hour and 15 minutes. Craig Groeshel talks about how he repositioned himself in leadership to get more perspective.

When we consider Acts 6, we see that there was a need to do things differently, and the likes of Stephen and Philip were appointed to solve a resource problem. The key thing here is that the people were chosen for their wisdom and being full of the Spirit.

There’s another great verse talking about the leaders who came to David at Hebron in 1 Chronicles 12:32: from Issachar, men who understood the times and knew what Israel should do—200 chiefs.

Here’s the kicker: the people with more wisdom are generally the people in stages 4-6 of the stages of faith who are opting out of church! (I also tackled some of their frustrations here.)

What I’m therefore advocating for is for pastors to take stock of where they are at, what is working and what isn’t and what skillsets can help them reposition on some of these issues.

There are many directions to go from here in future posts, but here are some questions to end off.

1. How much time do church leaders spend dialoguing with organizational specialists who have wisdom, are full of the Spirit, understand the times, and know what to do?

2. How does the church to rekindle cross-generational discipleship?

3. Could the church benefit from less focus on program-driven, attractional models of church which take up headspace and target believers in stages 1-3, for more effective ways of building more effective community in the body of Christ?

4. How can we leverage people with organizational (marketplace) skill sets in the running of churches?

5. What forums can we create to dialogue these issues to separate the wood from the trees?