Church Wheel Spinning
Part 2 of my Why Isn't Church Working Anymore? series.
I’ve spent 30 years watching church leaders lead. Even as a 13-year-old, I noticed how my priest seemed to wander at about the 15-minute mark of his sermon and how the congregation disengaged from what he was saying. I even timed it on my stopwatch and, sure enough, around the 15-minute mark, off he went. I confidently went to his house, introduced myself, and pointed this out to him while he was still standing in his doorway. He laughed at the exuberance of youth and probably ignored what I had to say. 10/10 for observation, 0/10 for delivery on my part.
I never stopped observing, though.
Here are four wheel church -spinning observations:
Leaders burn out or get frustrated that things aren’t working the way they’d hoped.
Leaders try to fix this with task prioritization.
Leaders continue to try to address their frustration with spiritual formation or by doing less.
When none of the above seems to work, something has to give.
I started some of those insights here, and after being exhorted by a friend over a long coffee to continue sharing some of my key insights, I’ve unpacked the four trends below. I hope my delivery has improved in 30 years 😉.
The building is on fire
Unfortunately, the place to start is where leaders are at, which is in big trouble and generally on the verge of burnout. When the New York Times is writing about pastors burning out, it’s also an issue that has become pervasive in society. Given the NYT was also writing about it in 2010, it means we’re not solving the problem either.
Clip Time: 5 mins, interview time 49 minutes
1) The stats on burnout and the state of the church
The Barna Group said in 2022 that 43% of pastors in the US were considering quitting full-time ministry. You can read a collation of older pastor stress statistics here with citations. Barna and other studies say that around 3/10 of pastors remain in ministry until they retire.
The Western church is also in a statistical state of free fall, which, excluding a holy intervention, is mathematically irreversible, according to Barna. A third of church-going Americans never came back to church after the pandemic. You can hear more about that below in an interview with Michael Graham and Jim Davis: What ‘The Great Dechurching’ Means for Church Leaders..
Time: 46 minutes
The World Health Organization defines burnout as: a syndrome conceptualized as resulting from chronic workplace stress that has not been successfully managed. It is characterized by three dimensions: feelings of energy depletion or exhaustion; increased mental distance from one’s job, or feelings of negativism or cynicism related to one's job; and reduced professional efficacy.
The first reaction I’ve observed among church leaders to burnout seems to be to push the afterburner harder. That either leads to adrenal fatigue or the realization of the need to change.
Carey Nieuwhof has done some good work on burnout. He’s also written two books, Didn’t See it Coming and At Your Best.
Video Time: 1 hour
2) Big rock theory as a solve for burnout
One of the main ways I saw leaders try to change was in the issue of prioritization which turned up in a thing which became known as your “Big Rock priorities” in one church I was in . This was taken from Stephen Covey and the work he did on highly effective people. So, while the below video from 1994 looks dated, the visual display is very powerful.
Video Time: 4 mins
Where the well-known illustration gets more complicated is when we decide what big rocks (priorities) should even be in the jar in the first place. As Covey said, “The main thing is to keep the main thing the main thing.” The challenge came in trying to define what the main thing actually was.
Reordering our lives for the sake of filling the “jar without it overflowing” doesn’t didn’t necessarily mean leaders were doing the most effective things.
The Big Rock Theory is often done in isolation, where leaders don’t consider the people and organizational elements which are involved in leading in a church, they just try and take a rational and logical approach to ordering their private world.
However, I’ve observed that there were still existential questions leaders had which weren’t being answered.
3) Spiritual formation: maybe less is more?
Another trend that tried to address some of these questions was the focus on spiritual formation in the charismatic churches I have been involved in. One of the people to popularize this was John Ortberg who asked Dallas Willard, “What do I need to do to be spiritually healthy?” and was given the response, “You must ruthlessly eliminate hurry from your life.”
John wrote referenced this in the book The Life You've Always Wanted and then John Mark Comer who was mentored by Ortberg also addressed the quote in a book of his own: The Ruthless Elimination of Hurry. He burnt out on after writing and promoting the book (the irony).
The book was widely circulated amongst circles I was in and studied in detail to try and solve some of the challenges facing leaders. You can hear Ortberg and Comer talk about the concept in the video below.
Video Time: 15 mins
The trend was largely a reaction in my mind to the Big Rock Theory. What wasn’t being solved was the need for margin and momentum in leaders lives and there was still a sense of going around the mountain on some of these existential questions.
So, if we could not solve the issues by ordering our tasks, lets try and eliminate some of them and live life at a slower pace.
4) The burnout bomb hits 0:00
a. Implosions
Living at a slower pace didn’t change the pressure points at play or answer all the questions either. When leaders have been through several attempts to shift the pressure they are under, there is always a risk that one of the results is that they implode as regularly featured in places like the Roys Report. That’s a whole topic on its own which you’re welcome to study.
b. Reinvent church
I spent 10 years in church plants and one of the things they did was try to re-invent church. It was honestly an exhausting and inefficient process, which bore little fruit.
Comer tried a similar approach when he decided to fundamentally re-think church and tried to shift his megachurch Bridgetown from a Sunday meeting focused church to having mid-week homegroups around a meal as the central focus.
While Comer was ultimately successful, the monumental effort it took to shift the culture of a megachurch of thousands of people took its toll and Comer handed over his church started the non-profit, Practising the Way. He is also now teacher in residence at Vintage Church LA and hopes to start a monastery at some point.
Video Time: 1 hour 25 mins
c. Start again
People often ask me why I left church planting and the most succinct answer I can give is this: all of the church plants I was in or who were in the network had 50 people in a meeting after 10 years and the pastors of the church had to find full time work.
There were two church splits in the network and all of the churches involved dismissed elders, flattened deacon structures and battled with maintaining sound theological teaching and external accountability. And so we moved on.
Sometimes starting again has real value. Jon Tyson left the church he was leading, Trinity Grace Church in New York, to start Church of the City. There’s not a lot of out there around why Tyson left a church he planted that grew to 11 sites in 10 years (on the surface, an amazing success story), but the most I’ve heard him speak about it is in this podcast.
The short answer seems to be Tyson grew into a conviction about church that the leaders/culture of Trinity Grace didn’t share. Unlike Comer, he decided not to try and shift the culture of the church he was in, but to start again.
Since he started Church of the City, Tyson has started a number of ministries around men, a prayer initiative and a church movement, called the Awaken Network.
Video Time: 21 mins
Series: Why Isn’t Church Working Anymore?
Part 1: Why Isn’t Church Working Anymore?
Part 2: Church Wheel Spinning (This post)
Part 3: Systemic Church Challenges
Part 4: What Actually Shifts the Needle in Church Leadership?
Great Article If you could redo it again and relaunch a church how would you do it different?