How the Church can Thrive in an Uncertain Future.
I.e. Your guide for leadership success in an uncertain world.
The future of the church in the West has never been more uncertain. The combination of rapid secularization, tectonic shifts around gender and sexuality, and the politicization of nearly everything in society have emptied churches around the country. Most of the churches we speak with report that attendance has shrunk by 40% relative to pre-pandemic numbers. Some pastors still pine for the glory days when dynamic preaching and a good band could fill an auditorium. Others have been so demoralized by the changes that they have quit ministry altogether or at least strongly considered it.
Regardless of where you or your church fall on those spectrums, there is no question that this is the most complex time to be a pastor in perhaps all of church history. Pastors have to navigate online services, local and state COVID regulations, political partisanship, complicated questions around sexual and gender ethics, ongoing racial angst, and all of this on top of the normal challenges that churches have faced for decades. People didn’t stop gossiping, lying, cheating on their spouses, and needing discipleship; these challenges have simply been layered on top of an already demanding job.
It reminds me of the Jim Gaffigan joke about having four kids: “Just imagine you're drowning and then someone hands you a baby.” These last few years have been tough, to say the least, but the future doesn’t look any easier.
So how do we respond? How should our churches adapt and move forward into this new reality? The Context Leadership Group was founded in part to answer this very question. We work with churches large and small across the country to help answer this question and provide solutions for forward-thinking churches.
All of this has been the focus of our work for the last several years. We are learning every day because the world is constantly changing. As we learn, we are writing about it so that we can be a resource for you and your church.
The six ideas we’ll outline in this blog series are ways that your church can be prepared to thrive in the cultural environment that we are facing. Before diving in, here is our caveat. God is in control, God decides what churches grow and do not grow, and God saves and disciples people. We believe that. But we have still been given the responsibility to steward our churches to be as effective as possible. As Augustine (or Ignatius) possibly said, “We need to pray like it’s all up to God and work like it’s all up to us.”
We know how this sounds, but we all just have to get better. We can no longer be mediocre at any of the things we do at church and expect to see the same results. For a long time, just having open doors and a denominational affiliation meant you would have a church. It didn’t matter if you preached well-crafted sermons or the music was terrible, you just had to be there and others would join you. This is no longer the case.
Most of us have done ministry in a cultural environment where church membership was baked into the system. Until 2020, the majority of the United States attended worship services on a regular basis. So in that environment, those who could do it best grew. It’s kind of like bookstores. For a long time, the only place you could get a book was at a bookstore, so the stores with the most options, lowest prices and best location were usually the most successful. Then Amazon came along and changed all that. Now bookstores have to win by competing directly with Amazon online (bad idea), serving some niche or making the experience of going to a bookstore into something desirable enough to overcome the fact that they have fewer options, higher prices, and a fixed location.
We can’t assume people are just going to show up at our churches anymore. What’s more, when they do show up, we should not assume that they will come back. Everything we do has to improve: preaching, music, pastoral care, children’s ministry, and so on. We have to earn a hearing; we have to earn commitment. We have to demonstrate to people that being a part of our church will actually bring about the joy and fulfillment that they desire. We have to show them that our community is one where all people will be known and loved, a community where people can thrive.
Some of you are fired up by this idea, and others are either feeling crushed by it or are rationalizing it away. Choose the first, if you can. Rationalizing the status quo isn’t going to help anyone, especially not your church. You will simply see a continued dwindling of participation, attendance, and ultimately giving. Those of you who feel crushed by the weight of this, take heart! No one is saying that you have to be somebody other than yourself. No one is saying that you have to have all of these things wired up like some megachurch. We just have to get better.
Don’t settle for mediocre. Expect better from yourself and those around you. Cut ministries, meetings, or initiatives that are not essential but take up valuable resources so that you can stay focused on what has the highest impact. Build a lean staff that can execute everything you need to do with excellence and joy. Focus on what matters most and don’t get distracted. Think about what your people (and their friends) really need right now and deliver it as well as you can.
This is the hardest of the five strategies so I wanted to get it out of the way. This will sound difficult, or even impossible, but you have so much potential that isn’t being tapped yet, and so does your church. Hold yourself to a higher standard and you will see that potential realized. Much of the improvement that you need to see will result from simply raising your expectations. When was the last time you thought through every aspect of your church and asked, “How can we get better?” This is the time to do just that.
If you don’t know what it looks like to get better or you don’t know how to take the next step, get a coach or a consultant to come in and help. We built the Context Leadership Group for exactly this reason. We are experienced pastors and leaders who have spent most of our lives leading churches from 0 to 5000 people. We all need to level up, and we are here to help.
