No Quick Fixes

When seeking to help a dysfunctional, or even a dying, church, the first and last thing to do is pray. Because, if you are the one God has called to help such a church, you will need all the power God will give you. (For sake of this conversation, I'm assuming I'm talking to the minister of a congregation; elders, and other leaders, can also benefit from the orientation and practices mentioned in this entry). Having prayed, and remaining in prayer throughout, church leaders need to understand that there will be no quick fixes in turning a church around.

I can think of several reasons why this is true. First, it has probably taken years for the church to get to where it is now and like a family with years of life together, it will not unwind overnight. Second, whatever is going on in the life of the church will be complex. While there may be only one real issue (and there always is and it is the same issue [see below]) at the heart of what is causing the church to be dis-eased, it will be layered over, like an onion, with lesser issues, concerns, and distractions. The third, and one of the most perplexing problems, is that church will have a hard time telling the truth about itself to itself. The last reason I mention now is that there will be key players in the life of the church who are rewarded by the status quo and will make counter moves to keep it so. As you will learn, sabotage is simply a part of the cloth of leadership.

Several years ago, I read Peter Wagner's The Healthy Church (Ventura, CA: Regal, 1996). Wagner made up some playful names for church pathologies found often enough in most churches today. These diseases included

1. Ethnikitis
2. Ghost-town Disease
3. People-Blindness
4. Sociological strangulation
5. Koinonitis
6. Hyper-Cooperativism
7. Arrested Development
8. St. John's Syndrome (lukewarmness)
9. Hypopneumia

Wagner was useful in calling certain experiences in the life of the church sickness. However, diagnosis is one thing, the cure another.

Having served a variety of congregations over the years, I have come to see that there is usually one major malady from which churches suffer. The lack of self-differentiation (I will define this more as we explore the nature of leadership in the life of the church) on the part of the leaders, whether the minister, the board of elders, or lay leaders. This means that leaders in sick churches have lost the ability to take clearly defined stands and they wave like a flag in the wind. To take a stand threatens to rock the boat and the sicker the church, the more it avoids rocking the boat and furthermore the more important it seems not to rock the boat. (This, of course, is just the opposite from the truth).

In this context, it is hard for any leader to be a self. If God has called you to serve in a hurting church, and you really desire to help that church, then understand that it's recovery will be closely tied to your ability to take unpopular positions without pushing people into agreeing with you but at the same time without giving ground either. My thesis, then, assuming that you are the one God has called to work within the context of a needy church, is that your success or failure will be depend on your ability to take clearly defined stands without becoming reactive. Remember, there are no quick fixes because it took a long time for the church to get here and it will take time for your "non-anxious" presence to begin to affect (hopefully, infect) those around you.

It takes a lot of courage for a church to confess it needs help, and for the record, a church will not if the leaders lack the courage to confess their own participation in the church's current situation. While a bit of an overstatement, but not much of one: a sick church will have a sick leadership (team or individual). Edwin Friedman (Generation to Generation: Family Process in Church and Synagogue, Guildford Press, 1985) has well stated that the health of a church (or any organization for that matter) will depend on the two or three leaders at the top. This means that if the two or three most influential members do not work hard at having an open, honest, and transparent relationships, then you are not likely to find open, honest, and transparent relationships in the church.

As a turnaround leader, your primary job will be to facilitate that open, honest, and transparent conversation the church desperately needs. You will do that best by stating clearly where you stand while remaining connected to the body.