Bert's Blog

Anticipation

Searching for the Silver Bullet? Don't

A few days ago Alice and I returned from a wonderful vacation . . . we kayaked, fished, read books, played golf, enjoyed kids and completed a few cabin projects as well.  It was a great couple of weeks of August weather and fun in Washington State.

And the old football coach noticed something . . . high school football practice was under way.  And of course, I stopped and watched for a while!  What surprised me was that practices today look a lot like they did when I was still coaching . . . over 30 years ago.  Yikes!

In the couple of practices I watched, the coaching theme was clear.  It’s all about fundamentals.  You want to win . . . then you have to be fundamentally sound. 

Interestingly, in football and in church there is no escaping the need to be good at the fundamentals.  Which brings me back to vulnerable churches – like struggling athletic programs, when churches begin to struggle they often look for a “silver bullet” . . . one trick play, if you will, that will turn everything around.  Unfortunately, there are no silver bullets – at least any that have long term value.

A few days ago I spoke with a colleague in another state – a master at taking churches that are stuck at a particular growth level or declining, and restoring effective missional momentum.  He said, “I receive calls regularly from some church’s leadership wanting help, but I end up helping very few.”  Okay, I had to ask the question: why don’t you end up helping more of them?

His answer?  “Mostly they are looking for a quick fix.  What I do, and what works, takes work . . . real hard work for the long haul.  They don’t want to do that.”  In my coaching terms, his answer is to win you’ve got to learn how to execute the fundamentals excellently and you’ve got practice those fundamentals over and over and over again.  In reality, you never get beyond the fundamentals: biblical integrity, obedience, evangelism, spiritual growth, prayer, Christ-like love, generosity, authenticity, worship . . . you get the idea.

It’s one of the messages to the seven churches in Revelation 2 – 3; they each strayed away from a fundamental or two, and they were each called back to them.  In fact, their ongoing lives as churches depended on it.  So do ours.

Developing Leadership . . . the "must do" of healthy churches

 Before we talk leadership, here’s a quote from the Summer 2009 Leadership Journal regarding interdependence, the topic of my last blog:

“We truly want to have an impact in our community, but too often we don’t achieve anything significant because we insist on doing everything ourselves.  We’re so caught up with our individual goals, agendas and projects that we forget how desperately we need each other.  Our impact is weakened because, like the world around us, Christians have succumbed to individualism.”

                                                Tullian Tchividjian, pastor, Coral Ridge Presbyterian,

Ft. Lauderdale, FL (Leadership Journal, p. 98)

Well, interdependence is indeed critical for healthy churches . . . it is the Body of Christ at work, after all.  And a constant, consistent and effective development of leadership would fall into that critical category as well.

Visits with vulnerable churches almost always reveal missing generations within the congregation and comparable missing generations of leadership.  Someone in a vulnerable church will often say it this way: “we’re down to two elders, and we have no prospects in the wings.”  When leadership gets that thin, vulnerability is almost always a characteristic of the church’s overall status.

This characteristic doesn’t grow over night.  It usually grows in churches that once had growing ministries and developing leaders.  However, upon arriving at a reasonable level of success, those leaders who had been moving the mission forward stopped doing the things that made them effective.  They began to simply ride those key elements, including leadership, which had been put in place during the growing period.  When that “ride” begins, ineffectiveness and its partner decline are not too far away. 

Too many seasons of the ride will create huge leadership and generational gaps in a church.  If existing long enough, those gaps will be nearly impossible to close.

The principle?  Good church leadership never stops doing, in principle, the things that made their church and its mission successful, and one of those keys is having generations of leadership always in development. 

Interdependence . . . a healthy church's friend

Wow!  Have I been delinquent on my blogging!  We’ve been up to our ears in vulnerable churches . . . trying to recover properties stolen by unscrupulous leaders, re-establishing corporate identities lost through carelessness, stopping a hostile takeover of facilities by a group that “only wanted to help.”  The good news, for our sanity at least, is that we’ve also been helping some of our healthy congregations discover new goals and strategies to become even healthier.

But back to the vulnerable.  One of the characteristics of those vulnerable groups we’ve been helping lately is that they become isolated . . . they become an island unto themselves . . . they become their own measure of health . . . and they eventually find leaders that want to keep them that way.  Over time, they become closed in terms of relationships with other churches, input from sources outside themselves and information that could expand their faith and improve the implementation of that faith.  In short, they become a closed system, the extreme expression of independence.  It seems with vulnerable churches, the unhealthier they grow, the more independent, and closed, they become.

The antidote?  Growing congregations and their leaders intentionally develop healthy relationships with other congregations and leaders that sustain Christian fellowship, mutual growth and a shared accountability.  To put it another way, we value interdependence over independence realizing that in interdependence we have a God-given compass to help us stay on course.  It’s the value of association.

The principle here is pretty straight forward: healthy congregations and leaders intentionally cultivate relationships with other healthy congregations and leaders.  Isolation is not the healthy church’s friend . . . interdependence is.

The journey toward vulnerability . . . Scripture's "heads-up"

 Vulnerable churches.  The concept was given definition in my May 13 blog: churches that have declined until their critical mass as measured in people, leadership, resources and results is insufficient, leaving them borderline viable or not viable at all, and therefore vulnerable to all sorts of misdirection, abuse and manipulation by unscrupulous individuals and groups. 

The definition reveals an end result.  The fact is that no group becomes vulnerable over night.  Rather, vulnerability is the end result of a journey.  That’s why recognizing the indicators of vulnerability and correcting them early is so critical.  Business guru, Jim Collins describes the journey well in his latest book, “How the Mighty Fall.”  Of this perilous journey, he says, “I’ve come to see institutional decline as a staged disease: harder to detect but easier to cure in the early stages, easier to detect but harder to cure in the later stages.  An institution can look strong on the outside but already be sick on the inside, dangerously on the cusp of a precipitous fall.”

Though he’s applying his words to business, they have equal import for ministry.  What we together need to see is that Scripture gives us a heads-up with respect to this.  Paul, for instance, in Acts 20 fears for the Ephesian church and their vulnerability to ravenous, wolf-like leadership.  Peter voices a similar fear in his letters.  John warns of the fall of true fellowship in I, II and III John, and the relational vulnerabilities that fall can bring to churches and believers.  Jude urges us to be contenders for the faith.  Interestingly, his urging reflects most on being able to contend against internal erosion rather than against external forces.  And the author of Hebrews calls his readers to account around five warnings, each of which relates to the road to vulnerability: drifting away from sound teaching, creating an unbelieving heart through disobedience, becoming spiritual dull by not practicing one’s spirituality, entertaining willful sin and becoming uncorrectable. 

My point?  The Scripture is filled with markers and warnings regarding what moves us as believers, congregations and churches toward vulnerability.   And as we’ll see as we continue this journey, it’s filled with the means to counter and where necessary reverse this perilous potential.  Check it out . . . okay?

So, you know a church is on the road to vulnerability when it has grown dull to the warnings of Scripture with respect to this deadly journey.  Next time: the danger of a fiercely held independence.