Distracted Churches Can Reclaim First Love

Yesterday, I received word that Church Central Leadership Community, a church consultant and certification firm located in Louisville, Kentucky, posted excerpts this week from my latest book Finding the Missional Path. These excerpts were published in their publication Church Health Today, a monthly magazine available to church consultants, pastors, and leaders.

I am honored and pleased ChurchCentral has chosen to do this. Several years ago, ChurchCentral provided valuable consultant training to me which has served me well in giving leadership assistance to churches and pastors of several denomination. I am grateful for such mentors as Thom Rainer, John Maxwell, Dan Reiland, Tom Bandy, Chuck Lawless, Reggie McNeal, Craig Loscalzo, Will Mancini and Paul Bordon. Just to mention a few.

Also, ChurchCentral has asked me to be a contributing blogger and I look forward to posting. Ministry Indicators is the consulting business I founded in 2000. It is a privilege to serve the United Methodist Churches of the Missouri Conference and others.

Thanks to everyone for their confidence in my consulting skills and 38 years of pastoral experience. At age 55, and for some time now, equipping and empowering leaders (in diverse ministry settings) so they can reach their own optimum ministry performance and leadership excellence, has been my primary goal.

Below is a portion of the excerpt and you can read the entire post by clicking here or by logging on to www.ChurchCentral.com



Contemplate a total surrender of meaningless activities and church busyness.
What would the church look like if we stopped counting people, stopped soliciting new donors, and stopped staffing or funding ministry programs that only serve our members?

Distracted churches come in many varieties: Missionary Church, Maintenance (Survivor) Church, Seeker-Sensitive Church (Weekend Church), Consumer Church, Church Growth Church, and Activist Church. Most churches are a combination of these characteristic types. Critical to understanding distracted churches is being able to definitely describe where your church is and to strategize ways to lead the church to practically demonstrate its first love of connecting people to God.

Missionary church
This type of church is noted for sending a lot of missionaries to foreign countries, raising funds for missionaries, holding missions conferences and, when they are in town, featuring missionaries prominently in worship services.

Because of rapidly-changing Western culture, however, many churches are experiencing outreach ministries that are as cross-cultural as traditional missions.

Maintenance church
If a pastor expends the most energy emphasizing the need for more workers to begin and sustain church programs, it can easily be interpreted as an organization primarily concerned about providing benefits. Thus, the pastor is the recruiter and members are clubbers.

Reggie McNeal describes such churches as having a "club" mentality. They are churches who have made themselves their purpose. Their priorities include maintaining established programs and practices, in large part because they are established, and keeping people coming to the church in order to maintain the programs. The church building (enlarging and maintaining it) is often a key goal or priority.

This model easily surrenders to legalism and making a "Little Big Horn" stand against the different look and change in the religious landscape. Many Christians who are loyal to this model see their faith and way of "doing" church as the only way. Tolerance of examining one’s faith is seen as compromise of their interpretation of the Bible. Either/or answers are viewed as the right answers.

In their view of church behavior, command and control are central issues. Discernment of scriptures always runs consistent with church polity and doctrine. To them it would be reprehensible to question the way the church does things or gets things done. In their eyes, there is no middle ground to those who see their mission in life as preserving the church against the attacks of the world. The huge problem with this mentality is that the church is certainly not a perfect world in itself. Click here to continue