Artificial intelligence is here, and someday the robots might come for us just as Sam Waterston warned. In the meantime, we need to figure out what AI can do and shouldn’t do for us.

This is true in the church world as well, so on a lark, I randomly chose an AI generator from a web search. This particular site produces mission and vision statements for a range of industries. All I had to type in was “church,” then choose a tone (inspirational), then select “generate.” Here’s what came back:

Vision:
To create a welcoming and inclusive community where individuals can find hope, inspiration, and spiritual growth, empowering them to make a positive impact in the world.

Mission:
Our mission is to spread love, compassion, and faith by providing a place of worship, guidance, and support for all individuals seeking spiritual fulfillment. Through inspirational teachings, uplifting music, and meaningful connections, we aim to inspire and empower our congregation to live a life of purpose, kindness, and service to others. Together, we strive to create a world filled with love, peace, and harmony, guided by the teachings of Jesus Christ.

It’s truth-telling time. How different do these statements sound from your church’s mission and vision statements? Probably not much. Most guiding statements tend to be aspirational and vague. And that’s why I’m becoming more convinced that they are not the most helpful touchstones for congregations. Leaders expend vast amounts of energy and time (and sometimes big money on a consultant) coming up with a vision and mission…and then the robots instantly manufacture something almost as good. This is one way AI is useful: it’s telling us we’re not putting our resources into efforts with the biggest impact.

Here’s what I’d like to see churches work toward instead:

A helpful story of our congregation. A church can have many narratives about how it arrived at the present moment, and they all might ring true to varying degrees. Not all of them will be useful in terms of seeing the congregation as part of Christ’s body and God’s ongoing work in the world, though. Often we need to be more thoughtful about how we understand and share about our church.

Core values. These can be lived or aspirational, as long as there is clarity about which is which. Brene Brown’s values exercise is a useful one for both individuals and organizations. Naming a church’s story can also illuminate what it is about. What are our non-negotiable commitments that without them, we wouldn’t be us? What ways of being are we trying to incarnate with God’s help?

Seasonal plans based on these values. Covid obliterated what little confidence I had left in 5-10 year strategic planning. Churches need to be more nimble and responsive. (Exceptions include such initiatives as capital campaigns. These too, though, must be deeply rooted in values.) What is God inviting our congregation’s focus to be for the next 6-18 months?

Another kind of AI: appreciative inquiry. Congregations and their surrounding communities are full of individual and collective blessings from God, some tapped and others untapped, that could be put to very positive use in the name of living out values and focus. These gifts change as people come and go and as circumstances change, so they need to be inventoried on an ongoing basis.

Means to assess whether the congregation is being faithful to its core values. This is everything from whole-ministry assessments to individual event debriefs to mutual ministry reviews with staff. How are we stewarding our gifts well in service to the nudges from God we’ve discerned? What adjustments do we need to make?

A congregational covenant. We are people of relationship, because our Trinitarian God embodies connection and also seeks kinship with us. How we interact with one another needs to reflect this, but as mere mortals we benefit from reminders of what healthy bonds look like. We can name and agree to intentional behaviors and attitudes, then establish regular opportunities to recommit to them.

All of these tools are more practical and customized than mission and vision statements, and we shouldn’t trust them to artificial intelligence. Consider how you might stock your congregation’s toolkit with them.

Photo by Mohamed Nohassi on Unsplash.

Note: the blog is moving to Substack! I will cross-post articles here and there in September, then post only on Substack from October onward. You can find me here on Substack.

Prior to the pandemic many churches were struggling to fill their committee slates. This was due to a host of reasons:

• Many church structures are holdovers from an era when congregations - and thus their leadership needs - were bigger.

• There are so many tugs on congregants’ time, making it hard to make monthly, multi-year commitments.

• Church members who are older or who have children with early bedtimes are less likely to attend evening meetings.

• Recruitment is often geared more toward filling slots than helping people discern how their gifts might help a church live into its purpose.

• Many congregations don’t develop leadership pipelines, which means current leaders tend to be burned out and potential leaders aren’t sure how to contribute.

All of these factors remain, hence the present tense used above. In this pre-post-Covid time, there are now added considerations:

• Some of the former stalwarts in congregations have drifted away to other churches or no church.

• People have connected with the virtual or hybrid manifestations of church and are now engaging in that space rather than coming as often to the church campus.

• Certain segments of the general population are completely wrung out from their pandemic experience (e.g., caregivers of young kids or aging parents and healthcare workers) and unwilling to add on big commitments.

• People’s priorities have shifted under the pressure of long-term crisis.

What all of this is resulting in is a never-ending cycle of nominations for a committee system that isn’t working in many places. So what can you do?

• Send the structure on sabbatical. There must be a mechanism for making key decisions and for extending congregational care. Beyond that, lay leadership can take a proactive break - as opposed to the one forced by the pandemic - for three months. After that time, talk about what that was like. What relief did that pause offer? What did you all miss? What wisdom bubbled up?

• Note where the energy is. After the pause have conversations with leadership and beyond about the hopes they have and the needs they see in and beyond the congregation. How do these align with your church’s values and mission? What does that mean for what you might want to experiment with?

• Consider how shorter-term projects could increase involvement. Standing committees are one way to get things done, but they are not the only way. Some ministry areas lend themselves to seasonal teams. By inviting people to join a group for a one-off event or a certain period of participation (e.g., plan worship for Advent), you increase excitement and the available pool of people (including those who join you online or who have busy seasons in their paid or unpaid jobs they have to work around), decrease the risk of the same few people doing all the things, and bring in new voices on a regular basis.

• Make meetings worth participants’ time. Gather at the times and by the means that work best for those involved. Create a plug-and-play agenda template. Have a spiritual formation/worship piece, a relationship-building piece, a business piece, and a wrap-up piece that ties the other three together. (If your structure is doing to look different, why not make the meetings run differently?) Here’s one shape that closing piece can take:

  • What invitations from God have we sensed in our time together?

  • What does that mean for next steps?

  • To what actions are we committing?

  • What’s left hanging?

  • How are you feeling about how we worked together today?

• Look at the by-laws. If you blow up your committee structure, your documents will need to reflect this change. Accurate documents build trust and transparency in processes and provide a touchstone when there’s confusion or disagreement. Don’t let this step stop you from making needed changes, though. Dotting the Is and crossing the Ts will be a small price to pay for renewed and refocused congregational energy.

So let’s do it. Let’s call time of death on the committee structure, bury it, and see what new life results.

Photo by Mathew MacQuarrie on Unsplash.

Last week I shared one of the biggest challenges that the Church faces in this season. Today I’m sharing one of the other hurdles I’ve noticed in coaching calls and informal conversations with pastors and lay leaders: the Church’s tendency to operate out of scarcity rather than abundance. This scarcity mindset takes many different forms. The pressure to grow (usually defined numerically), whether from within the congregation or from the judicatory or denomination, arises from comparison with the church down the road and anxiety about survival. This causes congregation members to become mired in nostalgia for an earlier era when Sunday School classrooms were bursting at the seams with children or to pitch ideas for programming that are ill-suited to the congregation’s demographics, person-power, or theological commitments. Ironically, this worry about not being or having enough creates insularity and suffocates the imagination and willingness to experiment that could potentially result in growth in terms of spiritual formation and impact in the larger community if not nickels and noses. Instead, congregations hold tight to ministries that need to be celebrated and ended well so that something that better fits who the church is now can bubble up. 

This scarcity mentality takes its toll on members, who become discouraged or exhausted from being tasked with more responsibilities as the overall membership ages and decreases. It is particularly hard on leaders, both laity and clergy, who carry the weight of the church on their shoulders. Certainly pastors too often become the hired hands who absorb all the tasks that others don’t want to do or don’t feel capable of doing instead of being set free to be spiritual guides and partners in ministry. When their to-do lists are an endless scroll, these clergy feel guilty about self-care and time away, and they spiral toward burnout. 

I believe we need an orientation re-set. We need to train ourselves to look for individual and collective gifts, defined very broadly. What talents are represented in our congregation? What relationships with the community do we have? What are people in the church knowledgeable or passionate about? What tangible assets do we possess? What infrastructure do we have in place for efficient use of all our blessings? What compelling stories do we tell about our experiences of faith? When we have a bigger sense of all that God has blessed us with, we can begin to dream of new possibilities. And when we dream, we can conduct holy experiments, calling our efforts just that. We can more intentionally build in times to reflect on what we’ve learned about ourselves, our neighbors, and God and whether we want to continue this trial with some tweaks or pursue another holy experiment. The learned helplessness begins to dissipate. We reconnect our programming with outreach and spiritual formation. We discover our potential and find our niche in our contexts. We help bring about the peace of God’s reign. (This e-book can help you assess, discern, and plan for experimentation.)

I believe we can solve the problems of not knowing and talking honestly with one another as I detailed last week and of being stuck in scarcity thinking. I think making progress on one of these issues can move us forward in the other. And I know that sometimes it takes someone outside of the system to help with either or both challenges. That is why I love the work that I do. If I can facilitate conversation that will help your congregation overcome these hurdles, please contact me.   

Photo by Felicia Buitenwerf on Unsplash.

I first sensed a call to ministry when I was a youth. I tried to talk with my youth minister about the vocational stirring I felt, but he wouldn’t engage. I met with my pastor, who encouraged me privately. (He didn’t think our church was ready to throw support behind a woman in ministry. He was right, but he also wasn’t pushing the culture.) For a long time, then, my mentors were either strong women who weren’t clergy or clergywomen I “knew” through books and periodicals.

In seminary I found a congregation that had no qualms about bringing me on as an intern and later ordaining me. That business about women being barred from ministry because they were “first in the Edenic fall” (see: 1984 Southern Baptist Convention) seemed far removed from my burgeoning career in more progressive contexts.

And yet, it wasn’t. Microaggressions abounded among staff and congregants, sometimes making churches unpleasant places of ministry. Clergywomen peers found themselves toeing the glass cliff, looking over their shoulders at church people who were willing to “take a chance” on women’s leadership only as a last-ditch effort to slow decline – and then crowding them on that precipice when the long skid was not reversed quickly enough. Other highly-qualified women ministers noted their male counterparts professionally leapfrogging them as they heard “no” again and again from search teams. All of this was – is – happening in mainline denominations that have supposedly conquered sexism.

Let me be clear. The Church needs women in the pastorate. It is shrinking, in part, due to the lack of tenacity, wisdom, innovation, and compassion that women in ministry have to offer. Time and again, though, women pastors hear that churches are not ready for them, or these clergy realize after accepting ministry positions that congregations had misjudged their own preparedness. The ramifications for this miscalculation are huge. If a clergywoman is not successful because of the church’s failure to lay groundwork, that congregation often thinks, “Well, we tried having a woman as a pastor, and it just didn’t work out” instead of examining its assumptions. The church hesitates before calling another woman, thus missing out on deeply-needed gifts and perspectives. Additionally, that pastor might begin to question her effectiveness and call rather than her fit with the context, possibly leaving the ministry for good and ensuring that no congregation benefits from all she has to offer.

Here, then, is my attempt to give churches an assessment they can use to judge their true openness to a pastor who also happens to be a woman. (I want to thank alumnae of Young Clergy Women International for their input on the points below.) You can download a PDF of the assessment here, which I encourage you to share.

Pre-pastor search work:

• The church has had a woman in its pulpit as a guest preacher, and it referred to her sermon as such rather than as a “talk” or a “devotional.”

• Church leadership has discussed any members’ protest (such as staying home from worship or walking out before the sermon) of inviting a woman to guest preach and publicly re-affirmed support of the preacher.

• The church has had women in significant lay leadership roles (elder, deacon, warden, clerk of session, moderator, etc.) and has worked through any conflict that arose as a result of their election/selection.

• The church has eliminated exclusively male pronouns/descriptors on its website and in its social media.

• The church regularly uses curricula or other materials written by women (e.g., seminary professors, pastors) with theological authority.

Pre-interview pastor search work:

• The pastor search team is representative of the demographics and commitments of the congregation as whole, thus making it better able to reflect accurately the fullness of the church’s story to ministerial candidates.

• The pastor search team has structured its work so that it is rooted in listening deeply to God’s guidance.

• The pastor search team has discussed its assumptions and the congregation’s about a great-fit pastor, probing the reasons behind them.

• Having surfaced these assumptions, the search team has named specific competencies (rather than personality traits) as the criteria for a great-fit pastor.

• In communications with the congregation, the pastor search team has helped the church broaden its imagination about a great-fit pastor.

• The pastor search team has eliminated exclusively male pronouns/descriptors for the hoped-for pastor in all search team documents (e.g., position description, position advertisements, church profile).

• The church as a whole has earnestly prayed that God will lead it to the best-fit ministerial candidate, no matter how that candidate might differ from church members’ expectations.

• The pastor search team members have covenanted to run all questions to and about candidates through the filter of “Would we ask this of a male candidate?” (Examples of questions to be sifted out: “Who will watch your children while you’re working?” and “How will your spouse’s employment affect your ability to move here/stay here for a long time?”)

Interview/call pastor search work:

• The pastor search team is aware of and open with all candidates about potential challenges that await.

• With all candidates the pastor search team inquires about the needs of the candidate’s family to ensure hospitable on-site visits, and later, to help integrate the incoming minister’s family into the life of the congregation (to the extent the family desires).

• The church leadership has discussed the possibility of conflict arising from calling a woman (noting that this conflict might come disguised as an issue about something else) and is prepared to stand behind the candidate of choice/incoming pastor.

Ways you can use this assessment:

• Churches in pastor searches. This assessment provides a readiness test for calling a clergywoman.

• Churches with settled pastors. This assessment offers action steps to lay leaders and current pastors. (The “getting ready,” after all, doesn’t just happen. It takes intentional work. And if your church is not willing to do this work, spend some time mulling the reasons why and praying about them.) Even congregations that think they are ready to receive a clergywoman – including those who have or had women ministers – could benefit from working through the points above. Often moderate to progressive churches think they are more welcoming than they actually are.

• Clergywomen. I invite you to use this assessment in your call processes to help gauge whether a congregation might be a good fit.

• Judicatory bodies. Use this assessment to help congregations and search teams work through the steps needed to set up the possibility for long and fruitful ministries between churches and clergywomen.

Note that some aspects of this assessment can be adapted for considering a congregation’s preparedness to be led by a pastor who would be another kind of “first,” though there would be additional work specific to the variety of first. Often a candidate will be more than one kind of first – identities are intersectional, after all – making it essential for a church to take readiness steps in multiple areas.

This welcoming work is worthy of intentionality and intense listening to the movements of the Holy Spirit, and not just because of the clergyperson in question. This attentiveness and the resulting actions can lead to spiritual transformation, deeper discipleship, and increased connectedness among people and between people and God. These benefits are available to all involved.

Download a PDF of the assessment here.

In the field of positive psychology, focus is placed not on the diagnosis and treatment of maladies but on creating the conditions for human flourishing. A key aspect of thriving is engagement, when we are so into what we are doing that everything else fades into the background while we are doing it. The flow model developed by Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi says that for a person to be deeply engaged in an activity, her skill level must be in relative balance with the challenge of the task. If her skill availability is high while the difficulty of the task is low, she will quickly get bored. If the challenge outweighs her talents, her anxiety ratchets up.

What does the flow model reveal to you about your work? Specifically:

When are you deeply engaged in ministry? At these moments you are most likely living into your God-given calling.

When are you bored? Though you might have developed some reliable skills to carry out these less scintillating tasks, you are not building on your innate strengths.

When are you anxious? There is such a thing as a healthy stretch, which is a challenge that fosters our personal or professional growth. When we are overextended, however, we can start to believe that we are frauds and worry that we will fail those who rely on us.

Take a look at your responses to the above questions. What are the percentages of time spent on engaging, boring, and anxiety-producing tasks? Everyone has some tasks that fall into the latter two categories – that’s part of work life (and adulting in general, for that matter). But if those aspects are disproportionately large, it’s time to look at ways to revamp your job description. What dull or stressful assignments can be eliminated or shrunk if they’re less essential or redistributed to others who can do them better and with more enthusiasm if they are truly important? Your personnel committee or pastoral relations committee might be able to help you assess this.

If there’s not much that can be changed, then it’s time to consider whether your position is still a good fit for you. If not, what might a great fit look like? Your gifts are too valuable not to be fully engaged.

The latest rage on Netflix is Tidying Up with Marie Kondo, an eight-episode series in which an internationally-renowned organizational consultant goes into cluttered homes and helps families cull their possessions. All of the people that Kondo works with are at some sort of transition point in their lives. Some are newlyweds or new homeowners. Others are readying themselves for the arrival of a baby, grieving a loss, or wanting to move from living like students to inhabiting more adult personas. These changes provide the urgency for making their home more welcoming.

The tidying method Marie Kondo uses is not a light-a-match-and-walk-away approach. Instead, she asks her clients to hold each article of clothing, book, or tool and note whether it sparks joy. If it does, keep it and find a more efficient way to store it (for example, the KonMari method of folding clothes). If it doesn’t, say “thank you” and donate, recycle, or dispose of it. The overall purpose of the tidying is to be grateful for the past and to imagine the future you want to move toward, being more thoughtful about what you need in order to get there.

There is much about the KonMari method that is worthy of churches’ consideration. Lots of congregations, even (maybe particularly) small ones, are stooped over from the weight of so many ministries. As more are added, few to none are brought to an intentional close, making the church’s mission unclear and stretching congregation’s financial and people resources much too thin. What might it look like, then, to identify what God’s purpose for your church is? To name everything that the church is doing, just as Marie Kondo requests that her clients put every clothing item on the bed and every book on the floor to look through? To examine each ministry, noting whether it is an essential part of the present and/or future and saying a sincere “thank you” to those that are not?

At the end of each episode of Tidying Up, the families have worked through clashing priorities and conflict styles to create a home that reflects who they want to be. And while I realize this is a tv show that is comprised of carefully curated clips, the struggles the subjects go through are a microcosm of congregational community, and the desire to move forward with intentionality rings deeply true. So consider capturing the cultural moment, taking the best of what the KonMari method has to offer and assessing your church’s ministries for a more peaceful, purposeful future.

The easiest measurements of how things are going are quantifiable, such as money or attendance. Unfortunately, they are not the most helpful. One reason is that unlike in the business world, where the number of widgets produced or the profit margin does tell much of the story, numbers don’t necessarily reveal the kind of spiritual growth we’re (hopefully) aiming for in church.

Another reason that nickels and noses don’t give us much useful information is that they are lagging indicators. This means that they are backward-looking.

Leading indicators, by contrast, give us benchmarks toward progress. We ask, “What are we going to do to work toward our hoped-for outcomes?” When we name our part in bringing about change, we acknowledge our responsibility, build in accountability, give ourselves an assessment tool to measure our progress along the way, and set goals that we have actual control over.

So, for example, a lagging indicator might be a certain percentage of growth in worship participation. A leading indicator, however, might be that our church develops a team that prays for those who are seeking a faith community like ours to find their way to us. It might be offering training on better including people with disabilities. It might be offering a Bible study on hospitality. It might be learning to tell the story of God’s work among us to our surrounding community in a more compelling way. It might be revamping the bulletin to make it more visitor-friendly. It might be pulling out a pew or two and creating a prayground. All of these efforts emphasize imagination, not fear. They are in service to a larger goal, but with the emphasis on what is now within our control and requires our investment and ongoing discernment. They lay the foundation not just for growth in numbers but also in understanding of our connection to God’s story, God’s work among us, and the gifts God is asking us to use on behalf of others.

I encourage you to assess your current measurements. Which ones are lagging? How might you transform them into leading indicators, and in the process allow yourselves to be transformed?

There are times when we get stuck because we’re lacking a piece of the puzzle. Why can’t this person and I get on the same page? What’s keeping me from tackling that task that never drops off my to-do list? Why does my work feel so overwhelming or confining?

These are situations in which an assessment could help. Assessments help us better understand aspects of our personality, habits, and approach to relationships. With this new awareness, we are more equipped to lean into our strengths, read rooms, develop systems that compensate for our weaknesses, and surround ourselves with people whose skills provide the yen to our yang.

A lot of ministers are familiar with the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (which was my first introduction to assessments), the Enneagram (which I’m still learning about), and Prepare-Enrich (which many regard as the go-to for counseling couples before and after marriage). Here are some others I really like:

Core Values Index. In this 10-minute assessment takers identify 72 words that best describe them. The combination of words chosen reveals the taker’s innate nature and primary motivators. This test helped me understand how two very disparate parts of my personality and work preferences relate to one another. (A free version of the test is available here.)

Mindframes. This free test is based in neuroscience. It assesses which parts of the brain the taker operates out of most frequently for thinking and doing. Mindframes uses this information to identify how the taker’s brain processes information most efficiently. This test showed me my preferences so that I could capitalize on those strengths – and it revealed which areas of the brain I need to access when the situation calls for a perspective shift.

Thomas-Kilmann Conflict Mode Instrument. This assessment measures how much the taker uses each of five approaches to conflict. It’s useful for identifying conflict-handling modes the taker might want to utilize more or less often. It is also helpful in team work for helping the members understand one another’s conflict style.

5 Love Languages. This might sound like an odd addition to this list, since the 5 love languages are primarily used for relationships with loved ones. I have found it useful in ministry, though, for pinpointing how to relate with others more effectively, particularly in pastoral care or shared leadership.

Learning styles inventory. This free assessment is geared toward educators so that they can strategize how to communicate best with their students. I have found it helpful for realizing that I remember best information presented to me visually. The test also reminds me to utilize other learning styles when working with others.

This is far from an exhaustive list, but I hope these assessments provide some pathways to deeper understanding of self and others. Your results can be a great jumping-off point for coaching – now that I know this about myself, what do I do with this information? – so contact me if you’d like to explore that possibility.

It’s hard to muster up the will to be vulnerable when we absorb criticisms and failures into our identity: “I’m not good enough.” “I’m a screw-up.” That’s why Brené Brown’s distinction between shame and guilt is so helpful.

Shame focuses on our own or someone else’s (lack of) worth. It is rooted in the need to assign blame and in the reluctance to change, and it can quickly lead to a sense of powerlessness and even desperation in the shamee.

Guilt, on the other hand, focuses on behavior – not so much who was wrong but what went wrong: “I messed up” rather than “I’m messed up.” It fosters reflection about how to do differently and a sense of agency for making changes, resulting in hope for future successes.

In many churches those self-reflective muscles have atrophied, leading either to shaming (“Pastor So-and-So killed our congregation with X initiative”) or to feeling ashamed: “Pastor So-and-So left us to go somewhere else. What’s wrong with us?” “Our church is so much smaller than First Church. Why would people choose to come here when they could join a congregation with so much more to offer?” These kinds of mindsets, whether they are expressed aloud or not, can kill a church’s energy and become self-fulfilling prophecies.

How, then, can we help our congregations lay claim to hope? Questions can help flip the narrative from one of shame to one of guilt. For example:

• What do we do well? What are some things we’re able to do that bigger/better resourced/more established/etc. churches can’t?

• With regard to particular situations, what do we need to do differently the next time?

Notice that these questions focus on actions rather than personalities.

What narratives in your church – or in yourself – need to be flipped, and what questions will help you get there?

You and your leadership have decided it’s time to prune the list of ministries your congregation offers. Now it’s time for the fun (AHEM) part – actually killing what is sure to be an earnest, devoted church member’s pet project.

Sigh. So how do you rip off the Band-Aid with those for whom this will not be good news?

Listen deeply to stories about the ministry’s glory days. This conversation may be uncomfortable, but it is also an opportunity to learn more about the history and culture of the congregation and community.

Show sincere gratitude for the ministry’s impact and the time and energy put into it. There was a need for this ministry at some point, or else it never would have been launched.

Ask the church members whose claw marks are in the ministry what they want its/their legacy to be. What would best honor the people who have poured so much of themselves into this ministry – to end it with joy and intentionality or to let it limp along until it dies of natural causes?

Talk through the importance of letting the ministry go, acknowledging the grief involved. Help the ministry’s proponents come to their own realizations about the potential in reallocating money, time, and person power.

Decide together what elements of the ministry it is important to carry forward. One ministry pollinates another.

Publicly celebrate the ministry and the people who made it happen. This ministry has helped shape the church and its surroundings. Thanks be to God!

In many (most?) churches, new ministries are added at a faster rate than dying ones are eulogized. Add to that the new standard for active membership – attending a couple of Sundays a month as opposed to three or four – and congregations are cruising for some big-time leadership fatigue.

It’s important, then, to evaluate ministries for their missional value versus energy expended. Here are some questions to ask staff and lay leaders on a regular basis:

Which ministries…

…embody the core values of our congregation as a whole? 

…help us share the love of Christ in ways that meet others’ needs, not just our own?

…are reaching people who would otherwise go underserved?

…allow room for initiative, creativity, and new participants/partners/leaders?

…meet the above criteria and are either going strong or have real potential to be re-energized?

Highlight these ministries and determine how to give more oomph to flagging but critical initiatives.

As for the ministries that don’t make this list, stay tuned for part II of this topic.

In every new call there are landmines that must be sussed out and avoided, at least in the early days. You’ve got to figure out what topics can’t be discussed without hushed tones, what habit the last pastor had that drove everyone crazy, whose blessing is needed to launch a new initiative. Early wins + landmines avoided = longer honeymoon period for church and minister.

And then there are sacred cows. These are the preferences and rituals that church folk sometimes seem to love more than Jesus himself, bless their hearts. Every church has them, and they are the stiflers of new leadership, new ideas, and new life. They trap congregations in permanent maintenance mode.

In his article “Eight Common Characteristics of Successful Church Revitalizations,” Thom Rainer emphasizes the importance of taking on those sacred cows. He notes that one church listed all of its ministries and labeled them as biblically essential, contextual, and traditional. In other words, where in scripture do you find a directive for this ministry? If it’s not in the Bible, do we hold onto this ministry because it serves our community well or because we have “always” done it?

I think this kind of parsing – done by leadership teams or by the congregation as a whole – could be very eye-opening. “Why do we do what we do?” leads into “Is it helping us accomplish our God-given mission now, and if not, where would our efforts and resources be better spent?”

Ministers cannot tackle sacred cows alone. They must help the congregation come to its own realization that it is a new day with new needs.