Photo by Karl Fredrickson on Unsplash

Do you know where your church is?

Most pastors think they do, and most church members and elders believe they do, but do you?

After going through these last several years of people coming and going, people decided to stay or leave based on how you handled masks, vaccines, opening and closing, people moving because of jobs, or simply deciding that it is nicer to watch church in their pj’s. Do you know where your church is?

Really?

Taking a new job at a church towards the end of covid and the church gathering had some disadvantages, but it gave me some advantages. It helped me see more clearly where the church is and ask some questions because “I wasn’t in it” as much as others.

But even if you haven’t changed churches or jobs, you can still step back to see where your church is.

This matters because you as a pastor might think your church is one spot on the map, your elder team or staff believes it is somewhere else, and then throw in the people who volunteer and attend your church. If you don’t know where you are on the map, you won’t be able to lead people to the next place in the journey.

When I arrived at Community Covenant, I found documents of 4 different sets of mission statements or values in the last decade. When I asked people why we existed, I got the answer based on when they started attending and what they heard repeated the most. Consequently, we weren’t on the same page.

This happens in churches, even if the pastor doesn’t leave. Churches slowly lose their way, lose focus on their mission, go to a conference and hear a new idea they have to implement immediately and gradually; the direction they had isn’t laser-focused anymore.

In his excellent book, Resilient: Restoring Your Weary Soul in These Turbulent Times, John Eldredge tells us what to do now: “The first thing you should do when you are lost is stop! This is critical – stop moving and get your bearings. Even if it takes some time.”

Many of us, as pastors and leaders and churches, are lost. We are lost in the fog of covid, unclear on who is still a part of our church, and unclear on what church looks like in this post-pandemic world.

And we need to stop.

We must pull everyone together, figure out who is with us and where we are on the map, and then set a destination together. 

When I arrived in New England, I interviewed almost 40 people in our church. People who had been a part of our church for decades and some who came in the last year. I asked them the same eight questions and those answers were invaluable to me. They helped me figure out where we were, so we could determine where we were going.

Here they are:

1. What is going well at Community Covenant Church?
2. What is not going well at CCC?
3. What is one thing about CCC you hope doesn’t change?
4. What is one thing about CCC you hope does change?
5. What burning questions would you like to ask me?
6. If money weren’t an issue, what would be your next full-time hire(s) and why?
7. If you were in my shoes, what would you focus on first?
8. How can I pray for you?

Here’s the fantastic thing, 90% of the answers were the same.

Whether you are new to your church or not, you can ask these questions or questions like them to find out where you are. You might tweak them to find out what you learned in covid, what did covid reveal about your church, and what has God put on your heart in the last 2-3 years that you need to pay attention to. 

But as I’ve said before, this is a season where pastors need to think like church planters as they move forward. Church planters are pioneers; they are starters, forging new ways of doing church and risking, and more and more pastors need to have this mindset.