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Every church starts with the desire to be a healthy, growing church that helps change the community around it with the gospel. No church begins with the desire to be an insular community that has “a country club mentality.”
The longer a church exists, the more difficult it becomes to keep the original vision and excitement. Families grow up, leaders get older, and communities around the church change. Slowly, the leadership team that was bustling with new ideas starts to recycle old ones. What was once new starts to feel stale.
And many times, the church and its leaders are unaware of the shift that has occurred within them, the church, and the surrounding community.
The question becomes, what is a church supposed to do? If a church is beginning to decline, can it reverse the decline and return to the glory days? Or are those days past? And if you are in a church that isn’t declining, how do you know if it will begin to decline?
If, as Jim Collins says in Good to Great, “Leadership begins with getting people to confront the brutal facts and act on the implications,” then we as church leaders must confront the brutal facts about our churches and act on the implications.
Often, the leaders of churches in decline do not want to face the brutal facts. This can happen for several reasons. One, the brutal facts are uncomfortable. It means admitting that what was once a thriving church no longer is. It might mean admitting that they led the church into decline. Two, it means acknowledging that the community around the church has shifted and changed, and the church didn’t change with it. Third, it means facing grief and loss—the loss of influence as a church, the loss of staff and members. Facing the brutal facts means facing reality, and for many people within churches, that brings a lot of discomfort, and we’d rather focus on the positive.
However, the second part of Collins’s challenge is equally difficult: Act on the implications.
Not only are we to face reality, but we are also to act on what those facts reveal. As we will see, this means praying and asking God for what He has for the church’s future, dreaming together, and experimenting. It might mean ending specific ministries, changing how you do small groups and make disciples, or it might mean changing how the people in the church relate to each other. It is just as uncomfortable as, and possibly more painful than, facing the brutal facts because acting on the implications is the moment of change.
Acting on the implications is challenging for a church and its leaders. For many leaders, the culture shift is difficult because they are often unaware of it or unprepared to address it. They are blind to the change happening in the community around their church and to the needs of those people.
How do you face the brutal facts? How do you do that, especially if you are a new leader at your church? Charles Stone says there are five ways to define reality:
- Take your church’s pulse.
- Decipher the unwritten code.
- Discover the wounds from the past.
- Clarify the church’s overall health stage.
- Match strategy to situation.
These steps of defining reality help pastors understand the first steps of revitalization, how to move forward, and how to help their people navigate the steps to rebuilding.
