Corporate Death Wish

Chatting to my friend Mark Bonnington (Kings Church Durham) on the phone the other day. We got on to church planting and attempts to reignite dying fellowships. I think we both agree that initiatives to reignite dying embers are more and more critical, if huge quantities of kingdom resources are not going to be slowly and painfully squandered as fellowships dribble towards their end, and whimper out of existence.

But he raised the concern that his church is developing leaders that they would love to guide into situations of reignition, if they were actually going to be allowed to reignite. However, in many instances a church on its last legs is there precisely because it has taken decisions that mitigate against spiritual life. Most obviously that it is a comfort zone that nobody present actually wants to be challenged or changed. What they are looking for is someone to come in, keep the status quo and maintain the congregation's happy, spiritually pointless non-kingdom-extending club. Unsurprisingly, not particularly attractive for leaders who want to grow the Kingdom of God.

The phrase Mark used was "churches with an unspoken corporate death wish." They would never say it, but when push comes to shove they would rather die than do what it takes to see the shoots of new spiritual life. He identified a particular generation of folk in whom he sees this tendency, among whom vision has burned low and discipleship has waned, but who like to sit in church with their friends. 

Needless to say, pastors and leaders on the lookout for where God would have them serve next should take pains to steer well clear of corporate death wish places. Why go somewhere where the instinct is to resist growing in God rather than to embrace it? (unless you are looking for comfortable status quo, in which case you shouldn't be in leadership anyway). That kind of pseudo-church will die, and it will take leaders out with it.  

Leaders as Change-Agents Part 6

At the end of the day we can have as much biblical vision as we like but if our church culture leads people to dig their heals in then it is impossible to put it into practice.

Click to read more ...

Leaders as Change-Agents Part 5

What do leaders bring to the table to help put the supremacy of God at the heart of all church life and church activities?

Click to read more ...

Leaders as Change-Agents Part 4

In the process of change we are inviting people to embrace a different concept of themselves, of their role, their purpose for being in the church, their interactions with others, the purpose of the group and maybe their reputation. Change is a big ask, in other words. We are inviting them to move form the comfortable to the uncomfortable, the known to the unknown, form inaction to action, form areas where they feel skill to ones in which they feel deskilled.

Click to read more ...

Leaders as Change-Agents Part 3

Where does a united approach to solving a problem in a church come from? Shared biblical vision. It's the only place. For sure you can have a shared organisational vision that produces results for organisational change, but if it isn’t supremacy-of-God-oriented then what you get is a building or a project or an adjustment to practice rather than kingdom growth.

Click to read more ...

Leaders as Change-Agents Part 2

In a comment on the previous change-agents post Daron left a number of excellent thoughts on reasons change might be necessary in a church. If others would like to leave similar suggestions we could put a very helpful list together that I will put in a future post.

Spiritual leadership is NOT the same as other organisational leadership. That is not to say we don't have a lot to learn from secular leadership models and theory, but those models will only take us so far.

Spiritual leadership involves knowing what God wants for his people in his local church, using God's methods to get them there, relying on God's power to do it. Therefore the process of change and the methods of initiating change that are available to Christian leaders are not necessarily the same as in any other organisation.

Organisational change in churches starts with spiritual roots. Roots of godliness, spiritual perception and hunger for God. That is the baseline starting point. When we meet situations where it seems impossible to bring necessary organisational change because of the sheer degree of resistance, our first response is to pray and teach into these areas. Because gospel-centred change emerges from gospel-centred convictions about ourselves, about God, about the church and its purpose.

If you don’t believe that the purpose of the church is to declare God’s excellencies to a dying world, then any call to change it to produce that is threatening. If you think that activities are good in and of themselves regardless of any connection with glorifying God, magnifying him and drawing attention to him, then you will never be able to stop those activities or replace them with ones that do.

Unless the reality of God’s promises grip people they won’t adjust their lives to base all they do on them. Unless the grace of God in Christ is thrilling them, they won’t attempt new things with an attendant risk of failure, because they are content with the way things are.

Leaders as Change-Agents Part 1

Whether a church develops for future gospel extension or concretises itself in the past will largely be decided by whether leaders are allowed to lead for change, and how they lead for change. This is what I want to explore in this series of posts

Click to read more ...