In the Details

It's just one key.


No way you'll really notice it being gone.


I mean how many times do you use words with "k" in them anyway?

If you've ever had this occur, you know how annoying - even frustrating it can be. Like a paper cut on your finger, or a nick on the side of your tongue, all you can feel is that one annoying spot, and it seems everything you do winds up there or happens to trip over it.

It's such a little thing. But is it?

I'm sitting here thinking about churches. Big surprise, that. I just got finished reading Outreach magazines' Top Churches of the Year issue. We weren't in it, again. They measure differently than I would, but it's hard to argue with some of those churches given the impact they are having for the Kingdom of God.

Also in the issue is a series of interviews with pastors of those churches asking two vitally important questions: What have you learned? What would you do differently?

One of them said, "I have learned that after 9 years, all churches forget why they started in the first place. It's inevitable. And from that point on, they are dying, and just don't know it."

Wow. Jolt of reality, huh. It does fit with what I read recently though.

Pastor Mark Driscoll, of the Mars Hill Church in Seattle, Washington, says that churches have four phases:

Phase 1 - Creative, the dream stage The creative phase is the beginning of a new church or a new project within the church. This phase is marked by enthusiasm, hope, and numerous ideas that are considered for implementation, which causes momentum

Phase 2 - Management, the reality stage In the management phase, the ministry project becomes a reality and requires a great deal of organization, management, and problem solving to make it successful. This phase can be a lot of hard work and is not as enthusiastically pursued because it is tedious and difficult.

But without managing the creative ideas, success is not possible. The hope for every church is that they work through their management issues, thereby enabling them to return to the creative phase, where they dream up a new project and enthusiastically undertake it and raise a whole new set of management issues to overcome.

Therefore, the goal of the management phase is not to get the church organized or under control. Rather, the management phase is needed to eliminate the inefficiencies and barriers that are keeping the church from refocusing back on the creative phase and creating a whole new set of problems to manage.

Phase 3 - Defensive justification, the failure stage In the defensive justification phase, something has gone terribly wrong and has failed at the management stage. Or the church succeeded at the management stage but never returned to the creative phase and got stuck with a bunch of well-organized managers running the church but no creative and visionary new ideas to move the church forward.

When this phase sets in, the church begins to stall, plateau, and slowly decline. People are less motivated to serve, money is less generously given, and a cloud of lethargy and complaint begins to settle in. This is because some leaders in the church start to act defensively and justify their failures rather than finding creative or management ways to overcome them.

In this phase, time, money, and energy are used to explain problems rather than to fix them, which is the primary clue that organizational death is on the horizon unless changes are made. Because the church is in a defensive posture, people start to leave the church, and the best and brightest people are no longer attracted to the church because it has lost sight of any risky mission that calls people to rise up in faith.

The peculiar truth of the defensive justification phase is that many of the excuses provided in this season are in fact valid. But whether or not they are valid, the fact remains that they need to be overcome.

Phase 4 - Blaming, the death stage An organization that remains stuck in the defensive justification phase for too long inevitably then declines to the blaming phase. In the blaming phase, it is obvious that the church or ministry is going to die, and excuses and explanations for the death have been devised.

This does not necessarily mean that the church will be closing its doors; effectively dead churches have been known to keep the doors open on Sundays for many years to welcome a handful of people who have no mission.

In this phase, the focus of the church is determining who will be blamed for the failure so that another group of people can escape responsibility for the failure. Some churches blame the pastor and fire him, others blame Satan and spiritualize everything, and still others blame the outside culture as being too hard for a church to thrive.

Rarely does the leadership of a church in this phase rise up to repent of the things that are preventing the church from returning to the life-giving creative phase, and eventually the church dies.

Great insight.

Where's your church in that scenario?

Friends, it's not enough to remember the past successes fondly and point to them as what your church is today. That's a lie. A comfortable lie, to be sure, like using an old picture for your online profile. But when someone shows up on-site, they're going to know really quickly there are not 400 of you there, and there's a lot less hair or your head or a lot more of you to go around than that picture let on.

We have to keep dreaming.

We have to keep looking outside and thinking of ways to get people from the world to the fringe, from the fringe to the congregation, and from the congregation to the core.

This is not optional.

It is breath.

Stop doing it, and people might say "doesn't he look natural", but that detail they neglected to mention - that "he's not breathing" part - means a whole lot.

What are you doing to birth the next dream for your congregation?