Change Is Vital in the Church

A business is always trying to move and grow and change and evolve and make sure that it’s never standing still. In a church, we often are much more comfortable with the status quo. We’re comfortable with tradition, and we like that feeling of knowing exactly what we’re going to have and experience. That’s a key difference between church leadership and business leadership in terms of change and what’s required to keep the organization moving. Often in a church, we don’t recognize that we need to change or that we need to move. But we do.

This material was originally recorded as part of the Renovations Project. It has been lightly edited and condensed for clarity.

The church needs to be willing to change

In business, you recognize change because, in most instances, you’re not growing anymore, or you’re failing in some way. You might be failing your customers, or you might be failing your employees. In a business, it’s very clear when change is necessary. In a church, I think that we get so comfortable with our traditions and the status quo that we don’t want to change. I don’t think it’s just in dwindling numbers that we recognize this, but I think it’s in the health of our congregation and the happiness of our congregation. If they want to be there, and they want to be discipling, and they want to be growing, then I think you have a healthy church. 

I think that a business can never afford to have the status quo. It’s important in a business to be profitable and make money. There’s a different dynamic in churches. We don’t think in terms of revenues in churches, but we do have contributions, and we do have stewardship to be involved in. For the stewardship of the resources that were provided, it’s very important that we continue to always be changing and avoiding the status quo.

Having a discomfort with the status quo, you need to point that out, and we need to be willing to talk about it. We need to be willing to look at what change might be necessary. When we are looking at all the dynamics of the church and the different generations that we serve, there are different needs, and we need to be able to address those needs. The key thing is for the people who are in leadership in the church to recognize that change is necessary.

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We have an example in our church where we started our church in a fairly traditional format. We had a congregation very comfortable with singing hymns and not varying from that. We had a very purposeful movement by the leadership of the church to be able to address other generations in the church; we thought it would be more difficult than it turned out to be. It was the thing that our church needed. We are a very multi-generational church now. We started with mostly people my age and older, and now we are mostly young families with young children. To me, that is the future of the church. 

The purposeful movement of change in our own church was finding a pastor who was willing to do that movement and take some grief for that. But at the same time, we were trying to bring everyone along in the process, because when you force change and you don’t bring people along with you, it gets really ugly. In our case, we brought in a pastor who was willing to make change and could do it in a loving way. That’s how the change was made. And today, the church is probably not recognizable in terms of the congregation that we have. The same people are still there. We didn’t lose people in the process, which really was a shock to me. We didn’t lose people, and we grew tremendously. We started a church with about a hundred people, and today we’re pushing a thousand. I attribute that to the willingness to change. 

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“Sacred cows” in the church

I think in a business when you talk about “sacred cows,” you’re talking about people that need to make change in some way, or you’re talking about systems within the business that need to be changed, or you’re talking about customers who need to be changed. In a church, it’s different; “sacred cows” are just so comfortable, and it’s painful to try to move or to try to eliminate a sacred cow (any idea, custom, or practice that is held in high esteem and without question). In a church, that could be a music program, or a children’s program, or a teen’s program, or it could be the demographics of the congregation. So many things are difficult to change and are uncomfortable to change. When you take it back to biblical principles and what we’re commanded to do, and what is critical to the health of the church and the longevity of the church, then you need to recognize that sometimes we need to make changes in order to incorporate that.

If we’re talking about a bad fit in an organization, this is different in a church setting. In a church, you are working with people who really mean well and really want to be there and want to help, but they don’t have the skills and the talents necessarily to do that. It’s a painful thing. In our church, we believe that you need to have the right person in the right seat on the bus; we use that mantra. The leadership of our church is very much dedicated to finding the right seat for that person. If it isn’t where they’re currently working, then we try to find what their God-given talents are and where they fit best in the organization. Sometimes it’s a matter of helping them discover that they are not comfortable in the organization. They might not be comfortable with the leadership, or they might not be comfortable with change. If you do it in a loving way and you have a leadership team that’s willing to do that, it works out. 

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There’s a place where a church can be administered like a business and do that very successfully without compromising the church, without compromising biblical principles, and without compromising people. It can be done very much like a business. For example: you’re especially concerned about financial responsibility. In the church, we have stewardship we need to be responsible for, and we have resources that are important not only to the church, but also important to God. Financial responsibility is very key to doing church management. Similarly, there’s the development of people, and development of programs, missions, and all of those things. They have to be done well so that people want to be involved in them. When you talk about metrics, people can see that there are measurable things that happen when they provide service for the church.

Innovating in the church requires people

If you’re wanting to innovate within the church, I think you need to have as many people involved as possible. It’s obviously driven from leadership, but you need to be able to involve as many people from the congregation as you possibly can to get perspective. I think councils in churches lose perspective because everything is running smoothly, and we don’t want to make any changes. It’s just too hard to do that. We might have a congregation, a full congregation on Sundays, but it might not be a healthy church; it might not be a church that’s healthy below the surface.

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I do think that change happens on a regular basis in a church, just like it does in a business; it has to. You have to get people involved just like you would in a business. You’d pull people from all areas of that organization, and you’d have them involved in trying to direct what the change is going to be. Setting a vision is just critical for a church. But it doesn’t come from one person.

We all want to have our pastors provide the vision for the church, and even our small leadership teams to be responsible for vision and bringing the organization along, but it has to come from all areas of the church. Everyone needs to feel like they have a voice and are an important part of that process. We can’t rely on a pastor alone to do that. We need to have people from all areas of the church and all generations. Everyone is involved; everyone gets to have something to say about that. The leadership team then takes that information and provides the direction. 

In our churches, we need to lead with excellence. We don’t have the latitude or the luxury of letting things go in a church. We really need to address things as they come.

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