Downstream Problems
Confusing Problems with Symptoms
After a few years of listening to the Rest is History, I bit the bullet and paid for the subscription service for me and my son. (My son and I! I need to get better at this grammar thing…)
Aside for paying a little bit for folks who put in the work to produce this, it also gets us access to some bonus listening. My eldest and I are history nerds, unapologetically so, but it’s also a lesson that I’ve tried to instil into our kids (particularly through my naff musical tastes), that nothing comes from nowhere. We all had a start point, a development, and ended up where we are now. Having planted a new church, and also had the joy of previously pastoring a 110-year-old church that has since closed, I’ve seen the spectrum of church histories. One thing is clear though, is that most church cultures do not collapse all at once. They drift. They can learn updated ways of speaking, deciding, singing and gathering, but often don’t. Generations come and go, and there is tension between pining for the past, and realising that there is a future coming. It always seems that after a few years, someone looks around and ask, “Why are we like this?” The questions are usually quite similar, even in different cultures..
Why do we struggle to reach unbelievers?
Why do the same few people do everything?
Why do we struggle to develop leaders?
In studying this over the past few years, I came to a really sad realisation. The visible problems that we are often frustrated by in church life are often downstream from deeper issues. Recognising this for the conclusion of my research into leadership development was a real ‘ah-ha!’ moment, that swiftly changed into an ‘uh-oh!’ moment. Just like lessons of history, the root of our struggles are in a past that we sadly cannot change.
I have been thinking about this in the Irish context. Evangelical circles are small enough that everyone knows everyone, or at least knows someone who knows someone. In fact, we’re likely related! A church plant does not have the luxury of anonymity within our context, and in this it’s quite easy to tell the cultural influences each church or their leaders has. Culture becomes visible quickly as the roots of our history and experiences eventually poke through in preaching style, ecclesiology and music sung. But those deeper issues seem to travel alongside them.
Across the wider Western church, many of the issues we complain about are perhaps not present issues, they are presenting symptoms. The church that feels competitive may have an evangelism problem. The church that depends on the same exhausted people may have a discipleship problem. The church that feels like it’s filled with consumers may have a community formation problem.
If we misdiagnose the problem, we will keep treating the wrong thing. And in historical terms we’re doomed to repeat them. Well, until the whole thing falls flat. I asked a few folks about the symptoms they feel might be downstream problems, and I think we can lump them into two baskets. So here they are…
When Churches Stop Fishing and Start Trading Fish
One of the strangest things about much contemporary church growth is how little of it has to do with conversion. In researching this article I did a scan on a few social media sites from churches in different countries, and the results were quite similar. The advertising hook was aimed at Christians, with language about belonging, notes to Christian community, and also buzz words referring to ‘solid’ teaching, ‘vibrant worship’, good coffee and pastries! These are catnip to Christians! But what it showed was that the audience aimed at were perhaps already Christians, and the intention was to attract them to their particular church.
People move from one church to another of course, I’m not naïve enough to deny that. Sometimes this is for good reasons. Sometimes because people have been hurt. Sometimes because they have moved house and need a faithful church, or are looking for children’s work, or some other ‘need’ filled. We should not sneer at Christians who need a new church home. Receiving bruised sheep can be a necessary mercy. And I know personally about the challenges of your kids being the only kids in church. Added to the fact that their Dad is the pastor, Mum is the kid’s worker, and both parents are the youth leaders! Yikes!
Still, we must be honest about the larger pattern; many churches grow by attracting Christians from other churches. Over time, churches can become skilled at appealing to already-churched people. All you need to do is learn the language, expectations, and anxieties of Christians who are looking for something else. We become good at rearranging the existing Christian population while doing very little to reach people who are spiritually lost. It’s a cursory survey, but in Ireland the number of churches grew substantially in the last 5 years (by over 200), but the number of Christians basically stayed the same. We’ve simply reshuffled the pack.
If we’re being honest as church leaders, this is one of the great temptations in church ministry. We know how to speak to Christians. We know what Christians like. Even our “outreach” can make Christians feel we care about mission, while never bringing us into sustained contact with unbelievers. The missional movement may have ended up being a small group Bible study under a different (and cooler) name. The deeper issue here, perhaps, is a failure of evangelism or at least understanding what it means to live on mission. It might not merely be a failure to be able to run evangelistic events, but a loss of confidence that the Gospel is good news for ordinary people who do not yet believe it and the courage to speak and live that out to people who are different than us. I suppose the challenge that you might give is that even if we lose contact with those people, we are still growing. My push back is that churches usually do, well some do, but eventually the greater number decreases. We might improve our Sunday services, update our websites and social media platforms. We might also speak into real human struggles, make sure the coffee is decent, the kids are safe, and the preaching isn’t boring - none of these things are bad - but none of those things are evangelism.
Evangelism is the church bearing witness to Christ among those who do not yet know Him. It is becoming the kind of people who can sit across a table from someone who believes almost nothing we believe and still love them enough to speak of Jesus with clarity. What history has shown is that when our evangelism weakens, churches become competitive. Of course nobody is as bold to say, “Our strategy is to gather believers from other churches,” but if we are not reaching the lost, the only available growth is the movement of the already found. Then the church down the road becomes a threat. Their gain feels like our loss. The way back is not to despise growth, we do need to pray for it, but we need growth that comes from mission, not transfer alone. If we stop fishing, we will start trading fish, and after a while we may forget the difference.
The Leadership Crisis That Isn’t Really About Leadership
So, if our confusion around church growth could be a weakness in evangelism, another issue we hear again and again is the lack of leaders coupled with the exhaustion of a few faithful people. I think it’s called the 80/20 problem; 20% of the people do 80% of the work. There are always those faithful saints who arrive early and leave late, stack chairs, teach children, make tea, lead small groups, visit the sick, reply to messages, and somehow still feel guilty that they are not doing more. In a small church, especially, these people are precious. Without them, many churches would simply stop functioning. But they are also probably burning (or burnt) out, and filled with cynicism and hurt. My friend John Hindley wrote a book, Serving Without Sinking, a few years ago, that is a balm to our weary souls on this subject.
This is often described in loud tones as a leadership crisis. “We need more leaders.” “We need more servers.” “We need people to step up.” That may be true. But many leadership crises (crisises?) are actually discipleship crisises (crises!?) Maybe I should just go with ‘problems’!
The ‘problem’ is not simply that there are no leaders, the problem is that we have perhaps not formed people deeply enough in Christ to recongise gifting, to create space for serving, and also to encourage people in emerging as leaders. We have often assumed that if people attend church long enough, they will somehow become disciples, but mere attendance is not discipleship. Exposure to Christian stuff is not formation. Agreement to our statement of faith is not obedience. A person can sit under biblical preaching for years and remain passive. They may know the right answers, appreciate the sermons, and speak warmly about the church. Yet their life remains mostly untouched by the demands of following Jesus in community.
Let’s be fair, sometimes they have never been shown another way. They have been welcomed, taught, and encouraged, but not personally discipled. Nobody has helped them connect the Gospel to their money, time, marriage, parenting, work, habits, or life ambitions. Nobody has invited them into ministry with both opportunity and formation, most likely because we have relied on programmes, books and courses to do what only people can do. Courses can be excellent. Books are good. The issue is whether these things actually carry the weight of relational discipleship, or whether they merely give us as church leaders the comfort of doing something.
In many of our churches, emerging leaders are discovered accidentally rather than developed intentionally. Someone is available, so they are asked to serve. Someone is gifted, so they are given a job. Someone is confident, so they are put up front. Someone has been around for years, so they are assumed to be mature. Then we are surprised when a person’s gifting outruns character, when a volunteer burns out, when a potential leader disappears because nobody invested in them, or when the church cannot survive the absence of one or two key people. I’ve seen all of those things first hand, as I imagine, have many of you.
It’s hard to swallow this, especially for those in pastoral ministry, but church without discipleship will eventually become dependent on a few people. Now, before I get some push back, let me say that a church with great relational discipleship may still be stretched, but people will be growing, taking responsibility and leaders will emerge. It might take time, and be a bit messy, but if we take care of discipleship upstream, leaders will be found downstream.
It Is Not Raining Men
Despite what The Weather Girls sang in the 1980s it is not raining men, or new believers, or mature disciples, or emerging leaders. Nothing ever drifts into ‘better’ in Christianity. Most of the images in the Bible require work and patience, like farming, fishing, or athletics. If we don’t take care of upstream realities of evangelism and discipleship, we should not be surprised at the culture that appears downstream. But we cannot, as a friend of mine bans in his church, blame ‘our people.’ Our people ‘don’t’. Our people ‘won’t’. They are Jesus people, and if you are a church leader, He has placed these people into your loving care, under His guidance and strength. By His grace, we are ‘those’ people.
If we as leaders do not intentionally cultivate a Gospel-shaped culture, another culture will happily do this for us. Usually it will be a blend of whatever people brought with them, or the prevailing consumer culture, political culture, family culture, workplace culture, online culture…whatever culture that we are surrounded by. The church never exists in a vacuum, something is always discipling us.
In our moment, consumer culture is one of the strongest forces shaping church life. Side note: Todd Wilson has written a great book on how this culture was brought into the church in the 19th century. Here’s the link: https://church-growth.org
But Todd puts his finger on something truly frightening. He shows how people are trained every day to evaluate, compare, select, and move on. Choice is identity. Convenience is a virtue. Commitment must constantly justify itself. The customer is always right! Then people bring that instinct into church. They may not mean to. They may love Jesus. They may be sincere. But they have been shaped by a world where everything is curated around preference. So the church becomes another place to assess. Was I fed by the pastor’s sermon? Were my children happy? Did the music suit my preference? Did the sermon make sense to my needs? Did anyone notice me? Why did their tea taste like coffee, and coffee taste like tea? Some of those questions are important, but when preference becomes the centre of our focus, the church becomes less about Jesus and more about me.
A healthy church culture is different. It is not conflict-free, no real church is. Read the New Testament slowly and you will be cured of romantic ideas about early church life, people get beaten with sticks and hit with stones, and they fight, a lot. Hardly the stuff we show in modern church social media posts! However, we do know from the New Testament is that the presence of problems does not mean a church is unhealthy, tt means people are being gathered into Christ and still need to be formed, and that they are maybe involved in something that the devil wants to disrupt.
So perhaps the invitation for us all is to walk back upstream, into our past a little bit, to recover evangelism where we have moved towards attracting other Christians, or to recover discipleship where we have settled for a bigger Sunday service attendance.
This will not solve everything. Our churches will still be messy because people are messy, ha!, we are all messy! Pastors will still get tired. Members will still misunderstand one another. But a church shaped by evangelism, discipleship, and Gospel culture will have a different focus. It will not be perfect, but it will know what it is for. And it will know who it belongs to.