Mark Dawes, Staff Reporter
THERE IS a new word in the lexicon of church growth gurus. It is called 'turnaround'. If your church attendance has plummeted or plateaued, then it is ripe to become a turnaround church. But, that can't happen until your church has a leader who is a turnaround pastor.
This new approach to doing church is featured prominently in the fall 2005 edition of Leadership, the quarterly United States journal for pastors and church leaders which explores various aspects of pastoral and congregational life.
Your church is ripe for a turnaround if it is characterised as having: an ageing congregation, a loss of corporate vision, little community impact, declining and low attendance, conflicts, low attendance and moral problems, reported Leadership in its main article entitled 'Back from the brink'.
The journal, which is part of the
family of publications of Christianity Today International, had commissioned a survey of pastors and lay persons from 31 churches that had experienced turnaround. Altogether, there were 761 respondents. Based on the survey, Leadership listed the following five factors that are critical to successful turnarounds.
FIVE FACTORS
Turnaround leaders distinguish between obvious symptoms and underlying problems. The publication cautioned, however, that one should not be surprised if there are significant differences between the pastor and the congregation concerning the cause of the problems.
Turnaround leaders pay careful attention to team building and timing not just to vision. There is a danger, Leadership reported, "in pointing out the problem to the masses of people who haven't yet realised there is a problem, unless there soon follows discussion of courses of action. Point out the problem too soon, and the pastor risks losing existing momentum needed to fuel new initiatives. Make the problem public too late and the congregation will feel left out of the process, and likely balk".
Spiritual initiatives are vital. These spiritual initiatives include such activities involving the entire congregation: praying and fasting for a significant period; praying and asking God and people for forgiveness of sins; reading together a book recommended by the pastor which speaks either to church growth strategy and/or ways to experience God.
Church leaders pointing out that God is already at work. In other words, turnaround leaders communicate to their congregations that they should acknowledge where God is working and join Him there.
Acknowledge that turnaround attempts work often better than expected. Parishioners were often on board once the initiatives were fully explained or after the changes began having a positive impact.
Leadership also provides case studies of churches that have experienced turnaround. It records, for example, the case of a 200-member church in Glen Ellyn, Illinois which, when the senior pastor spoke of the need to have another pastor on staff, agonised on the matter concerning the congregation's ability to pay another cleric. Though their financial statements were showing that they could not afford the extra pastor, they dared to trust God to supply the money and so they took a leap of faith and hired the additional cleric.
The story, which appears under the headline 'Connect with the disconnected', shows that since that time, the church's flow of income has been on the incline. That decision caused the church to have birthed a ministry to the homeless in which these persons are not merely fed, but facilitated to become an integral part of congregational fellowship.
Perhaps the single most valuable article in this edition of Leadership is an interview the journal did with the Rev. Steve Goodwin, pastor of Redeemer Lutheran Church in Rowland Heights, California and author of Catching The Next Wave: Leadership Strategies For Turnaround Congregations. The interview appears under the headline, 'A controlled burn: leading change is a dangerous, consuming calling'.
Goodwin pointedly describes how a pastor should lead the change process in a congregation. He said at the outset, "Denominations spend so much time and energy preparing church planters, but we need to spend equal time preparing church reformers."
Pastors, he continued, need to understand the social structures of a congregation. "The need to be cultural anthropologists diagnosing the factors that prevent growth."
Strong psychological health, he told Leadership, is the foremost indication that a pastor is suited to lead a struggling church to a turnaround. He said, "Pastors who come with narcissistic tendencies or grandiosity make terrible reformers. We really need healthy pastors who understand themselves.
Reformers, said Rev. Goodwin, are made, not born. They need, however, to be visionary, having a grasp of the big picture, while possessing enough intuition to sense what's wrong in a system and be curious enough to search for answers.
ADJUST EXPECTATIONS
He said to prepare for the hardships that reforming a church will bring, a pastor should first of all adjust his/her expectations. Rev. Goodwin, who is also an adjunct professor at Fuller Theological Seminary in California, said he often asked his students, "Was John the Baptist a failure because he got beheaded?" John, he explained, "didn't end up on the cover of Time. He got beheaded, but, he did what God needed him to do ... You've got to be able to say 'whatever God wants of me, God gets'."
Rev. Goodwin knocks on the head conventional wisdom that says on being called to shepherd a congregation, the new pastor should gently wade in the water and not shake up things radically in the first year or so. But that is bad advice, Rev. Goodwin thinks. He believes that the newness that comes with having just been installed pastor of a church is the ideal time to shake up the congregation radically and place them on the path to turnaround.
CHANGE WILL HAPPEN
"When one starts the reform the right way, it signals to everyone that something is finally going to change," Rev. Goodwin said. More of Rev. Goodwin's views are available at his website: www.reforminghope.com.
This current edition of Leadership contains a list of books and websites resources for persons interested in pursuing the turnaround path. Many pastors will find useful, too, an article by Leadership's Editor-at-Large, Gordon McDonald, entitled, 'Clean out the sludge: A theology of turn around'. In that column, McDonald used the seven churches of Revelation and argued that the Lord was saying to all of them that they needed to turnaround.
Provocative, too, is an article by H. Dale Burke, the man who succeeded the Rev. Chuck Swindoll at First Evangelical Free Church in Fullerton, California. Rev. Burke's article is entitled 'Even healthy churches need to change'. He argued strongly that the conventional wisdom that says 'If it ain't broke don't fix it' is not a philosophy that is good enough for the church of Jesus Christ. Indeed, he said, it is a philosophy that will lead to nowhere.
Send feedback to mark.dawes@gleanerjm.com.
