By Jeff Brumley
For years now, some agencies and experts who coach church planters and struggling congregations have tried to steer over-eager or desperate clients away from the quick fix of sizzling worship services or other gimmicks to draw big crowds.
Instead, they attempt to lead ministers to the very time consuming process of reviving or building churches that nurture disciples and serve surrounding neighborhoods, congregational coaches like George Bullard say.
“You have to work with people in an adult discipleship process,” said Bullard, president of the South Carolina-based Columbia Partnership and general secretary of the North American Baptist Fellowship. “You can’t expect to wow them with a worship service.”
Bullard and other church leadership coaches got a boost in that message recently from Baptist Rick Warren, founder and pastor of Saddleback Church in Lake Forest, Calif.
‘A crowd isn’t a church’
Warren — whose multisite, 22,000-member Baptist church began in a high school theater with about 200 members in 1980 — acknowledged he is often asked by young ministers how they can best replicate his success, according to a Christian Post article about the Exponential West conference the preacher addressed earlier this month.
His advice: be patient, put God and others first and don’t try to follow trends.
“You must be very careful how you build,” Warren said during the three-day conference in Los Angeles. He added that success in ministry isn’t about size and speed.
“I could show you how to get a crowd, but a crowd isn’t a church,” he said in the Post story. “Most church planters spend an entire year planning the first service and none planning the second.”
Rather than keeping a constant watch on the hottest trends, Warren said it’s having a clear purpose, process and pure heart that are needed.
“If you want a church that lasts, you have to build it on purpose, integrity, humility and generosity, not on people, personalities or style,” Warren said. That’s “because the only things that will last forever are eternal purposes of God.”
‘No easy answer’
Others who coach churches say they are often amazed at how little attention church planters and those trying to revive congregations have given to the extent people like Warren and Andy Stanley worked to plan, launch and grow their churches.
“They have seen Warren and Stanley and they’ll say, ‘If we just got our act together on this, we’d be fine — why can’t we?” Bullard said. “You’re not going to be able to help those churches because that’s unrealistic.”
Hearing someone at Warren’s level get honest about the difficulties and challenges of church planting and revitalization is refreshing, said Bill Wilson, director of The Center for Healthy Churches in Winston-Salem, N.C.
That included Warren’s statement that half of all church planters will fail.
“Yeah, I like the fact that Rick Warren is so straight up about that,” Wilson said.
Certainly just trying to copy what successful churches have done will not work, either.
“Viability and staying power is hard, not easy, and it can’t be bought,” Wilson said. “There’s no book to purchase, no magic formula and no pixie dust.”
Wilson said he’s been pressed by Christians in struggling churches about how they can turn their situations around. The answers are the same for church planters looking to hit home runs.
“It is the hardest thing anyone will do and a lot of it is out of their control,” he said.
Sometimes, he added, it’s just being in the right place at the right time.
“On a regular basis, people want us to come and do a revitalization of their congregation,” Wilson said. “We have to say, sure we will give you guidance, but we coach a process and the real work of the process is by the church.”
The key word there is “process,” Wilson said.
“We don’t bring you a pre-packaged plan or vision for the future.”
And vision isn’t easy to come by, he added. Instead, it must be hammered out over time through prayer and discussion and the willingness to take risks.
But a lot of folks resist that, he added.
“You need clarity of mission and purpose, but some people just want shortcuts and magic bullets,” he said. “There is no easy answer.”
A missional mindset
But that doesn’t stop many congregations from looking for them, said Travis Collins, director of mission advancement for the U.S. operation of Fresh Expressions, an international movement to help churches navigate postmodern culture.
Paying attention to church growth or declining statistics or the musical or worship interests of Millennials can lead some churches to ignore the needs of the communities around them.
“I think these trends and fads and answers for the church usually are formulated in a church conference room or denominational conference room,” Collins said.
Seeking that clear vision for a church often begins — or should begin — with establishing a missional mindset that asks first how to minister to people, rather than how to entertain them, Collins said.
“Begin with service, not with a service,” he said. A lot of churches “begin with a worship service and hope somebody comes.”
Another way to put it is to put the kingdom before the church, Collins said. Conversations and visions are transformed when a congregation’s focus is no longer on its survival.
“Instead of formulating the answers, let’s go ask the questions” about what communities want in their local churches, he said.