Mars Hill Mess

When a Large Church is No Longer a Blessing . . .

Recently a very large, multi-site church had its lampstand removed. This kind of event should grip and grieve the hearts of everyone in spiritual leadership in our country. The pastor had resigned in the weeks just prior to the church’s demise. The remaining leadership decided to disband their network of fifteen churches and let each church decide if they wanted to continue meeting. The move caught lots of people off guard and ended one of the nation’s most prominent and celebrated ministries.

Systemic Breakdown

If we were to perform an autopsy on this particular ministry, we would discover that it did not suffer (as many do) from ineffective programs or a lack of growth. Rather it appears their crisis came about through a cancer of unhealthy leadership functioning.  And since, biblically speaking, churches are bodies, we can see this as a systemic breakdown.  A diseased “head” mortally infected the whole.

Systemic functioning relates to spiritual and relational dynamics that operate behind the scenes (and have operated historically) in the body of a church. When we talk about measuring or diagnosing the level of “systemic health” we assess things that tend to spread through and affect the whole congregational body, things like trust in leadership. Many pastors and church leaders ignore the ramifications of such underlying spiritual and relational issues. This grave oversight (or perhaps better, “under-sight”) always proves costly.

Systemic vs. Programmatic Approaches

How does a systemic perspective differ from programmatic approaches and the kind of problem solving most church leaders do in relation to church health? An illustration might help. At the stadium where our family goes to watch our favorite professional baseball team, the between-inning antics often get everyone’s attention. One crowd favorite is the Home Depot Tool Race. It involves four people dressed as oversized tools consisting of a supersized paintbrush, a drill, a hammer, and a bucket. They race around the warning track. It is never a “clean race.” The paintbrush tries to trip the hammer or the drill bumps off the bucket. One or two of the tools almost always end up on the ground and never make it to the finish line.

The tools in the tool race could just as well represent the problem-solving methods we use in leadership, one bumping out another as we try to “solve the problems” we see. We fire, hire, split, replace, reorganize, etc. to find healthy functioning, but when systemic health is poor, the same unhealthy things keep happening.

Systemic health has more to do with how the race is run and why we run it this way. It looks at how the “tools” have been relating to each other, and may have been doing so for years. Why does the drill have a history of bad behavior toward the bucket? How come the hammer acts so heavy handed? Why do the other tools put up with the hammer’s big head? How come the paintbrush always tries to cover things up?

When systemic dynamics are healthy a church experiences a supernatural Life-source—Jesus’ presence and blessing on their ministry.  However, a pattern of unhealthy relating in the family of God has long-term, painful, implications.

Signals of Systemic Problems

Just as in a physical body, when our systemic health is poor, Christ—the Lord of our church—uses pain to get our attention. He uses the pain to signal us that something is not right, but until we realize what’s going on, we keep running our dysfunctional tool race. And sometimes, if the pain grows great enough, the ministry can fail completely.

The church I mentioned at the beginning of this post experienced a major trauma. The fifteen “satellite churches” have now experienced something that has severely broken their trust in leadership, and the “sickness” (distrust of spiritual leadership) will continue to manifest itself in those bodies unless they receive corporate healing. Systemic illnesses are like that. Time does not heal those wounds. They require intentional treatment.

Would you like to raise awareness of your church’s “systemic health”? Consider taking Blessing Point’s free online assessment. It may start an important discussion among your leaders and save your church from the kind of illness that causes ministries to languish or have their lampstands removed.

What lessons might we learn from a church whose lampstand gets removed?

Rev. Mark Barnard serves as President of Blessing Point Ministries.  Blessing Point works to mend the tapestry of church life and restore the radiance of Christ’s Bride.  Barnard is the author of several books and coauthor of The Eighth Letter – Jesus Still Speaks!