How to Ensure Your Church Struggles to Move Forward

Do you want to ensure that your church struggles to move forward in 2020 and beyond? Well, we’ve got quite an article for you!

How to Ensure Your Church Struggles to Move Forward

1. Overwork yourself into oblivion.

This year has been tough. Maybe you would even call it the hardest year of your ministry.

The amount of decisions you’ve had to make and the speed in which those decisions had to be implemented have taken a major toll on your heart.

So, instead of ensuring this is a season that you implement or maintain a healthy rhythm of rest and even observe the Sabbath, this is the time to just push harder, to not let up, to fight through, and to tell your spouse, “it’s just a season.”

Everyone loves following a burned out leader into a battle.

2. Pour all your energy into that 1-hour service on Sunday.

There are 168 hours in a week, but you better believe that the best use of your time – like all of it – is to pour all your energy into an hour long service.

After all, “that’s how we’ve always done it.” And since you and your team have unity around that rallying cry, go with it.

Only think of possibilities inside of that beautiful box.

3. Make sure your digital presence and strategy have these two secret ingredients: low-quality and low-consistency.

Sure, this is the age of the internet and a lot of your people spend a lot of time on platforms like Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and many more. But you’ve got a lot of excuses. I mean, who has time to learn how to use things like Canva or iMovie or the camera function on your phone? And isn’t this internet thing just a fad, anyway?

Yes, there are a ton of YouTube videos on doing better at digital that you could watch, but Clip Art and PowerPoint are so much easier to create content with. You know, another announcement about Sunday service.

And let’s be real here: your church just doesn’t have the resources to do digital well. Definitely avoid looking at this church’s Facebook, Instagram, or YouTube accounts. They’re just an outlier. They must be one of those mega-churches!

4. Whatever you do, avoid any future vision dreaming and planning.

I’ve always liked checkers more than chess, anyway. It’s far easier. You’ve got a ton going on in the short-term. It’s probably going to be best to pursue that 2020 vision in 2021, anyway. Obviously, the optometrist got the prescription wrong.

But seriously, this is definitely not the year for a physically distanced leadership retreat.

That whole walking and chewing gum is really hard. Short-term is really the only thing to be thinking about right now. At least this year, we have an excuse (thanks, Rona).

After all, who knows what the future holds, anyway?!

5. Give in to the complainers. Better yet, make them leaders.

They’re loud about things because they care. They’re not obnoxious they’re just passionate.

And think about it: since they can see all the problems with every decision you and your leadership team have made this year (and let’s not act like their prophetic gift has only been on display in 2020 – they have a long track record), they must have amazing solutions too.

They are, without a doubt, the leaders you’ve been praying and waiting for.

What would you add?

I’m curious, what kind of things do you see that we could do to ensure the churches we lead struggle to move forward? Either leave a comment below, join the conversation in our Facebook group, or send us a tweet.

Grow as a Preacher and Leader [Free Resources]

Want to grow as a preacher and leader? We’ll help you do it. Just subscribe to the blog. And to get you started and as a way of saying thank you, we’ll include 6 free resources: Building a Leadership Pipeline Packet, Pre-Formatted Sermon Notes Template, Sermon Evaluation Worksheet, 56 Weeks of Preaching Topics, Sermon Series Planning Evernote Template, and the Weekly Productivity Evernote Template. All this for free when you subscribe.

Disclaimer: if you didn’t get it by now, this was an exquisite display of sarcasm. And yes, if you wondered if sarcasm is my love language, you would be correct. Well done.