Part Two: Why do churches reach a growth ceiling?

By Dr. Jim Osterhaus

EDITOR'S NOTE: This is the second of a two-part series. Read Part One here.

 Pain and Resistance

One of the hardest concepts to grasp for those who wish to grow is that fact that growth will bring about pain, pain from the loss of important things valued by the pastor and the congregation. What losses are you talking about? you might ask. Growth looks like a good thing, right?.

The first loss for the pastor is the loss of her/his role as the sole minister in the congregation’s life. Pastors of small churches are jacks of all trades. Their responsibilities extend from administration, to public speaking, to hospital visitation. They are the go-to people for practically everything. And many ministers truly cherish this go-to aspect of their lives. In addition to this, having all of these functions gives the pastor a great deal of control, control that often is hard to relinquish. But failing to relinquish this can-do-everything role means the pastor becomes the bottleneck to growth. 

But there’s not only pain for the pastor. There’s pain for the whole congregation, pain from the loss of a small, tight community, and pain from the loss of their familiar role as a congregant as they have known it.

Pain, or the anticipation of pain, causes anxiety. And anxiety creates resistance. I don’t want the pain, so I’ll resist what is creating the pain, which in this case is change.

Here’s an important concept to keep in mind. Resistance is not a foe, but an ally, an ally because it’s giving you information, nothing more, nothing less. But it also tends to screw up plans for moving forward, so most people don’t think of it as an ally.

However, a better way to understand it is merely the forces that exist within each of us that resist change and the pain that change creates. Our brains are structured in such a way as to feel most comfortable during steady state, when nothing is altered. Introduce the hint of change, and our brains tend to react and resist.

The first signal resistance sends is, I don’t like this change. In fact, I don’t like any change.  The second thing resistance signals is, Okay, I can tolerate some change, but you’re going too fast! When the signal inside of us, or from our mentees or direct reports activates, it is up to us to figure out what the signal means. The same as when your smoke detector goes off in your house late at night. You can say to yourself, ‘Damn smoke detector’ while you rip it off the wall and destroy it. Or you can try to figure out what the detector is signaling to you. If there’s a fire, you sure want to know about it.

Competing Values: How I continually manufacture non-change

Because the pastor becomes a facilitator when the issue is transformational, don’t think that the pastor is unimportant. The key element in growth still defaults to the pastor. The leadership role changes depending on the demands of the situation, but he is still the leader, and central to success. And probably the most important characteristic of any successful leader is self-awareness. The self-aware leader is one who understands his own hard-wired personality (those elements that are God-given) and his/her own story (those people and factors that molded him/her as s/he grew up) and the surrounding culture and how it impacts thoughts and behaviors. This self-aware leader is able then to regulate her/his own anxiety as situations become disquieting. 

Let’s start with how we in fact resist change – how we ourselves tend to resist the very changes we ourselves say we want to make. To do this, we need to turn to a discussion of values. Remember, values are those things that matter most to us. Most of us would hope that our values are always aligned and consistent. Unfortunately, that is rarely the case. Life in general, and organizational life in particular, has a nasty habit of offering up choices based on values that aren’t always aligned.

Every organization – business, government agency, church, club – holds numerous challenges as these go about conducting their missions. That will always be true. But what is it within myself that these myriad challenges elicit? It may be nearly impossible for us to bring about any important change in an organization without first understand, then changing ourselves.

Notice that much of what we’ve talked about involves delegation (aka empowerment). Delegation is extremely important for pastors. However, so many pastors get into micro-managing. There is undoubtedly a competing value at work inside of these pastors, unless they simply believe that micro-managing is the absolute best way to do kingdom work and lead their people (which flies in the face of all best management practices, much less kingdom values).

It’s important for you to begin to see how one value, i.e. delegation, gets trumped by another value (competence). Think for a moment of what that competing value inside of the micro-managing pastor is. There’s a good chance that her/his need to be competent may be the competing value. What happens when you delegate? You cede quality control. You know how you would perform, but what about your congregants? Will they do an equally good job? The only way to know is to constantly look over their shoulder.

You might want to fill in the below chart for yourself to see where you might be defeating yourself because of internal competing values.

What do I want to see occur in my church (what do I value)

E.g. I want to see my church grow. This requires distributing leadershipduties to others.

What am I doing/not doing that defeats column one from occurring?

E.g. Whenever I try to turn over leadership, I become anxious and jump in and take back leadership

What competing values drive my actions in column two?

E.g. I must do everything perfectly, and ceding leadership to others is too uncertain as to quality.

This exercise will give you a good start in understanding your own internal inconsistencies that may be sabotaging your best intentions.

Now What? Leading Change

For an excellent look at how an organizational culture can change, take a look at the movie Moneyball. In this movie (based on the true story of the Oakland As ball team in the early 1990s), Billie Beane (the General Manager of the As) comes to a harsh reality. We have no money to buy quality players to win against the big money cities, so we must fundamentally rethink how we go about selecting players. Sound familiar? How can we compete against the mega-church when it’s nearly impossible to close the gap between us?

With the help of Pete James, who has looked at the game and its statistics from a very different paradigm, he begins to rethink how he should do baseball. And the first thing he gets from his scouts, then his manager, then is players, is massive resistance. They realize immediately the losses they will suffer personally if they are to implement this new program. Their anxiety peaks, and they push back, hard.

But Beane continues his program, first getting a few early adaptors, then demonstrating that his plan can work (though the pushback remains fierce). The church world is no different. If you decide that you want to break the 200 barrier and grow, the pushback will be massive. The stakeholders (congregation) will need to wrestle through the implications. The journey will be difficult. But if you stick to it, the results can be rewarding.

I think John Kotter’s work will be helpful. He says that the change process goes through a series of phases that, in total, usually require a considerable length of time. Skipping the below steps creates only the illusion of speed and never produces satisfactory results. Making critical mistakes in any of the phases can have a devastating impact, slowing momentum and negating hard-won gains. So let’s look at the stages:

1. Establish a Sense of Urgency.

2. Form a Powerful Guiding Coalition.

3. Create a Vision.

4. Communicate that Vision.

5. Empower Others to Act on the Vision.

6. Plan for and Create Short Term Wins.

7. Make Improvements and Keep the Momentum for Change Moving.

8. Institutionalize the New Approaches.

 We won’t delineate each of these steps in detail here. You can get Kotter’s book and see what he says. What is critical for you the pastor to understand is that you yourself may in fact be the single most critical impediment to change. If this is the case, it will require a great deal of soul-searching on your part to begin the change process within yourself. And this process almost never occurs in a vacuum. In other words, you need other pastors in whom you trust and with whom you can take this journey. The ability of each of us to deceive ourselves while our own competing values run rampant is unlimited.

Dr. Jim Osterhaus, Ph.D, is a Senior Partner with TAG Consulting. He also serves as Vice President of the Standing Committee of the Diocese of the Mid-Atlantic and is a member of Truro Anglican Church in Fairfax, VA. Read Part One of this two-part series here.