Four Church Staff Barriers to Reaching the City
Reorienting Our Church Leadership Around a Kingdom Agenda
“If it doesn’t get people into our church, we don’t do it.”
It was under that mandate the church staff functioned. The daily work, the relationships forged, and the initiatives launched were all designed to funnel people into the pews on Sunday.
So many things about that deserves our respect. The strategic focus and relentless intentionality created the opportunity for life change and church growth.
We discovered, however, several unintended consequences that seriously undermined our ability to reach people who were near to us but far from God.
If you or your church desires to reach your city, these four barriers will hold you back:
Programming Protectionism
Every church needs good programs. Programs provide structures and steps for people to join the disciple-making pathway. Some of those programs include worship, small groups, and age-graded ministries.
But no church, regardless of size or capacity, can create programs broad enough in scope to funnel all of the disciple-making activities needed to impact a city.
For example, one church I served had a program of outreach that included home visitation every Tuesday night. It was a great program, and small group leaders were required to participate. The problem was that one of our leaders also coached Little League baseball on Tuesday nights. Which is more effective: Spending time with 16 kids and their parents every Tuesday night or driving 45 minutes to make one visit? Both are important, but only visitation was celebrated.
But no church, regardless of size or capacity, can create programs broad enough in scope to funnel all of the disciple-making activities needed to impact a city.
Rather than applauding the leader for leveraging his influence for the kingdom, we were suspicious of community engagement that did not originate from our church programming. The staff did not create, could not manage it, and could never measure it, so, neither did we encourage it.
Capacity Constraints
Every organization has a capacity limitations, and churches are no different. But the great joy of shepherding a congregation is the task of “equipping the saints for the work of ministry” (Ephesians 4:12).
The church ministry team is not called to do all the ministry, but to share it with the congregation. This decentralizes ministry, removes unnecessary bottlenecks, and emboldens everyday Christians to live on mission with Jesus.
Yet most of the time, pastors and ministry leaders are measured by what they do rather than what they equip and empower other people to do.
The result is a ministry team that becomes the leadership lid for effective kingdom impact. The staff’s limited capacity limits the scale of work done in the community.
There is a better way.
What happens when pastors see themselves as coaches who teach skills, build a playbook, and inspire fellow believers to fulfill their ministry in the workplace, in their neighborhood, or at their school?
Bill Hull wrote what’s become a classic book called The Disciple Making Pastor that casts vision and offers practical help to this end.
Cooperation Aversion
It’s a bold statement, but I still believe that the local church is the hope for the world.
What I mean by that is that God has established and empowered by his Spirit local churches to take the Gospel of Jesus Christ to the ends of the earth. It’s through local congregations growing in grace together and equipped for Gospel witness and work that our neighbors and the nations come to Jesus.
It’s also true that the local church has an expiration date.
She is an essential but a temporary means to advance the eternal kingdom of God. Gene Mims reminds us in his book The Kingdom Focused Church that Jesus mentions the church only twice. But he talked about the kingdom over 90 times.
When Paul wrote his letters, he wrote to a group of local churches in a particular city. There was an understanding that while these churches were distinct, they were united.
What we find in the West is that it’s much more popular to preach about the kingdom of God than to actually do what it takes to join Jesus’ kingdom work in the community.
Until pastors and church staff members see other local, Gospel churches as kingdom partners and then organize their vision, mission, strategy, and workflow accordingly, kingdom work will be a slogan, but not a reality.
What we find in the West is that it’s much more popular to preach about the kingdom of God than to actually do what it takes to join Jesus’ kingdom work in the community.
Cooperation is hard. Perhaps that’s why John takes so many column inches to record Jesus’ prayer for unity among us in his final hours prior to the crucifixion. Perhaps that’s why Paul made such an effort to write his letters to the churches located in cities throughout Asia Minor.
Perhaps they knew that cooperation is not an organizational issue as much as it is a heart issue.
And when our hearts reflect the heart of Jesus, we will do whatever it takes to join his kingdom mission.
Misplaced Metrics
It’s possible for a church to thrive (or at least survive) while a community declines, and for the church to feel satisfied about the progress.
Sometimes the gap between the church’s apparent health and the community’s brokenness is explained away with “darkness hates the light” type of rhetoric. The idea is that we have answers our neighbors don’t want to hear. And there’s some truth to that.
But Jesus said that the harvest is plentiful, but the workers are few (Matthew 9:35-38). His primary concern was the readiness of the workers not the receptivity of the harvest.
In his 3-Circles evangelism training material, Jimmy Scroggins, pastor of Family Church, West Palm Beach, Florida wrote that he and his staff began asking different questions about the church’s health. Instead of “How’s our church doing?” they began to ask, “How’s our city doing?”
Considering the condition of your city is a big shift in the church’s metrics of health or unhealth.
In his book, Kingdom Collaborators, Reggie McNeal calls for an expansion of the church scorecard. Internal metrics are important, but they are not the only metrics to consider.
As long as the church scorecard only includes internal metrics, we will never empower the people of God to live on mission, most of our neighbors will not come to Christ, and our social structures will continue to collapse under the weight of spiritual brokenness.
As long as the church scorecard only includes internal metrics, we will never empower the people of God to live on mission.
The Finish
Every church wants to reach their city. Pastors and church ministry teams labor in the work every day. The barriers to community impact are real, and some of them require a mountain-moving God to act. But these four particular barriers are overcome when pastors and church leaders reorient their leadership around a kingdom agenda, recalibrate the measures of success, and release God’s people to live on mission with him.
Courage & Civility Church Kit
A few years ago, I wrote a practical guide to help churches and church leaders engage in the public square. It includes sermons and small groups studies you can use in your church. Download that free resource HERE.
Everyone’s Wilson
I lead Everyone’s Wilson, a network of churches, businesses, and nonprofits working together for the wholeness of our community. The Lord has shown great favor over the last 18 months, but there is still a lot of work to do. And we depend on church, business, and individual support to fund this work.
So if you would consider becoming a financial partner, I would be grateful. CLICK HERE TO GIVE.