“Making Changes in the Established Church” (Part Four)

We’re talking about making changes and leading the church to new ways, especially in the established church that has been there for a while.  Obviously, a person who starts a church from scratch “digs his own grave,” as many of them like to say.  That’s okay and a valid way to build a church, and sometimes the new plant has faster growth than the established church.  But there is also a great challenge for pastors to embrace and love the established church and help it to become stronger in every way.

Most Common Mistakes While Leading Established Churches

1. Making changes too quickly, too fast.

A friend of mine attended the seminar sponsored by a church that had a drastically different approach and mission statement, and then came home to try to reverse fields and change his church into that model immediately.

Obviously he was disruptive, and became the object of penalty by the church board.  He was released within the year.

Incremental change is not wrong when it comes to methodologies and something carefully planned for the future.

2. Hurting the people already there while you try to connect with the people not yet there.

This is a hard one.  This is the subject of the book, Who Stole My Church?, by Gordon MacDonald.  It seems wrong to pretend the people who gave the money and the time to build the church do not matter as you give more time and money to build the future church also.  Can’t everybody go along for the ride and for the benefits?

Many times this relates to worship music itself, as did that book on change.  But other times it’s simply neglecting the people already attending while trying to get new people to come.

Obviously there should not be such a dichotomy in purpose.  Let’s do both – win new people to Christ and disciple and give pastoral care to the people already in Him.

Tomorrow we’ll continue our examination of mistakes that often negatively impact the change process.