Small church self-esteem

Many writers have noted that one of the major problems smaller churches face is poor self-esteem.  They simply don't feel good about themselves.  This can especially be a problem in a church that once was much larger than it is now.  It is also often a problem for a church that goes from having a fully-funded pastor to a bivocational pastor.  Churches that have frequent pastoral turn-over can also have self-esteem issues.   They wonder what is so wrong with them that pastors do not want to stay with them.  Churches that have more than one of these issues going on at the same time will certainly struggle with maintaining a good image of themselves.  What can pastors and lay leaders do in such churches to help raise the self-esteem of the church?

The first thing I would recommend is to constantly remind them that they remain God's people, and God doesn't measure success the same way we often do.  Churches do go through cycles, but they always remain God's people.  His love for them never fades away.

One of the things I often did as a pastor was to tell the people from the pulpit that I believed in them more than some of them believed in themselves.  I would tell them that by working alongside God we could accomplish amazing things.  Some of them didn't believe me at first, but I kept that message in front of them.  They finally began to believe me when we did start getting a few victories under our belt.

The second thing I often suggest is to challenge these churches to a task you know they will accomplish.  Some of these churches feel they haven't accomplished anything worthwhile in years, and this is in fact the case for some of them.  Give them a goal they can't fail to accomplish, and then celebrate the victory, celebrate it again, and then set another challenge.  Start small and work your way up to larger challenges.

The author of a book I'm reading believes that success can become addictive, and I think there is some truth in that.  We've all seen sports teams that seem to be defeated when suddenly their offense scores a couple of times.  The momentum shifts, and the team that was losing now appears to be able to do no wrong.  They score again and again until they finally win the game.  The same thing happens in churches.  They can be going through a rough spot and everything seems to be working against them.  One day they are given a goal which they achieve.  The bar is raised a little with the next goal, and again they are successful.  Soon, they begin to feel a little better about themselves, and eventually they find they accomplish far more than they thought possible.  One success builds upon another.  Not only do the members of such churches now believe they can accomplish something worthwhile, they refuse to not succeed in their efforts.

Finally, encourage them when things don't work out as planned.  We set some goals we didn't achieve.  We had more than our share of failures.  I would remind them that failure is never final.  I would challenge them to help identify the reasons we didn't initially succeed and make revisions to our plans.   Sometimes we identified that our timing was off, or we had not done enough planning, or our efforts weren't there.  Sometimes I just missed God and led them in the wrong direction.  Regardless of the reasons, I would remind them that failure is just an event; it didn't make us failures.  We would learn some things and move forward in ministry.

In a church with poor self-esteem it can be hard to create any momentum, but once you start getting some momentum working for you it can take you further and faster than you may have thought possible.  If you serve a church with a poor self-image of yourself focus your ministry on raising that self-image.  It will pay great dividends in the future.