Will your church pay the price to change?

Most churches and pastors say the right things.  They want to reach more people for Christ, they want the church to grow, they want to have a greater impact on their communities, they want to see healthier families, etc.  However, if the pastor begins to do the things it might take for these things to happen he or she is quickly challenged.  As Gil Rendle writes in Journey in the Wilderness: New Life for Mainline Churches, churches often request leadership but then resist it and reward management.  It's not that these churches do not really want what they claim to desire; it's that they want these things to occur without any disrupting changes.  They are not willing to pay the price that change requires.

Realizing that every church and situation is different, what are some of these potential costs?  I discussed several of them in my book The Healthy Community: Moving Your Church Beyond Tunnel Vision.

• Change in pastoral leadership.  This won't make me popular with many of my readers, but sometimes the church can't change until it changes pastoral leadership.  Some pastors simply do not have leadership gifts and probably shouldn't be in pastoral ministry.  Quite often a pastor reaches a place where he or she cannot take a church any further and needs to step aside for new leadership.  I was willing to leave the church I pastored for 20 years when I realized it needed leadership with different gifts than I had.  My role was to lay the foundation for the next pastor to build upon.  When I accepted that it became easier to resign and let that happen.
• Change in lay leadership.  Some churches will never change because of controlling lay leaders in the church.  These persons are seldom willing to step aside voluntarily as they have convinced themselves they are doing God's work by resisting any change that might be proposed.  They are defenders of the church and even of the faith in their minds, and until the congregation is willing to confront these individuals there is little hope of change or growth occurring in the church.
• Conflict.  Any significant change in a church will produce conflict, and many churches are willing to do anything, including die, to avoid conflict.  Conflict produces the basic reactions of fight or flight, both of which makes people uncomfortable and are costly to the church.  There are ways to approach conflict in a more healthy manner which churches need to learn before the next conflict affects their congregation.
• People leaving the church.  One of the most feared statements in many churches is, "If you decide to make this change my family and I will leave the church, and I've heard from others they will as well."  Such warnings are often enough to stop any effort to introduce change into the church.  Smaller churches especially are fearful of people leaving because of the value such churches place on relationships.  We need to come to grips with the idea that it is OK if people feel they need to leave our church.  If the congregation believes God is leading it one way and someone threatens to leave if we go in that direction, we must be willing to tell them good-by.  My experience has been than they are often replaced by new people who are attracted by the changes we've made.  If someone doesn't share the church's vision it is best that they do leave so they don't become a stumbling block to the church and the church's vision doesn't become a stumbling block to their spiritual growth.
• Fear of the unknown.  All systems prefer what they have known in the past.  We know how to do what we've been doing for years; we don't know how successful we'll do the new things any change will bring.  That is frightening to most leaders, and that fear is a price they must be willing to pay.

The good news is that these costs are not insurmountable to a church.  Any church is capable of paying the price to change, if it is willing.  As I've shared with church groups, "If you want to do something you will find a way.  If you don't want to do it you'll find an excuse."  If your church truly wants to do what it claims it wants to do it will find a way to pay the cost to make that happen.