{"id":17628,"date":"2018-05-17T11:54:37","date_gmt":"2018-05-17T18:54:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dminlgp\/?p=17628"},"modified":"2018-05-18T07:18:36","modified_gmt":"2018-05-18T14:18:36","slug":"how-to-change-a-church-without-killing-it","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/how-to-change-a-church-without-killing-it\/","title":{"rendered":"How to Change a Church Without Killing It"},"content":{"rendered":"

I grew up in a small town of Mt. Juliet, Tennessee.\u00a0 We had one elementary school and one high school.\u00a0 Just as I became a preteen, Mt. Juliet grew enough that they built a separate Junior High School.\u00a0 As Nashville experienced rapid growth in the 1990s and beyond, my hometown changed to become a trendy bedroom community for those who wanted to live away from the city.<\/p>\n

While I have not lived in Mt. Juliet since the 1980s, I still visit my mother regularly who lives there.\u00a0 On one such visit, we drove by this little country church and she told me, \u201cStuart, they got a new pastor and he told them that if he were to come, he would change their music to contemporary.\u00a0 Well, he did and half the church left.\u201d<\/p>\n

To be honest, I do not know anything about that church, and I do not know what became of it, but most of us in ministry have known of churches that have either split or had a mass exodus.\u00a0 I know of a church where the youth minister made a strategic change to intentionally go after unchurched teens.\u00a0 He met them in the community, invited them to the Wednesday night youth group meeting, and shared the gospel with them.\u00a0 The parents of the \u201cchurch kids\u201d noticed these teens smoking in the parking lot after church, cursing loudly in the church hallway, and flirting with their daughters.\u00a0 When confronted, this youth minister listened to their concerns, but tried to encourage these families to understand his perspective.\u00a0\u00a0 Eventually, dozens of families left the church for another church which had a \u201csafer\u201d youth ministry.<\/p>\n

If you are like me, you probably can recount more stories where a change was made in a church body or ministry, only to cause dissent and decline.\u00a0 For that reason, many pastors and church leaders are cautious about making changes that might be unpopular, even if they believe that these changes are totally necessary.\u00a0 For example, I heard about one large church where the pastor retired.\u00a0 The elder pastor met with the new pastor on his way out.\u00a0 He handed the new pastor a piece of paper with three names.\u00a0 He said, “these the names of three staff members that I should have fired years ago but I didn\u2019t have the heart to do it.”<\/p>\n

These examples and more came to my mind last month as I listened to the audiobook, Managing Transitions: Making the Most of Change,<\/strong><\/em>\u00a0 by William Bridges.\u00a0 This book was written to business leaders but was obviously relevant to pastors and other church leaders.\u00a0 Bridges makes the point repeatedly that organizations who make changes without managing the implementation of the entire transition process often fail.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

For some of us, we may see the words \u201cchange\u201d and \u201ctransition\u201d as synonyms, but Brides sees \u201cchange\u201d as more cognitive (what should we do?) and \u201ctransition\u201d as psychological\/emotional (how will this affect me personally?).\u00a0 Bridges asserts that good change with bad implementation is, in reality, a bad change.\u00a0 One illustration he gave was when the Italian clothing company, Benetton, diversified by buying several sporting goods companies in the late 1990s.\u00a0 All of a sudden, Benetton gained a bunch of employees who were avid sporting goods enthusiasts.\u00a0 They were asked to relocate and made to integrate into a very different business culture.\u00a0 It was a total failure, most of the sporting goods employees quit, and Benetton eventually closed down it\u2019s sporting goods line.\u00a0 Whether or not the purchase of these companies was a good or bad decision can be debated.\u00a0 But the poor implementation by Benetton sealed the fate of \u201cBenetton Sportsystem.\u201d<\/p>\n

What can church leaders gain by reading Managing Transitions<\/em><\/strong>?\u00a0 Here are my thoughts:<\/p>\n

a)\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Bridges uses the story of Moses many times in his book, even though the target audience is secular business leaders.\u00a0 Yet, pastors will be inspired that God\u2019s word shows us how God led Moses to manage transitions effectively.\u00a0 To put it simply, managing transitions is biblical.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

b)\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Many church leaders are afraid of making changes because of the possibility of negative consequence.\u00a0 This book gives these leaders a path to help make changes that are willingly adopted by church members.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

c)\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Most seminaries do not teach seminary students how to manage transitions effectively.\u00a0 Maybe one reason that many young pastors have such short tenures is that a lot of mistakes are made in this area?<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

d)\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Our culture is changing at a rapid pace.\u00a0 Most church leaders do not believe that our society will look the same 10 years from now as it does today.\u00a0 They know that the church will have to make significant changes in order to be effective in the coming years.\u00a0 This book can help them effectively implement these changes.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

In conclusion, the consequences of a bad transition in a church can be brutal:\u00a0 lost members, hurt feelings, a drop in offerings, a negative reputation in the community, etc.\u00a0 Not only should church leaders decide what changes need to be made, they also must carefully plan how this transition should be managed.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

William Bridges, Managing Transitions: Making The Most Of Change (Boston, MA: Da Capo, 2017).<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I grew up in a small town of Mt. Juliet, Tennessee.\u00a0 We had one elementary school and one high school.\u00a0 Just as I became a preteen, Mt. Juliet grew enough that they built a separate Junior High School.\u00a0 As Nashville experienced rapid growth in the 1990s and beyond, my hometown changed to become a trendy […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":87,"featured_media":17634,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[346,1246,1248,1247,1242],"class_list":["post-17628","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-change","tag-managing-tranitions","tag-moses","tag-the-sevens-know-how-to-manage-the-heck-out-of-transitons","tag-william-bridges","cohort-lgp7"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17628","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/87"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=17628"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17628\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":17655,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17628\/revisions\/17655"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/17634"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=17628"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=17628"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=17628"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}