Leading in a Time of Crisis 2

John Maxwell says ‘It’s important that the team members know exactly where the team stands.’ On that Boxing Day I got up and wrote down the things people were saying to me about church (I know, how sad is that? Working on Boxing Day!) – I hadn’t had enough space until then to reflect on what was going on and analyse our situation. At this point, I came up with five major reasons why we were where we were.

1. We were facing a growth challenge – could we cope with more people? Could we recover from sending out a church plant and supporting another smaller one? Could we adjust to new roles as a team? Could we go through the pain of counting the cost of all these changes?

Mark Driscoll says that you need to re-engineer or replant the church every year and the main reasons churches don’t grow is because the elders don’t want to change.

2. We faced the facilities challenge – we were running out of office space and we don’t have enough space for weekday activities or Sunday ministries outside of the main meeting, so we investigated relocating.

3. We faced a financial challenge - £90K short and needing to do something with our buildings.

4. We faced the diversity challenge – the race issue.

5. And we faced an apostolic challenge. Could we recover from planting South Central? Could we help with Greenwich? Could we release Mick Taylor further with training for Newfrontiers?

This was my analysis. Any one of these challenges is big enough for a church. Put all five in the mix and we could get stuck, by which I mean stop growing.