“Pastor, you’re building your own kingdom. Shame on you!”

“This church has lost its soul. It’s become just another corporate provider of religious goods and services.”

“I long for the days gone by when everyone pulled together. We were all on the same page and life was grand.”

Certainly you’ve heard these laments if you’ve been in ministry for length of time. They point to an underlying problem that intentional interim pastors often encounter in client churches: failure to balance organism and organization as the church grows.

I’ve met this in four of the churches I’ve served as an intentional interim pastor. Each ran into trouble because the pastor and the church leadership team didn’t know how to transition  structure and operations to accommodate growth. As a result, in all four cases, the church went through a period of travail; the pastor ended up leaving under duress.

In each church the problem was not that the church had become “corporate” or that form had become more important than function (as many are want to wail). The dysfunction wasn’t related to the size the church had become. But, then, dysfunction has no direct relationship to size. Messed up churches come in all sizes and shapes.

The problem is that growth brings complexity. Handle it with care.

Finite human bandwidth

There is a very important reason why churches must develop structure, set up lines of communication and codify policies and rules. This is needful because human beings only have so much “bandwidth” to communicate with other humans; we can only relate to a fixed number people in a task environment like a church. The numbers I’ve heard run between 50 and 70.

In other words, in a highly fluid, dynamic and unstructured ministry environment we can only handle between 50 and 70 lines of communication for conveying information, assigning tasks and maintaining feedback loops.

Once a church grows beyond this size these informal lines of leadership and communication must give way. They are not adequate to lead the larger congregation that the church has become.

Critical Transitions

A church clearing various milestones on its growth curve must make a number of critical transitions. Here are three.

First critical transition: Shuffling the leadership team

This becomes a problem in two ways. First, people who flourished in that seat-of-the-pants ministry leadership style often struggle to transition to a more codified leadership structure and communication process. In that transition they lose something important to them, the thrill that comes from operating in a fast-paced environment.

Second critical transition: Selling the vision until you’re blue in the face

Second, if the mission and vision of the church are not repeatedly hammered home – I can’t stress this enough – the people who come in to leadership responsibility because they flourish in a structured setting will not have bought in. As a result – I have seen this time and again – for them the machine is the mission.

Third critical transition: Deciding if you’re God’s leader for this place at this time

If you’re strong in gifts of mercy and service the chances are you’re going to struggle growing the church much beyond 150 to 200. It can be done but it requires you to acquire new skills and master new behaviors that won’t come naturally to you.

It could be that you’re a pastor who is exceptionally skilled in administration and management. You’re probably quite capable of leading a church of several hundred. But when the church grows to the place that additional staff are needed – because you can’t carry the load – those management skills may prove your undoing. If you micromanage your staff rather than setting the vision and delegating BOTH responsibility and authority you’ll eventually run out of runway.

This is a tough question but one that every pastor needs to ask: are my skills, training and experience adequate to lead what this organization has become?

Closing Thoughts

There are some other interesting research questions here. For example, one’s personality profile and spiritual giftedness surely are factors here, but I’ve not seen the research. Being a “High D” (Performax) and with spiritual gifts in leadership, preaching and teaching I flourish in rapidly changing environments that allow me to give leadership and instruction to the group. Having been in more structured churches where I’m part of a team and where I have a lot of administrative duties drains me of energy. But that’s a problem in me, not in  the church’s complex leadership structures.

I don’t know the degree to which these observations would have to be tempered by culture. I would like to know if indigenous churches planted by natives and not western missionaries suffer these same issues. My prediction is that they do because it relates to human communication bandwidth and the nature of human systems.

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