Henry Tolbert [00:00:00]:
If you're like most pastors, your church is facing decline and still trying to recover from the pandemic. Look, I know that if you go on social media, it looks like everybody is growing and everything is going well, but the reality is, is that for many of us, it still feels like we're recovering from the pandemic. If that's you, hold tight. In this episode, I'm going to help you identify ten things that lead to church decline or, or as I call them, church killers. And I'm going to help give you some of the tools and some of the strategy and some of the things that you can be thinking about to help you overcome, even. Especially as we record this episode. We're getting ready to go into the summer here at the start of season three of the church Systems podcast, and I'm excited to help you take the next step and help you move things forward. All right, so look, when we talk about this, we talk about these ten church killers or these things that lead to decline.
Henry Tolbert [00:00:57]:
One of the things we know is that churches naturally decline. Let me be honest about that. Churches naturally decline. And can I take it a step further and tell you that churches naturally die? I can't go right now and identify the church at Ephesus or, you know, the church at Philippi or any of these churches that arguably the greatest church planter in the world planted. Now, we can go and identify some of the offshoots and some of the things that came out of that, but those particular churches we can't identify because churches naturally, over time, fade away. But the question that we've got to ask is, how do we maximize the opportunity that's in front of us today? How do we maximize the moment that we have today to actually take steps forward? Well, today we're going to do what I'm going to call part one of this, and we're going to walk through this, and I'm going to share it with you. For those who haven't met, my name is Henry Tollward. I'm the owner and founder of Systems consultant.
Henry Tolbert [00:01:54]:
You know, over the course of my ministry experience, I have served as a church planner, a church revitalizer, an executive pastor, a young adult pastor, a campus ministry leader. I served in all these different roles. And eventually I came to the conclusion that my task, my calling, my purpose was to help you, was to come alongside you and help you take the next steps. And that's why we created the church systems podcast. This is where we come to answer the hard questions and give you the tough, simple, yet simple solutions to move things forward. All right, as I said, you know, I'm a friend of pastors. I'm here to serve, to help, and to make a difference for you. So let's jump right in and let's start this with part one.
Henry Tolbert [00:02:34]:
Well, you know, one of the things that I see so often is that pastors are overloaded. Pastors are overloaded, you know, and the challenge, especially for most pastors, is that we have learned how to be functionally burned out. Right. In psychology or in counseling, they have this thing called functional depression, right? It's where you can be depressed, but you learn how to keep into your routine and so you can keep going. And so as a result, most people don't notice, most people don't pay attention to it, and so it just becomes another thing. Well, I've seen that in ministry. Pastors have really figured out how to be functionally burned out, meaning that we can be overloaded and we keep on going. Here is what I mean when I say functionally burned out.
Henry Tolbert [00:03:24]:
All right, number one is that you have too much stress. Is that you're constantly worried about or thinking about what is to come. You can feel it in your body. You feel it on your mind. Your mind is always thinking about the next thing. You've always got these things going on. And what I've learned is that this is where so many pastors live. And unfortunately, once we get through this stage, we fall into this place of apathy.
Henry Tolbert [00:03:52]:
When we fall into, when we go from stress to apathy, in stress, we're thinking about all the different things that need to be done in apathy. We are stepping back and saying, well, you know what? Nothing I do is going to make a difference, so I'm gonna just stick with my routine. That's apathy. And really, we don't want any of either of those things. And so instead of going through stress and getting to apathy, what we want to try to do is we want to try to pull you back. We want to try to pull you out of stress to say, okay, how can we take that elephant that is stressing you out and break it down so that we can consume it one bite at a time, and that's what we got to do. But this is one of the signs that you might be overloaded. Another one is just, you just don't have enough time.
Henry Tolbert [00:04:36]:
You know, you're thinking about the things that you want to do and some of the things you know how to do. You just can't make space to do it. You know, between all the things that are already on your plate, maybe you're by vocational and you're thinking about, well, I've got a full time job, and then I've got to figure, I've got a family that I've got to take care of. My kids are getting older, they're growing up, I've got to support them. I want to be a good father, I want to be a good husband. So I still need to do date nights, and I still need to hang out with my wife, and I want to do these other things. And then here is ministry. It's my passion, it's my calling, it's what I love.
Henry Tolbert [00:05:10]:
But I just feel like I don't have enough time on the calendar. I need to take better care of my health. I hadn't been investing in working out and doing some of the things I need to do. Maybe I'm even sacrificing study time. You know, I don't have as much time to study as I used to, to read as I used to, to do my own devotion as I used to. I just don't have enough time. And if that's where you are, I get it, I understand. I literally just had this conversation with my wife.
Henry Tolbert [00:05:36]:
I said, hey, in the next week, I gotta get away. I said, because I've got a million things in my head and I just can't organize. Like, I'm tired of trying to repair this plane while it's in the air. And that's what it feels like when you're out of time. It feels like you're building, but you're flying as you're doing it. And so it's like, well, look, how am I going to make these repairs if we on the road the whole time I'm doing this? And that's a tough thing. Here's another thing about when you're overloaded is that you waste energy, is that you do stuff and you keep doing things. You keep having meetings, you keep having conferences, you keep doing all these different things, but you're not doing them efficiently, it's not efficient.
Henry Tolbert [00:06:18]:
And so what's happening is you're wasting a lot of energy, and you're not only wasting your energy, you were wasting your team's energy. Is that there, there are two things that I see often happen here as it relates to the team, right? Because I'm gonna come back to you. But with the team, number one, either you have them doing stuff that's not really moving the needle, or number two, you don't have them doing anything. And so the energy that they could be spending on the ministry, they spend on something else. And, you know, look, you know, it's like a vacuum, man. If you don't feel that space the right way, something else will fill it. And now when it comes to you, when it comes to wasted energy, you keep bouncing from one thought, from one idea to the next. But there's no coherence, right? It's not cohesive.
Henry Tolbert [00:07:03]:
That's a better word. There's no cohesiveness to what you're trying to do. And as a result, you're just wasting energy. You're doing stuff, but it feels like you're on a treadmill, you're sweating and you're out of breath, but when it's all said and done, you're in the same spot. That's one of the things that happens when you're overloaded. And then the fourth thing is you need more money, you know, from. And I, and I'm not afraid to talk about this in a very real way, not just for the ministry, but for you personally, is that you feel strapped and it limits your vision. You know, for me, I struggle sometimes to have vision beyond my resources because I know what it takes to get where I need to go, right.
Henry Tolbert [00:07:44]:
And I want to trust God and I want to do all the right things. And I will continue to do that. I'll continue to grow at that. But I also know what it takes. I know if I want to reach new people, I can run Facebook ads, but I know what Facebook ads cost, right. I'm aware of all of those different things. And so as a result, it becomes a barrier for me. And so for you, you've got to think about the same thing and really just kind of wrestle through, man, what's happening in that area of our lives.
Henry Tolbert [00:08:12]:
Is this what's holding me back? Is this what's got me down? All right, so those are some of the reasons that passes are overloaded and what it means to be functionally burned out and what it looks like. But now let's talk about these ten things that lead to decline. Right? I want to break these down for you, and I want to talk about exactly how you can begin to move forward. We're going to start in this episode with the first five. All right, number one, one of the first things that leads to a decline is an unclear mission and vision. You know, when you're not clear about your mission, when you're not clear about your vision, when you're not clear about what you're here to do. When you're not here clear about what you're trying to accomplish, then what happens is you begin to get all this sideways energy. You're missing out on the people who would correct, connect around your real mission.
Henry Tolbert [00:09:02]:
But also, people feel like they're just going through the motion. And when people don't see a compelling goal in front of them, they disengage. And so one of the reasons that your leaders might be disengaging is because there's no clear mission and vision. And I want to be clear about this. When I talk about mission and vision, I'm not just talking about a mission statement or a vision of where we're going. I'm talking about a mission and a vision. Yes, those two things, but all the things that come along with it, which includes a plan. Can I tell you that the strategy might be one of the things that's keeping people from really connecting with.
Henry Tolbert [00:09:37]:
With the mission and with the church the way that they should? You know, here's the truth. Your leaders know. They know you. They know how you operate. They know that every six months, you're gonna have a great idea. They know that you're gonna be fired up about it for a couple of weeks, and you're gonna drive it home. And they know also that eventually it'll just sputter out and it'll go away because you'll have a great idea without a strategy. And so, as a result, they just don't engage.
Henry Tolbert [00:10:08]:
And so what you need to be thinking about is, how do I get a clear mission, a clear vision, and a clear strategy that's going to help us move forward. Right. And it needs to be inspiring. This mission needs to be not just enough to get me excited, but enough to inspire those around me to see how. How their purpose fits into the global purpose that God has given us as a congregation. So you need to get a clear mission and vision, and you need to get a clear strategy for where you're going, but also how you're going to get there. That's the gap that so many leaders have. You can see the future.
Henry Tolbert [00:10:47]:
You can discern where God is calling you to go, but you don't know how. And so one of the things you need to do is you need to map out how we get there. All right? One of the things that we do with our partners, with the churches that we work with is that we help them to put together what we call the MVP's, their mission, their values, their pathway, and their signs and in those four elements, we help lay out the strategy to come alongside the mission to say to everybody, here's how we're going to get this done right. It's our habakkuk. Two. Two. That's how we write the vision and make it plain so that the ones that read it can run. We want people to be able to run.
Henry Tolbert [00:11:25]:
We don't want to be able to just walk and crawl. We want them to be able to run. We want to really be able to go. Right. And I'm using the play on words there, but that's what we want to do. So unclear mission and vision is one of the first things that that will cause church decline. Number two, in effective outreach, ineffective outreach. You know, when.
Henry Tolbert [00:11:43]:
When your outreach is not planned in a way that it's really going to help move the needle forward, then guess what? It causes a problem. It causes a major problem. And so one of the things that you've got to do is you've got to figure out how do we really connect with people? But number the first thing I would say is you got to figure out who you want to connect with. You know, all outreach is not created equal. And maybe your church is not called to do everything, but there is something that you're called to do, and you've got to figure that out. You know, instead of trying to reach the whole city, what if you focused on reaching the people within a 1 mile radius? What if you focus on just reaching the people around you and saying, how do we make an impact right here? How do we make a difference right here? How do we help the people right here? That's how you can begin to make a tangible difference by simply starting where you are, by simply starting with the group of people around you and saying, here's how we're going to make a difference. You know, what if you had a strategy that wasn't just giving things away? Because when we talk about outreach, that's what most churches think. They think, you know, let's give stuff away.
Henry Tolbert [00:12:53]:
Let's go give away school supplies, go give away food boxes. Let's go giveaway backpacks. You know, whatever it is, they just give stuff away. And that is a part of outreach. But the deeper part is to identify a set of needs that you can consistently meet and begin to build relationships with people around those needs. Right? It's not just, hey, here's a school supplies. But what if instead of giving out backpacks this year, you gave all the school supplies to the teachers and you said to the teachers, hey, if you ever come up short on some supplies, let us know. We'll come alongside and help you because kids are going to cycle through the school and probably be gone, you know, depending on what age group, in five years, six years, three years, two years.
Henry Tolbert [00:13:38]:
But those teachers, that administration, they could be there for 20 years. And can you imagine that instead of just connecting with the individual kids, right, who really don't see the big picture of what you're trying to do anyway, you connected with the administration and the teachers and you built a long term relationship. And that way through the school, you got to touch all the families and not just a handful of them because you built rapport, you built relationship where they really trusted you and you could really do something long term. That's what I mean when I talk about outreach. You got to be effective. You've got to make sure that you're not just doing it, but that you're doing it well. Number three. Ah, this is a big one.
Henry Tolbert [00:14:18]:
Many churches have a weak discipleship path. You know, what I mean by that is we're just not discipling people. We're excited to have people attend church and we're excited to have people do stuff, but we're not really discipling them. We're not laying out a path for people. As a matter of fact, I believe most churches in America, especially most, I would say most african american churches, because that's where I spend most of my time. Most african american churches are not prepared for people who are unchurched. They're built for people who already understand the church. They use church language and, you know, we assume that everybody understands.
Henry Tolbert [00:15:02]:
But the fact that we don't lay out the discipleship process every week, we lay out salvation. That's not what I'm saying. I know we lay out salvation. We say, hey, here's Romans Road. If you want to come down, do this. We do that every Sunday without fail. But what I'm talking about is, do we say to people, here is how you become who God wants you to be? Here's how you walk with Jesus every day. Here's what salvation is.
Henry Tolbert [00:15:26]:
Here's what it means to be a Christian. Here are your spiritual gifts, all those different things. You know, we have something that we do for our church is called digital discipleship. And with digital discipleship, we build an online new members class for our churches so that people who come into the church can get a great start from the very beginning. And you could do something similar. You could do the same thing, but you need a discipleship path that is clearly laid out and that is serious and simple for people to uncover. If you don't make disciples, you're gonna one day discover that you've got a church full of attenders and attendees. And here's the thing about attendees.
Henry Tolbert [00:16:09]:
Many times they're in consumer mode, meaning that they come to receive, but they don't come to give, they don't come to serve. They don't necessarily come to be a part. And while you'll always have some of those, you need a group of people who can cross over the line, just like the twelve did with Jesus. They went from this is Jesus's thing to this is our thing. Jesus says, look, I don't call your servant, I call you friend, because servants don't know what the master is doing. And so he says, I need you to know. I need you to be aware. And he brings them in, and you need to do the same thing.
Henry Tolbert [00:16:43]:
If you want the church to grow, you got to make disciples. Attendees will bounce from church to church, but disciples can lock into a mission. All right, number four, this is a tough one. Irrelevant ministries. This is another thing that hurts the church. Right? And let me break this down, right? Because there are a couple of ways I could have gone with this, and I know I could have talked about how, you know, ministries are just, you know, we don't have the ministries that people want, and I think that's a part of it. I think it's important that our ministries meet the needs of the people that we have and the people we're trying to reach. You know, sometimes we look up in our ministry, meet who we used to be, they meet the people we used to have.
Henry Tolbert [00:17:23]:
But the people that the ministries were, have been built for, you know, they, when they started 20 years ago, that group of people might be 70 or 80 years old, and so now they can't really engage with it. Maybe they still want to do it because it's their routine. They don't have the energy to do it. They no longer have the need for it like they once did. And so things change. And so one of the things that you gotta begin to explore is you've got to begin to figure out, do our ministries really matter to the people we have? But here's the other thing. Number two, I really want to talk about wasting the potential of great leaders because they're in the wrong place. You know, from season to season, you've got to stop.
Henry Tolbert [00:18:03]:
And you've got to ask, man, is there anybody who's in the wrong seat. Is there anybody who could be on our team who could be better served by moving into another area, into another department? You've got to stop and ask that question because it makes a world of difference. When you get the right people in the right seats, you'll begin to see a whole lot of things change, and that's what you want. All right? And so you've got to make sure that your ministries are actually meeting the needs of the people who are there. You got to make sure that you're solving real problems that people are having and not that you're just doing this ministry because you want to do it. Is it solving people's problems? All right, last one for this episode number five is chaotic church operations. Look at that desk. Come on.
Henry Tolbert [00:18:49]:
Maybe your desk doesn't look like that, but maybe that's a picture, that's a shadow or a type, to use a preacher word, of how your church operates. It's chaotic. Nobody knows where to find anything. Nobody knows where to go when they're looking for something. Nobody knows any of that stuff. And if you have chaotic operations, most people step back. I say this all the time, and I'll continue to say it, a confused mind always defaults to no. And so one of the reason that.
Henry Tolbert [00:19:23]:
One of the reasons that great people won't serve, that they won't engage is because from the outside, they can tell that your operations are chaotic. They find out about everything at the last minute. Stuff is routinely happening that only a few people know about all these things. These are chaotic operations. And sometimes when I say chaotic operations, you think that it's always got to be this blatant thing. Sometimes it's not. You know, a couple years ago at church, I was pastoring, there's. We were putting together like a choir or something for Christmas, and.
Henry Tolbert [00:19:55]:
And I found out about this, and some other leaders found out about this. Literally, when the choir was singing, there was a group of people in the choir, and I had almost half the church saying, why didn't nobody tell me that we were doing this special thing. That's chaotic operations. That's something you got to fix. And I'm telling you that from experience that you've got a. You've got to do that because this is where people getting unintentionally hurt. Right. Chaotic operations.
Henry Tolbert [00:20:27]:
People call the church, want to talk to the pastor. Somebody takes the call, says, okay, I'll get. I'll let them know and get back to you. You never find out. You never get back to them. Next thing you know, they left the church, and you look up three months later, go, oh, what happened to such and such? And you never find out. But what really happened is, is your chaotic operations told them that they weren't important. And so what you want to do is you've got to make sure that you get organized enough to do things well.
Henry Tolbert [00:20:54]:
You know, in our church systems boot camp, we have these modules, and all of these modules cover a different system, from planning your worship service to assimilation, how do you turn guests into members to evangelism? How do you reach new people, to small groups, to volunteer training, to generosity, to even getting yourself and your team organized and putting together an organized staff meeting? All of those things are in those modules. But the beauty of it is with every module, we give our churches a document. They can edit that document. And by the time they finish going through all of our modules, they have a manual. They have an entire ministry manual for how they do things and for how they get things done. And so you need to be thinking about something similar. You need to be thinking about how you can organize your church for growth. Your church does not need to be organized for where you are.
Henry Tolbert [00:21:46]:
It needs to be organized for where you're trying to go. What works with 50 people has to change when there are 150 people. And so you need to start organizing yourself for where you're going. And that's one of the main things that we do, is that we help churches organize for where they're going, not just for where they are, but for who they're going to become in the future. All right, so listen, that's the first five. I'm going to give you the next five in the next episode. But I hope this was good for you. I hope this was helpful to you.
Henry Tolbert [00:22:13]:
Listen, if you want to take some of these steps and you want to move forward, there are two things I want to invite you to do. Number one, I just released a brand new ebook called how to revive a stuck congregation. It is literally how to overcome the ten pitfalls, the ten things that we're going to be talking about in these episodes. You can download that ebook. It's only 497. Literally. It's just a processing fee, but you can download that ebook and you can start reading through it. It's a really simple and easy read to really help you think through this stuff, right? I'm not just trying to throw information.
Henry Tolbert [00:22:46]:
I want to help you think. I want to help you get clear on where you are and where you're trying to go. So that's one thing you could do. But if you really want to take the next step, I want to invite you to explore our church systems bootcamp. You can go on our [email protected], if you scroll down, you'll see the big orange column. Look at the orange column. That's our church systems boot camp. And in that church systems boot camp, it's a twelve month program where we walk with you to help you take the next steps you need in order to move forward and go from where you are to where God wants you to be.
Henry Tolbert [00:23:17]:
All right, listen, this has been the church Systems podcast, episode one of season three. I'm excited to continue this journey with you and to watch God do some amazing things in your church. All right, until next time, keep the gears turning. Peace.
