Church World: Engagement

 Recently I read an advance copy of Future Church: Seven Laws of Real Church Growth. One of the laws the authors--Will Mancini and Cory Hartman--describe is the Law of Development (versus Involvement). There are 3 areas: doctrinal, skills, reproductive (duplication of disciples). The problem they describe for churches is how to develop disciples in a fractured world: geographically even in an urban, rural setting; values; schedule (no time to spend with others on a quality basis). So people check off their to-do by attending church but not growing in discipling relationships. The analogy they adopted from a pastor and tennis pro: most people just want to tweak their weekend "game" and not bother to get revolutionize or transform their game to win a tournament. Winning a tournament may have eternal life consequences for those we care about.

Just like businesses, the church world is struggling with engagement: enthusiasm and commitment. Church leaders often depict the Pareto principle when describing how their programs are executed: 20% of the people do 80% of the work. Whether those 20% are enthusiastic is another question, but assume they are. Then we might say churches only have 20% engagement. Exactly the supposed levels that Gallup has been measuring in a variety of business organizations for the past 30 years--and it really hasn't changed.

So we need a revolution. In this and my business blog, I describe that engagement won't change unless a foundation of mutual trust is laid. Trust is built through competency, integrity, approachability, openness and empathy. I don't find church leadership lacking in these areas much. However, I do find, anecdotally, that people lack a trust in God. They say they trust God but in their deepest parts of their hearts and minds, their "micro-truths" (a borrowed term of a deep truth not shared publicly) are they don't believe God is dependable, keeps His promises and also they are afraid to share their sinful behaviors. For business leaders, rebuilding trust requires extraordinary visibility, two-way communication (a lot of listening to questions, comments, complaints) and execution of practices in keeping with promises and values.

One of the practices I advocate is Open Tour, not Open Door--don't make people come to you, instead go to them. Or as one new associate pastor learned when he inquired where his office would be: it's out there in the parish, go and walk.

Mancini and Hartman describe rebuilding the activities, not necessarily programs, of the church people so that modeling behaviors are visible and caught by others. On-the-job education can happen in one-to-one or one-to-few mentoring schedules. Once this is created and working well (and there's another rub, how do you know? How would you measure it?) then use your programs to "attract listeners, call learners, send go-ers".

I know how hard it is to change a corporate culture when I have 40 hrs per week of contact with those in the organization. Imagine how hard it is to change a culture of skepticism, busy-ness and program focus in an organization where at best you might have 1 hr/week of contact.