Pastor Writer: Conversations on Reading, Writing, and the Christian Life
Pastor Writer: Conversations on Reading, Writing, and the Christian Life
Karl Vaters — De-sizing the Church
Karl produces resources for Helping Small Churches Thrive at KarlVaters.com.
He's the author of five books on church leadership, including his newest, De-Sizing the Church: How Church Growth Became a Science, Then an Obsession, and What's Next. His other books include The Grasshopper Myth and Small Church Essentials.
Karl also hosts a bi-weekly podcast, The Church Lobby: Conversations on Faith & Ministry, featuring in-depth interviews about topics that concern pastors, especially those who minister in a small church context.
Karl has served in small-church ministry for over 40 years, so he speaks and writes from decades of hands-on pastoral experience. He and his wife, Shelley have three children and two grandkids.
You're listening to episode 221 of the Pastor-Writer Podcast conversations on reading, writing and the Christian life. I'm your host, chase Replogle. Carl Vader's is no stranger to the Pastor-Writer Podcast. It's been my honor to be able to talk with him before. When I saw that he had a new book coming out, I knew that it was one that I would want to read and certainly what I'd want to discuss on the podcast. But I didn't realize how important this book was going to be to me. Carl has always worked in the space of small church ministry, trying to help small church pastors, small churches, be the best they can. But his new book, desizing the Church is, I think, one of the most important conversations I've had on the podcast, certainly this year. I'm really excited for you to be able to hear the conversation, certainly excited for you to be able to pick up the book, because I think it's a conversation we desperately need to be having as pastors, as churches, as laypeople in churches. Carl's a great writer, a great conversationalist, and I hope you get as much out of this conversation than I did. Thanks for listening.
Speaker 1:Well, I'm joined on the podcast today by Carl Vaders. Carl produces resources for helping small churches thrive at carlvaderscom. He's the author of five books on church leadership, including his newest book, the one he joins me today to talk about. It's titled Desizing the Church how Church Growth Became Science, then an Obsession, and what's Next? His other books? You might be familiar with the Grasshopper Myth, as well as Small Church Essentials. Carl also hosts a bi-weekly podcast, the Church Lobby Conversations on Faith and Ministry, featuring in-depth interviews about topics that concern pastors, especially those who minister in small church contexts. Carl has served in small church ministry for over 40 years, so he speaks and writes from decades of hands-on pastoral experience, and he and his wife Shelley have three children and two grandkids. Well, carl, it's always great to have you on the podcast. I've always loved the work that you've done. Really, really excited to be able to bring this book to the audience as well.
Speaker 2:Thank you, Chase. I appreciate the opportunity. It's always excited to be able to bring this book to the audience as well.
Speaker 1:Thank you, chase. I appreciate the opportunity. It's always good to be on with you Well, you have really been providing just great resources for so many years. I'm a small church pastor no many small church pastors so I've turned to your books. You're writing before, and so I saw this book coming out and knew right away it was one I wanted to read and certainly one that I wanted to be able to talk to you about. But the book itself one of the places it starts at the very beginning is with this phrase that I think you've coined for the purposes of the book de-sizing. So maybe it's a good place to start. What do you mean?
Speaker 2:by the word de-sizing the church. Yeah, it's a good question because, yes, I made the word up.
Speaker 1:That's the nice part of being a writer You're allowed to do that.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it is For my first book, the Grasshopper Myth. I made up the term. I didn't make up any of those words, but I put them together in a way they never had. And now I just made up a whole word all by myself. Yeah, I made up the word because I have this concept in my head and I wanted to make it as concise as possible.
Speaker 2:So let me start by saying what desizing isn't. Desizing is not downsizing. I want to say that right up front, because I'm known as the small church guy and I have never had a desire for churches to be small. I just want small churches to be great. And this really isn't about small churches so much as it is about we have an obsession with bigness in the church, and I believe that this obsession with bigness has reached a point where it's causing all kinds of problems, many of them visible and some of them yet to still bubble up to the surface and bite us. But I think this obsession with bigness and this obsession with numerical increase is hurting us in ways that we don't even recognize yet, and we have to stop using numerical increase as the primary and sometimes the exclusive way that we determine whether or not a church is healthy.
Speaker 1:I think it's really helpful to make that distinction at the beginning, because I get this a lot too. I talk a lot about small church and I try to talk about the value of being a small church pastor, the things that I've enjoyed about being a small church pastor, and I'm keenly aware, too, that it can come across as if I think the only true ministry is small church ministry, or the right way to do church is the small church, which is not the case. I've worked in some large churches, and so I want to make sure at the very beginning you and I are not arguing why every church should be small, nor is the book, as you say, trying to attack large churches, but I think the way you put it there is really helpful. There's something in our mindset of bigness that really has kept us from being able to think about what churches are and what really an effective church is, regardless of size.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it really has. I mean, we all have limited brain capacity and to the degree that we think, well, I can handle two things at the same time, well, okay. But no, even brain science is showing that we cannot maintain two things at the same time. We can only toggle back and forth between them. So if we're constantly emphasizing the size of our church, then we have to toggle back and forth between that and the other things that Jesus called us to do, which you know, making disciples and being people of integrity and the essential things of the church. And I do think that we have so obsessed over bigness that it has, in many cases, replaced much of what Jesus actually called us to do and to be as his church.
Speaker 1:You write at one point early in the book that this obsession with bigness is it's so pervasive that people may not even realize there is another way or there are alternatives to just thinking about size. What are some of those signs that you see within the church right now that bigness has become an obsession, that size has become sort of our only means for evaluating what a church is?
Speaker 2:Well, I mean, anybody who's been in ministry for very long knows the conversation that you have with pastors at maybe a pastor's conference or whatever, where you know, hey, so what are you running? And that kind of comes up. But one of the things that recently happened that really kind of struck me was there was a research done recently I believe it was by Gallup or Barnett was one of the major ones and the headline was two thirds of American churches are stalled or shrinking. And so I read the article and I saw what they were saying. And then I looked at the actual data and here's the way it laid out Almost exactly one third of churches were increasing in size. Almost exactly one third of churches were increasing in size. Almost exactly one-third of churches were maintaining their size and almost exactly one-third of churches were decreasing in size. So that headline, which was two-thirds of churches are stuck or declining, could have read two-thirds of churches are maintaining or increasing.
Speaker 1:Two-thirds of churches are maintaining or increasing Right.
Speaker 2:That would have been just as accurate a headline. But we take that middle group of churches that are maintaining their numbers and we see that as stuck. We see that as problematic because we are so obsessed with numerical increase that any lack of numerical increase year to year is seen as a five alarm fire that we have to address immediately because it must be the sign of endemic problems and it isn't necessarily so.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think there's that cliche in pastoral ministry that healthy things grow and I sort of laugh when I hear that because I think at this stage of my life the only growth that's happening you know I've capped out height growth so the only growth that's happening now is probably an unhealthy growth in my life. But there is sort of a natural size that some of us are able to lead at, to get to and worth celebrating. You spend a lot of time in the book unpacking the history of the church growth movement and sort of even, as we'll do, the conversation half of the book's kind of about this history of the church growth movement, how it's impacted the way we see church today. The second half really, I think, is your alternative to that, other ways to be able to look and evaluate the church. But I'd love to hear you talk a little bit about where we are in the history of the church growth movement.
Speaker 2:Yeah, this is really the spark for the book was a couple conversations that I had about the church growth movement and its history, and Gary McIntosh, actually, who's an expert in church growth and who wrote the biography of Donald McGavern, who's considered the founder of the church growth movement. It was some conversations with him where he corrected some of my misunderstandings that made me go, ok, what else am I missing? And so I did the research so really quickly. What I discovered was there wasn't a single church growth movement in America. There were actually two. The one that we're that church leaders are most aware of was begun by Donald McGavern, and even though today you ask nine out of 10 pastors if they've ever heard of McGavern, nine out of 10 of them will say no. Nevertheless, his language, his ideas and even the kind of questions he asked about church health are the questions and ideas and words that we typically use in church right now, and we just don't know where they came from.
Speaker 2:Donald McGavern was a missionary in India for all of his career and he started noticing that there were places where entire villages were coming to Christ, and he actually went to these villages and confirmed that it was happening. Then, when he retired at the end of the 60s 1960s, got to get my century right as well. He went to Africa and did some research there, where the same thing was happening. They came home and wrote a book called the Bridges of God about the principles that he discovered of what God is doing in these places where entire people groups are coming to Christ at the same time. Out of that he then started the Fuller Church Growth Institute, which is ground zero for the church growth movement, and for the first seven years as he taught it, he would not allow American pastors in the class.
Speaker 2:Now you can't just say no American pastors allowed, but what he did was he put restrictions on the students that had to have been working outside of their primary language, they had to have been working with another ethnic group and so on, and by doing so he excluded most American pastors, and part of the reason he did that was because he feared what American pastors would do if we got a hold of his ideas.
Speaker 2:He feared that we would turn this idea of people movements coming to Christ into a big church contest, which in fact is what we did when we eventually got a hold of those ideas. And now the church growth movement has been primarily known for how do we make an individual congregation get bigger, rather than how do we increase the percentage of Christians within the community surrounding me, whatever church they might end up going to. And so this deep dive into church growth history and then into American history. These two streams converged into this interesting thing that we've got right now, where we're using the language of one movement but we're still living in the previous movement, which was the entrepreneurial movement of the American church growth stream that pre-existed Donald McGavern.
Speaker 1:You offer a list of these sort of what you call the American stream or the way the American church has influenced this movement, sort of adopted it. Some of the things on that list are things like a focus on how I did it, pastors I think these will resonate, by the way, with pastors and even lay people who are listening, so an emphasis on how a particular pastor grew a church, how this works, so a sort of pragmatic approach. They tend to be personality-based, attendance-driven, individualistic, homogeneous, so focused on a particular group or segment of people, and entrepreneurial or targeted in their resources. Of American lists, maybe commenting on a few of those that stand out to you that you think really do describe the moment we're in and how the American stream really changed what the church growth movement originally was.
Speaker 2:Yeah, the first one in there is how I did it, because I think it is the most important of them. That's actually a phrase that Gary McIntosh created, so I'm going to give him credit for that. But what he talks about is that in the American church growth movement, typically what we have is and any pastor who's gone to a church growth conference has experienced this the promoted main speaker is the pastor of the biggest and or fastest growing church in the area and that pastor gets up and says here's how we did it at our church, now go and duplicate it at your church. And God doesn't sell franchises. That's not how his church works.
Speaker 2:Mcgavern's idea was hey, let's study the underlying principles from all kinds of different places, including outside of the American bubble of what are the principles? What are the principles, what are the foundational ideas that are happening when entire people movements are coming to Christ? So his was how to do it rather than how I did it. So McAvern's idea was wasn't go out and find somebody who's doing it well and try to do it their way. It was understand what God is doing and how God is moving and understand the principles that are underneath that.
Speaker 2:One way of phrasing that that I didn't put in the book is when I talk to young pastors, I tell them when you're beginning in ministry you're going to be listening to a lot of other pastors, a lot of other sermons and you should. But when you start in ministry you're going to be tempted to be a tribute band. Don't be a tribute band, be a cover band. Here's the difference. The tribute band only sings the songs of the one band that they love. The cover band sings the best songs from a variety of bands.
Speaker 2:So I tell them don't just preach the way your favorite pastor preaches. Pick a whole bunch of them from all different places and be a cover band. Yes, for a while you're going to sound like other pastors, but sound like multiple other pastors rather than just one other pastor. And as that flows through you, eventually it's going to come out in a unique way that is exclusively you. And I think that's kind of the difference between the McGavern and the American stream. In the American stream we tend towards picking that one hero of the faith and being just like them and duplicating them. But McGavern's idea was pick the best ideas from the best places and put them all together and it will end up looking different at the end, because it's flowing through you.
Speaker 1:Yeah, one of the other ones that on the list that really stands out to me is the and I think you're getting at it even in that description the personality-based approach that churches tend to rely heavily on a single personality to track, to maintain, to sort of build and grow.
Speaker 2:Um, we, we tend to be attracted to uh, certain individuals because of the impact that they've had upon our lives, and there's nothing wrong with, um, having someone who speaks into your heart and who speaks into your life and from whom you learn more than you would from other people. But it has to be based on their deeper things than their personality. It has to be based on their deeper things than their personality. That's why the phrasing for the American stream wasn't individual based, but it was personality based. There's nothing wrong with following the apostle. Paul himself said follow my example as I follow the example of Christ. It's not just follow my example. In everything Inherent in that is the implication. If I stop following the example of Christ, then you should stop following me. So it wasn't duplicating Paul's personality anywhere. It was based on something much deeper than that. To the degree that you are following the example of Christ, then we should follow you, and to the degree you don't, then we shouldn't.
Speaker 1:How about the attendance-driven? I mean, I think this is one that's sort of at the core of the book too, that the only way we know how to measure things within the church is attendance. I mean you allude to it. If somebody asks how's my church doing, my tendency is to say good, we're at about and give a number right. I tend to when we sit around at a staff meeting, what do we?
Speaker 2:Attendance-driven has so many problems to it. One of them is attendance is a lagging indicator, Like all I can tell you is what attendance was last Sunday. But last Sunday is done, I can't do anything about it anymore. And one of the things that really good leaders understand is we want to look for leading indicators, not lagging indicators. So how many people are being discipled is a leading indicator of where the health of the church is going, rather than the last Sunday's attendance. Tell me where the church has been.
Speaker 2:So if we really want to be forward focused, which is one of the emphases of the church growth movement, let's be forward focused. Well then, let's. And attendance is a backward focused indicator. Let's look at discipleship, and that's a more forward focused indicator. So that's a huge part of it is we've got to be looking in the right direction and attendance doesn't get us there. Secondly, we all know that you can build a crowd on both good things and bad things. So if you only look at the attendance and then reverse engineer it to how they got to that big attendance, you might be reverse engineering some very bad, hurtful principles. Not necessarily A lot of big churches, a lot of growing churches, are doing it extremely well and are very healthy. But if we start only with the end in mind, of how big the attendance is, we're assuming health may not in fact be the foundation.
Speaker 1:Yeah, another one of these images is the entrepreneurial pastor, and this one is something that I've felt really, even through my seminary education, my Bible college experience the sort of pastor as CEO, pastor as visionary, the one who's sort of articulating the organizational vision. How do you see that American influence of the entrepreneurial spirit, the entrepreneur, impacting what it is to be a pastor today as well?
Speaker 2:This is one of the things that comes most strongly from the American stream and I am an American and have no reason to deny that. I think anybody, any American, who does not start with the wonderfulness of this nation, I think, is going to get it wrong. I think we need to start with the fact that God has blessed this nation in extraordinary ways. But I think there are some unintended negative consequences to even our best ideas and, for instance, the entrepreneurial pastor is an unintended negative consequence from America's absolutely best ideas, namely the First Amendment and the Bill of Rights to the US Constitution. Right, the First Amendment, our best ideas freedom of religion, freedom of speech, freedom of assembly these are our best ideas, but an unintended negative consequence of that is something that we don't understand. So let me give you a little bit of history. I go into it deeper in the book.
Speaker 2:The people who wrote our founding documents came from Europe primarily, and in Europe, where they came from, they came for religious freedom, because in Europe they had state churches and if you didn't worship at the church that was approved by the state, then you could be punished for that, sometimes killed for that. So they wanted to escape from that, and correctly. So when they come to America and you've got the separation of church and state, there's no longer a state church. Well, in Europe, when they collected their taxes, they also collected tithes, and so pastors in the state churches did not have to attract a crowd or get people to give, because they got paid monthly by the government from the tithes that were collected from the tax base. We don't realize that in America In fact, there's still a couple of countries in Europe that still do it that way today but in America we don't have the state church anymore, which means the pastor doesn't receive a state check anymore.
Speaker 2:Which means if you are an entrepreneur, if you're charismatic, if you can draw a crowd and if you're good at getting money out of that crowd, then you can build a bigger church and you appear to be more successful. And sometimes that's happening as a natural result of church health, but, as we all know, that also does sometimes happen because of scam artists. So this entrepreneurial thing, to be entrepreneurial is not a bad thing, but it isn't automatically a good thing either.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I often wonder too if that sort of emphasis on entrepreneurial, CEO, pastor, church growth metrics, if it hasn't cost us what a pastor is, do we have a sense of what it means to be a pastor without our mind sort of immediately going to organizational leadership or to CEO structures or entrepreneurial spirit, All of those things obviously components of the work a pastor does, but the real distinction of what a pastor is seems like something that today is really confused by a lot of pastors and churches.
Speaker 2:I fully agree. I've read too many articles over the last five to six years or more that in fact say things like we don't need any more hands-on pastors, we need more entrepreneurial pastors. Any more hands-on pastors, we need more entrepreneurial pastors, which is just counter to everything I believe about what pastoring is. I don't think it's bad to be entrepreneurial and creative and innovative, as long as it's towards the right goals. But to say we need fewer shepherding pastors and fewer hands-on pastors and more entrepreneurial pastors is to completely miss the point of what the role of pastor is supposed to be in the church.
Speaker 2:And we've gotten so far away from it that we have actually written articles and I've heard speakers basically put down the simple act and the simple life of the average, typical, normal pastor who loves their congregation, who is there for them and who, quite frankly, wastes too much time being inefficient about spending an entire day at a hospital with a sick church member rather than going out there and efficiently using their time to be entrepreneurial and I've literally heard that spoken of as a negative Pastor. Stop spending all of your time at the hospital. Have somebody else visit them instead. But if you've got especially fewer than 100 people in your congregation. That kind of inefficient use of time is, in fact, what we're called to do a whole lot of the time.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that resonates with me a lot. We just had a member of our congregation pass away the week before Easter and I sat at the hospital for four and a half hours with just him, while he was unresponsive, his family was trying to get things in order and together. And certainly the week of Easter, you know, the Super Bowl of Sunday sometimes called Probably not what a lot we're doing, but I left the hospital feeling, sometimes called, uh, probably not what a lot we're doing, but I left the hospital feeling having a sense of being a pastor, uh, in ways that often other things don't produce. I think that that that sense of being with people is something, and I understand, uh, as churches change and roles and responsibilities are different. But I always find myself really grateful for those opportunities because they, they, they remind me of what it is I was called to, or what it is to be a pastor a shepherd to people.
Speaker 2:I could not agree more Absolutely.
Speaker 1:You talk in the book, though, that all of this we've sort of been hitting just a few of these points that you call the American stream of church growth, that they have produced a kind of addiction to growth within many pastors. And I think this is the hard part. The book does it really well and it's hard in kind of a podcast conversation to get to everything, but I think it's easy for people to listen to even the things we're saying and say, oh yes, I agree, the church shouldn't be that, but still, what's sort of wrestling in our own heart is that ambition, that desire for more, for more, measuring ourself by the size and comparison that you describe it really as a growth addiction that many pastors are experiencing. I'd love to hear how you recognize that and see that as well.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and part of the challenge that we need to have. I wish we had different words for some of these different concepts, because growth obviously can mean several things and I do believe that we have a growth addiction and this was the concern that Donald McGavern had that we would take his principles that were designed to grow the church and that we would use them simply to numerically increase an individual congregation, that we would turn it into a big church contest rather than a way of growing, of seeing Christ's church grow and seeing. For me, church growth is an interesting term and it has come to mean the individual growth of an individual congregation. But in fact, if you look around where most of the biggest churches are, all the research recently has shown us that in most of those situations it is not in places where Christians are increasing as a percentage of the population, but these biggest churches are happening where Christians have the financial ability to build large buildings and we're consolidating into larger groups, and I live in one of those places. I live in Orange County, california.
Speaker 2:The megachurches around us are world famous, but my county has not become a more Christian place in the recent 40 years. Where all those megachurches have popped up, there are fewer Christians, we're just gathering in larger groups and I don't think it's valid to call that church growth. But I do think in a place where a whole bunch of small churches are popping up and where Christians are actually increasing as a percentage of the population, I think that's a valid thing to call church growth. So we need to be more accurate in our terminology and in what we mean with the words that we say when we're talking about the growth of the church.
Speaker 1:There's a quote from the book that I wrote down. You write at one point our church structures. So the structures that we're creating of our churches have always reflected our theological aspirations and exposed our ecclesiastical ambitions. Our church structures they reflect our aspirations theological aspirations and our ambitions, our ecclesiastical ambitions. Maybe unpack that for listeners a little bit.
Speaker 2:Sure, I mean, if you look back at the, you know the great cathedrals of Europe, for instance. So it was about a thousand years of time in which these grand cathedrals in Europe were the epitome of great churches, and a big part of it is. And even today people will visit those cathedrals and they'll talk about how they're tall. And they created new architecture so that the churches could be taller and taller and taller. And the theological reason they gave was so that our eyes would be lifted up to the heavens. And perhaps the more real and more negative reason was because they wanted the church to be seen from a distance and they wanted to have the recognition in the community. So I think both of those things intertwined. But even our theological idea of our heads being lifted up towards the heavens, somehow being closer to God, quite frankly, theologically, is ridiculous, because God doesn't live physically up in the sky. Back then they kind of thought he did.
Speaker 2:Today we know, because you know we got rocket ships we know that drawing closer to Jesus is not about physically lifting our heads up. It is about, more often than not, kneeling down and reaching out to the least of these and to those who are on the margins and in the fringes, and doing justice and acting with mercy. It is about our behavior more than the physical position of our body when we're in a building. So we've gone from that and now people look at the big box megachurch. I even had a friend of mine a little while ago who said I can't stand these big box megachurches. I mean there's not going to be drywall when we get to heaven. And I looked at him and said, yeah, there ain't going to be stained glass windows either. Like neither one of these is more theologically correct, but they do reflect our ideas about theology. And so today's big box megachurch many of them are built based on principles that we learned from building shopping malls and supermarkets. And that's not my accusation, that's from conversations I've had with church architects.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's a really helpful reflective question as well, too, to ask myself us that are a part of a church what I'm building is what we're building. What does it reveal about my aspirations, ambitions, what it is we see ourselves accomplishing? I think it's a really helpful way to ask that question personally as well. Yeah, the book does. We've been sort of exploring some of the negative sides of the church growth movement. You actually there's a great point in the book too where you actually talk about some of the things the church growth movement got right, and I think that might be a good segue for us. All these things that you're sort of recognizing are failing us when it comes to actual discipleship, building, community, the role of a pastor. The book is not just to tear down what we've gotten wrong. You have some really helpful suggestions I want to get into for what this might look like to do it a different way, but the things you see that the church growth movement actually succeeded or got right in the process.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it was very important to me not to be all one-sided on the negative because, as I've said several times, a lot of these negatives are unintended negative consequences of what are otherwise very good ideas, and I believe that the church growth movement, by and large, has been a real positive for us. I truly, for instance, are the church growth movement helped us to get out from inside our denominational walls and started realizing, hey, we can work together as denominations in different ways to reach out locally and to combine with others in the global church. So I think that's huge. Love, love, love love about my big church friends is they are extraordinarily generous in sharing all of their best ideas as quickly as they can. They don't trademark any of it, like if they discover a better way to run a parking lot or a better way to light the stage or a better way to teach without notes, they put it in a free podcast to share it with everybody. And there's a spirit of generosity and of sharing that I think is really, really encouraging and really, really helpful.
Speaker 2:And I think also, church growth movement was willing to ask some hard questions and to say, okay, let's not just look around and say, oh, we must be doing well because of this. But let's ask some of the harder questions, which, quite frankly, I'm grateful for because I asked some hard questions in the book. So to all of my church growth friends who say, yes, churches need to ask the difficult questions to see if they're being healthy yes, we do need to right now. And I think we need to ask some hard questions to see if they're being healthy yes, we do need to right now. And I think we need to ask some hard questions that the church growth movement has not been willing to look at about themselves. I think it's time to take that look.
Speaker 1:Well, one of the things that I wanted to be able to sort of fill in the picture on is what if a pastor is listening to this and saying, okay, you've piqued my interest, Maybe I've focused on the wrong things. What does it look like then to, sort of, if the church has become obsessed with bigness, as you call the book, to desize our thinking and start paying attention to some other things? I think one of the places to start is metrics. What is it that we're supposed to be counting if it's not just attendance? And, after all, you and I are part of the same and we have what's called our ACMR right, Our annual report to the fellowship, where we count up all the numbers for all the things and turn it in. What should counting look like in the church? What metrics matter? How do you think about what it is the church should be measuring?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think we should continue to measure all the things we're measuring Get the attendance down, get the offering, how many people are in small groups but the question isn't so much whether or not we should measure them, but then what do we do with it is really the question. And how do we judge the success or lack of success of a ministry? Are those numbers the best way to make those judgments? And I would say they really aren't. We need to be looking at things much deeper than that.
Speaker 2:So near the end of the book, I actually have a survey of 16 questions in four critical areas where you can judge the health of your church based on some non-numerical principles like how well are we reaching people, how enthusiastic are our people looking towards the future rather than the traditions of the past, and you can go through it and you can begin to get some sense in a numerical way of what are actually non-numerical qualifiers. So some of it is. I think we just need to not make numbers the primary way by which we're judging these things. Use them to inform us, Don't use them to define us.
Speaker 1:Do you have a way that you do that, when we've alluded a couple times to the common pastoral interaction although it happens even with friends or family How's the church going? And sort of your initial response is to give them an attendance report. Right, I mean, that's sort of even the cliche In your own experience as a longtime church pastor. How is it that you could sort of desize that conversation? What are the kinds of ways that you find yourself responding to those questions?
Speaker 2:Yeah, let me give every pastor listening a life hack. I don't do life hacks very much, but I'm going to give you one right now. Every church has great things that are happening in it that are not necessarily numerically based. Where you just counseled a couple that was on the verge of divorce and now they're not divorced but they're back in love with each other again and they're going to move forward. There's no place you can put that in a box with a number, right? Or somebody just came back to faith in Christ that we've been praying for for so many years and they've come back to faith in Christ. Okay, there's one number in a box, but the amount of time and prayer and effort and energy and the amount of joy that it infused into a congregation is not a numerical thing.
Speaker 2:So here's what I encourage pastors to do we need to have a couple stories.
Speaker 2:I'm going to use a very American expression here. We need to have a couple positive life stories from our congregation in the chamber ready to go for when that question is asked. Because if you're not ready for it, when somebody asks you how's the church going, you are going to want to respond numerically and if it's not going well, numerically, you're going to want to avoid the conversation or you're going to have to admit what feels like failure. But if, instead, you're going to this conference, you're going to be going to your annual denominational meeting or whatever you know, you're going to be asked this question. Before you go, sit down and think through what are one or two amazing things that God is doing right now in the lives of people in this congregation. I'm going to have them ready to tell as the answer to how your church is doing. If you don't have it ready before the question is asked, it won't come to mind when the question is asked. You've got to have it ready before, but if you do, you can shift the tone of the conversation.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think that's really helpful, probably a helpful discipline too, even personally. I mean, it probably is evidence to your argument that the first thing that comes to our mind is we have no trouble remembering the attendance numbers, because that tends to be how we're measuring ourself, versus maybe it takes us sitting down to come up with the stories. I think it's a really good piece of advice. The other thing you say in towards the second half of the book is you open by saying that integrity is the new competence, that in this model of church growth, the competent pastor, how I did it is the emphasis. But you see the possibility for within the churches of the future, for us to really be valuing integrity instead.
Speaker 2:Yeah, if you look around today at people who say they're deconstructing their faith, or those who say they have and they become ex-evangelical or de-churched or whatever the phrase is you will not find a single person who's deconstructing their faith, who says they're doing so because the church didn't get its technique right. But you will find people who will say I left the church because they weren't living up to their ideals and I couldn't trust them anymore. They were not people of integrity. Now sometimes they've left because of a loss of their own integrity. There are all kinds of other reasons, but nobody's leaving because the church didn't get bigger or because the church got its techniques wrong. Now they may go to another church because they got it by their band, but nobody's leaving the faith because of this.
Speaker 2:But we've had 40 years where we've been teaching technique and competence and we've assumed people were living with integrity. But all you got to do is look around at about every week or two it seems like there's another report of another high-profile pastor or ministry that has not been living with integrity, that has not been morally upstanding, and to see that that's where the disintegration is coming from. We can no longer assume moral integrity. I believe that we need to teach integrity with the same amount of discipline and the same amount of enthusiasm that we've been teaching technique for the last 40 years.
Speaker 1:Part of this is what you call the desizing of the pastor, that, as pastors, we're going to have to take up this work ourself. In evaluating where we are, you offer a really helpful assessment, but also not just somebody could listen to this conversation and say we're doing this our next staff meeting. We're desizing and not really do the personal work of what that looks like for them as a pastor as well.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I, there's actually. I mentioned the one survey, but there's actually another survey earlier in the book that it's entitled Do I need to desize? And it's 10 questions that you can answer from zero to five and it'll give you a score of. You may be less desized and you may be more obsessed by bigness than you realize, more obsessed by bigness than you realize. So that'll actually give you a tool by which you can get some objective outside help as to where some of your challenges might be, because I think most of us well, not most of us, but I think a whole lot of us, especially in ministry we have a tendency to want to see ourselves through rose-colored glasses.
Speaker 2:I know, obviously there are those on the other side of the emotional spectrum who only see the bad about themselves, and that's equally problematic. But we need a more accurate assessment of ourselves rather than a too negative or a too optimistic one. Off of that hamster wheel is a really important first step towards reestablishing health and effectiveness, first of all in our own lives and then secondly, out of the overflow of health and both emotionally and spiritually in our own lives. Then that overflow can be what we minister from, rather than simply just trying to get the numbers up year to year.
Speaker 1:How much of that for a pastor do you think comes from the sort of competition that can often form with ministry, and even that competitiveness sort of track deeper to a personal insecurity that if I succeed at the church I'll have value and feel good about myself. And I can see that I'm doing that by comparison.
Speaker 2:Yeah, anecdotally, I would say that that is endemic. We are obsessed with that and consumed with that, and you and I actually just met on a trip. We just recently met in Germany. We were both there doing some ministry, and every time I step out of this country, even if it's just like barely over the border to Canada, or some of the trips I've been able to do to Europe I really do discover that it is this keeping track of success by numbers is not exclusively American, but boy, we've got a patent on it.
Speaker 2:It is very American, and most of the rest of the world doesn't have quite the obsession that we do, and so we need to realize that some of this is cultural. This idea of getting the numbers up from year to year is not a universally human trait, but it is a very cultural trait, and if you don't step outside of that cultural bubble for a little bit and see that in other places they handle it slightly differently, we can think that that's the only way to do it. But it really isn't universal, it's really very cultural.
Speaker 1:One of the other things you suggest for pastors in this process of desizing even themselves is, uh, the value of inefficiency. Talk about a strange thing to say in a pastoral sort of leadership book that there's a value to inefficiency. How is that?
Speaker 2:Well, that's what you were talking about earlier. You know. Four and a half hours at the hospital with uh, with a member who can't even respond consciously to you and may not even have known that you were there, that is a really inefficient use of your time, Chase Right, but it was absolutely the appropriate use of your time. And what I've discovered is small church pastors specifically and I'm talking particularly if your church is 100 or fewer, which is like 80% of the churches in the world. Church is 100 or fewer, which is like 80% of the churches in the world.
Speaker 2:Most pastors of smaller churches are masters of inefficient use of time and I'm not saying that sarcastically, I mean that sincerely that there are time. So much of what we do is burning of daylight hours and it's very easy at the end of it to look back at the day and go, oh man, I didn't get to this, I didn't get to this, I didn't get to this, but again on a day like you had, where you sat with a member who was passing into the arms of Jesus for four and a half hours so that somebody was there with him during that season. You can't put a numerical value on that, but I believe that has eternal value, even if it's just for you in having sat there. So I'm not a fan of inefficiency. I like my efficiency apps, I like the best usage of my time, but I also recognize that there will be major chunks of my day, of my week and of my months that I am purposely going to have to spend in the slow process of fellowship and of discipleship, and that's a huge part of pastoring.
Speaker 1:It certainly feels like that choice as well. Right now it's always easy to make the choice towards efficiency, towards more, towards getting more done, but that intentional choice to not get as much done, to be inefficient, feels like it's also then connected. It takes courage. There's something of character that begins to build even in that choice, and I think about that the same way. I'll often point out that when we talk about Sabbath, I think it's sad that many people think Sabbath means if I take one day off a week, I'll get more done on the other six. Right, sabbath is a life hack to be able to squeeze out a little more efficiency and energy, when really I think Sabbath is saying something like I will accept that I will only achieve six, sevenths of what I'm capable of achieving, that there will be a margin of my life that I choose not to work. I choose to give it to the Lord and entrust it to Him that there is something, even in that choice of inefficiency, that can actually be forming character in a person.
Speaker 2:Oh, I fully agree. I wrote an article a couple of years ago why it's not a good idea to use Sabbath as an efficiency tool or something like that. We're just saying exactly what you just stated. Yeah, we do Sabbath, first of all because God commanded it. Secondly, because he said I'm doing this for your good.
Speaker 2:I'm convinced that when Moses came down the mountain with the Ten Commandments, that the buzz through the camp that night was not oh, we can't murder anybody. Oh, no, we're not going to be able to commit adultery. I think all of those were fairly self-explanatory. I think the big news through the camp that night of a bunch of very recently freed slaves was we get a day off. God has built into the top 10 rules for us to live our lives, to take one day away from all of our labor to worship him and to recover from the last week and get ready for the next week. And I think Sabbath needs both of those things. I think Sabbath needs both relaxing and worship. And if you're just relaxing, it's not Sabbath, it's vacation. If you're just worshiping, like a lot of pastors on Sunday, then it's a workday and it's not a Sabbath. We need the downtime and the worship combined in order for it to be legitimately Sabbath, because it has to be God-focused and not schedule-focused.
Speaker 1:I think it's fair to say the book. It's a really helpful tool for shifting away from just attendance numbers to more of a holistic view of discipleship. What does it look like to actually make disciples, not just attenders? But discipleship's always that difficult term to know what is a disciple, how do I know I'm making a disciple? Where am I in that process of discipleship? Do you have some thoughts around how a church that's wanting to do that, genuinely wanting to be a church that's making disciples, but struggling to figure out if they're doing that or what that looks like, or how to know to measure that they are succeeding at that?
Speaker 2:chapter on it. Discipleship fixes everything, Because I've really come to believe that in the last few years. You can't name a problem in a church that discipleship won't fix, which is why Jesus told us to make disciples. But at the core of discipleship is relationship, and relationship is never fast or efficient. Relationship is slow, Relationship is ponderous, Relationship is complicated, but relationship is what we were made for.
Speaker 2:The entire premise of Scripture and the entire premise of the Church is to put us in right relationship with God and in right relationship with each other. If the Church has a product to sell and I don't even like using the term together if the church has a product to sell and I don't even like using the term but if we have a product to sell, our product is relationships. We want to be able to put you in the right relationship with God and have that growing and put you in right relationship with others and to have that grow as well. And so if we are, we can do the best teaching in the world. But if we're teaching people that we're not in relationship with, that's not discipleship, that's just teaching.
Speaker 2:Jesus discipled the 12. He taught crowds. He did not disciple the 5,000 that he fed. He taught them and he fed them, and then he got into a boat with the 12 and discipled them. And he got into a boat with the 12 and discipled them Because even Jesus, God made flesh, had physical limitations and understood that he could not disciple more than a certain number of people. So we have to be in relationship with people in order to call it discipleship.
Speaker 1:Well, the book we've been talking about is Desizing the Church, how Church Growth Became a Science, then an Obsession, and an obsession. And what's next? I can't recommend the book highly enough. I knew it would be good because I've always appreciated the work Carl's done, but I really think it Very rarely do I give a must read recommendation on books on the podcast, because I know everybody likes to read different things. But I really think this is such an important must read book for pastors but people in churches.
Speaker 1:It affects all of us and I think a couple of things I hope comes out of it for readers. I think for some it'll be a challenge. For those of us who know sometimes in our heart is that obsession, that insecurity, that competition, that addiction to bigness as Carl writes well about. I think it'll be a challenge to you. But I'm also hoping that the book is an encouragement to pastors, an encouragement to a lot of pastors who are just trying to shepherd people and be with them, make disciples, but often feeling like that doesn't get the attention. That's not where the energy is. Nobody's appreciating that. Sometimes even congregants don't understand that's not even what they're looking for. It can be hard to stay that course. Maybe, uh, to wrap us up, a word of encouragement for a pastor who might be in that situation.
Speaker 2:Yeah, use numbers to inform you, but do not fall into the trap of letting numbers define you. There will be a lot of voices around you and there will be the voice from inside your own head that will constantly want to pull you back into being tempting when the numbers are up than when the numbers are down. Certainly, there's a temptation towards pride when the numbers are up. There's also the temptation towards shame when the numbers are down. Don't buy the pride when the numbers are up. Don't buy the shame when the numbers are down. Stay faithful. There's a segment in the book about we can't fall to the tyranny of results, that we've got an idolization of outcomes in our culture. That is dangerous and I do believe that we have turned outcomes into an idol and we need to stop idolizing outcomes and we need to do the faithful work that God has called us to and leave the outcomes to God. Yeah, really important word desizing the church. I hope you pick up a copy.
Speaker 1:Carl, if people want to grab yeah, really important word desizing the church. I hope you pick up a copy, carl, if people want to grab one. If they want to, maybe they're new to your work and they would like to be able to read some of even the other things we've referred to, some of the work you've been doing for small church pastors. What's the best way for them to just learn more about your work and maybe pick up one?
Speaker 2:Sure, yeah, go to carlvaderscom. All the information is there. I write at least one article per week. We also have guest articles there, and that's also the home of my podcast, the Church Lobby, that goes out every couple of weeks. Actually, we're on a one-a-week segment right now as we're doing some special interviews around desizing the church. But carlvaderscom is the clearinghouse for everything you need from me, and there's even a contact form there if you want to reach out to me. I'd love to try to respond to every email that comes through the contact page.
Speaker 1:Well, Carl, just want to say thank you again. My prayers, blessings over the book. I know it'll be a real success and helpful to so many churches and pastors. I'll be praying that way as well and always grateful for an opportunity to have you on the podcast.
Speaker 2:Thank you, Chase. I really appreciate the opportunity too.
Speaker 1:As always, you can find show notes for today's episode by going to pastorwritercom. I have a link there to Carl's blog, as well as the book that we were discussing Desizing the Church. Also, if you wouldn't mind, take a moment and leave a review wherever you listen to podcasts. You can do that by clicking a star rating or typing out a short message. I always love hearing that feedback. It's helpful to me to continue improving the show, as always. Thanks for listening, until next time, thank you, thank you.