When the Church Falls... And Rises Again: What Redemptive Rebuilding Actually Looks Like

In this episode of the Healthy Church Staff Podcast, Todd Rhoades discusses how churches can rise again after experiencing leadership or organizational crises by undertaking the difficult and honest process of rebuilding. Key steps include embracing truth over spin, lamenting losses, rebuilding trust, and ensuring redemption through time, honesty, and systemic change. • Rebuilding starts with truth, not spin. Churches must name their issues to heal. • Lament is essential: Churches should not skip the grieving process. • Rebuilt trust is stronger and must be earned and tested. • Redemption is possible but requires time and thoughtful systemic change. • Churches need to conduct a 'ministry autopsy' to learn from failures and prevent recurrence.

Have questions or comments?  Send to podcast@chemistrystaffing.com

Be sure to subscribe to The Healthy Church Staff Podcast wherever you regularly listen to podcasts.

- - - - -

Is Your Church Hiring?
If your church is searching for a new staff member, reach out to Todd for a conversation on how he might be able to help.

Are You Looking for a New Ministry Role?
If you are open to a new church role in the next few months, add your free resume and profile at ChemistryStaffing.com.

Transcript

The Fall Is Not The End

SPEAKER_00 0:09

It doesn't have to end at the headline. Yes, churches fall, leaders fall, trust shatters, people leave, but that's not always the end of the story. Some churches rise again. Not by spinning the narrative or rushing to the recovery, but by doing the slow, painful, holy work of rebuilding. And that's what we're talking about today here on the Healthy Church Staff Podcast. Hi there. My name's Todd Rhodes. I'm one of the co-founders, along with Matt Steen, over at chemistrystaffing.com. And you're listening to the Healthy Church Staff Podcast. We're here every weekday, Monday through Friday. If you haven't subscribed, go ahead and hit subscribe wherever you're listening to this. Also, a brand new website I'm just rolling out this week. I mentioned it. If you haven't done this already, I would love for you to be one of the charter members. Cosh, absolutely nothing. It's churchleadershipradar.com. Churchleadershipradar.com. Just pop in your first name, your email address, and every day I will send you a very short, concise email with some of the top finds that I'm finding. I'm a connoisseur of we often say I'm a church geek. Matt and I are church geeks. So we love to just load up on all the news that affects churches in the country, any kind of new resources that are coming out. I love to learn by reading and connecting people and I with ideas. So that's really what this is. Churchleadershipradar.com. Go ahead and head over there. And yeah, that would be good. I would love it if you would do that. All right. Today we are talking about churches that go through a really hard time. Maybe their leader falls, or maybe things just fall apart. But some churches, that's the end. Look at Mars Hill. Uh they hit a crisis, and that was the end. That was the end. It closed shop really quickly. Other churches do the long, hard work of rebuilding. It's holy work, it's hard work, it's gut-wrenching work. But we're going to talk about how churches can do that. And maybe your church has been through a rough patch. And if that's true, maybe you had a pastor that that just had an affair or something horrible happened and they had to leave, and you're left there picking up the pieces. Today's podcast is for you.

unknown 2:29

Okay.

Truth Beats Spin Every Time

Lament Before You Cast Vision

Earning Trust With New Systems

Redemption Takes Time And Help

Book Coaching And Next Steps

SPEAKER_00 2:30

Let me start here. Because this is tough. This is tough stuff. This is tough stuff. And we hear, we see the headlines. I see the headlines when I'm working on the church leadership radar.com piece that I'm doing. Every single day. I hate it. There is a story about this pastor was arrested, or that pastor did something that disqualified them, or this church is just it's in horrible place. They're shutting down, or every single day. Let me say this though, and this is where I want to start. Rebuilding starts with truth, not spin. Okay. You can shut the podcast off today because this is the most important thing that I'm going to share with you. Rebuilding after a crisis like this for your church starts with truth, not with spin. You can't heal what you won't name. I've seen churches that go through a crisis on Sunday, and by the next Sunday, you'd never know it because they just move on. They've appointed a new pastor, they've moved on, and you can't heal what you won't name. And churches that rise again do not minimize what happened. They don't just, I think of the Leslie Nielsen in in airplane. Everything's exploding behind him. There's car crashes, there's fires, there's bombs going off, and he's there's nothing to see here. Nothing to see here. Churches that do that minimize what just happened rarely rebuild. Churches that do, they acknowledge the pain and they own the failure as hard and as difficult and as gut-wrenching as it is. They stop protecting reputations, they start protecting people because truth is where trust begins to grow back. I see this all the time with churches when there's a pastoral crisis or a church crisis, they just don't want to share the truth. They make excuses, they share parts and bits and pieces here and there of the truth, but they nothing to see here, nothing to see here. Let's move on. Here's the part that there's that they're missing a lot of times, I think. And it comes from the Old Testament, and it's a word that we don't hardly ever use anymore. It's called lament. Lament. You need to lament before you start casting the new vision. There is a time to grieve. Don't skip it. Don't launch a capital campaign to distract from the crisis. Don't rebrand your way out of the wreckage. Sit in the loss. Sit in it. Absorb it. Lament. Let people cry. Let people be angry. Lament is the language of spiritual honesty, and it's what prepares the soil for something new. And the churches that skip lament, rarely do they rebuild the trust that they need for the next chapter of ministry. And that leads me to point number three. Rebuilt trust is stronger than borrowed trust. Let me repeat that. Rebuilt trust, stronger than borrowed trust. When a church comes back from a fall, the trust just gets rebuilt. But it gets rebuilt differently. It's earned. It's not assumed. You might have assumed trust before all this went down. You can't assume trust anymore. You have to earn it. The new trust that you're going to have to build has to be tested. It's not going to be theoretical. It's going to be earned. It's going to be tested. And churches that do this well don't try to recreate what they had before, especially the next Sunday. They start by building something new with healthier systems, with stronger accountability, with humbler leadership. And they do that whole they don't do the damage control. They take the time. They look at the redemption that can come out of this story. And I often call it an autopsy. They need to take the time during their time of lament to look back and see what in the world just happened here? And how do we make sure that it never happens again? That's the ministry autopsy that a lot of churches skip along with the lament. And then I'll leave you with this one. This is number four. Redemption is possible, but it takes time. I've seen churches that fell hard and rose even stronger, but it wasn't because they hired a PR firm. It was because they did the slow work. They took the time to own what happened. They took the time to lament, to let people suffer through this. They brought in outside help, absolutely. And they listened to the victims if there were victims. They changed the systems that allowed the failure. They learned about this by doing that autopsy. And they gave people time. They just gave people time. Time to heal, time to doubt, time to come back. God specializes in resurrection. But resurrection is not instant. Here's your bottom line for today. The fall does not have to be the final chapter. And if you're in a church that's been going through a rough time or your leader just tripped and fell on his face really hard, your church can rise again, but you have to be willing to do the hard work of redemption. If your church is recovering from a crisis, resist the urge to rush. Just resist it and ask, have we truly grieved? And do we even know what we're grieving? If you're rebuilding trust, name one system that you're changing, not just one leader that you're replacing. I wrote a book on this. It's actually When the Church Falls. It's really about this very factor. It's not just about avoiding disaster, but building the kind of church that can weather storms day in and day out for the long term. And you can get a copy of that at When The Churchfalls.com. Hey, if there's any way that I or anybody on my team, maybe your church is going through a hard time. Maybe you've just fallen as a leader and you need help getting back up. Maybe you're you're, I don't know. Anything we are here to serve you. We'd love to be able to work with you. If there's any kind of coaching or consulting that we can do to help you through this, we've got a lot of experience in working with churches that have gone through really rough patches. And if we can serve you in any way during this time, reach out to me, podcast at chemistry staffing, podcast at chemistry staffing.com. And I'd love to hear from you and hear your story. If there's any way that we can help, I would love to be able to do that. And again, the book is over at WhenThechurchfalls.com. You can pick up a copy there. Also, before we go, if you've not done it yet, head over to churchleadershipradar.com. Check that out. Put your um email address and your name in there, and starting tomorrow, even before you wake up, unless you get up before 5 45, which I know some of you do, you will get tomorrow's edition of Church Leadership Radar with some really good leadership tips and news items in there to help you become a better church staff member over time. All right, that's it for today. Hopefully you'll join me again tomorrow right here on the Helping Church Staff Fire. Great.