Sheep Without a Shepherd: How Parishes Break Out of Survival Mode

Many parishes aren’t growing, they’re just trying to survive, and survival mode becomes its own weekly rhythm: urgent issues dominate meetings, important decisions stall, and discipleship gets postponed.

Ministry like this is exhausting – parishioners don’t know where to go and leaders feel like they can’t lead. Using Matthew 9:36 (“like sheep without a shepherd”), the episode calls leaders to move from reacting to shepherding.

The practical path forward is simple: diagnose what hijacks your week, identify what must be protected, then pick one “stop-doing” move (stop, condense, or delegate) and replace it with scheduled margin for people, prayer, or planning.

Key takeaways

• Survival mode is predictable: urgent needs dominate, meetings get heavy, important decisions don’t get made, and discipleship gets pushed down the road.
• Survival mode isn’t just busy. It’s disorienting, leaving leaders reactive instead of shepherding.
• “Predictable urgency can be redesigned” when you add guards and boundaries instead of reacting to everything.
• If you can’t name your top priority in one sentence and your conversations are only logistics, you’re likely stuck in survival mode.
• One small boundary won’t break the parish, but it can break the survival loop.

Visit CatholicMinistryProfessionals.com and reclaim time for discipleship.

Transcript

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Before we begin, we just want to let you know that Catholic Ministry Professionals is brought to you by Briar Cliff University. Briar Cliff provides a vibrant community, top-notch faculty, and cutting-edge programs that empower you to reach your full potential. So whether you're pursuing a degree in business, healthcare, or the arts, Briar Cliff can provide an environment where you can thrive. Learn more at BriarCliff.edu to start your transformative academic experience. And now, on with the show. I'm John Cons, and this is the Catholic Ministry Professionals Podcast, your favorite leadership development podcast for Catholic churches. Today, we're discussing the survival loop. That's right. We know that so many churches aren't growing. They're just trying to survive. And we're going to talk today about how to break that cycle, how to gain a little momentum for the mission. You know, when we look around, we see, especially in our rural area we're at, where I'm at here in the United States, that parishes aren't growing. In fact, they're condensing. We have so many parish groupings. And what happens when a pastor hears this church is going to be, for lack of a better word, demoted to a worship site and added to your parish. Their hearts can skip a beat and they go, oh no, I'm so busy already. How am I possibly going to take care of one more community? And what we see then is that we we move from this place of maybe flourishing or growth-minded, you know, discipleship building effort to just trying to survive through this new season. But the problem is that survival mode is really hard to beat and it takes intentional effort to break out of. And it's exhausting to be stuck in survival mode because we we didn't get into ministry to just maintain a sacramental machine. We got into ministry because we want Jesus' mission to expand. We want it to grow. We want the message to go out. We want more souls in the pews. We just don't know what the next step is. That said, survival mode does have a really predictable pattern that when we can identify that, we can then try to leverage beyond it, right? What we see happen so many times is something urgent comes up and it dominates our minds, it dominates our meetings, it dominates all of our week. And this isn't necessarily because of, you know, maybe one parish is getting added or we're merging or whatever. It's just the weekly rhythm because everybody in our parish thinks that their ministry, their personal pet project is the most important thing. And so they really push that. And then that makes our meetings heavy because, oh, we got to deal with this other parishioner who came in with this idea, or we have this the Knights of Columbus have this thing going on and it's super important, super urgent. We need to deal with this. But what happens is when these urgent things come up constantly and our meetings are heavy, important decisions never get made. And ultimately, the task of discipleship gets postponed. It gets pushed down the road. It never sees its full fruit in the context of our parish life. And so we want to take a look at that. And our goal for today is really, really simple. We want to take a moment to understand our survival loop that we're stuck in. We want to identify the things that need to be protected, and then we need to pick one thing to stop doing, one stop doing move this week that creates margin for the mission. And this isn't, again, this is not an overhaul. That's not what we do here on the podcast. It's just the next faithful step that's going to help us break that cycle and make our the maintenance of our ministries more predictable so that we have room to focus on the mission. And so let's dive into that today, starting with a key scripture verse that's really it's at the heart of where I'm at in this ministry in Catholic ministry professionals, and that's from Matthew chapter 9, verse 36. And it said that Jesus had compassion on the crowds because they are like sheep without a shepherd. See, survival mode, it's not just busy, it's disorienting. It leaves our people not knowing where to go, and our our leaders ultimately feeling like they can't lead, right? You you've seen this in your in your leadership structures, your leadership teams, the pastoral council that feels like it needs you there just to talk about what's going on this week. The the mint the finance council that needs you there just to tell you what's going on, the parishioners who have this thing going on in their hearts that they want to respond to, but they don't know what the next step is. They come into your office and you you say, I can't give you my blessing. I don't know what to do with you, right? I don't have room to talk about this right now. But what we see here in this scripture, that the compassion that Jesus has on them isn't just a feeling. It's something that moves him toward action. It gives him direction. It helps Jesus to know what the next step is, the thing to address and respond to, right? The survival loop keeps people just in a reactive state, but it keeps them from shepherding. So instead of reacting today, we want to focus on shepherding because shepherds, they protect, right? Shepherds protect what must be protected, their sheep, by shepherding the sheep, the people, right? So that's what we need to step into is moving from reacting to the things that are going on to intentionally shepherding, intentionally leading and guiding the conversations, the behaviors, the things that happen in the parish. And when we start to do that intentionally, one little step at a time, we're gonna begin to get a little bit of room and reclaim time for discipleship. So we're gonna move on into the three things that we want to do if we want to break this survival loop. And the first of the three things is to take some time to understand your survival loop, right? Don't start by fixing it. Don't just jump in and start throwing things at the wall, see what works. Start by diagnosing it, spend some real time with these questions. And so I've got these questions for you, and it's just food for thought to help us think through what are the things that make us feel stuck, like we can't move the mission forward in our parish. So here's the questions. Um, the first of these is what are the top three things that hijack your week most often? And what I mean by this, these are not the important things, right? It's good if there's a sick call that happens and you need to go and you have room to do that, and it doesn't completely like demolish the parish plan for the week. It's good to be able to do those things, right? So these are sick calls, you know, funeral-related meetings. These are not things that hijack your week. These are these are necessary pastoral things that we need to be able to respond to that that really are kind of the meat and potatoes of the mission, is meeting people in actual needs, right? So somebody walks into the office and they this, you know, can you respond to them and meet them where they are if they're in a crisis without it destroying what you needed to get done this week? You know, maybe that you know, you you have some new parishioners and you'd really love to meet with them. These are not things that hijack your meetings, these are moments of mission that need to be in the week. So I'm not talking about those. What I am talking about is meetings that are too long, or maybe you have meetings that are unnecessary that you just feel like you have to go to. If you've got a large parish grouping, I know one pastor who has 11 parishes, his territory covers essentially the same square mileage as the state of Rhode Island. So travel between worship sites can really hijack that. So if he's got to travel a bunch to these different sites for different things, it adds a huge chunk of time to his plate, which is time he's not able to really use intentionally for the mission. And then some of us just get stuck in email, right? These things too, right? I get a million emails from these people because there's no proper gateway or communication about who to reach out to and when. So the pastor just has 150 emails a day that he has to try and get through. These are things that hijack your week because you're you're not meant to be just stuck in your office chipping away at menial tasks. You're meant to be out on mission. And so that's that's what we want to really wrestle with. And what are the things that hijack our week? And when we can identify those, we move on to the next question, right? Because my week is being hijacked by these, what important thing keeps getting pushed to next week or the next week? You know, what decision have you been postponing for a month, maybe even longer? Um, and these these are the things that that weigh on you. They make your ministry feel heavy. But you know, just like a cyclical thing that can happen is, well, what are we gonna do for Lent? What are we gonna do for Easter? What are we gonna do for Advent? But we push them back until the point where we just have to default to the easiest thing. Um, and and then we feel the weight of that too, because we're no we're not really doing the that we're not really responding to God's call. We're just doing something easy that checks a box. Right? Other things that you might be assessing, like do our mass times or our ministry times fit the needs of our people in our actual community? You know, maybe you have an employee that needs to be corrected or needs to be let go, and it's obvious, but you just don't have time to deal with it. Right? When when we don't address the three things, like the things that hijack our weak, these actually really important decisions get pushed back to a point where it's it almost feels like we're stuck in them. And and we settle for, well, this is just the way it is, this is my cross. I'm just gonna let this thing, I'm gonna let this thing slowly martyr me over time, and we'll see what happens. The uh the next question to help us get a little bit of clarity is is what meeting takes the most time and produces the least clarity, like the least tangible fruit, the fewest decisions. And I'm just gonna say it, I'm just gonna put it out there. There's a good chance that it's your weekly team meeting. Because and the reason this is true is because it's every week, it's a substantial chunk of your time. And if it's a meeting that should only be or could only be 30 minutes, but you're taking 90 minutes to do it, that's a huge waste of time. And probably you're not actually using it for mission-related decisions. You're not using it to disciple one another, to refine each other. You know, chances are it's a little bit unfocused, it's a little bit just of a data dump, things that could be in an email, and you can change that, right? So is that that that's that question is what meeting takes the most time and produces the least clarity? Another question, where do we keep reacting instead of leading? And and this might be we all have that group of people or that one person who just complains about everything or has an opinion about everything, and they constantly are trying to demand your attention. They're constantly trying to nitpick into things. Like every parish has that person, and we're, you know, so if we're always giving our time to vocal dissidents, that's gonna be heavy, right? Instead, we, you know, maybe it's the other thing is it might be a really anxious parishioner. This is somebody who who probably maybe needs professional help, like a therapist, but they're trying to make it a spiritual problem, you know, and so you got to think about the things that keep you reacting instead of leading. And and maybe it's just a regular process of like last minute asks that everybody's making, because there's no intentional effort to make requests structured and intentional to guide those behaviors that we that we need to see from parishioners to be able to respond more intentionally and lead more decisively as people seeking to shepherd our flock. Now, here's another question that I think can also reframe. What's the predictable point in the week where things just go off the rails? And I how I want to frame this is that it's it's maybe not the same thing, but it's a reality that happens. I was at a workshop and I was talking about structuring your ideal week, and one of the people in attendance said that that's a ridiculous thing. I can't structure an ideal week. People are constantly coming into my office and yada, yada, yada. Okay, well, that that's the thing that derails your week. The fact that things come up and you you now become so rushed to do things that are so routine, that's the thing that derails your week. So it's it's really looking at, well, the thing is not that people are coming in, it's that I'm not focused, I'm not um disciplined in the way that I do my job, so I I can't predictably manage the maintenance of the mission, right? So what's the predictable point in your week where things go off the rails? And then finally, here's one. If you if you had to name it just really honestly, like what are you afraid of? What are you afraid of that will you think will break if you stop doing this one thing? Right? If you have to name that, what is it? We're all afraid if we stop doing something that it's just gonna like break the whole parish. But the reality is that that's probably not gonna happen, whatever it might be. And that that that might be something as as simple as just saying, like, I'm afraid if I'm not constantly available to people, that something's gonna unravel and fall apart. But the reality is that that's just not true, you know. So what's that thing in your heart, in your mind that weighs heavily on you that you're afraid if you stop doing it, that it's it's it's gonna break, break the parish if you stop doing that one more thing? So I want to leave you just with some really just quick indicators that maybe you are in survival mode, as if you know, if these questions diagnostically as you're going through of them don't strike any chords for you. Here's some other ways to think about it. And and we just want to take a take a look and see, you know, are are we really thriving or are we just surviving? Are we really shepherding or are we just reacting to what's going on in here? And so some just quick indicators that you may be in survival mode. The the first thing I would say is that if you can't if you can't name your top priority in one sentence, you might be stuck in survival mode. You're probably making everything equally important, which is to say that nothing is most important. If your calendar is simply meetings plus emergencies, um, you're probably in survival mode. You're you're you're trying to be too many places at once and be on top of everything instead of delegating responsibly to those who who you have called into these leadership positions or have been moved into these leadership positions, sometimes voted in by parishioners, instead of delegating them and trusting them with the mission the way that we should. If we're just, you know, dogging on all these meetings and then on top of that we have emergencies, you're probably in survival mode. If you keep saying we should, but never assign an owner or a date, that's a good sign that you have good ideas, but none of them are getting done because nobody's ever responsible for seeing them through and held accountable by specific dates. Um if you keep saying we should, but never assign an owner or a date, you might be stuck in survival mode. And then finally, if you're not having conversations about discipleship, and those conversations are only getting replaced by logistics, like what's going on for this weekend, do we have enough servers for mass? Um, do we have enough lectors? Do we have, you know, if if that's all your conversations are instead of the broader questions of how we're going to move people into discipleship, then you might be stuck in survival mode. Because again, the mission of the church is not the managing of a parish. The mission of the church is to make disciples, to evangelize all people. And so if you're never having that conversation of how we reach this people over here that aren't connected to our church, then you're probably stuck in survival mode instead of being set free for mission mode. All right. So the one question that I would leave you with is do you want to be free? Because the first step then, if you want to be free, if you are stuck in survival mode, is to identify the things that need to be protected. If everything is important, then nothing is being protected. If everything is urgent, nothing is being protected. Shepherds protect, right? Jesus had this desire where he saw the people were like sheep without a shepherd. The shepherd comes in, he guides them to the water, he guides them to food, he protects them from the wolves, right? If everything is important, we're not really looking at what needs to be intentionally protected. So what we need to do is identify the the non-negotiable for this seizing. Like what is the thing the Lord wants you to prioritize right now and what would simply be irresponsible to crowd out? Um, and and here's a really simple filter that we can use, right? This idea of shepherding. Does this help guide people towards Jesus or not? Right? Whatever it is, this meeting, is this meeting shepherding the leaders in the room toward Jesus or not? Or is it just a machine we keep running, we keep showing up to? I mean, how many meetings do we have where all we're doing is just telling each other what's currently happening, or we're just showing the numbers, but we're not actually doing anything, right? We're not actually making any decisions, right? Does this meeting help shepherd people? If nothing else, I mean at least make that little adjustment to say, hey, we're gonna start with prayer, and then this is the direction, this is the thing I feel God is calling me to do. And I here's a scripture that backs it up, we're gonna pray with it together. Right. That at least would be an intentional effort to shepherd the people in the room. And as you do that, then they become equipped to shepherd those outside of the room. But just that simple filter, right? A shepherd protects. You're not called to just be a CEO of a parish, you're called to shepherd. And so what we want to do is really look at these meetings. We want to look at everything that happens here and just that simple, simple filter. Does this shepherd people toward Jesus? If it doesn't, then it's something that needs to be maybe adjusted. And that's we're gonna move into the third part, the third thing for this week, which is to pick one stop doing move. All right. And that that's it, it's just choosing one thing to either stop doing, to condense, or to delegate, right? It could be one meeting, right? Maybe we don't need this meeting. Maybe all we're doing is just sharing uh uh finance council meetings for me are one that I think oftentimes we're just showing what the numbers are. If that's all we're doing, then we can probably just put it in an email, or everybody can do it remotely with spend 15 minutes, show the numbers. If there's a question or a vote or whatever, deal with it, be done with it, right? Don't make it something where everybody has to travel 20 minutes out of their way, sit around for 60 minutes and travel 20 minutes back. Condense it, right? Or delegate it, right? Maybe there's someone else in the parish that you pastors on their leadership team that can go to the finance meeting and you don't need to be there, but they're gonna keep you in the loop, they're gonna keep you updated. That's delegation, right? So there's there's one meeting, one recurring task, or one expectation that you can reset. That's another thing. Office hours. You shouldn't be in your office all the time. A pastor should not be in his office all the time. A ministry leader shouldn't be in their office all the time. The mission field is not on your computer screen in your email folder. The mission field is out there, right? You need to go to the grocery store, you need to walk down the street, you need to be available, you need to go to the games, you need to do the things. But you don't need to sit in your office all the time so that you can be available for whoever walks in. You need a process to collect those people, their information, and then reach out to them. But if you set and protect specific times that you're in the office, then all of those side pieces, they all find their kind of their nexus, kind of their linch point, their hinge point in that office hour. And you can say, when so-and-so walks up to you or accosts you in the store or whatever, you can talk to them briefly, but then you say, Hey, send me an email. Uh, these are my office hours. I'd like to find a time to meet with you about this. And it protects all your time around you. Uh before mass, somebody comes in and they're like, hey, father, we're new to the parish, we want to sign up, yada, yada. You say, okay, hey, send me an email. Here's a card. This is my email. And I would love to get you on my calendar this week because I've got some time set aside for you. Right? That's such a better conversation to have than, hey, I can't talk now. I'm ready to start mass, you know, buzz off. You know? So we we what we need to protect the things that need to be protected by stopping, condensing, or delegating these meetings, these recurring tasks, or these expectations that need to be reset. And when we do that, though, we're replacing that time with margin for mission. So on the one side, you're stopping something, you're condensing it, you're delegating it. On the other, there's something you need to start doing or you need to do more, right? And that could be that that office hours, like starting specific office hours for meetings, um, which is also added benefit if you your staff knows you're going to be here at this time. There's time for prayer. Maybe you need, maybe you're not really praying and you need time for prayer. I'd say that's step number one. Get time for prayer, protect it. Don't even go to the parish office or the church until you've had time to pray, right? Or maybe you need time specifically set aside for planning. You know, once every six months, once every 12 weeks, once a quarter, right? We're gonna have a half a day as a staff to plan out our next 90 days and what God is called, like discern what God is calling us to do, make decisions around that, and then protect those decisions with intentional accountability, maybe new processes, right? And then whatever the That thing is, that missional margin that you need to put in your calendar, you need to start doing. Put it on the calendar. Don't just think about it like, eh, on Mondays, I'm gonna try and do this. No, like Monday at one o'clock, I'm gonna do XYZ, right? Whatever it is, put it on the calendar, very concrete, and that protects it so that you're not heaping things on. You're not saying yes to something else at that time. This is something you have decided is missionally important. You're committing to it and you're sticking to and you're following through. Amen. Amen. Amen. And with that, we can move on to the devil's advocate. And I I can imagine the people that are listening, you're listening to this episode and you're thinking, right, you know, John, I'm on board with you. Like I do feel like maybe I'm stuck a little bit in survival mode, but it's not a choice. Like if I slow down, things are gonna break. Okay. I hear you. I've been there, I've felt that. But here's the reality check, right? Everything that I thought was super urgent and important in every position I've ever been in. The week after I left, somebody new came in and they had new priorities and they changed it, and guess what? The parish is still there. You know, some urgent things are real, right? Somebody comes in, there's been a death in the family, somebody's really sick. Some of these are real. But a lot of your urgent things that you're responding to, right? We need mass ministries and stuff, these things are predictable. And we can we can put in place real guards to like make sure people are signing up, they know that they're signed up, and we have to do like minimal guiding of that. These are these are just basic signups. And predictable urgency can be redesigned. Okay? So the loop stays in power because it rewards the reaction. Like you feel needed, you feel responsible, you feel like saying no is uncharitable, you feel like you've done something when you do it. But but the cost of all of this is that our work becomes busy, but it's not productive, it's not bearing fruit. We end up managing little pieces, but not shepherding the people that have been entrusted to us. And ultimately what we are experiencing as a church is that when we live in the urgent survival mode, discipleship becomes a thing that we'll hopefully get to later. Um, it it becomes something that we hope is happening in the midst of our programs, not an intentional effort to disciple. So I want to reframe this and really think about this because one boundary that you put in place isn't going to break the parish. But it can break the survival loop, and that's what we want to do today. For example, just a really practical line that you can start putting in place to guide the behaviors of people, to give yourself a little more room for mission or presence in the moment. A really practical line to use when somebody demands your time right now, just tell them, send me an email. Right, whatever it is. Like send me an email. Like, let's put it on the calendar. And if you've protected time for meetings, then you can just send them a link for your available times. It's not like you have to send 15 emails back and forth to find a time. They're opting into a conversation with you. Okay. But what happens on the other side of that is if we're constantly saying, like, oh, this person came in, they're hopped up about this, I have to respond to it now. That's not true. It's just not true. Um, and and so we have to protect our space. We we have to use our time well that God has given us for this mission that we've been entrusted with. And we can do that when we set up simple boundaries that help to shepherd our people in a specific direction that protect the most important things that God has placed on your heart that you've discerned that He is calling you to, that you need to respond to, so that the people in your parish won't be like sheep without a shepherd. All right. And with that, of course, we never want to leave you without something that you can do today to help you take action on this conversation. I want to invite you to pick one thing, just that one thing, right? Step number three from the three things. Pick one thing to stop, condense, or delegate this week, like a like a meeting, a recurring task, the expectations people have with you, and and fix it. Stop doing it, condex it, condense it, delegate it, and replace it with scheduled margin for people, for prayer, or for planning. Um, a couple other things you can do. You can always share this episode with your priest, your pastor, or a friend in ministry, so that it doesn't just stay a good conversation, but you say to them, hey, you know, I listened to this episode. I'm not sure what I think about it, but I'd love to hear your thoughts on it. If we could talk about it, that'd be great. And then finally, you can book a discovery call with us, Catholic Ministry Professionals.com, and we would love to chat with you about getting clarity on the next steps for your parish so that you can reclaim time for discipleship. All right, thanks for listening to this episode. Remember, one saint can transform their parish through their work. You were made for a time like this. And with that, we'll see you in the vineyard. The Catholic Ministry Professionals podcast is brought to you by Briar Cliff University. Briar Cliff provides a vibrant community, top notch faculty, and cutting edge programs that empower you to reach your full potential. So whether you're pursuing a degree in business, healthcare, or the arts, Briar Cliff provides an environment where you can thrive. Learn more at Briarcliff.edu to start your transformative academic experience.