Knowing Your Yes (Mike Glenn)

By Mike Glenn

One of the fundamental principles of leading a local congregation is understanding church’s are living organisms. While we use organization principles in organizing the life of our churches, there are moments when corporate structuring simply won’t work in church life. Churches have memories and histories. Churches have identities and stories. Any effective leader of a local church will tell you that if you want to know who your church is now, you have to understand who your church was then. If you want to know where the church is going, you have to understand where the church has been. 

Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash

Likewise, just as any of us need to know our purpose to thrive and live our best life, every church needs to know its purpose. Of course, most people will absent-mindedly quote the Great Commission and say every church is a Great Commission church. That’s true, but how a church executes that commission within their community will be as individual as the church is. This is where leadership is critical. 

In the religious culture, we’ve developed a “church growth industry” where experts will come in and interview your leadership, your members, your attendants and random strangers in the neighborhood.  They’ll run all of this through their formulas and bring in a computer printout everything the church needs to do in order to grow. The presentation will be impressive with PowerPoint slides and handouts with colorful grafts. There’s only one problem with the plan. It will look like every other plan for every other church. I tell pastors all the time that one of their most important jobs is to keep the “experts” out of their churches. 

One size doesn’t fit all. Never has. Never will. 

A good pastor will approach their church the same way a parent approaches their child. They will understand God has already placed a dream – a vision– within that congregation when the church was born. There is a God-breathed DNA within every congregation and the pastor’s role is to tease out the church’s personality and character the same way a parent does with a child. A pastor walks with the church on this journey of self-discovery and says, “This is who you are. This is who God created us to be.” 

And once that identity is discovered and affirmed by the congregation, everything else is “no.” Once the church has found its “yes,” everything else is ‘no.” Churches, like people, have gifts and churches should lean into those gifts. Churches should also recognize they don't have all the gifts. Churches can do a lot of things well, but no church does everything well. That means churches should be willing to claim their moments and release the rest. 

Some churches do traditional worship very well. Other churches do contemporary worship better than most. This is fine. Give the church permission to do what they do well and not do what they don’t do well. Nothing is worse than a church trying to do something they don’t have the calling or the giftings to do. The most frequent example given is the worship ministry. Have you ever seen a traditional church trying to do contemporary worship? It’s not pretty. Neither is the contemporary church trying to do a traditional service a pleasant experience. The same is true in any area of the church. Not every church is called to have a soup kitchen. Not every church will have a ministry for the deaf or families with special needs children. Not every church will have a state of the art online presence. And that’s OK. Every church has its yes and it should focus as much as possible on that yes.

Which means pastors are going to have to get comfortable with people leaving their church. Early in my ministry, I wanted everyone to go to my church. I would adapt and compromise trying to make everyone happy. The only thing I did was make everyone mad. 

I finally got the point of saying here is what we do as a church and that’s all we can do. I even got to the point, believe it or not, where I would tell people they wouldn’t be happy with our church and ask if I could help them find a place where they could get plugged in. I know most of the pastors in the area, I would tell them, and we’d talk about what they were looking for in a church. From that information, I’d recommend the church that did that particular ministry well. Everyone was better off. 

When people would ask me why I was willing to do that, I would shrug and tell them, “We all work for the same Boss.” 

As pastor, lead your church to find their yes and let everything else go. We’re not in competition with the other churches. We’re there to compliment one another. No one church can show the fullness of God or capture the full glory of God alone. It takes all of us.

And yes, we all do work for the same Boss.