Essentials for Effective Established Churches

I am making these points after thinking about established churches from Thom Rainer’s recent post.  While there is purpose and value in church planting, Rainer is right in thinking that we cannot give up on the established churches, even though leading them poses difficult challenges.  Pastoring a church of any age will be challenging, so instead of complaining, let’s just remember some essentials of leadership as we strive to keep ministry effective. These are my thoughts, and I’m certainly no expert.  What did I miss?  Leave a comment.
———————————————————————————————————-

1. Preach the Gospel. The gospel message is needed because it has the power to save people. Established churches sometimes don’t preach the gospel and so they don’t see any transformation and become stagnant country clubs. If we want to see peoples’ lives changed and making a difference in our community, we must proclaim the Gospel, which is the very reason Christ established the church.
2. Love people. People want their pastor to care about them.  The challenge for young pastors especially is that we are often stereotyped into wanting to build up a huge church and do things for our own glory or like what we’ve seen somewhere else. I’m not sure why that is, but I know I’ve run into that. People think the pastor will care more about their ministry and plans, and will forget about loving and actually shepherding people.  I spent the majority of my first year at Central going out and being with our people. Just getting to know them and praying with them– showing them that I genuinely care about them.  As challenging as they can be sometimes, people are the reason God put pastors in place!
3. Challenge complacency. Many maturing Christians get to a point where they feel like they don’t have to grow any longer. A pastor leading an established church has to not only challenge complacency in the church’s life and ministry but also in each person’s life.  Urgency in ministry is often lost in an established church, so we must always keep people focused on what’s next for the church and in their lives.  If we don’t lead them somewhere, they will obviously stay where they are.  As everything else in the world moves forward, the church does not– this leads to the church’s decline.
4. Keep evangelism at the forefront. Many reasons why a church plateaus or is dying is because it has lost its fervency as witnesses for Christ. The longer a church lives, the easier it is for it to become focused more on itself. This was never the goal of the church, so if we are going to lead established churches to still be effective, we must keep that initial purpose for the church at the front of our thinking and acting.
5. Confront sin. Many established churches don’t do this, and then problems continue because they’re never dealt with. Confronting sin should be done according to Scripture – in a loving but truthful way. However, if the church ignores sin (attitudes, behaviors, actions, etc.), there will always be hurdles as it tries to move forward.

Advertisement