Does Your Church Need to Shift Gears?

I enjoy driving a car with a stick shift.

One of our cars is a classic 1979 VW Beetle convertible. Like most older Beetles, it has a manual transmission. After decades of driving such cars, I can instinctively tell when it’s time to do exactly what I need to do with my right hand or with which of the pedals. I’m not a particularly coordinated person, but I’ll tell you, when it comes to driving my convertible in traffic, I’ve got moves!

However learning to drive a stick shift can be pretty counter-intuitive, especially at first. After all, once you get past the awkwardness of slowly letting out the clutch to lurch your way through an intersection, the last thing you want to do is sacrifice any of that momentum by push that clutch back in to move to another gear. After all, you’re finally moving now!

I recall one of the first times that I ever tried to drive a car with a stick shift. In high school I was considering buying an older car that I was taking for a test drive. I swung by the home of an old car guy in our church named Herb. Herb graciously buckled in and said little while I lurched around town in that ‘55 Chevy. But later in the ride, as we were both probably starting to show early signs of whiplash, Herb gently suggested that perhaps I might try shifting a little earlier rather than waiting for the engine to redline on these side streets of our small town.

Herb was right. I didn’t know it, but I had a lot to learn. I didn’t even know what I didn’t know.

Shifting gears at the right time can feel counter-intuitive. After all, the car’s moving fine, right? But failing to shift when needed can make things much more difficult than needed.

A similar thing can happen in churches. As a parachute-drop church planter, I know how difficult it can be to start a church from scratch. As a senior pastor, I’ve known how difficult it is to try to join a pre-existing team to try to win their trust and help everyone move ahead. The challenges faced by a point leader make the prospect of getting 2000lbs of classic car going by moving a shifter lever and pressing a few pedals look pretty simple.

When leading a church, gaining some congregational momentum can seem like everything. Planning your new sermon series in the fall is a very big deal, or getting your programs launched solidly, especially if you’re a few volunteers short of a full team. And getting attendance or General Fund offerings to slowly ratchet up rather than down can seem like a never-ending struggle.

When those kind of challenges are right in front of you every week, it’s not hard to understand how a point leader might not put much thought into what comes next after this week’s challenge. After all, if we don’t deal with the challenges of today, we might never reach the challenges of tomorrow!

If I get surprised by a sudden need to shift in my Beetle I can respond pretty quickly. The clutch goes in, my hand reaches out and suddenly I’m back in second gear again. Churches may be less responsive to sudden changes in approach. While it feels great to finally get enough small group leaders for the current program, it may not be all that easy to produce a few more trained leaders if newcomers show up.

In one of the churches I led we placed a strong emphasis on small group participation, but as the church grew we quickly filled all of our groups and ended up with a six-month waiting list for new small groups due to our lack of trained leaders. I guess we simply hadn’t dared hope that our change efforts would actually work. Our lack of forethought regarding future leaders prevented us from doing one of the very things we’d said we were all about! (insert forehead smack here).

Of course we eventually scrambled to cover the need, but in the meantime, we had unwittingly encouraged a wave of newcomers to settle into “spectator” roles in our church. Our lack of readiness cost us later on.

One of the realities of a volunteer-reliant organization like a church is that the group’s response time to changes may be a lot slower than other similar organizations. A small business may have only a few people involved, perhaps most of them present on a daily basis. Changes can be handled quickly and nimbly if needed. After all, they’ll have to learn the new software if they want to keep doing their jobs, right?

But while a mid-sized church may have the same number of “people-hours” happening weekly as a small business, a mid-sized church will respond to change much differently. News of a sudden change can’t simply be announced in the break room, it will need to be processed. People will need to talk together about things. Not everyone will read their emails or be available for the meetings so the same presentations may need to happen multiple times. Some will find themselves excited about the change, while others will be skeptical. More conversations will inevitably follow, both planned and unplanned.

Most importantly, people understand that the church should feel different than a business. Leaders who simply announce changes without helping their people to embrace those changes may eventually be surprised at the pushback they experience, even from loyal team members. Churches shouldn’t feel like that.

Churches can change, and sometimes change dramatically. But they usually can’t change on a dime.

Does this mean that churches shouldn’t expect to change? Not at all—ever since Jesus called those first fishermen to be his disciples, he has always changed our expectations more than we could ask or imagine. When was the last time you heard a worship service conducted in Latin? The church of Christ is intended to change.

But those changes need to happen wisely. And that will involve some forethought on the parts of leaders. If leaders fail to plan, congregation’s are confronted with abrupt transitions that strain congregational ties unnecessarily. In automotive terms, that’s known as shifting without a clutch. 

But wait a minute—doesn’t all this talk about planning get in the way of simply trusting God for our future needs? Don’t we need to leave room for God to work in our ministry plans? It seems like ministry leadership should ultimately come down to serving God faithfully today, letting him hold tomorrow for us until we get there, right?

While that’s certainly true, that doesn’t mean that God isn’t looking to prepare wisely for future events that we could have seen coming. Just because I made it past each stop sign with Herb that day in that Chevy didn’t mean that I shouldn’t have begun wondering which way the shift lever would need to move to find the next gear.

Ultimately, driving a car with a stick shift involves a balance of knowing what your next move is but then paying attention to your surroundings to know when and how to take it. If you find yourself going up a hill you may stay in second gear a bit longer until you reach the top. But going down the other side you may actually slip into 4th as you breeze along freely. You plan your approach, but then adapt your plan to the changing terrain.

So also with a leader’s strategic response to the Lord of his church. It’s irresponsible for a leader to have little idea of just what their church’s next “gear shift” moves would be, just like it’d be silly to have no idea where second gear is on the shift pattern as you head through an intersection. A leader who doesn’t anticipate the next gear shift removes any chance to help people prepare for it.

But it would be equally irresponsible for a leader to make plans and then cling anxiously to them, even if God were to introduce later surprises that change everything. When leading a church it’s important to have a plan that anticipates not simply today but also tomorrow. But when leading that church it’s also important to have built-in opportunities to survey what God seems to be showing you so that you can adjust your plans if needed around what God seems to be doing among you.

One of the things I’ve enjoyed about coaching and consulting is the satisfaction of helping leaders and teams step back and take a fresh look at what God might be showing them about what he’s up to among them. When leaders are eyeball-deep in the week-to-week pressures of ministry it can be easy to miss the shifts and changes that God might be introducing. More sadly yet, our fervent grasp of yesterday may make it difficult for us to discover the opportunities that God may be opening up for tomorrow.

If you are a leader, who helps you step back so you can notice what God might be up to in your ministry?