A discussion on managing change from someof the pastors featured in the book, best Practices of Growing Churches

The demands of growing a healthy church are diffificult, but one of the ways pastors learn helpful insights is by listening and talking to one another. Recently, Tom Nees, director of the USA/Canada Mission/Evangelism Department and author of Best Practices of Growing Churches, met in a phone conference with several prominent pastors, many who were profiled in his book, to talk about issues affecting growing churches. An edited portion of that discussion, on managing change, appears below. An audio of the complete 50-minute session is online at www.usamission.org. The complete conversation features comments from the following pastors: Craig Coulter, Mark Fuller, Corey Jones, Jerry Moen, Bud Reedy, Gene Tanner, and Kerry Willis.

Tom Nees: All of you have led your congregations through various stages and some with significant change. What can you say to pastors who are in a situation they know needs to change, but they’re not quite sure about how to go about bringing change?

Kerry Willis: Longevity is the greatest convincer. I have some longevity with the people [I pastor] and I’m part of the fabric. A pastor from North Carolina, a friend, moved to Virginia, and he’d been here about a year, and he asked me, “Cary, I can’t get the people to change anything. Could you give me a clue?” I said, “Well, if you would put Virginia tags on your car that might help.” He did, and it did help.

Gene Tanner: After people see you making right decisions, they begin to feel like, “If you say it can happen this way, I think it will.” So, I think Cary’s right. The huge thing is being there long enough for people to see your decision making. They begin to trust that you’re not going to lead them off a cliff. Just because you know where you have to go doesn’t mean you’ve got to be there by Thursday. Inch-by-inch, making tiny changes, letting people absorb that change, making another change, and letting them absorb that change. Every time you make a change, you’ve got to love on them a little more.

Kerry Willis: Well, I think the key to change is finding the correct throttle on the church you pastor. My dad is a shrimp boat captain, and he had a Cummins engine in his shrimp boat years ago, when I was a teenager. I wanted to get home quicker than he did, you know, because I had dates and things like that. Every once in awhile, when he wasn’t looking, I’d reach my hand through the wheel-house and bump the throttle. Not one time did I bump the throttle that he didn’t know I had messed with his engine.

And every once in a while, when I’m here in the church, I feel like I’m in the wheel house. And there are staff members and other people trying to bump our throttle—they’re trying to get us to move quicker than this church is capable of changing. And they never do it that I don’t feel it and do just like dad did. I reach back, take the throttle, and throw it back to the RPM’s that I know will get us to where we need to go. And sometimes that’s frustrating, like the staff for example, because they think I’m moving too slow. My answer to that is always this: “I plan to be here for a lifetime, do you? “

Bud Reedy: Leonard Sweet, in his book, Summoned to Lead, made a statement that I immediately wrote down on the flyleaf of my Bible. He said, “There was a time when one of the most important things that a pastor could bring to the church in the way of leadership was experience. It is now no longer the most important thing. What’s the most important thing is discernment, being able to discern God’s move and what God is up to, and then knowing how to get in step with that.”

One of the things we talk a lot about here at Still Meadow Church is what are we willing to risk, and what is our pain threshold for reaching lost people? And we keep that language before our congregation all the time at the board level and at the congregational level. This is all about reaching lost people. Jesus came to seek and to save the lost, period. And that’s why we’re here, too.

So if we’re going to reach the lost, we’re going to have to change some things. We’ll try to discern through prayer and fasting and spiritual conversations with one another what it is that needs to change to put us in a better position to reach the lost.

What we’re really doing is making a preferential option for lost people. And so, we are actually speaking for people who aren’t here yet. What do they need? What kind of church do they need? And, we also talk a lot about not being afraid to experiment. I don’t think we do that very well in the Church of the Nazarene. It’s just a matter of attempting great things for God. And some times it appears that they flop. That’s okay. We just to get right back up on the horse and try something else. So, let’s not be afraid to experiment. Reaching lost people is worth the risk.

So, we keep that language before our people all the time. And I think that’s created an atmosphere here at Still Meadow where we’re willing to risk some things for God. Lost people are worth the risk.

Craig Coulter: I think part of that is having the vision out there. People are willing to risk if the vision is the right vision.

Mark Fuller: I think there’s a direct correlation between how long a church has gone without change and how long it takes to affect real change. When I was at Crossroads Church in Phoenix it took a lot of years to earn the right to lead effective change in that church because it had kind of gone through a time without that. And I’ve noticed that in other churches by just talking with different pastors.

That goes back to the tenure thing we mentioned earlier. Now, in my coming to Grove City Church, the former pastor, Bob Huffaker, had engendered and nurtured this attitude of change, and I just walked into it as the new senior pastor, and they just expected me to [lead] change. And it was no big deal. In fact, they would have been surprised if we hadn’t changed. So, if I were speaking to a pastor who’s pastoring a church that has had a history of just flat-line or decline, it’s going to take a long time to earn the financial change, orleadership change, to bring about the ministry change that needs to take place.

Tom Nees: Well, thank you all.

About Best Practices of Growing Churches: