Senior Pastor

What Has Institutional Success Done to the Church?

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Questions About Multisite Churches, Institutional Spending, Consumerism, and Accountability

Over the past several posts, I have been examining eleven questions I have been asking myself about the contemporary church.

I began with questions about church leadership and then turned to questions about what happens when the church gathers. 

Four questions remain:

  1. Are multisite campuses a desire to grow God’s kingdom—or the senior pastor’s kingdom?
  2. How biblical is it for as much as 50 percent—or more—of a church’s giving to support buildings, maintenance, utilities, and staff?
  3. Has the contemporary church fostered a consumer mentality rather than genuine discipleship?
  4. Why is the contemporary church so reluctant to practice church discipline?

These may appear to be four separate issues, but I believe they belong together. Each one raises a larger question: What happens when preserving and growing the institution becomes more important than forming faithful disciples?

Once again, I am not asking these questions as someone standing outside the institutional church. I have spent more than thirty-five years as an insider. I have served as a senior pastor and district superintendent. I have made my living from the gospel for most of my adult life. I have not merely participated in these systems. I have benefited from them.

Neither am I suggesting that everything associated with institutional Christianity is necessarily wrong. Institutions can preserve important traditions, combine resources, support ministries, and accomplish things an individual congregation could never accomplish alone. But institutions also have a natural instinct for self-preservation. Over time, keeping the institution alive can become more important than fulfilling the mission for which the institution was created. That is the concern behind these four questions.

When Expansion Becomes the Mission

I understand the appeal of the multisite church model. We explored it in two of the congregations I served over the years. It can make good financial and missional sense, particularly when a larger congregation merges with a smaller or struggling one.

The larger church can provide financial resources, leadership, technology, administrative support, and ministry programs the smaller congregation could not sustain on its own. A struggling church may remain open, and a Christian presence may be preserved in a community where it might otherwise disappear. Those are good things.

Everyone wants to reach more people for Christ. At least, that is what we say our goal is. A multisite model can provide opportunities to reach people in different communities while avoiding the expense of duplicating every administrative function. I appreciate the concept.

Still, I find myself asking a question: Why not call the new location a church plant? If the goal is to establish a congregation that makes disciples and reaches its community, why must it remain a campus of the larger church? Why must it retain the larger congregation’s name, organizational identity, ministry system, and usually its primary preacher?

Does the campus have local leadership with meaningful authority? Is it being prepared to become a self-governing congregation? Is the goal to reproduce healthy churches—or to extend the reach of one church’s brand? And, perhaps most uncomfortably, is the goal to grow God’s kingdom or our kingdom?

I am not suggesting that every multisite church is driven by ego or control. That would be an unfair judgment about motives I cannot know. Some multisite churches are undoubtedly reaching people and doing meaningful ministry.

But the model deserves examination. Bigger is not necessarily better. Expansion is not necessarily multiplication. Increasing the audience of one gifted communicator is not necessarily the same thing as forming a new congregation with mature local leaders.

Perhaps the real test is not how many campuses a church has but what kind of disciples and leaders those campuses are producing. If every campus remains dependent upon the personality, preaching, and authority of one senior pastor, have we planted churches—or merely expanded a platform?

When Maintaining the Church Consumes the Church

I am writing this while attending the General Conference of my denomination, the Evangelical Methodist Church. As part of that meeting, I have been looking at financial information from our congregations. The numbers raise difficult questions.

In many smaller churches, more than 50 percent of the congregation’s giving is allocated to pastoral support. Once denominational support, insurance, utilities, maintenance, and other facility expenses are added, as much as 80 percent of the church’s income may already be committed. That leaves very little margin for ministry and outreach.

This is not an argument against paying pastors. Scripture clearly supports those who receive their living from the gospel. As one who has received his living from the gospel for most of his adult life, it would be more than a little hypocritical for me to suggest otherwise.

Nor is it an argument against maintaining church property. Buildings require electricity, insurance, repairs, and upkeep. Those expenses are real and ignoring them does not make them disappear.

The problem is not that churches have expenses. The problem is what happens when almost everything a congregation receives is required simply to keep the congregation operating. At what point does maintaining the church consume the church?

We regularly say, “The church is not a building.” Our budgets, however, sometimes tell another story. They may reveal that maintaining the building, supporting the staff, and preserving the organization have become our highest priorities.

Again, I understand how this happens. A congregation loves its pastor. It values the building where generations have worshiped, married, baptized their children, and buried their loved ones. The building holds memories that cannot be measured on a financial statement. But a difficult question remains: If 80 percent of a church’s giving is required to maintain its staff, building, and denominational obligations, how much is left to feed the hungry, care for the poor, serve the community, support missions, and make disciples?

Perhaps an even harder question is this: Are we supporting these things because they advance the mission, or has preserving them become the mission? The institution was created to support the ministry of the church. The ministry of the church was never intended merely to support the institution.

When Disciples Become Consumers

Church-hopping and church-shopping have become normal in the United States. When we want a strong children’s ministry, we look for the church with the best children’s ministry. When our children become teenagers, we search for the church with the largest youth group, the most activities, the best facilities, or the most dynamic youth pastor.

I have watched this happen in churches I served. Families would participate in our children’s ministry, but once their children became teenagers, they migrated to the bigger church because it offered more opportunities for their teens.

I understand the impulse. Parents want their children to enjoy church. They want them to build Christian friendships, learn the faith, and have experiences that will encourage them to follow Christ. Confession: I’ve got teenage grandchildren. I want the same for them.

But I have begun to wonder whether we parents (and grandparents) have abdicated our responsibility for our children’s faith development to the professionals. We have outsourced discipleship.

We began to believe our children needed a professional children’s minister, a professional youth minister, and a full calendar of religious activities more than they needed parents who prayed with them, opened Scripture with them, worshiped beside them, served with them, and demonstrated a life of faith before them.

Churches have helped create this expectation. We compete for families by offering more programs, better facilities, larger events, and specialized ministries for every age and stage of life. In the process, we can unintentionally communicate that discipleship is something religious professionals provide for us. That is what consumerism does. It changes the question.

Instead of asking, “Where is God calling us to belong, serve, sacrifice, and grow?” we ask, “Which church offers the most for me and my family?”

The church becomes another provider of goods and services, which happen to be religious in nature. Worship becomes something we attend. Ministry becomes something the staff performs. Discipleship becomes another program we consume. And when another church offers a better product, we move.

I am not opposed to children’s or youth ministry. I am grateful for those who invest in children and teenagers. But no church program can replace the role of parents (and grandparents) in the spiritual formation of their children. The church should equip parents for that responsibility, not encourage them to surrender it. Have we become so focused on attracting families that we have forgotten how to form them?

When Accountability Threatens Attendance

Consumer Christianity also helps explain why church discipline has largely disappeared. No one seems to be accountable anymore—morally or theologically. We are reluctant to address destructive behavior because we do not want to appear judgmental. After all, we are all sinners. We are afraid of being hypocritical, unloving, or legalistic.

Those concerns are understandable. Church discipline has sometimes been practiced harshly, selectively, and publicly. Certain sins have been exposed while others were excused. Ordinary members have been disciplined while influential leaders were protected. What was supposed to produce restoration sometimes produced humiliation instead. We should repent of those abuses.

But the misuse of church discipline does not eliminate the need for loving accountability. “We are all sinners” is a reason to practice accountability humbly. It is not a reason to abandon accountability altogether.

The New Testament vision of the church is not a gathering of people who mind their own business while sitting near one another for an hour each week. It is a community whose members belong to one another. They encourage, teach, correct, forgive, restore, and bear with one another. That kind of life requires accountability.

Of course, accountability becomes difficult when people relate to the church primarily as consumers. Consumers do not expect to be corrected by the businesses they patronize. If they become dissatisfied, they take their business somewhere else. Church leaders know this.

If we challenge someone’s behavior, question a theological conviction, or call for repentance, that person may leave. Their family may leave with them. Their giving may leave too. They will probably find another church down the road that asks fewer questions. The temptation is to remain silent. But a church that is afraid to lose people will eventually become afraid to disciple people.

Biblical accountability is not about controlling people, policing every failure, or pretending some of us have risen above the need for grace. It is about loving one another enough to tell the truth and walking with one another toward restoration.

Perhaps the disappearance of church discipline reveals something deeper. Meaningful accountability requires meaningful belonging. It is difficult to hold one another accountable when relationships are shallow, attendance is optional, and participation consists primarily of watching a few people conduct a service. Church discipline cannot be separated from church community. We cannot expect accountability from people who have never been taught that they belong to one another.

What Are We Actually Building?

Multisite campuses, church buildings, paid pastors, denominational structures, children’s programs, youth ministries, and organizational growth are not inherently wrong. Each can serve the mission of the church. The danger comes when these things cease to serve the mission and quietly become the mission.

A church can have multiple campuses, excellent facilities, strong programs, growing attendance, and a substantial budget while failing to form people who live under the lordship of Jesus. A smaller congregation can devote nearly all its resources to preserving its pastor, property, and programs while having little margin left for the ministry it is trying to preserve.

Both may be institutionally successful—or at least institutionally committed—without necessarily being faithful to the mission Jesus gave His church. Perhaps the most important question is not whether our churches are growing, adequately funded, programmatically successful, or institutionally secure. Perhaps the question is whether our life together is forming people who look more like Jesus.

Are we making disciples—or merely attracting attenders? Are we multiplying churches—or extending brands? Are our resources supporting ministry—or is ministry supporting the institution? Are we forming children in the faith—or outsourcing their discipleship? Are we loving one another enough to practice humble, restorative accountability—or are we too afraid someone might leave?

Institutions have a way of convincing us that their survival is essential to the kingdom of God. It is not. The kingdom existed before our institutions, and it will remain long after they are gone.

The church must always be willing to ask whether its structures are helping fulfill the mission of Jesus or hindering it. Everything else—our buildings, budgets, programs, positions, campuses, and denominational systems—must remain secondary to that purpose.

We should not be asking only whether the institution is succeeding. We should be asking what its success is producing.

No Easy Answers

I know. I’ve raised a lot of questions. Many of which have no answer. Or, the answer will be different in every congregation. 

I haven’t asked these questions to condemn anyone or anything. I asked them of myself as one who leads in the institution. I just asked them out loud in the hopes that other leaders might ask themselves, and in so doing, that we might all be more faithful in our leadership.

As usual, my questions only raise more questions. Perhaps they did for you, too. I’d love for you to share your questions with me. Leave them in the comments below.

Until next time, keep looking up…

11 Questions I’m Asking Myself About the Contemporary Church

/ pastorlynnmalone / 1 Comment

Examining the Church We Have and the Church Jesus Intended

I have spent most of my adult life serving the institutional church and I’ve spent much of the past week sitting in institutional meetings. The week was encouraging and uplifting, but it also prompted me to reflect on the “institutional” church as it exists today.

Here is what I’ve been thinking about all week…

For more than thirty-five years, I have preached sermons, led worship services, administered programs, attended meetings, developed budgets, supervised staff, and participated in denominational structures. I have served as a senior pastor. I have served as a district superintendent. I have not only participated in the denominational system; for a season, I worked for the denomination. Even now, I remain an ordained elder serving as the pastor of a local church.

I say all that because I don’t want anyone to misunderstand what follows. I am not standing outside the institutional church throwing rocks at it. I am standing firmly inside it. I have given most of my life to it. I love the church, and I continue to believe the local church can be one of the most beautiful expressions of the body of Christ in the world. But I also know that I have been complicit in fostering some of the very issues I am beginning to question.

I have helped create worship services in which most people watched while a few people participated. I have stood behind the pulpit as the central personality in the room. I have encouraged people to invite their friends to “come hear the preacher.” I have supported budgets that devoted significant resources to staff, buildings, programs, and institutional maintenance. I have participated in denominational systems that sometimes appeared more concerned with preserving the institution than advancing the mission.

I have measured attendance, counted giving, promoted programs, celebrated growth, and worried when the numbers went in the wrong direction. I have sometimes treated a full room as evidence of spiritual success without asking whether the people in that room were actually being formed into the image of Christ.

I am not confessing that everything I have done was wrong. Much of it was done prayerfully, faithfully, and with good intentions. Some of those practices have borne genuine fruit. But good intentions do not place our practices beyond examination.

Neither does the fact that a particular practice is not found explicitly in the Bible make it inherently wrong. The New Testament does not give us a complete operations manual for the twenty-first-century church. It does not tell us what time to gather, how many songs to sing, whether to use a pulpit, how to organize the church office, or what kind of building to occupy. We have freedom to develop structures and practices suited to our time and place.

The question is whether those structures still serve the purposes of the church—or whether the church has gradually begun serving the structures.

A practice does not become biblical simply because churches have done it for a long time. Neither is it necessarily faithful because it attracts a crowd, produces measurable results, or appears successful. Every practice must be examined in light of the character of Jesus Christ, the teaching of Scripture, and the mission Jesus entrusted to His church. That examination has led me to begin asking some uncomfortable questions.

1. Is the senior pastor a truly biblical role?

The New Testament speaks of apostles, prophets, evangelists, pastors, teachers, elders, overseers, and deacons. It certainly recognizes spiritual leadership and entrusts some people with particular responsibilities. But do we find anything resembling the modern senior pastor—the primary preacher, chief executive, public face, institutional leader, and often central personality of the congregation?

The role may not be inherently wrong, but what happens when so much authority, visibility, and responsibility become concentrated in one person?

2. Is the church supposed to be a gathering of non-participants?

Paul describes the church as a body in which every member has a function. He also pictures gatherings in which different members contribute to the life of the community.

How, then, did church become a gathering in which a relatively small number of people perform while everyone else watches? Have we unintentionally taught people that attending church is the same as participating in the body of Christ?

3. Are multisite campuses about growing God’s Kingdom—or the senior pastor’s kingdom?

I know this question sounds pointed, and I do not presume to judge the motives of every pastor or congregation using a multisite model. Heck, I even tried it myself once (to no avail). Multisite churches may reach people who would otherwise remain disconnected from Christian community.

Still, we should be willing to ask why one pastor’s preaching must be broadcast into multiple locations. Are we multiplying churches and leaders, or extending the reach of a particular personality and brand?

4. How biblical is it for more than half of a church’s giving to support buildings, maintenance, upkeep, and staff?

Buildings and staff can serve the mission of the church. Pastors who devote themselves to ministry may rightly receive financial support, and congregations need places in which to gather.

But when much of the church’s financial life is devoted to sustaining its own operations, we should at least ask what remains for mission, mercy, generosity, and ministry beyond ourselves. At what point does maintaining the institution become the institution’s primary mission?

5. When did church gatherings become sermon-centered?

I am a preacher, and I believe preaching matters. The proclamation and teaching of God’s Word have always been central to the church’s life. I’ve often told my congregations that they pay me to be their pastor. I preach for free!

But is a thirty-minute sermon delivered by one person supposed to become the defining feature of Christian worship? How did the sermon come to dominate the gathering while prayer, testimony, conversation, shared discernment, and the Lord’s Supper moved toward the margins?

6. When did the church lose its weekly commitment to the Lord’s Supper?

The earliest Christians appear to have gathered regularly around the table. The breaking of bread was not an occasional addition to worship. It was central to their life together.

How did many Protestant churches move from the Table every week to once a month, once a quarter, or even less frequently? What did we lose when the sermon became weekly but the Meal became optional?

7. Is denominational hierarchy a biblical concept?

Denominations can provide accountability, connection, shared resources, theological identity, and a means of accomplishing ministry that no single congregation could undertake alone. I have benefited from those structures and have worked within them.

But how closely do our layers of boards, agencies, executives, superintendents, bishops, conferences, and administrative offices resemble the leadership structures of the New Testament? When does connection become control? When does accountability become bureaucracy? When does the institution begin protecting itself?

8. Is professionalized ministry the biblical model?

Scripture recognizes that those who preach the gospel may receive their living from the gospel. There is nothing inherently unbiblical about paying pastors or other ministry leaders.

But have we created a system in which the work of ministry is largely outsourced to professionals? Have pastors become religious service providers while church members become their clients? Has professional ministry equipped the saints for ministry—or relieved the saints of ministry?

9. How did we develop such a consumer mentality concerning church?

People shop for churches based on music, preaching, children’s ministries, facilities, style, convenience, and personal preference. Churches respond by marketing programs and attempting to provide increasingly attractive religious experiences.

How did following Jesus become another consumer choice? And how much has the church itself contributed to that mentality by treating people as customers whose preferences must be satisfied?

10. Were early church gatherings limited to one hour?

There is nothing inherently spiritual about a longer gathering. A three-hour service can be every bit as lifeless as a one-hour service.

Still, why has an hour become the accepted limit for worship in so many churches? Why do we become anxious when the service runs long? What does that reveal about the place worship occupies in our lives—and about the kind of experience our gatherings have become?

11. Why is the modern church so afraid of church discipline?

Jesus and the New Testament writers took sin, accountability, restoration, and the holiness of the Christian community seriously. Church discipline was not intended to be cruel, controlling, or punitive. Its goal was truth, repentance, reconciliation, and restoration.

Yet many churches avoid it almost entirely. Are we afraid people will leave? Are we afraid of conflict? Have abuses of authority made us unwilling to exercise any authority? Or have we become so consumer-oriented that we no longer believe the church has the right—or responsibility—to call its members to a life of holiness?

I’m Asking, Not Accusing

I do not have settled answers to all these questions. If I had the answers, I probably would not be writing this series. Or, more likely, I would have already written a book and gone on the speaking circuit.

I am also aware that it is much easier to identify problems than to propose faithful alternatives. Institutional structures developed for reasons. Many of them solved real problems, supported valuable ministries, and helped the church carry the gospel across generations and cultures. Tearing down structures without understanding what they hold together is neither wise nor faithful.

Nor do I believe the solution is simply to reproduce the first-century church. The early church existed in a particular historical and cultural setting. It had problems of its own—many of which are preserved for us in the New Testament. My goal is not to romanticize the past. My goal is to examine the present.

I want to consider what Scripture establishes, what freedom Scripture allows, what benefits our contemporary practices provide, and what unintended distortions they may have produced. I want to distinguish between what is biblically commanded, what is biblically permissible, and what we have simply come to assume.

Most of all, I want to ask whether the church we have built is forming people into the image of Jesus for the sake of others.

I love the church too much not to ask. And because I am part of the church I am questioning, these are not questions I am asking about “them.”

They are questions I am asking about us.

They are questions I am asking about me.

So, I invite you, over the next two weeks, to reflect on these eleven questions with me. In addition to my regular Tuesday posts, I will add two Friday posts to unpack these questions a little more deeply.

I would love your feedback, too. Comment below with any questions these questions raise for you, or feel free to dispute my assumptions. I certainly could be wrong and I invite your correction. Let me hear from you.

Please join me on the journey.

Until next time, keep looking up…

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