What to Do When No One Cares

The reason your church is managing decline is that you are heavily invested in problems that no one cares about.

Back in February, that’s what I might have said to you, to your church’s leadership, or to your whole congregation. Budget woes, shrinking attendance, fewer children in Sunday school, deferred maintenance on the building, volunteer burnout… These are real problems, of course, and they take lots of time and energy to address. But no one cares. You care, of course. Your church cares. You all care so much you pour gobs of energy and time and angst into solving them. But be clear: no one outside your congregation cares that you have those problems. And an organization that pours most of its problem-solving energy into things that no one outside the organization cares about is working with a recipe for decline.

That’s what I would have told you back in February. And then we would have had a robust conversation about what it looks to begin to shift a congregation’s vision and mission around problems that exist beyond the church’s physical and institutional boundaries. And it would have been fun! Invigorating! Imaginative! But that was so 6 months ago. Ah, we were so young.

Here’s what I’d like to say to your church now: People still don’t care about those problems, and a growing number of them are in your own congregation. Back in March, in the span of a few weeks, your church’s institutional problems faded in people’s minds as others came into focus: isolation, fear, change, uncertainty… And so you invested in connection, however clumsy and awkward it was at first. And sure, it was a huge loss. But it was also an enormous gift because on some level you had to ask yourselves, “When we take away the layers of church that the wider culture already doesn’t care about, with what are we left?”

3 questions and an invitation:

• What will we care most about as we move forward?
• What will be the consequences of that caring?
• Do you believe it’s God’s heartfelt wish to get everything back to normal?

This fall I’m going to lead a series of church leadership retreats. This is something I was already doing before the pandemic, so we’ll just move it online. I want to engage you, your church leadership, or maybe your whole congregation with some deep thinking about where we are and where we might be headed. If this invitation ignites some curiosity in you, I hope you’ll let me know and we can get that lined up.
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With Awe and Belonging,
Ben