by Eddie Pipkin

I was driving down a familiar stretch of busy 6-lane road recently and realized that the local government had invested in some nice new landscaping in the grassy median.  I love it when public spaces are given some extra love and attention.  I think it’s one of the things that sets a community apart.  A series of lovely crepe myrtles had been planted and carefully staked.  By the time I made that same journey a week later, some crazed leadfoot had already plowed through three of them, their mangled carcasses scattered across the grass.  Will they be replaced in a timely fashion?  It depends on whether there was a long-range plan with a budget and a person in charge of making the inevitable refurb.  Local churches face this problem constantly: big plans that may or may not be backed up by an ongoing plan for maintenance, updates, and repair.

I’ve seen this median beautification project play out before.  Someone goes to the trouble to think through a nice addition of shrubs or trees, only to see it mangled in the months that follow.  It is a certainty on high-speed, highly travelled roadways. Cars will leave the roadway and crash into your botanical beautification.

If there is going to be a beautification effort that lasts, it has to be accompanied by a robust plan to repair the predictable damage.  If a car plows through the plantings, they must be cleared and planted again as soon as possible, not months later.  This is only feasible if there is an arrangement n that includes a budget for repair and replacement and a team in charge of keeping track of the area and responding with efficiency.

Local churches face this challenge every time they begin a new initiative.  I’m not referring here to landscape projects (although that is sometimes exactly the issue that needs to be addressed), but to any and every kind of project where we start something new and wonderful.  We bring a fresh and vibrant idea to life!  Then, over time, the shiny wears off, and the thing that was once the highlight of our ministry begins to show evidence of our neglect.

This can be a new program or enterprise.  It can be an infrastructure project.  It can be an event.

Any of these things begins with excitement and investment that then diminishes as the thing in question matures, and as the new wears off, if we are not diligent, what was once a source of pride morphs into a point of awkward embarrassment.

There are many relevant examples with which you will be familiar:

  • Prayer Labyrinth:  You are approached by an Eagle Scout who needs to do a big project, and you come up with a great idea to build a gorgeous, landscaped prayer labyrinth in the unused space behind the worship center.  Everybody is very excited when it premieres, but after a year or so, the Eagle Scout is off to college, the landscaping has become overgrown, the border rocks are kicked out of place, and the anti-weed underlayment is coming up in shreds.  No budget was allocated for maintenance, and no caretaker was named for this site’s future care.
  • Senior Club:  You come up with a great idea to have a recurring weekly social gathering for senior adults, complete with occasional field trips and impromptu parties and potlucks.  It begins with great enthusiasm, but after a year or so begins to dissipate (as some participants move or decline physically and no strategy is in place to recruit new participants and no budget is in place to facilitate activities or staff member in charge of organizing the excitement).
  • Hospitality Initiative:  You come up with a great idea to put together a cracker jack hospitality team with a huge upsurge in excitement with training, a dedicated physical hospitality station, cool artistic vests for the team to wear, and a folks who are genuinely pumped about this ministry, but after a year or so, the new has worn off and the initiative begins to decline.  Only half the team is wearing their cute vests, the hospitality center has not been maintained and has become a cluttered lost and found location, and you’re constantly begging the congregation to fill empty slots on the crew.  The leader (who was passionate about this cause) has moved away, and no one has taken up the mantle.  And the budget to support this initiative has been cut.
  • New Member Engagement:  You come up with a great idea to ramp up an exciting new onboarding process for people who are interested in becoming a part of your congregation.  There is much excitement as you launch new tech-supported orientation meetings with guest speakers from different ministry areas, followed by a welcome brunch and a cool in-worship membership ceremony.  Newbies are connected with mentors who guide them in their acclimation to their church family!  But after a year or so, the enthusiasm has faded.  The orientation gatherings are one person with some copied handouts, and the membership ceremony has dwindled to a three minute “recite the vows” perfunctory moment squeezed in between the Children’s Story and the second worship song.  Mentors have dried up, and new ones have not been recruited.  Also, the budget to support this initiative has been reduced.
  • Guest Readers for Worship:  You come up with a great idea to feature the awesome diversity of your congregation by recruiting a variety of guest readers for your worship services.  The enthusiasm is immediate and intense!  Older folks, young children, cool youth, and people of all races and physical abilities and cultural backgrounds jump on board and make a mark, bringing a wide range of interpretive presentations to your normally by-the-book readings, prayers, and announcements.  After about six months this effort peters out as you realize how hard it is to sustain each and every week.  And you know the rest of the story. . . .

I picked some random examples, which you will recognize from your own experience, but you won’t have any trouble thinking of five or ten more.  It’s common, and frankly, it’s natural.  It’s just so much easier to get a thing going, fueled by the adrenaline of ‘new thing energy’ than it is to do the deep work of sustainability.

I also left one biggie out because it is so ubiquitous that it is worthy of its own paragraph or three.

CHURCH WEBSITES and social media.

Local churches struggle mightily to keep their public facing websites and social media accounts current.  It’s a significant problem, and it’s a hard one to see because the person who is turned off or turned away by an inability to find you and engage in the virtual space will probably never let you know.  It’s the cost of missed opportunities, and the cost of missed opportunities is one of the most difficult metrics to define in any organization.

Local church websites continue to feature out-of-date calendars, lapsed contact information, descriptions of groups that no longer meet, biographies of staff members who no longer work there, and woefully insufficient event announcements.  Social media posts are tepid or cursory.  There are long lapses between posts.  Websites are difficult to navigate.  Links are broken.  Ugh.

The work of sustentation is the application of organized discipline.  There must be a point person for any initiative, and this point person should be encouraged and supported in every way possible.  They should also be held accountable to the goals of the initiative (which arguably is part of the holistic work of encouragement and support).

One of the mistakes that key leaders sometimes make is to fall into a pattern of attempting to micro-manage every initiative.  This fails because we don’t have the bandwidth for that level of detailed oversight and because people are disempowered by that level of well-meaning harassment.

To successfully empower the point person is to provide resources (financial, logistical, training, coaching, connection, and spiritual).  That’s what primary leaders should be doing for their point people.  And they should schedule regular check-ins as a matter of course.  They should be asking, “What do you need?”

By the way, one of the consistent keys to be found in successful, growing churches is a continuity of leadership.  For every passionate leader in place – and there is much to be said for a person who is passionate about one specific initiative being given rein to manage that one project without a grander resume – that passionate leader should have someone working with them who is the ‘next man up’ waiting in the wings, learning the details of the project.  We err in putting project after project on the shoulders of just one person, while not investing in bringing up new potential leadership.

These are the kinds of questions we must ask ourselves at the beginning of projects, although it’s not the fun part (!).  If, however, we train ourselves to look farther down the road, we’ll find we are much happier when we get there.

What strategies do you and your team employ to make sure that initiatives are sustained over the long haul?  Do you have mechanisms and habits in place to help keep the enthusiasm alive and bring fresh energy to maturing projects?  In your personal experience, what are the factors that lead to projects fading and failing, and how can these outcomes be avoided?  Share your thoughts in the comments section if you dare.