Question: How healthy is your current lifestyle? Do you exercise regularly? Eat healthy? Drink lots of water? Spend time outdoors? Don’t answer those questions. At least, not here. You can answer this one instead.
“How important are systems in creating and maintaining a healthy body?”
Obvious, right? You want good muscle tone? It’s going to include some system of exercise that includes lifting weights in a repetitive manner (whether it’s lifting boxes out of a truck or weights in a weight room). Less visits to the doctor? That will most likely result from a regular & healthy diet. Lots of energy? All of the above and a whole lot more. Systems are a prerequisite for consistent health in our bodies.
The same is true of our church’s. Whether we like it or not, the similarities between how we manage our bodies and how we manage our church’s can be just too close for comfort (guilty pause here to contemplate the systems you have not setup for your body). A healthy church is going to have a ton of systems in place. Most of these systems will serve to maintain the ministry activities, environments and events the church regularly hosts. Systems will play a vital role in building new muscles (facilitating church growth), maintaining appropriate weight gain or loss (setting & keeping ministry goals), keeping stress levels to a minimum (maintaining ministry focus), and assuring all bodily vitals are healthy (unity in the church, engaging ministry culture, growing believers, transformed lives, etc.).
A healthy church must have healthy systems. Please don’t confuse “systems” with “healthy systems”. Big difference. It seems to me that there are four kinds of systems in which we may choose to engage in:
- No Systems
OK. That’s not actually a system. But it counts simply because sometimes we just don’t setup systems. As a result, those particular areas of ministry may be effective for a time, but eventually the lack of systems will catch up to the leaders and it (that ministry) will either get behind, overwhelmed, or shut down.
Real example from my church: At one point in time, there were no systems in place to ensure the sanctuary and hallways were actually clean on Sunday morning. They WERE cleaned regularly late in the week, but often they would get dirty between when they were cleaned last and the Sunday morning services.
- Declining Systems
These are the systems that used to work, but are irrelevant now. We still do it this way because that’s how we’ve always done it. (check out my sacred cow series) We keep declining systems in place because they DO usually keep things running – to a degree. They have the general appearance of effectiveness, but in the long run they will lead you to ruin.
Real example from my church: A few years ago we held our worship team rehearsals on Saturday nights. It worked great for a season, especially for our young adults. However, over time it became more and more difficult for those with families and children to make practices at this time. We finally read the writing on the wall when some key worship team members let us know they would have to step down from the worship ministry.
- Maintaining Systems
These systems keep things running at the status quo. Many church systems will be maintaining systems, are perfect for their role and shouldn’t be changed. They do what they are designed to do. However, over time maintaining systems may eventually turn into declining systems if not evaluated and updated.
Real example from my church: A faithful and consistent volunteer comes into the office every Saturday to fold and stuff the bulletins for Sunday morning. The system is working great and the volunteer loves to do it. A regular evaluation, however, will ensure that the job doesn’t turn bigger than she originally planned (perhaps through numerical growth and an increase in demand for bulletins).
- Producing Systems
These systems don’t just maintain, they create momentum and encourage growth. It can be very difficult to create a producing system. You might end up spending three, four, perhaps even ten times more time, energy and resources creating one than you did for a maintaining system before it is operational. However, once it’s up and running your ministry will experience a great boost in it’s overall effectiveness without taxing your key leaders and volunteers. Like all systems, these should regularly be evaluated to ensure they don’t turn into managing or declining systems.
Real example from my church: At our ‘Discover Class’, a class we encourage guests to attend to learn more about the church, we take about 10 minutes to teach on water baptism. As a result, we will often receive requests by the attendees of that class to become water baptized. This short teaching encourages spiritual growth in the believer, motivates them to make our church their home church and ultimately creates excitement in our Sunday Services as we regularly celebrate water baptisms. Water baptisms can often be a perfect opportunity to share the good news of Christ, which in turn builds momentum as people receive Christ.
How healthy are the systems at your church?