Navel Gazing

If a church hangs around long enough, it is going to start showing some gray hairs, and get set in its way.  Somewhere along the road which leads to stagnation and maybe even death, churches go through a season of navel gazing.  Trying to figure out what went wrong and what can be done to fix it easily becomes a favorite past time.  Of course, figuring out what went wrong and what is wrong is obvious to anyone who is old enough to have an opinion.  The fixing it part of the equation is not nearly so clear.   

Any time the navel gazing starts, the people with the numbered structure plans for recovery show up full of enthusiasm.  These planners speak to a second group, the naysayers who mainly are against most anything, just like they have always been when someone whispers change.  The third group which shows up in the room are the ones who advocate doing nothing except praying until everyone else comes to the same conclusions as they have reached before the praying begins.  It is no wonder church planning is such difficult business and something which often dies an early death buried by black ink on reams of paper.   I am not the expert on the process except to say I have done some over the years only to find myself and the church mostly where we were before we started.  

More and more I am coming to the conclusion that it is a process which cannot be hurried and put on a time schedule.  When this happens, it is the schedule which dictates and not the needs of the church, or the Holy Spirit.  Too much of the structured planning we do is really about maintaining and preserving the institutional life of the church when the church is, according to Scripture, a spiritual community centered on Jesus.  When Jesus had important things to consider, He went to the quiet places and waited and waited and waited on the Father to speak a Word.  There is no time for waiting in a our church planning process because we have to get it done in a specific time frame.  Maybe we need to work on learning to wait with the same intensity that we learn to gather statistics.