Affecting change in a church requires a slow pace – four to six years in
some cases – and a long-term commitment from the staff, a pair of pastors
stressed.
“You must go slow,” said Hal Mayer, co-pastor at
Flamingo Road Baptist Church in Fort Lauderdale, Fla. “You will kill a
church if you are transitioning too quickly.”
Affecting change in a church requires a slow pace – four to six years in
some cases – and a long-term commitment from the staff, a pair of pastors
stressed.
“You must go slow,” said Hal Mayer, co-pastor at
Flamingo Road Baptist Church in Fort Lauderdale, Fla. “You will kill a
church if you are transitioning too quickly.”
Mayer joined fellow pastor Dan Southerland in delivering the
annual Layne Lectures at New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary. The pair
lead a church that has grown from 300 members to some 2,500.
The average transition in a local church takes four years or
more, Mayer said.
“If you don’t have time to transition a church over
four to five years, then do not lead that church,” Southerland emphasized
during his comments. “It is immoral to lead change and then leave the church.”
Unfortunately, most staff people do not stay long enough to
affect change at a church, he added. “When you first come to a church,
especially right out of seminary, most of your members are older than you are,
and they have all been there longer than you have. But if you stay at a church
long enough, you get to a place where you are older than they are and have been
there longer than they have been. …
“That’s called power and authority to lead change.
You don’t get that by moving from church to church. You get that by going
somewhere and staying.”
Flamingo Road has made significant transitions in its ministry,
most notably from a traditional program-driven, committee/deacon-driven church
to a contemporary purpose-driven, staff-led church, Mayer and Southerland explain.
“If you were to look up the word ‘traditional’
in the dictionary, you would have seen a picture of our church,” Mayer
said, noting that the church’s worship style is now very contemporary in
an effort to reach its target audience of young residents.
“It’s not that contemporary is better than traditional,”
he said. “You just have to choose the style of music that fits your purpose,
your target and your strategy.”
Southerland related the change to lessons he said he has learned
from travels to South America. Decades ago, missionaries brought organs on horseback
and required the indigenous people to learn sacred music that was coming from
America, he noted.
Missionaries now have turned the South American people loose
to go back to the music of their souls, Southerland said. In turn, worship has
just jumped off the charts because the music now matches the target and their
hearts, he said. “God does not value the style of music. He values the
heart in the music, the worship in the music.”
Mayer also discussed the church’s transition to a purpose-driven
approach. “The purpose-driven (mentality) fundamentally changes the way
you do business.” he pointed out. “It’s not about rearranging
the furniture or the outside, or getting a praise band, or using a screen. …
It’s the basic philosophy behind your ministry.”
Southerland said his church had 19 committees and a board of
deacons earlier but now has a team of pastoral staff members who equip lay ministers
to do ministry.
Also, the church now has five worship services to accommodate
the varying schedules of its target audience – and has moved from a traditional
Sunday School approach to a strategic small group approach.
Flamingo Road also is intentionally mission-focused. It was
important not only to reach people in the community and assimilate them into
the church but also to start other churches, Mayer said. The church has started
21 mission churches within the last 10 years, including five in other countries.
“We believe it is not a matter of growing a megachurch
or starting missions,” Mayer said. “It is not ‘either/or.’
That’s the wrong question. The decision is that we’re going to reach
everybody we can with our church, and we’re going to continue to start
new churches because we know that new churches reach people for Christ.”
The years of transitioning have taught key lessons on how to
change from a church that was designed to meet the needs of mature Christians
to one designed to reach the lost, the two pastors say. They include:
Every church should be continually in transition.
“If you are following a creative, active God, then you
are in the creative process of transitioning all the time,” Southerland
said.
“If we don’t transition, then we don’t know
what business we are in,” Mayer added. “If we think we are in the
business of doing Sunday School at 9 in the morning and worship at 11, and we
are locked into that, then we are going to miss the next generation. That is
not the business we are in. The message is the business we are in.”
Every church leader should be continually in
transition.
“The difficulty in most churches today is that the leader
won’t transition,” Southerland said. “It takes a crisis or a
catalytic leader to bring about change,” Southerland told the seminary
audience.
He shared how an elderly woman in his church told him to say
she did not like the contemporary music being used but would support it if it
helped reach her grandkids.
Three months later, the church helped win her grandson and
his entire family to Christ. “As an 85-year-old lady, (she modeled) the
choice of purpose over preference,” Southerland said. “She was a church
leader willing to be in transition.”
Two main keys to successful transition are preparation
and pace.
“It’s a disservice to the kingdom of God if the local
politician better understands the community than we do,” Mayer said. “We
have to use a methodology that translates the message to that community.”
For instance, Flamingo Road uses a membership covenant that
clearly relays that if someone is living in an immoral lifestyle (living with
someone outside of marriage or in homosexuality), then the church will not baptize
him or her. “We raise the bar (for membership),” Mayer said.
Up to the point of membership, visitors lovingly are taught
what the Bible says, Southerland noted. “Doctrine matters, but so does
the attitude behind the doctrine. You’ve got to do the preparation before
reaching out to people.”
Concerning pace, Southerland reminded persons the goal is not
to kill a church but to bring it to life in a fresh new way.
One must create a climate of change.
Pastors who go to conferences and come back to implement change
without a climate of change will fail, Mayer said. “Lead one change at
a time, very slowly and carefully. Then, when you have completed that one change,
then you begin on the new one.”
Southerland continued: “You can’t change a dozen
things at a time. (But) by the fourth or fifth slow change, you have created
a climate for change.”
Most staff people do not stay long enough to
effect change.
A commitment of time is necessary, Mayer said, noting that
most pastors are not viewed as true leaders until their seventh year in a pastorate.
The key elements in any transition are purpose,
target and strategy.
“Purpose is what you are about – what is it God called
us to do?” Mayer said. “Target is – who are we going after with
this? Strategy is – how we are going to do it?”
Southerland said most churches start with programming, which
is strategy. But the focus first must be on what God has called the church to
do, then on strategy, he said.
“There are four different groups in our communities –
lost people who are not in church, Christians who are not in church, baby Christians
in your community, and mature Christians in your community. Which one of those
groups is your target?”
Most churches will say it is the lost, Southerland said. But
if one examines their programming, the group that they are most designed for
is mature Christians, he noted.
Transition is more about a process than about
a final product.
“It’s not about a destination,” Mayer reminded
seminary students. “Life is about a journey. Don’t wait to do ministry
until after you get out of seminary.”
“As long as we are on this earth, it is about change,”
Southerland added. “As long as we are leading God’s church, it is
going to be about change.” (BP)