Lead Time
Lead Time
You Can’t Afford to Be a "Small" Church Anymore—Here’s the Math
Is the small church model dead? In this explosive episode of Lead Time, Tim Ahlman and Jack Kalleberg sit down with Pastor Rob Myallis (ELCA) for a brutally honest conversation about the economic realities choking the life out of mid-sized churches. With rising costs, unsustainable pastoral expectations, and shifting cultural engagement, Rob unpacks why churches averaging 80–120 in attendance may not survive without radical change.
We tackle everything:
- $30,000 health insurance costs
- Why 150 people is the relational ceiling
- The burnout crisis among solo pastors
- Why people treat church like a rec center, not a sanctuary
- And the hard truth: your old church model probably isn’t working
If you’ve ever asked, “Why are so many churches declining?” or “What future does my congregation really have?”—this one’s for you.
Join the Lead Time Newsletter! (Weekly Updates and Upcoming Episodes)
https://www.uniteleadership.org/lead-time-podcast#newsletter
Visit uniteleadership.org
This is Lead Time.
Speaker 2:Welcome to Lead Time, tim Allman, here with Jack Kauberg. It's a beautiful day to be alive. We are experiencing the last days of heavenly weather here in Phoenix. We're going from right now. We're recording on May 5th. It's like 65 degrees. By Friday it's going to be 100 degrees. That's quite a swing, jack, that's right. I'm looking forward to it. Well, this week is going to be 100 degrees.
Speaker 3:That's quite a swing, jack.
Speaker 2:That's right, I'm looking forward to it. Well, this week is going to be great and I'm not. Yeah, and then it's pool time, right, that's the way the weather works here. But, jack, how you doing man, you loving life, I am loving life.
Speaker 3:I mean, we're coming off of a really beautiful Easter season where I mean the amount of people that had come to be guests and worship together on this community was, I think it far exceeded everybody's expectations. We know that Easter is kind of a heavier, a heavier season for us and this was just really something special to behold and to celebrate.
Speaker 2:So we're having a we're having a little bit of a euphoric high off of that still and just kind of well yeah it kind of feels and I've talked to a lot of a lot of pastors just coming off a retreat with 20 pastors and everybody kind of feels like you know we've weathered.
Speaker 2:I probably said this last year we've weathered the storm, but I don't think the storm was fully weathered and there's probably going to be some things to still or there obviously will be. But it's like we're back in some respects in the local church from the COVID catastrophe and everything that is there, like the wounds are mostly healed and people are coming to church. They're different and I think the sense of urgency now, the evangelical fervor, young people more passionate about things of faith and spirituality, for those congregations in every church body who are focusing on an invite, culture, hospitality, love. The message is deep but it's accessible, if that makes sense. The preaching is open-handed Because we're preaching to such a broad variety of people.
Speaker 2:Yesterday, jack, I mean, I got to preach to a person who, disenfranchised Catholic, married a nun and they have three young kids. And there's something in this disenfranchised Catholic mom that says I think we need to find a faith community. And they remembered, oh, one of our pastors, pastor Jeff, invited them to worship and now they've been in our pews and this guy has no comprehension of the biblical narrative at all, like his family wasn't there, like that's a broad audience that we, that we preach to on any given Sunday and so, and then you've got your lifers, who know the stories, some of them better than even I do, because they've been in pews. You know all of their, all of their life. It's just such a diverse context for me.
Speaker 3:And then seeing all the baptisms that we had, all the baptisms 12.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and I've talked to so many churches where they have these baptism sundays and people are coming out of the woodwork. We had five adults get baptized yesterday for the first time we don't read that total.
Speaker 3:First time baptism, it's great. 10 time. 10 total at gilbert and two at east mesa. Yeah, yeah, wow spectacular.
Speaker 2:Yeah, dad and two, two sons at east mesa, mom and her daughter. It's so exciting. Well, today we get the privilege of learning with a brother that I just got connected to after I was on Brian Stecker's On the Line podcast. He reached out to me and appreciated the conversation with Brian. I had a lot of fun with him. He's going to be coming out on our podcast here soon as well, coming out on our podcast here soon as well. But Rob Myallis I'm saying that right, rob, I should have asked. Myallis is a pastor in Lancaster, pennsylvania. He pastors an ELCA congregation, so we're going to get into that story a little bit today. He graduated from Luther Seminary in 2008. So we got out and into the field the same exact year. He has a wife and two teenage daughters, so all the prayers are appreciated for me and all dads trying to raise teenage girls and boys, to be sure. So how you doing, rob? What a joy to be with you today, man.
Speaker 4:It is great to be with you guys. I heard you on a podcast and I appreciated your fervor for reaching people with the gospel, especially one that's rooted in the theology of Martin Luther and the Lutheran confessional tradition, and I often feel sometimes like not quite like an Elijah, but like I'm the only one, and then I discover, no, that there's a multitude of voices that are really trying to proclaim Jesus Christ crucified and risen for you as a free gift, and so it was a joy to hear your passion for the gospel and then your passion for how we can reach out and connect with people and build communities, communities of faith, in which this faith is proclaimed, received and passed on.
Speaker 2:Well, yeah, the joy and honor is mine and I don't know as much about the ELCA story. I mean, don't know as much about the ELCA story. I mean I look at it from an outsider kind of perspective and, frankly, the LCMS we have enough opportunities to grow as we try to, you know, start new churches, revitalize a number of our declining churches and speak kindly and contextually to all of us in all of our because our congregation is a different type of congregation than a rural, rural congregation. Right Size, scope, staff, all of it. It's very, very different.
Speaker 2:And so we're trying to navigate those waters and lead time as one of those podcasts it's trying to set up those kinds of conversations. But what are some of the greatest struggles in the ELCA? And I'll set you up with this You've done some economic work and you, you we've spoken about this a lot the confessional, missional kind of tension. I'm sure that is a present day reality in the ELCA as as well. I'm not a huge fan of using those. I think it's a false dichotomy, but nonetheless that's the way the language kind of moves us into these respective camps and I believe that's unfortunate. So just tell a little bit of the ELCA story, catch us up and then we can move into the way you're looking at the economics of the local church. Rob, this is going to be fun.
Speaker 4:Yeah Well, again, thanks for having me. It's really again good to be here, and I'm going to give, ultimately, I think, a pretty analytical answer to that. So I just want to start, though, with an acknowledgement that the decline of the ELCA and, more broadly, the decline of the Lutheran Witness although, like you mentioned, there seems to be something in the waters right now, especially among the youngest cohort, like 18 to 24, maybe to 30, where there's something that they're coming back but it's really a pretty emotional question for me. I grew up in the LCA in the 80s and I don't think, actually at that point, the experience of an elementary schooler in an LCA church versus the elementary schooler in an LCMS church would have been all that different in the 1980s. Both denominations were run by men that had fought together in World War II. This is like pre-sexuality, pre-call to common mission, pre the political divides, pre the contemporary worship and pre all of that. So I think we actually probably had a pretty similar kind of VBS kind of experience acolyting like as kids in the church.
Speaker 4:But what has happened over time then is that almost just about every institution that I've been a part of in the ELCA has died. The seminary where I my dad went to seminary right around the time that I was born. That seminary in Philadelphia no longer exists as a standalone seminary. My dad's first call was in a West Philly congregation. That church no longer exists. The seminary I went has basically become an online campus, my intern, like my sort of contextual learning site and seminary. That church has closed. I mean the Deaconess Center where I went with my dads on the weekend as a kid to give communion I wasn't giving, he was giving communion that Deaconess Center was sold. So, like most of my childhood, the church that I grew up in, beyond theology, just structurally, has just fallen apart, and so that's a lot of grief for me. That's a lot of grief to realize that I wasn't just a child of a congregation, I was the child of an ecosystem that had all of these kind of moving pieces and I think to myself, you know, for like my kids or my grandkids, like what's still going to be there of a confessional Lutheran witness in this country, and I also have a real motivation for this.
Speaker 4:I've been coaching the cross country team, or helping to coach that, and so I interact with high schoolers and middle schoolers and about seven or eight months in I said I need to start praying for these kids, not because there's specifically a need of prayer or something, but I realized that for many of them, nobody prays for them. I want you to think about that. There are kids in our communities. Nobody prays for them. I think of how many prayers were ascending daily for me as a child.
Speaker 4:They're not getting prayed for and they're trying to figure out who they are in this world of social media, of sort of choose your own identity, all of this stuff. And they don't know. They've never heard the promise, they've never had water poured over their head and said you are a beloved child of God, solely out of Christ's favor for you. You are a beloved child of God, solely out of Christ's favor for you. And so I have this just heart of like. If we don't get this right, god will do it through some other way we trust.
Speaker 4:But it just breaks my heart that as a Lutheran church in America, we haven't always risen to the challenge and again we're mired in kind of like 30 to 40 years of institutional decline at varying speeds in various ways. So I'll just kind of get 30 to 40 years of institutional decline at varying speeds in various ways. So I'll just kind of get that out there Like this is a really I'm going to give you a really analytical answer now, but I want to say that there's a big heart answer that's underneath it all.
Speaker 2:Well, yeah, I mean, god Jesus loves these little children and there's been so much confusion, you think the gender confusion. You know, where is my core identity? And, as confessing Lutherans, our baptismal theology gives the answer. But are we letting kids? I'll tell you this. So I coach two high school football. I get to be the chaplain, right?
Speaker 4:And every single devotion in some way shape or form. It's not the main theme, but I will round back to identity over and over again and and that is why so many kids are so anxious because they're trying to figure out who I am without any sense of either antecedent, a family, a faith or even a biology, and that is just far too great of a burden for somebody at 15 to try to do all that.
Speaker 3:So I can't imagine trying to be somebody at that age and saying I have to. I have to decide on figure out what my identity is, and I have to get it right because it's going to have to be something that informs me for my whole life.
Speaker 4:And it's something that's going to be paraded before everybody else and evaluated and liked or not liked, right it's so much so decide who I'm friends with and who I'm not friends with.
Speaker 3:I mean, that's a big burden to be put on a kid.
Speaker 4:Exactly so, so that we can come back and talk about identity formation in you anytime. That's a hard topic for me too. So now that I've just said that, like I come at this as somebody who's just witnessed just all the sort of the pieces of the infrastructure falling apart and the response to that is in part like a theological, like hey, we messed up theologically and I think there's some truth to that real truth. But I don't want us to get paralyzed there because I think there's some underlying economic issues that are at work that even if America has a religious revival, it's unlikely to benefit LCMS and ELCA churches unless we change kind of some ways about how we think about what it means for us to be a church, especially at the congregational level.
Speaker 2:What should we change? I mean, that's a big assertion right there, Rob.
Speaker 1:If there is a revival which I think there could be.
Speaker 2:I think there definitely could be a lot of people very open to coming to our churches and I think we're seeing a little taste of it right now in our context, jack, with all the first timers coming. So what's going to prohibit us from being a part of welcoming people through word and sacrament If we really believe our theology is like so great, you know, and we're not. I'm not even going to get into the differences between the ELCA and the LCMS at the highest levels, but but I'm proud of our theology. I know you'd say in many respects the same. So if we're proud, rightly in the Holy Spirit and the truth has been revealed to us, what's getting in the way of us getting?
Speaker 4:it out. Yeah, and I'll just say one other caveat, and that is that whenever I talk to people from the Missouri Synod, you all still have a coherent denomination. The ELCA is not a coherent denomination. We can unpack that another time, but it's just not the same kind of framework. So even to say the ELCA thinks or teaches this, that statement could have been said 20 years ago. It can't anymore. It's just a lot more diversity.
Speaker 4:And it's not just diverse, it's just not theological. It's just hard to explain how, when we make decisions anymore, theology just isn't the primary driver anymore. So it's kind of like a post-Lutheran, post-confessional body where you have pockets of people doing some really awesome stuff, but it's just more like the carnival than the chapel. It's more like the carnival than the chapel. Like like Lutheran Church never viewed itself as like the cathedral. We all sort of sort of felt as like the chapel, like we're kind of the best of the cathedral but we're not quite as like you know, stuffy or something. We're just the carnival. Okay, so that all looks fine. Let's finally now, like 15 minutes in, get to economics here. Okay, there are certain sizes of a firm that make sense. So, for instance, in the my dog just came upstairs, sorry In the dairy industry you don't have farms that have 200 cows.
Speaker 4:You have firms that have 100 cows or a thousand. Why is that? Because once you get over a hundred, one family can't attend to it and they've got to hire somebody. You've got to hire somebody. Only having two or three employees is inefficient. Then you got to go big. Or like you've never seen a McDonald's that serves a thousand people. Why Fast food can't do that many people. No, it's because you have a certain scale for your ovens and everything else. So again, in all of our industries you have certain points where firms are going to congregate. This is just any industry. Certain sizes make sense.
Speaker 4:Well, it turns out within a church. The scale that made sense for the latter half of the 20th century was 80 to 120 people. You could have one building, one pastor, and you could also have like a part-time organist and a part-time sexton and a part-time secretary, and you could do this and even afford to give your pastor pay raises for a couple of years. Right, this is kind of probably the churches that dominated the Lutheran landscape for a long time, outside of the most rural areas. Okay, why is that model no longer working? Is it because of Word and Sacrament theology? No, it's because, well, first of all, health insurance. My health insurance for my family costs about $30,000 a year from my congregation. So that means that if you're a congregation that worships like 100 people a Sunday, each of those people is paying what like $300 a year. They're paying all this money just for health insurance before they even got to your salary, just to kind of pay. They're not even talking. I'm not even talking your like, your retirement, just your health insurance alone, and so what you have then is an especially so again, your math is just harder.
Speaker 4:The second thing and I'm going to get back to this later is that most of our buildings had a significant expansion in the 1950s and then an even another round of expansions in the 1990s, which means we're all coming up on the 30 and 60, like the 25 to 30 and the 50 to 60 year maintenance bills. So we have these huge pockets of deferred maintenance in our buildings, which means that your per person cost of your pastor and your per person cost of your building no longer mean that you can do that off of 80 to 100 people a Sunday. In fact, the only way you could have one person who doesn't have their health insurance split with their spouse and can actually afford more than like one or two pay raises, the only way you could do that would be to probably have about 160 to 200 people a Sunday, and the problem with that is that humans cannot relate to that many people. They've done all this analysis over time of how many humans a human can relate to and basically it turns out that it's about 150. The Doomsday Book the Normans conquer the British Isles. They do a whole survey of the size, the census, the average Welsh and British village at that time 149.2 people. They do this analysis of the cerebral cortex of primates and their group sizes and then extrapolates out to humans it's 150.
Speaker 4:You as a human can be a raging extrovert, but you cannot remember the suffering of 150 people. In fact, in Mark's gospel when Jesus does the miracle of the feeding of the 5,000, he divides up the disciples and he tells them put groups now of 50 to 100. He doesn't say we'll do groups. You can't relate to more people. So, in other words, the math to get the money to work for you to have one pastor you have to have more than that one pastor can relate to.
Speaker 4:And this is why how many of you have friends and pastor friends? Their church has grown. They took that little country church and it's booming now and on the inside, after six or seven years, those pastors are so tired. And they're so tired because they're expected to do all the pastoral care for a size that's bigger than their brain can actually process. And so you could say oh well, this church that worships 110 people a week, we could grow it to 130, 140. You'll kill the pastor in the process. You just can't do it.
Speaker 4:And that's why what's happening across our denomination is that these churches that used to have enough people kind of what a human could relate to 150 people you could get out of that enough kids to kind of shake and bake a Sunday school and a youth group you just can't anymore. In other words, the minimum size you need to be sustainable and attractive is probably under like 40 people a Sunday. So you're just like a house church or a small church with like a pastor who's like part-time or you probably need to be 300, 500, a thousand a Sunday. So you get that per building and per kind of clergy cost down to the point of affordability. That's a lot I just gave there, so I just bumped on you. So tell me what makes sense or what makes sense there.
Speaker 3:I don't disagree with some of the numbers you're throwing out there. I think one of the things that we're seeing is, well, we would serve in, from a Lutheran perspective, what you would consider to be a large church, right, and yet our staffing ratio I would say right now I would say it's probably a little, we're running a little too generous on it. Even but you know that's a different conversation we're staffing at about one full-time equivalent for every 50 average, you know, in average weekly attendance, right. So if you do the math and you take what's our weekly average attendance and how many people we have on staff, it's about one to 50, right Now they're not all called and ordained pastors. They're people serving in all different types of roles, but still they're all part of what we would call the span of care within the church. And on top of that we have a very robust small group ministry where we're equipping volunteer leaders to, you know, let's say, small lowercase pastoral care for people. They're not doing word and sacrament, but there are going into relationships where they're doing spiritual care for people.
Speaker 3:So I think one of the things right now is like the model right model of the pastor doing everything, versus creating a team of people that are sharing the responsibility of spiritual caregiving for the entire congregation. I think that's one thing that needs to be looked at the economics and this is an economic issue it's not economic to do the sole pastor does all of the caregiving anymore. It has to be a distributed process within the church, including people with different types of titles and including a lot of volunteer people. So if you look at all of the people in leadership roles in the church, including people that are not paid, you know we've got just volunteer leaders average about one to 10. So you know one out of 10 in average weekly attendance.
Speaker 3:We have somebody in some sort of a volunteer leadership role and that's part of the span of care for the church and what I see is like that is probably one of the most important things that makes a church healthy and it is something that you can begin to start scaling into, even as you're a smaller church. But the problem is we don't think that way. We're not. You know, I think a lot of people serving in these contexts because that's been the model for so long, they're not programmed to think that way intuitively about it. It's the pastor does everything and maybe the culture of the church is they want the. I don't want to volunteer visiting me, I want the pastor visiting me, right, and that's some of the culture there. But if you can work through that culture, that's some of the things that helps you get through the economics of this issue, which is absolutely a reality that you're bringing up Thoughts on that.
Speaker 2:Tim, it's the only way a church is going to bust through the 120 to 150. Uh mark in weekly worship is releasing, releasing and equipping the saints, uh, at a ratio of probably something like jesus did it one leader for 12, call it.
Speaker 2:What call he or she, whatever you want to call him an elder or whatnot, a deaconess, but that if you looked at your ratio, so say you're the church worshiping 100, do you have? And we don't? We don't. We don't think that we think of one pastor and maybe a secretary or everything Rob was just saying. But does he have a leadership team? Call it whatever you want A spiritual care team that are in roughly the eight to 12 ratio number for a church worship being about a hundred people. That, and obviously you're like, well, I can't pay all of them.
Speaker 1:No, obviously you can't pay them all.
Speaker 2:But are you meeting with them consistently? And I think in many churches that start to grow the elders take on that kind of spiritual care role in the congregation. So as it grows, we've just found small groups work right, raising up leaders to do more spiritual care. You can't just do small groups because people are going to have different seasons of life that they're walking through.
Speaker 2:That's going to need more specialized care and so you need probably a spiritual care visitation team. Pastor needs to be obviously connected to that as well. But if the pastor will not control it all and really focus on Jack and I'm going back to another podcast we had recently focus on word and sacrament, like do Sunday things and visitation things, but then also equip, give the word away, train teachers, find other men that can teach and raise them up to teach in smaller little communities, and the burden will be shared.
Speaker 2:I mean, the Moses and Jethro story is so obvious here. Right, there's no way you can possibly do this. This is way too heavy, way too heavy for you, but unfortunately so I'm going to counter this. Unfortunately, a number of these congregations and we're speaking in broad generalities here, so just give us some grace have gone from. I remember the day when the sanctuary was packed and it could have been in the nineties early two thousands and we were worshiping two services, both traditional, most likely two services, and there was a Bible study in the middle, and both of those were were very full and that congregation was probably worshiping 250, some somewhere in that range. But over time it could be.
Speaker 2:The community has changed over time. It's it's regressed, and often what you have in that regression is a retreat in mission and then an acquiescence to pastor doing everything. If you get right down to it, I guarantee in those years of growth pastor was not doing everything, but now, kind of, he's taken more responsibility. I was trained to do the ministry rather than develop other people, and so, yeah, it just kind of is what it is. It really takes one leader, a pastor, and then a small group of people, a leadership team educating themselves and saying I think we can do it. I think we can do it different here, and this is going to benefit not just those that are in our pews, our chairs, but also those who are going to be reached with the gospel.
Speaker 2:We said a lot in response to what you said. There's no other way. We're going to go one way or the other. Hopefully we're going to grow. But I agree with you, rob. I think the 80 to 120 mark, while it may be okay I don't know that it's the best economic model for us advancing the cause of Christ. Say more there to what we just said, rob.
Speaker 4:No, look it worked really well for a long time, but it's not necessarily going to go forward. And I think there are some real questions then about what is the office of ministry, and I think that is one that you know thinking about theologically, and I appreciate what you're saying there about okay, look, the answer is we need the pastor to focus on word and sacrament ministry and really allow to put it in terms of the small card article, the, you know, the consolation of the brethren, and I love what you talk about both in terms of like, look, you have to think your sort of ordained staff to congregation, your program staff, your admin staff and your sort of volunteer leaders and how you do that. So the question becomes why is it then, if this is so obvious, that the only way that we can sustain the model, if we want an educated clergy, is to have kind of other ministries that are going to sort of embrace and do pastoral care? Why is it that there's such a fight on that issue? I'll save you, I'll save you, I'll let us all obey the amendment and I'll say I'll give an economic kind of business rationale for why that gets to be the way it is, and I want to offer sort of two ways of thinking about it, and the first is mildly interesting and the second is haunting. Okay, the mildly interesting and the second is haunting. Okay, the mildly interesting way to think about it is that basically we're a third-generation family business that after World War II people in America got serious about church and they built their churches and then in the 80s and 90s it was like the second generation and now we're the third generation and it turns out that most businesses fail.
Speaker 4:In the third generation of family businesses, the founder comes along, does a great thing, works really hard. The second generation comes along, expands what happens, kind of like in a good sequel, like discovers the broader universe, and the third generation well, the third generation got what they wanted for Christmas. Right, they were not the one who was putting in the 14 hour days in the garage to figure out how to make the product work. And very often in third generation. And I think in a lot of ways we're kind of like these third generation businesses out of a particular model that like it's just no longer sustainable, uh, on our backs I.
Speaker 2:That's really good, jack. I'll kick it to you after this, I think. I think that's a really good metaphor. What happens in the third generation? You lose the grounding metanarrative of why the congregation formed in the first place. All of the storytellers have passed away, those that lovingly challenged if a pastor were moving in a passivity direction or an overly controlling direction, providing equilibrium toward mission and confession, those storytellers of why we started and how we reached and grew. Those storytellers are no longer there and therefore we regress to pastor doing everything, Jack.
Speaker 3:There's actually a story of innovation that goes into the fact that you have all of these churches that were built around this model.
Speaker 3:They had done a lot of analytical work and a lot of strategic work and said this is a system that we can embrace, that's going to get churches planted everywhere, and this is mind-blowing. Back in the day I mean, there seems to be a big gulf right now between LCMS and ELCA. Back in the day, they used to collaborate with church planting. They would go into an area and say, okay, you plant here and we're going to plant here, and then you plant here and we're going to plant here, and they would collaborate on this process, and they would build these churches that was exactly your size, because they had a model in mind, saying this this is economically a viable thing to do, and we can just repeat this process over and over again. So what was the heart of it, though, was evangelism, like we're going to build more churches in more locations and places where and you know, our, our, our districts would take the risk and buy property like way out in advance of things that are being developed.
Speaker 2:That doesn't happen anymore. Right, think about the size of the properties we often bought Jack for this day and age.
Speaker 4:Far too small, exactly, far too small. Go ahead, rob. Exactly Far too small. Go ahead, rob. This is really where. So again, there was a pastor at a really large church in North Carolina, solid guy, and he was doing this, trying to do like a multi-site church, and he planted a church and again he had aimed for this church to kind of start with one pastor and kind of work its way up and it didn't work. And I said you kind of saved yourself time because in the end this model doesn't work anymore.
Speaker 4:And this is you don't have mega churches dropping like one pastor and like two families in a place. You have them sending out 30, 40, 50 families at a time, and those people already understand that the pastor is not the primary pastoral caregiver. They know that from the beginning. Our model for the last hundred years beat into people's brains. The pastor is the primary nexus, of sort, of the congregation's pastoral care, and so the question is how can we theologically and practically undo that, and why is it so difficult to do that? Ok, haunting.
Speaker 2:Talk about haunting. What's haunting.
Speaker 3:Real quick on the numbers here because I've done a lot of research on this. Most megachurches when they're either doing planting or multi-site planting, which, whether it's new church, or they're shooting for a staff of about five, and they're shooting for about 500, four people in worship right off the bat.
Speaker 4:So they're already bigger than all but 25 Lutheran churches in the country, exactly. And the other thing I want to get to the haunting thing but I'm going to throw out something that I think that theolog—I'm going to make—this is kind of theological in my sense is that there's going to be people, regardless of sort of Lutheran denomination, they're going to tell me that I'm wrong and then two years later, they're going to come back and say I hate the fact that you're right about this. I understood that worship was the center of Lutheran life. God comes to us in the word, a word of law and gospel, to guide, to condemn and then to raise us up to new life, and that that word then was buttressed through Bible study. And then you lived out this in a fellowship of intense Christian bonds that then served in the broader world through revocations, and then we came back on Sunday and God's word came to us again. Does that? I mean you're with me? So far, right?
Speaker 4:Okay, what I have realized is that for most people nowadays they do not think about worship as the center of their religious life and they approach church as the way that I approach life and they approach church as the way that I approach, and most of us approach, the rec center, where you know what I'm going to make an hour this week for, like my faith, and this week I'm not going to go to worship on Sunday because the youth group needs a volunteer on Sunday night and next weekend there's a soccer tournament on Sunday, so I'm just going to watch online. And then the next week they're like you know, one of my friends is presenting in this small group this week, so I really want to go to that. And then the next week they show up in worship. In their mind they were like fully present for my church. Their offerings came out of their you know bank accounts. They shared with five different people a link to the sermon that they loved. They corresponded with one staff member multiple emails, but in the end they were only at worship just once, and what this means is most people are going to engage in our religious communities in different ways and that it becomes very tough for that church it was 100 people a week to sort of generate the sort of the number of on-ramps that the really large church can do, because the really large church can offer you 10 different ways to do Bible study, 10 different ways to do volunteering, 10 different ways to connect with other people and 10 different ways to worship, and so, again, you're just gonna be squeezed out in terms of programming of what people want towards like the really little or the really big. So we've got all these churches that are just at a size that is not going to generate growth and if it does, it's only going to burn the pastors out. So why then are we so resistant?
Speaker 4:Well, this is kind of what actually I was talking about Tim and the reason why he invited me to be on the podcast in the first place. This is kind of what actually I was talking about, tim and the reason why he invited me to be on the podcast in the first place, and that is that in an organization, let's just say that I like playing Ultimate Frisbee and a couple of us we play Ultimate Frisbee and there's a bunch of us are really excited, and then eventually we have enough people that it's no longer just kind of ragtag but, like every Tuesday at 4pm, there's like 16 of us that play. But eventually, now we have so many people, now we need to sort of schedule teams, and so now we have, like you know, a Tuesday four o'clock game and a Tuesday five o'clock game. But eventually we need to buy pennies. So like we all kind of look cool and we need like a referee, because people get so into this sport that just is about throwing a Frisbee around. So at some point you grow from like energy to involvement, to programs, to administration and you sort of work your way up. But now we have like eight teams that play Ultimate Frisbee. We've got even bylaws because we wanted to be a nonprofit, because we wanted to get tax exemption from the local businesses to donate their supplies to us, right?
Speaker 4:Well, eventually some of us are like you know, this just isn't fun anymore. Like we grew out of it, our backs didn't like us playing ultimate Frisbee anymore. We had knee surgery, whatever our kids grew up, and so we move on, but there's still like people playing. But eventually you get to the point where, like you don't really have enough people anymore to do like eight teams. So now you've got to like shrink down what it is, and now you have people who are frantically trying to like well, we need people to play. Can you play? Can you play? I don't like Ultimate Frisbee, but I just need somebody to play because we just need to, like, fill out, like this team, and we got to do it, and in the end, what you're left with in any organization towards the end is just a structure that has these bylaws and sort of rules for how to play that existed at the peak of the institution and no longer serve where you're at.
Speaker 4:And what happens in an organization, the nostalgia trap, is that you try to go back up the curve Right, and so this is when an organization is dying, is when you've seen this at churches, where they're frantically searching for people to fill committee spots, not because those committees are any more even needed for the mission of the church, but just well, of course, a healthy church has an evangelism committee and the evangelism committee well, we know we need to exist because it's in our Constitution. We have an evangelism committee and this is important for a church to have an evangelism committee, and you even have somebody get up there at Temple Talk before church. We're on the evangelism committee. Evangelism is so important to the gospel we need you to serve on this committee. What are you doing?
Speaker 4:The committee? Well, we're trying to figure that out. So if you have ideas, you can come and bring it Right. So like. So I'm sensing you know what I'm talking about here. So what happens in an organization is that you want to, you kind of want to go back up to where you were, rather than acknowledge that you actually need to go in a different direction. Now, are you with me so far? Yeah, yeah, yeah. So this is called the.
Speaker 2:IPA, the growth curve. Let me just summarize what you just said.
Speaker 2:It's an actual growth curve. It's energy. Woo, we're getting there, let's conquer. And then so we create the new thing Involvement. People start to come to the new thing because more people are coming to the thing. It needs to get organized. So programs start to develop, sports team, whatever the services start to develop to welcome people. And then you put together structure, administration, constitution, bylaws, all of the voting mechanisms that help the thing continue to sustain itself, and then it eventually the focus inevitably ends up going more toward administration than and this gets back to my initial assertion around story back, rather than the energy of the grounding metanarrative for why the organization exists in the first place, and obviously in the local church, it's to reach people with the gospel, to make disciples who make disciples.
Speaker 2:There's no argument there, but more of the time and energy ends up talking about when, on my day, we used to do it or this institution was created to do this and so we just got to. Rather than this is what leadership is, it's acknowledging what is. Do you want to acknowledge the truth? And in any organization, 20% is going to be messed up. So let's just acknowledge yeah, we got some work to do and it's going to be painful, for sure, but Jesus is with us and he's never going to leave or forsake us and again coming back for leaders.
Speaker 2:And my identity is not pastor, my identity is a love child of God. My identity is not perfect pastor, always making everybody happy. It's. We got stuff we got to work through. It's going to be difficult, but God is with us. And then you want to dream again. You want to gather together to start to dream new dreams, to reach more people with the gospel. Let's put our heads and hearts together, invite the Holy Spirit to be present and see what God wants to do. Jack, any observation of that?
Speaker 3:Yeah, no.
Speaker 3:I what Rob? What you described was exactly the governance of our church that I entered into about 20 years ago. I was elected the way I got involved in leadership at our church. I got elected into the controller position on our church council and we had all these committees and it just absolutely blew my mind because we're sitting here trying to figure out, like budget issues and I've got the social ministry committee and the evangelism and like none of these people were on these roles, were there to deal with budgets. They were there you know we're going to do cookouts and you know what I mean and the governance was very, very, very, very dysfunctional of the church. The governance was very, very, very, very dysfunctional of the church.
Speaker 3:And what I want to do is I'm giving a shout out to a lot of the really, really talented lay people in this ministry who recognize that even before Tim came on board and we went through governance transition and just basically said we have to think differently about what the model of our church is, about what the model of our church is, and they primed the pump for a professional ministry system that was designed around the professional ministry, equipping lay people to do ministry really well under guidance and empowerment and it's been. It wasn't perfect the initial rendition. We had to go through another revision of that to get that much better where it is. But I would say you're absolutely right in that the church has to embrace the idea that, hey, at one point in time this was the gold standard for a governance model. It got everybody involved right, it was beautiful and it works for 150 people right, but it doesn't work for an organization that's scaling to 400, 500.
Speaker 4:At that point in time it just has no capacity to deal with that type of leadership and scale billing. Yeah, so again, so what? My first argument economically was that the kind of the size of congregation that we were tending to locate around was was not really is not going to be efficient. It's sustainable outside of some really rare exceptions and some really wealthy communities or churches that have large endowments moving forward. And then I just offer that even if you had the money, it'd be very difficult to sustain it programmatically. And again, I think the future of the church is likely going to be much smaller organizations that just don't have a lot of overhead or really can kind of make decisions really quickly and offer people community I mean, just that's what they do in their niche or like really large institutions that can just offer a whole bunch of ways for people to have on ramps and in the busyness of their life to kind of figure out how they do this thing of their walk with Jesus and with others.
Speaker 4:And now we're getting to the point of okay, so how as an institution do we move from like sort of all these churches in the middle to kind of these churches at the extremes? And I think it takes, and what I think it actually takes is a lot of patience and a lot of good leadership, because you essentially have to get people to trust you enough as a leader to say we're actually not going to go back to the way it was. And you have to know, as a leader, how to kind of play your cards of like. Well, I'm not going to fight the fact we have a Christmas bazaar this year, even though the Christmas bazaar has only caused me stress the last four years. It's not brought in anybody to Jesus, it's not brought and not even made us money, but like they want to cook their soup and they want to sell it and so like I'm not going to fight it this year because I've got to fight this other battle. So, and I think it just takes time as a leader to fight those not even fight but just massage those where you can tend to what was, but free up enough resources to kind of say where is the spirit moving us?
Speaker 4:So if we've got all these you know young adults who are coming in, or we've got a new retirement community that's being built, how can we actually minister to that? You know particular cohort and the reality is is that most of our systems, the pastoral care and administrative demands, will suck us dry in terms of our capacity to do that like new thing that God may be leading us to, new thing that God may be leading us to. So I would say that this, rather than what this curse says, is that the only way forward is to sort of not try to go back up the nostalgia ladder but to say where is the energy flowing right now? Or that's the business term in terms of faith, what might God be calling us to do?
Speaker 4:Who needs the gospel in our community that we can reach in a new way? Or who in our church is bringing forth some ministry? And so if I think at a healthy church there's probably one or two ministries every year, at least one that you're probably saying we're not going to do this anymore, we're not going to allocate communication and staff resources to it, and if somebody wants to do it, you go for it, but in terms of the communication and staff resources, that's not going to get the top billing or even any resources anymore. I think, again, that takes a lot of skill at the leadership level to be able to navigate that.
Speaker 2:Yeah, pastoring is and leading it is more art than science, that is for sure. And because there's people and these ministries have people connected to them, I guess the frustration for me as a larger church pastor is coming to grips with how consumer centric the everyday kind of early, maybe less mature, christian is in their walk. And you've got to just acknowledge, like I want a place for my kids to experience Jesus. What kind of programming are you going to have? I want a place where my favorite pastor is preaching all the time. They don't have a lot of sensitivity for development work or for running tests and development of different people through different programs. Like if and here's the, and this is I'm sorry, but if you're a larger church, which in the LCMS churches that worship over 500 new data, 1.4% of the LCMS that worship 1.4%, so we're not talking a lot of churches but if that is your church, it's about 80 or so churches that worship over 500.
Speaker 2:You have to recognize that people are first and foremost consumers before they're contributors to advancing the gospel.
Speaker 2:And if you're going to play the game I'm sorry If you're in a suburban urban where you got all these other mega churches that people can compare you to, et cetera, then play it to the best of your ability, but don't try to move past.
Speaker 2:The first point of emphasis on folks is the average Christian is a consumer first and you can say that's sin. I think it is. Eventually we want to get them to see the new life that is ours in Jesus. But I think at the very same time churches like ours, or the church that's in a slow decline, can start to envision if leadership development is in their DNA, if there's enough of a groundswell three, four, five people who really see discipleship and then bringing more people in I think that congregation can have a groundswell of energy to start smaller faith communities, house churches, microchurches et cetera, and I think that could be very, very invigorating to them. But all the data people can get ticked off at us if they want, all the data is showing churches going in either of those two directions, and so just the way it is.
Speaker 4:Yeah, exactly, I'm not trying to make an economics as a difference in a normative and a positive claim. I'm not making it. This is a difference in a normative and a positive claim. I'm not making it. This is a better like a normative claim. I'm just saying, like you look at it and basically people either want a really small community where they feel totally safe and secure in that kind of 45, 30 to 40 people family size group or they want a large church where they can just kind of take their pick. And they're consumers, that's true. They're also just weary and they're worn and they don't. It's good. It's like the reason why people don't buy fixer upper homes anymore.
Speaker 4:And this goes back to to economics. If you, where in this country, where in this country can you afford and this especially as a pastor to only have like one spouse working anymore, unless that spouse is making a lot of money? Right, housing costs are so expensive. So you've got, most families have at least one and a half or two full-time working people and they don't have time to figure out all this stuff. So, hey, this weekend at the church services online, like that's works for us.
Speaker 4:I'm not endorsing this. I'm just saying this is the reality that we live in, and I think this thing goes back to how we think about not only. So let's go then to sort of thinking about how we would help young clergy. If they're a young clergy, the chances are that they're going to be sent out, not to one of those 1.4% of churches, but they're going to be sent out to these churches where they're asked to do the impossible. They're asked to basically raise the dead, which Jesus can do, but to sort of live in a model that just isn't going to kind of bear fruit. So how can we help them understand that, like it's not your fault, how can we help them kind of have the leadership skills to kind of try to move in another direction? And then how can we equip and challenge large churches to be doing church planting or to sort of say, hey, you've just got to, you've got to focus on scaling up, because that's the game right now for better or for worse.
Speaker 3:Yeah, you know, and it may seem daunting and in reality there are things that small, smaller churches can do. There's reforms let's say systemic reforms, philosophical reforms that you can do. I would say don't reform, you know, don't abandon the gospel ever. You stick with biblical truth. But in terms of your systems, in terms of the culture that you build right off the bat, I would say in a small church context, you could focus on something called the span of care. What does the span of care look like in this church? Are there other people who are working as volunteer leaders, who are helping with the spiritual care and the leadership of the church? And can you start to build a culture that the church is primarily run by and ministry is primarily done by people who are not paid? Actually, the vast majority of ministry that happens in our context is with people who are not paid and the role of the of the paid clergy and all ministry staff is to help facilitate that, to guide that, to empower that, to build culture around that. And you can do that in a small church context. It takes time, it takes grit, it takes it's. You have to be good at change management. We could probably do a much better job of teaching our pastors or, let's say, a sole pastor in a small church change management to get to that point in space, because that is an art, that is a skill, Just like you said, Tim likes to say change management is disappointing people at the rate that they can handle. I love that quote. Those are things that you can do right. Or you may say I'm committed to.
Speaker 3:A time I met this pastor at the BPM and he says I basically run a network of house churches, I function like a bishop for a bunch of house churches, and he said I don't take I don't even take a salary for it. We take offerings and we give it away. And he's got, you know, like 12, 15 little house churches that he oversees and it's all being run volunteer, including himself. Right, and it's awesome. It's a model that can scale at a certain level and do certain things. It's a totally valid way of thinking about things. Or you can build the big church.
Speaker 3:I was at Watermark in Dallas. It fits 3,000 people in there. You know it's like that's a different level of scale. They think differently. You know they've got 25 people on their comms team, so you know there's different models that you can explore and each one of those requires you to think differently about the model that you're in. But I agree that the model where the pastor does everything that's got to go away, that's not going to happen, that's not sustainable, that's going to burn people out economically and spiritually. I think.
Speaker 4:Yeah, rob.
Speaker 4:So, yes, yes, that's what I wanted to share today is that, again, all of us have a passion for the gospel, have a real concern about the trajectory of the institutions.
Speaker 4:We're in my sense, and what I wanted to offer today is that, if we're thinking about how we form clergy, how we train people, what skills are needed, how we do mission, how we do church plans, how we do all of this, I just wanted to say it's important for us to get the theology right. But even if we get the theology right, to assume that this vehicle that worked for about a 50, 60 year period of time in American history is the only vehicle or the primary vehicle through which it's going to work, I think that is not helpful. And so then, what are the ways in which we can begrudgingly or openly accept like, hey, this is the new kind of economic paradigm where pastors have to have health insurance and housing costs are high. So pastors are going to be a really scarce resource. You better be using them for word and sacrament and equipping. And what does that look like then in congregations or, you know, whatever else?
Speaker 4:I just wanted to kind of throw some economic models and language around and maybe that can help spur some conversation in some different directions, rather than the sort of the typical, you know maybe, sort of stuff we really kind of go in circles around.
Speaker 2:Hey, this has been awesome. Rob, you're a, you're a gift man. I appreciate you connecting Um, and, and we didn't even get into the ELCA. Uh, struggles, and that's probably just as well, because there there are many and uh, so I'll pray, I'll, I'll pray for, for you and and those that are trying to lead faithfully in the elca, and I we cover those prayers for those of us trying to do the same in the lcms.
Speaker 4:uh, for for sure yeah, yeah, like I said, I mean there's been a lot of developments. My sense is that if I like, took a video of the worship service you were in in 1985 when you were, you know, your first time being acolyte or whatever, and or whatever, and the first time, I don't think they'd be that different. So there, there is a lot of common in the heritage. Obviously there's differences in the denominations, but it doesn't matter what denomination you're in. Your family's health insurance costs the same amount, yeah, and? And if we want to figure out how to be effective stewards of the gospel, of the mysteries, we have to kind of also be stewards of the money and the model that we're in. So thanks for your.
Speaker 4:I really appreciated both of your comments today. I feel this is my own discussion, yeah, or whatever else, that's fine. The one resource that might be of interest is I do a weekly blog on the Greek in the lectionary. Now, I know that different churches use different lectionaries, but I have them also cataloged by scripture. So I try to sort of connect where the Greek and preaching might actually intersect and that's called lectionarygreekblogspotcom, and you can just email me at robertmayalis at yahoocom. Robertmayalis at yahoocom. And again, I'd love to hear other people's perspectives so that I can grow as a leader too.
Speaker 2:This was a lot of fun. This is lead time. Please subscribe, share, comment. All of it helps and this platform is growing and please share. Really productive, I think, very practical. Some of our conversations obviously get into more of the theological. This was in the economic realm and I hope you found it valuable, as we do. Whatever it takes and some people you shouldn't mix business with well, the gospel needs to scale, whatever it takes to get the gospel of Jesus Christ into the heart and ears of people that they would hear and believe and then move out into their various vocations and proclaim. That is our invitation, that is the call of the local church, the ecclesia, the called and sent out ones to proclaim the one who's called them out of darkness into a marvelous light. His name is Jesus. Let's make him known. It's a good day. Go make it a great day. Thanks so much, jack. Thanks Rob. God bless you.
Speaker 1:You've been listening to Lead Time, a podcast of the Unite Leadership Collective. The ULC's mission is to collaborate with the local church to discover, develop and deploy leaders through biblical Lutheran doctrine and innovative methods To partner with us in this gospel message. Subscribe to our channel, then go to theuniteleadershiporg to create your free login for exclusive material and resources and then to explore ways in which you can sponsor an episode. Thanks for listening and stay tuned for next week's episode.