Increasing Your Church’s Margin

by Rev. Mark E. Tidsworth, Founder and Team Leader

What brought you here won’t take you there, unless there is identical to here.

Your current organizational structure, relational dynamics, and church-perception combine to form your current expression of church. They are sufficient for maintaining what currently is, but insufficient for creating margin, growth, or significant adaptation. Your church system is delivering the exact outcomes for which it is designed, the combined effect of all that is. When you are looking for different results or outcomes, the system has to change. In other words, the way we do what we do yields what we get. To get something different, the way we do what we do must change.

Maybe we aren’t used to thinking of church this way, using organizational principles and dynamics to understand what’s happening. People in congregations are smart, regularly recognizing the organizational dynamics which form schools, businesses, and non-profit organizations. Yet because of the unique nature of churches, with layers of significant spiritual experience and highly charged emotions in the mix, plenty tend to ignore the dynamics contributing to faith community formation and functioning.

That’s why it’s periodically helpful to explore simple, yet significant statements like this.

What brought you here won’t take you there, unless there is identical to here.

Recently I was with a large church staff for several development days, learning and growing together. Listening to them describe their church, they are surely a spiritually ambitious bunch, eager to launch new major initiatives in the near future. I shared the italicized statement above with them, inviting dialogue. Immediately they were able to recognize they are functioning near the top of their capacity, with little margin for additional activity (while remaining sane). Though they have a good thing going, their current dynamics, norms, patterns, and processes are sufficient for maintaining their current expression of church. To pursue their spiritual ambitions, shifting is necessary.

This kind of conversation takes me back to Alice Mann’s classic question in the Size Transitions content and practice.

What would we need to change in order to assimilate the next fifty people God wants to send us?

This question was crafted during the age of church growth in this USA, long before the year 2000. Looking through the lens of numerical growth as a way for assessing organizational capacity made good sense during that time. Now, we might shift the question a bit…

What would we need to change, in order to make greater disciples of ourselves and our neighbors not yet here, while joining God’s mission to transform this world toward the kingdom?

This question lacks the specificity of Alice Mann’s, yet does invite the church into transformation. Using the statement in this article along with these couple questions, I hope you and your church will work to identify your driving question. To be helpful, increasing energy and focus, it needs to be a question that makes it clear we must transform. Every church is always working to answer its driving question(s), aware of it or not.

What brought you here won’t take you there, unless there is identical to here.

So, perhaps it’s time for this dialogue with your church leadership. What practices served you well before, yet won’t suffice for the future, assuming you want missional progress? What new ways of functioning will equip your church to live into its mission more fully? This is one of the necessary functions of church leaders, looking over our churches, assessing where we are in our journey of following Jesus and making room for others around God’s table.

If you need or want assistance for engaging this dialogue in your setting, reach out to us, since we do this regularly. If no assistance is needed, go for it. Your people, your church will ultimately be appreciative. Those among you who want to be part of a church who is on the move, participating with God’s mission, will be energized and engaged as you focus in on creating capacity for growth.

What brought you here won’t take you there, unless there is identical to here.