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Some people thrive on danger: Navy Seals, secret service agents, storm chasers. Add Steve Goodwin to the list. Like a firefighter who runs into a burning building while everyone else is fleeing, this is a pastor who seeks out failing congregations. He has led two Lutheran churches to major reform and now assists aspiring turnaround pastors through his ministry, www.reforminghope.com. He is author of Catching the Next Wave: Leadership Strategies for Turnaround Congregations (Augsburg Fortress, 1996).

Why do you focus on struggling churches?

Surveys show that 85 percent of our churches have stagnated in attendance or are in active decline. My passion is to help congregations get past that.

A lot of pastors are not making progress because they just don't have the skills to reform their churches. So they experience conflict, burn out, frustration, and deep anguish.

I see it all over.

Why do so many pastors lack the skills to reform their churches?

It requires a whole different set of skills than we learned in seminary. Denominations spend so much time and energy preparing church planters, but we need to spend equal time preparing church reformers.

Our counterparts in business are way ahead of us here. I see so many pastors making the mistakes John Kotter wrote about 20 years ago in his book Leading Change: they don't build a coalition; they don't anchor the change in the culture; they declare victory too soon.

So many well-meaning pastors get wounded because they don't have the right skills to lead through change.

So the things that we normally associate with pastoral ministry—preaching and pastoral care—are not what's needed to reform a church?

You have to preach, teach, and do pastoral care. That's essential. But on top of that, a reformer needs a separate skill set. They must be thinking, How am I going to make this culture change? How can I inject a new mindset for ministry among these people? How can I get them to think about the church as a mission that's sent out instead of just people coming in?

What skills do we need that don't seem especially pastoral?

Ministry is a spiritual enterprise, but it has a social component. Pastors need to understand the social structures of a congregation. They need to be cultural anthropologists diagnosing the factors that prevent growth.

For example, in my last church there was a lady who used to criticize me for every tiny thing. And she did it to everyone else, too. It was just nasty. I couldn't figure out why the congregation tolerated her for so long, until I realized there was a payoff for them: she chased off any new people who didn't look exactly like the current membership. She protected the rest of the congregation from having to change.

When I confronted her and she left the church, the congregation started to grow.

I highly recommend the book Church Conflict (Abingdon, 1994) by Cosgrove and Hatfield. It teaches pastors to do congregational mapping to reveal how the factions and coalitions in a church work and interact with one another. I ask my students to do this. It's always enlightening to watch a student finally understand why conflict always arises from one group in the church. And it gives them new ways to solve the problem.

What indicates that a pastor might be suited for leading a struggling church to a turnaround?

Strong psychological health. Pastors who come with narcissistic tendencies or grandiosity make terrible reformers. We need really healthy pastors who understand themselves.

Edwin Friedman is a rabbi who has done great work on family systems and applies it to congregations. He says that we take our own family of origin issues and superimpose them on the life of the parish. Friedman makes the case that we live out these unhealthy patterns over and over. And I see this all the time with pastors. To be a healthy leader of reform requires a pastor to make deep changes in himself, as Friedman says, to go back to our families of origin and resolve those issues.

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