It is possible for an unhealthy pastor to lead a growing church, but it takes a healthy pastor to lead a healthy church.
—Rick Warren
I have a problem with the idea of numerical church growth being the primary focus of pastors. In the early 1980s I used the term “church growth” because that was what everybody was familiar with. But I stopped using the phrase around 1986 because of the things I didn’t like about the church growth movement.
For one thing, I don’t like the incessant comparing of churches. The Bible says it’s foolish to compare yourself to others. If you find somebody who’s doing a better job than you, you get discouraged. If you find you’re doing a better job than someone else, you could become proud. Either way, you’re dead in the water.
A far better focal point than growth is health. Size is not the issue. You can be big and healthy, or big and flabby. You can be small and healthy, or small and wimpy. Big isn’t better; small isn’t better. Healthy is better. So I’m interested in helping churches become balanced and healthy.
If churches are healthy, growth is a natural occurrence. I don’t have to command my kids to grow. If I provide them with a healthy environment, growth is automatic. If growth is not happening, it means something’s wrong because it’s the nature of living organisms to grow. Church growth automatically means numerical growth to most people, but that’s only one kind of growth God is looking for in his church.
Putting the focus on church health can raise a problem, though. Attendance is much easier to measure. So how do we know whether a church is healthy?
Health Indicators
Actually, numerical growth is not an unreliable indicator of health; it is merely inadequate. There are five ways to measure growth. A church needs to grow warmer through fellowship, deeper through discipleship, stronger through worship, broader through ministry, and larger through evangelism.
You don’t judge an army’s strength by how many people sit in the mess hall. You judge an army on the basis of how many people are trained and active on the front line. The percentage of members being mobilized for ministry and missions is a more reliable indicator of health than how many people attend services. A church that’s running an average attendance of 200 in a town of a thousand is doing a better job than Saddleback Valley Community Church.
Consider one church I heard about in rural Indiana where their children’s program reaches 40 percent of the kids in the school district! That’s a highly effective church. Percentage-wise, that beats anything we’re doing here. A church may max out its numerical growth potential because of location, but it can continue its effectiveness.
Another mark of maturity is the ability to start having children. I want to see churches that are plateaued in numerical growth begin to reproduce through church planting. We’re now in the grandparenting phase; we have churches that were started by churches started by Saddleback. That’s a lot of fun because we get the credit but we don’t have to mess with the dirty diapers.
Then once we have a sense of what characterizes a healthy church, how do we go about developing it?
Health Cultivation
Health is the result of balance. Balance occurs when you have a strategy and a structure to fulfill what I believe are the five New Testament purposes for the church: worship, evangelism, fellowship, discipleship, and ministry. If you don’t have a strategy and a structure that intentionally balances the purposes of the church, the church tends to overemphasize the purpose the pastor feels most passionate about.
In evangelicalism, we tend to go to seed on one truth at a time. You attend one seminar and hear, “The key is seeker services.” You go to another and “the key is small groups” or “discipleship” or “expository preaching.” The fact is, they’re all important. When a church emphasizes any one purpose to the neglect of others, that produces imbalance—it’s unhealthy. It stunts a lot of churches.
To keep things balanced, four things must happen. You’ve got to move people into membership, build them up to maturity, train them for ministry, and send them out on their mission. We use a little baseball diamond to illustrate that. We’ve got a scorecard to evaluate progress. Just like when you go to a doctor and he checks all your vital signs, the health of a church is quantifiable. For example, I can measure how many more people are involved in ministry this month than last month.
How you accomplish those four objectives doesn’t matter. Some will look at the rapid growth in our church and attribute it to Saddleback’s unique style of ministry. People always overemphasize style because it’s the first thing they notice. The only important issue regarding style is that it matches the people God has called you to reach. We’ve planted twenty-six daughter churches, and we gave the pastors of those congregations total freedom in matters of worship style and the materials they use. As long as you are bringing people to Christ, into the fellowship of his family, building them up to maturity, training them for ministry, and sending them out in mission, I like the way you are doing ministry.
Health does not mean perfection. When a church focuses on evangelism, it brings in a lot of unhealthy people. My kids are healthy; they’re not perfect. There will never be a perfect church this side of heaven because every church is filled with pagans, carnal Christians, and immature believers along with the mature ones.
I’ve read books that emphasize, “You’ve got to reinforce the purity of the church.” But Jesus said, “Let the tares and the wheat grow together, and one day I’ll sort them out.” We’re not in the sorting business. We’re in the harvesting business. We do get a lot of unhealthy people at church because society is getting sicker. But Jesus demonstrated that ministering to hurting people was more important than maintaining purity. When you fish with a big net, you catch all kinds of fish.
That’s why one of the biggest programs in our church is recovery. We have five to six hundred people attend Friday night recovery meetings with you-name-it addictions. One of the most important decisions we made was not to have a counseling center. If we put a full-time therapist on our staff, the person’s schedule would fill up instantly, and 99 percent of the calls would still go unmet. We couldn’t keep up even if we had five full-time therapists. Instead, we’ve trained about fifty laypeople to do biblical counseling, along with a standard list of approved therapists we can refer to if need be.
First Things First
Growing a healthy church depends on the personal character of the leader. It is possible for an unhealthy pastor to lead a growing church, but it takes a healthy pastor to lead a healthy church. You can’t lead people further than you are in your own spiritual health.
Several traits indicate to me that a pastor is healthy.
The first is authenticity. That means you are aware of your weaknesses and publicly admit them. I’m convinced that our greatest ministry to others comes out of our weaknesses, not our strengths. You can impress people from a distance, but you can only influence them up close. And if you’re going to influence people, you better be honest, even about your weaknesses.
Last weekend at our men’s retreat, for example, I talked about how my wife and I went for sexual therapy. That blew some people away. My wife was molested as a little girl; it caused all kinds of problems in our marriage. I went to therapy thinking she had a problem. But once we got there, I realized I had some attitudes that were perpetuating the problem. I tell those stories so people know that we’ve got real problems, too.
Related to authenticity is humility. (It’s hard to talk about how important it is to be humble. You can’t say, “Read my best-selling book on being a humble pastor.”) It’s no accident that humor and humility come from the same root word. Humility is not denying your strengths; it’s being honest about your weaknesses. I’ve built a staff that makes me look good because they compensate for my weaknesses. I do what I’m competent in, and I don’t do what I’m not competent in.
Next is integrity. Is there congruence between what you say is important in your life and what you actually do?
In addition, a healthy pastor is always learning. I read almost a book a day. I read early in the morning and late at night. I’ve learned to get the ideas of a book quickly, to skim fast. Not every chapter in a book is of value. I flip through magazines everywhere I go. The moment you stop growing, your church stops growing.
I must give up some things in order to continually read and learn, and television is an easy choice. I haven’t completely given it up, but you don’t have to watch Seinfield or Home Improvement every week to know exactly what’s going on. I flip through TV Guide once a week to see if there’s anything I need to videotape, and then I’ll watch it when it fits into my schedule.
And just as churches need balance, pastors do, too. “Blessed are the balanced, for they shall outlast everybody else.” So many pastors flame bright, then flame out.
While most of us would say that balance is important in our personal lives, it usually takes a crisis to get our attention. When we began Saddleback, I was imbalanced. I burned out by the end of the first year, and I was depressed all of the next year. My prayer was not “God, build a great church.” It was “God, just let me live through the next week.”
But it’s good to have your losses right up front. The lessons I learned in that second year of depression saved me from flaming out for good. I set parameters. You’ve got to know who you are, who you’re trying to please, and what contribution God wants you to make.
Some people run themselves ragged by speaking all over the country. I don’t speak at national events because there’s a crowd. I’m a trainer at heart, and I usually only leave our congregation to train other pastors. I’m a local church pastor, and nothing is more fulfilling to me than pastoring my congregation. I don’t really care to be a celebrity on the circuit.
So to be healthy, I have to know my focus, my strengths, and my limitations. One limitation I have, for example, is that I was born with a brain malfunction. I took medicine from the time I was a child until college because I would often faint. I could be sitting in a classroom and just keel over. I even had to take a year off from college because of this. It was a scary time. I’ve been under the care of the best neurologists around. It’s complicated, but a simplistic explanation is that my brain has an unusual reaction to adrenaline. (It’s a good thing I have a low-stress job.) When a normal amount of adrenaline hits my system, I get dizzy and can black out. My vision remains blurred, my head throbs, and I feel intense panic until the adrenaline goes down. It’s like hanging on to the top of the Empire State Building with one finger and looking down—absolute terror.
Now, anybody who speaks knows adrenaline is the pastor’s best friend. It gives you passion, alertness, and energy. The very thing I need to accomplish what God has called me to do, however, acts like a poison for me. I guess it’s a thorn in the flesh. When I speak, I’m often unable to clearly see the congregation during the first several minutes of the normal adrenaline rush. People look blurry, I feel panic, and it is extremely painful to speak. I have asked a team to pray for me the entire service, during each of the four services. People ask me, “Do you ever get full of pride speaking to all those people?” Honestly, that’s the last thing on my mind. I’m praying, “God, get me through this. Use this weak vessel, and in my weakness, you be strong.”
Another practical skill that helps keep me healthy is learning how to refuel—physically, emotionally, spiritually. For example, I’ve learned to fall asleep in about five minutes. Last Saturday, I spoke twice at our men’s retreat. On the way back, I took a brief nap in the car, and I was able then to speak at two services that night. You can’t land every time you’re tired. You’ve got to learn to refuel in midair.
To refuel, I do three things:
- Divert daily—do something that’s fun.
- Withdraw weekly—a day off every week.
- Abandon annually—get away from your church to vacation, and don’t call in.
I stick with that fairly well and insist on it with my staff, too. It is a law at Saddleback that staff cannot work more than three nights in any week. I think the reason many pastors flame out in moral failure is that fatigue lowers our sensibility. One pastor described his affair by saying, “I was under such stress that I pulled the trigger, then ran around and stood in front of the gun.” The only way he could get off the fast track was to sabotage himself.
Refueling is more important than having an accountability group. I think accountability is overrated. It works only if you want it to. If I don’t really want you to know the truth, you’re not going to know the truth. The guy I just quoted had an accountability group.
A final side of balance, of course, is with my family. I don’t think my family’s health has been negatively affected by my ministry. My wife and I are pastors’ kids, so we knew exactly what we were getting into. The previous generation said, “If you put God first, then God will take care of your kids.” We believe that, but that’s not the same as putting the church first.
So I’ve tried to demonstrate that my family is more important than our church in practical ways, such as not preaching at a Saturday service in order to take my daughter to a special school function. For years our youngest son didn’t want to attend our children’s camp. But last summer he said, “Dad, I’ll go to camp if you’ll go with me.” Well, there was no question about it; I was going. But I was scheduled to speak at a preliminary Promise Keepers event for pastors in Atlanta. I canceled speaking at the PK event in order to be with my son.
Health Maintenance
What are my goals for the future?
Well, I’m getting back into blues guitar. It’s a great stress reliever for a frustrated rock star like me! (You oughta hear my “Backslider Blues,” baby!) If you live in California, you’ve got to be bilingual, so I’m hoping to learn Spanish. But mostly I just want to keep sharpening the skills I’ve developed so far, simply doing everything better—communicating, caring, planning, leading.
I have no plans to move out of local church ministry in the second half of life. I’m not going anywhere. I’ll pastor Saddleback, and at the same time continue to train pastors in how to grow healthy, balanced, purpose-driven churches.
Last year I was asked to consider becoming CEO of the Southern Baptist’s North American Mission Board. It’s a mammoth organization with a $100 million budget, but I knew I was not the man. I love being a pastor. One reason pastors listen to me is that they know I’m still changing diapers every week. I’m at bat every six days. I still deal with cantankerous members. Pastoring keeps me honest as a trainer.
I hope that Saddleback can continue to be part of the research and development department of the church at large. We’re not afraid to fail. We’ve always tried more things that didn’t work than did. Every once in a while we find—usually by accident—something that works. Then we teach the seminars and pretend that we planned it all along, when really it was only the result of trial and error.
One thing I have learned about staying healthy that I didn’t know starting out is that I need to offer my resignation to Christ every Sunday. That causes me to hold God’s gift with an open hand, and the stress factor goes way down because my identity is not tied to integers. I’ve seen pastors toward the end of their ministry who start holding on. They’re afraid to let go even when they stay beyond their effectiveness. We’ve all seen professional athletes who played two seasons too long. It’s only when you don’t have to stay that you can stay.
Copyright © 1997
