The Pastor's Heart with Dominic Steele
Christian leaders join Dominic Steele for a deep end conversation about our hearts and different aspects of Christian ministry each Tuesday afternoon.
We share personally, pastorally and professionally about how we can best fulfill Jesus' mission to save the lost and serve the saints.
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The Pastor's Heart with Dominic Steele
How do we diagnose complex problems within our church - with Greg Lee
All the time in church there are unexpected things happening. We or someone else makes a decision to change something which then relationally or missionally impacts another area of church life that we didn’t expect.
Sometimes we put too much attention into one area of church - and now other areas are suffering.
Whatever size your church is - the church system is complex, interdependent and interconnected.
Sometimes the presenting problem won’t actually be the real problem, there’s something else causing it which is not immediately obvious.
Greg Lee is senior pastor of Newcastle’s Hunter Bible Church.
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it is the pastor's heart, and dominic steel and how to correctly diagnose problems in your church. Greg lee he is our guest at church all the time. We're dealing with things going wrong. Somebody is upset about something and we make a decision. We we change something and then it impacts a completely different area of the church that we did not expect. Sometimes we put too much attention into one area and now other areas are suffering. We over-prioritized kids and youth ministry and the evening congregation is now bleeding. Or somebody does something that causes unexpected complexities somewhere else. Whatever the size of your church, the church system is complex. We are interdependent and interconnected and sometimes people will say to you, look, there's a problem here. And I mean they might say I'm not feeling loved. And it turns out that's not the real problem. There's something else actually causing it. That's related but not immediately obvious. Greg Lee is an old friend. He's the senior pastor of Hunter Bible Church in Newcastle and Greg, it's the pastor's heart of ecosystem thinking. Isn't it that we want to love people in this complex system?
Speaker 2:Yeah, my sense is, when people are looking for a church and staying in a church, they want to be loved and they want to be taught the Bible. It really is as simple as that. The tricky bit is, how do we love people, especially because, like I say, church is a really complex place. If you're a pastor, we tend to look at it from the things we do. I write a sermon, I preach a sermon, I run things, but the way people experience it can be very different. They experience it really as an ecosystem.
Speaker 1:Now, I've heard you present on this, but how did it actually dawn on you that church is an ecosystem?
Speaker 2:That's a great question. Historically, it was more through reading other people, to be honest, that the ideas were presented to me. I think I came into full-time ministry just wanting to teach the Bible and wanting to love people with a strong background in one-to-one ministry and also a strong bias towards really maturing people. As I came across other churches, I could see they had different priorities. So some churches were really big on how much we love God. Other churches are really big on evangelism and I think I started to realise, oh, we actually need to have a bunch of things working together. So it was a long, slow dawning process for me. I think I was a bit slow to get it.
Speaker 1:And when did you first have a moment where you thought I've got a problem here and the answer is not actually the easily I guess it's not the easily apparent answer that it was actually being caused by a problem somewhere else in the church?
Speaker 2:Yeah, Well, I can give you one that was fairly recent for us. One of our congregations was growing very quickly and historically is a really evangelistic group of people. They love evangelism. People were becoming Christians all the time and the evangelistic heat kind of dissipated from that church and we were thinking what on earth is going on? This is a congregation that's great at evangelism. When we stepped back, we realized actually what was happening was people, because we'd grown quickly there. People didn't feel connected and people won't invite someone along to a church that they themselves don't feel connected in, and so, in order to fix what we thought was an evangelistic problem, we realized we needed to fix a belonging problem, and so we started to run some events after church where people could hang out together. We started to focus on that and pray about it. Six months later, the evangelistic problem actually went away without us changing anything to do with evangelism, and so we realised that what we were feeling in one spot was actually caused by something else.
Speaker 1:So you've talked about belonging and evangelism. What are the various areas of church that you think we need to have as focuses?
Speaker 2:Yeah, there are different ways of exploring it. I spend a lot of time with Reach Australia and we talk about five and really they're things that you would want to see in every Christian's life and they come alive in a church. They're not just church, they're also individuals. So we want people to be deep in the word, that they know God's word. It's the word of God dwelling richly among us.
Speaker 2:I've just come off our music conference. I was watching uni students interact with the resurrection and it just turned their life upside down. You know the idea that now that Jesus has risen and returning, it changes marriage, it changes job, it changes everything. That theology driving life, being deep in the word, is what we want for individuals in church. But it can't be a sterile thing. It can't be just knowledge. It actually has to lead to a love of God and has to come from a love of God as well. Again, at the Mid-Year Conference, I was preaching on Ephesians 5, on Jesus giving himself up for us and talking to husbands, and I realized as I was preaching how much I love Jesus. I thought my King is so beautiful and it warmed my heart. It wasn't just an idea, we were deep in the word and it led to a love of God. We want that.
Speaker 2:We can't have sterile theology. Well, that's lovely, you teaching yourself.
Speaker 1:These words are actually better than I thought they were.
Speaker 2:I actually rebuked myself in that sermon. I sat down and I thought I want to be a better husband and I need to be a better husband and I want to do it for Jesus' sake and for Emma's sake and I actually felt really rebuked by my own talk. Good, but we don't just want churches that are inwardly focused there, we actually want them on mission, because God's heart is a heart for the world and so Christians and whole churches will have. We sometimes call it mission heat, but I think mission heart is as much as anything else.
Speaker 2:We have to weep over Jerusalem right. And so churches that are deep in the word, it will drive them towards mission and, if you like, being on mission actually pushes us back to the word. Christians and churches will also. When we have our Father's heart, we'll serve. We'll serve as individuals, but we'll also have a culture of serving in church, where people wash each other's feet, like our Lord Jesus did, and use our gifts and love the body. And there'll also be churches that value doing this together.
Speaker 2:We live in a very individualistic age, but we want people to see and there'll also be churches that value doing this together. We live in a very individualistic age, but we want people to see that church is a body, church is a family, and so those five areas we would say they're all interconnected, they all flourish together or they hurt each other, and we want all five of them to actually flourish. We want to focus on all five because one of the things that we've noticed is one well, one of the challenges is we're I cannot have clarity that there are five things that I want to work on, and so you can say to a pastor what do you want to achieve in your church? And he'll say well, I don't know, I just want to pastor people. These five things at one level, just give us five good targets to focus on. But realistically, I think most of us are likely to focus on one more than the other. So you and I, I think we're both wired in mission.
Speaker 2:The conversation we just had was all about mission, as we were having lunch together, which means that I'll be honest, I'm not wired necessarily for serve for training. Really, I've got to focus on that because, to be honest, if you put a non-Christian in front of me and you put a Christian who needs to be trained, I'll go to the non-Christian every time. I need to discipline myself to do the training thing. What the ecosystem does is say Greg, all of them need to flourish, rather than just the one where you find yourself at home, or rather than the one that's making the most noise in church, because often people will complain and so I need to make sure that all of them are flourishing together. That's my job as the senior pastor.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so everything is interconnected.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yep. Imagine a barrel with the staves running up the side. The water will come out of the barrel. Basically, imagine each of the staves goes a certain amount up or there's a hole in each of the staves at a different point. The water will flow out of the barrel at the point of the lowest stave, that is, if there is an area of church that is not flourishing, it will affect all of the others. And so, for instance, if, as a church, we are not on mission and really in love with, if we're not weeping over Jerusalem and wanting to seek and save the lost, what that will mean is that our deep in the word will become cold and it will become proud. What that will mean is our community becomes introspective and, if you like, self-indulgent. People will see relationships as an end in themselves, rather than leading me to love and serve others. What is it that I adore about God's heart? I adore his missionary heart, that is, if one of them is starting to struggle, we'll see the effects in all of them.
Speaker 1:Where do you think our tribe is most weak?
Speaker 2:I would say straight off to mission. So we are very strong. Our tribe on deep in the word.
Speaker 1:Guard the gospel yeah.
Speaker 2:We really value that. But the gospel is a proclamation, it's a message and I wonder if we sometimes will listen to a sermon and we'll ask the question was it faithful what was said? But maybe not ask who heard it. Were there non-Christians there to hear it? I wonder if we tend to value, tend to judge churches by how doctrinally sound they are rather than how evangelistic they are. So that would be that first one. I I wonder if, as well, um that, that loving god, um, that sense of passionate delight in him, so we would say loving god, we've really caught that idea that worship is a whole of life thing. Um, but you do see the psalms, uh, and you, you see it in Paul, that absolute delight in the character of God, that God is so beautiful and praiseworthy. I wonder if perhaps we are deep in the Word and we would get it, but whether or not we would feel it and embrace it and love it and yeah, yeah, just reflecting.
Speaker 1:The other day, I mean, you had that moment where you rebuked yourself. I was just thinking, oh, I should be shouting, I should be shouting with praise. So I didn't actually shout, but I increased the volume of my singing. So how do you do a congregational health check on the ecosystem? I mean, you go and do it as a consultant.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:But I guess, how do you analyse your own church and then how do you analyse somebody else's?
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's a great question. We want all four to flourish independently All five, sorry, to flourish independently and we want all five to help each other. Here is a way of doing, I think, a quick congregational health check For each of those five. We would ask four questions. One are we clear on what we're trying to achieve here? Are we clear on the outcome? Do we know what being deep in the word is? Have we set some goals there? Have we set goals in that congregation or in our whole church for what deep in the Word is? Have we set some goals there? Have we set goals in that congregation or in our whole church for what deep in the Word might look like? The second question we might ask is who are the people that we've put there? Have we got someone in church who is going to champion this and preach on it and raise people into it and have an eye on it? They're going to shepherd us there. Are they building a team or multiple teams, and are those teams healthy and are they trained and are they full? And so the outcome the people. Have we got programs that we're going to run regularly to make this happen? Because the thing about programs is they grow and build both trust in church, but they can also get better. And so, having clarity around the outcome, have we put people there who will then build programs that really will love and serve our people? And then the last one is are we checking to see if they're performing? Are we actually stopping every once in a while and saying we set those goals, have we hit them?
Speaker 2:So for Deep in the Word, just launching on one, we want to have a clear idea of what a congregation that's deep in the word looks like theologically from the Bible. And then we want to set some goals in terms of the number, the percentage of people, say, in growth groups. Each year we ask our congregation. We've started asking our congregation the question do you feel equipped and confident to handle the challenges that are thrown at you in life? From the word Asking our congregation, that has been a helpful thing. We can measure the degree to which people do quiet times and we're getting an indicator there of are people deep in the word, and so we've set those goals. We have someone who runs it, who builds a team for that. For us, the primary program for it is growth groups and that person who's running it is training people and recruiting them and they're helping them write material and we're very regularly looking at it and measuring the performance of it. Those four things for each of the areas could give us a sense of a congregational health check.
Speaker 1:Do you put equal emphasis into all of the five areas? That's a great question. Do you end up discovering? Actually, we put far too much emphasis in this area not that area?
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, great question. Often. Well, there's two answers. Often, yeah, people do really emphasise one area. So in our tribe, in our background, often, as soon as you get someone who is mature and thoughtful and godly, you chuck them into being a growth group leader, which means that they're deep in the word area and growth groups really are, is well-resourced, is powering yeah.
Speaker 2:And everything else really struggles because we've taken our best people and put them in one area, whereas we want to actually keep great people across all five because we don't want our loves God area to have our most immature Christians. We want strong people there. And so, yes, at one level you do want to, I guess, equally resource each At another level. We have found that pragmatically level. We have found that pragmatically, the more we talk about mission and champion mission in our church, the more all of the areas really grow in heat.
Speaker 2:Interesting and it's a pragmatic thing it's not that mission is any more valuable than anything else, but there is something about our gospel. Our gospel is a message to the world, to the unsaved. It is that all authority in heaven and earth is being given to Jesus. And we've found that, rather than mission being something that waters down community and people loving each other, it actually adds heat to it. And mission is the thing that will help people to say you know, I'm actually going to take a hit in community, I'm going to become more distant from this person so that we can plant another congregation and reach more people. Pragmatically, I think the more we're on about mission, the more the whole ecosystem really flourishes.
Speaker 1:Being on about mission does lead to disconnection, though.
Speaker 2:Yeah, but disconnection for good reasons, doesn't it In that? So we have. In our context, earlier this year we shut down three congregations, which was about 1,000 people who their congregations all ended. I was talking to you that week and you said I'm under so much pressure it was two and a half years, or something like that of planning that was all landing on the week we talked. And it all went really well and, in fact, one of the congregations that we launched in the city. We're now having to launch a second congregation.
Speaker 1:Really that's amazing, because that was like only three months ago or something, february the 11th.
Speaker 2:Yeah, we launched and so, yeah, it was four months ago and you know it's grown. And the reason people were really happy to say farewell to other congregations and to start a new one was because this was how we could reach Newey and Lake Mac better. And the reason people are actually really happy for this new congregation that's only four months old and now we're actually going to have to split it in two. It does take a hit. There's real disconnection there, but people are embracing it because they can see that new people have come to church. People are becoming Christians.
Speaker 2:Mission is the thing that stops relationships from just being an end in and of itself. If I focus on relationships as an end in themselves, I can never be loved enough. You can never fill my love tank if intimacy is an end in itself. But if intimacy is about growing each other in Christ and reaching the world, then I'll say, well, no, I will actually disconnect in order to connect with those people over there. And that's where that ecosystem thinking actually really helps, isn't it? We don't want to be the kind of church who is just on about being a loving each other community.
Speaker 2:Our God came to earth in order to love us and died on a cross. We want to be that kind of loves each other community.
Speaker 1:Let me come back to ecosystem in a moment, but I'm just wanting to drill down on that exciting journey you've just been on and changed, because you have actually just changed everything. Yeah, yeah, it was by the kindness of God, Because I mean one thing is you built a building over this side of the place and then, on the other side, you rented a building in the centre of the city, whereas you've been in kind of well rented buildings but set up and packed down for a long time.
Speaker 2:Yeah that's right. Yeah, so we've been. We've had five landlords for a long time, different congregations, all in public buildings, um, and, by the grace of god, we managed to get a building that would work. Um, but that meant reconfiguring all of our congregations, um, and the one area that we couldn't reach with our new building was the inner city, and so we thought, well, we don't want to leave that, and so we launched effectively in two places at the same time, and it was a big change process, but it was interesting, as we bought a building, and you and I have had lots of conversations about this in the past, about buying buildings.
Speaker 2:Yeah about buying buildings and doing fundraising campaigns, we realised that we said very clearly to our church this is not about creating a home for us, this isn't about comfort, this is about mission. This is a launch pad for reaching the city, and it does lovely things for the community as well. A building is a good ecosystem um resource.
Speaker 1:I think, um, but yeah, having a building to reach the city is is the thing have you had people who've come and sit and kind of, I'm feeling lost here, I'm feeling left out here, and have you noticed? Ah, that's an ecosystem problem of?
Speaker 2:yeah, yes, uh, one of the stories that you've heard me tell is chatting with a friend who he had. People come to him and say we feel unloved by you, we think you should visit us more. It was the classic come and visit, be in our homes. We feel disconnected.
Speaker 2:And he and I were chatting and we said, well, let's try and think about this from an ecosystem point of view, let's ask how the other areas are going, because this feels like a community thing. And we talked and he said, well, yeah, actually, that congregation is probably the lowest on mission. We haven't seen anyone saved in that congregation for quite a while and we haven't really pastored them well on mission. And we thought, well, that's interesting. Of course people are going to be inward focused if they're not outward focused. And then we looked over in the um, deep in the word area, and he said, well, actually, yeah, greg, that's the congregation that has the fewest people in growth groups, um, and we thought, well, that's really interesting.
Speaker 2:Of course people are feeling a unloved, they're quite disconnected from each other. Because growth groups are the thing that really does Well, one, it connects us with people, but two, it gets us thinking beyond ourselves because we're in God's word. And then I said so why is there such low growth group participation? And he said well, actually the problem is we're not training growth group leaders low growth group participation.
Speaker 2:And he said well, actually the problem is we're not training growth group leaders, and so we just haven't got groups to put them in. And so we realized what felt like what, presented as a loving each other community challenge, really was a serving and training and mission thing. And so we decided that let's focus on getting mission really happening in that congregation and let's train some new growth group leaders. Six months later, that complaint had disappeared. People's eyes had been lifted above themselves and they actually were being better looked after in growth groups. That was a really classic example of how paying attention to the whole of the ecosystem helped to show us that the problem wasn't where we were feeling it. We were feeling it, but it was caused somewhere else.
Speaker 1:You had another story of the evening congregation bleeding because kids and youth were over-functioning.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, so we have a lovely uni church full of really great people, but we noticed that actually, the leaders there just seemed to be slightly lower capacity than they had been in the past, and we were struggling for leaders and we were thinking is it that all the best people have started going to a different church? Is it the new generation, is it Gen Y? And then we realised, actually, that our youth and kids ministry was overheating, it was drawing off all of the best people, and so what we needed to do was, in fact, it was our youth and kids pastor who noticed it, bless him and he said what I need to do is recruit 50% of my people from other congregations, and that left a lot of the best people to be in unichurch, and so at that point it was a congregational ecosystem thing.
Speaker 1:Yeah, um, what about if your kids and youth ministry is underperforming? Yeah, like you just can't find the leaders.
Speaker 2:yeah, I wonder if that's where approaching it from an ecosystem point of view can actually really help. So asking the question is mission actually a passion for our church? Can people see that youth and kids is a really great mission thing? How many people so? That would be one way of approaching it. Then we could ask the question is how is the serve area going? What percentage of people have we actually got serving in church? You know that old classic adage 20% of the people do 80% of the work For us. In our church we aim to have 75% of our regulars, our members, in teams and it means we're still always struggling. We're always struggling to find people, but often there are more people there than we actually realise. It could also be a community thing that we haven't actually helped our church to realise that here is a group of people to love. So if I have a problem in any area of my church, my first response is to say how are lots of things feeding into this, rather than just reaching for the first, most obvious solution, if you like.
Speaker 1:Mm-hmm, yeah, when you've done think of your last church consultation. What was the thing that you identified? The ecosystem problem there? Oh, I mean you were telling me you've just done a consultation in London, oh yeah yeah. Cardiff, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah, there was a bunch of things that I got to go and visit a bunch of great churches in the UK In terms of ecosystem challenges. Yeah, I'll go to one church rather than a bunch and rather than kind of draw a generalisation. There was one church where what we could see was really wonderful faithful Bible teaching and a heart for serving and a really great community. But they actually were seeing very few people saved, mission had fallen off the agenda, so that part of the ecosystem was struggling and that meant well, they were feeling that in a bunch of ways. They were feeling it in giving. They were also feeling it in as they were coming into their meetings.
Speaker 2:So, their loves God thing, there was an insular feel. They could tell that they had a great community, but they could tell something was missing and so they were saying that we can feel that there is something missing in what we're doing. There is a vibrancy that's missing in what they're doing, and they were kind of feeling is it our meetings, is it the band? Is it the musicians? Is it the preaching, is it the praying? They were feeling for something in the meetings, but it was actually something outside of the meetings. It was the culture of mission in church because when you think about it, as we gather together and the gospel really lives among us, there is a vibrancy caused by mission that was kind of missing in their whole church, and so they realised urgency. I guess would have been the thing Mission urgency was draining that whole loves God area of their church.
Speaker 1:Thanks so much for coming in. It's a pleasure. My guest on the Pastor's Heart, greg Lee. He is the Senior Pastor of Hunter Bible Church in Newcastle. My name's Dominic Steele. This has been the Pastor's Heart. We will look forward to your company next Tuesday afternoon.
