Mike Glenn is Senior Pastor at Brentwood Baptist Church. The views expressed in this commentary are solely those of the author(s) and do not necessarily represent those of BCNN1.
One day, a young pastor reached out to me to talk about his church. I’ve found out if you stay at one place for long enough, people begin to think that you’re an expert of some sort. I’ve been at Brentwood Baptist Church for 28 years, and well, people think I actually know what I’m doing.
So, he had a church growth question. “Our church has grown to about 1,000 on Sunday morning, but we can’t seem to grow past that. We’ll bump up to 1,100 or 1,200 and then, we’ll drop back to 900 and start over again. What do you think?”
“You have a capacity problem,” I said.
“No,” he answered, “we have plenty of space in our buildings.”
“You didn’t hear me,” I said. “I didn’t say you didn’t have any space in your buildings. I said you, the pastor, have a capacity problem”.
I went on to explain that what he was finding out again and again was the limits of his own capacity as a leader. He could, in his current practices and systems, handle about thousand people, but he lacked the capacity to handle more. If his church was going to grow, he would have to create more capacity as the pastor of his church.
When you’re in your first pastorate, you do everything. You take care of the budget, the printing, maintenance, community relations and pastoral care. You preach all of the sermons, do all of the weddings and funerals, and you pray all of the prayers. While you’re in the middle of it, you’re constantly overwhelmed and under prepared. In the long run, however, it does prepare pastors for the long many facets of ministry.
The irony of the ministry is the larger your church, the fewer things you do. My church needs to be doing a handful of things – and only a handful of things. They don’t need me to do anything else. In fact, I actually hurt the church if I’m involved in areas where I don’t have any passion or gifting. There are people in my church who are much better than I am in any number of things.
Basically, my church needs me to do two things: study to preach and teach the Scriptures and think about the future of our church. So, over the years, my job has come down to three things: preaching and teaching, training leaders and vision. That’s it. A very effective team of staff and lay leaders handle everything else.
I say “over the years” because with me being at this church for 28 years, I’ve actually been the pastor of 4 or 5 churches at the same address. We’ve gone from a community-based church from a regional congregation to a multi-site congregation. Each time, we had to rethink the role of the pastor. What does the church need from me at this stage of the church’s life? How involved do I need to be in the various processes of congregational life? What can I release to a lay person? When do we need to hire a person of particular skills to better define our church’s structure?
Source: Christianity Today
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