The Healthy Church Staff Podcast
We're all about helping create a healthy, positive, and spiritually positive environment for church staff members and leadership teams.
The Healthy Church Staff Podcast
When Your Church Becomes a Nonprofit_ The Identity Crisis Nobody's Talking About
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You're sitting in a staff meeting and somebody turns to you and they says they say something like, Hey, what's our ROI on that ministry? And another person talks about brand awareness and customer journey, and the worship pastor maybe mentions user experience. And suddenly you realize something weird is happening. Your church sounds almost exactly like a nonprofit down the street, or worse, like a tech startup. The language has changed. Does this sound familiar? We need to talk about that today, right here on the Healthy Church Staff Podcast. Hi there, my name's Todd Rhodes. Thank you for joining me on this very fine Monday here on the Healthy Church Staff Podcast. I'm seeing this happening to churches everywhere, and it just happens. The silent takeover, churches just changing their language, their internal language. And a lot of churches, really over the past probably 30 years or so, I won't necessarily name for you where this all started or how it happened or whether it's a good thing or a bad thing. I'll let you decide that on yourselves. But churches are adapting kind of corporate language. And I've noticed even in the past couple of years that language has started to change again, a little bit more corporate y, and sometimes we don't realize it. Sometimes maybe we're talking about stakeholders instead of talking about the body of Christ. Maybe we're talking about metrics instead of the fruit of the spirit or satisfaction instead of spiritual formation. This kind of thing creeps in really slowly, and I'm not saying it's horrible. I'm just saying we need to realize when this happens. Because a lot of times nobody really notices, and before you, you get a little bit of creep to where you're talking a different language than most people would expect in your church. And like I said, it's it creeps in rather slowly. Nobody really notices until one day you just start to sound like everybody else. You don't sound like a church anymore. And here's why I think this matters, okay? Because when you start sounding more and more like a business, you start to think like a business. People become targets and demographics and success gets measured in numbers rather than transformation and staff meetings focus on efficiency, not in ministry. And you optimize for growth, not discipleship. Uh, growth's important too, but the sacred sometimes gets squeezed out by the strategic. And believe me, I am as much of a vision and a strategy guy. I love that stuff. And I am not, please don't hear me say this, I am not anti-vision or anti-strategy or anti-excellence. I think everything we do should just overflow with excellence. But sometimes I think there's something that we could be losing because we don't just serve people, we serve people, but that's not it. We also shepherd souls and we don't just run programs, we actually are there to facilitate encounters with God. And our product our product isn't a service, it's transformation. Our customers aren't clients, they're our families. And our success isn't measured in how we're doing quarter over quarter, it's measured in the results that we're getting for the kingdom, in eternal results. That's what makes this whole thing different. That's the one thing that we can't afford to lose. And honestly, if you think about it, that's why you joined up. That's why you felt called to ministry because you wanted to make a difference, not just in 30% growth increase, but in life change that God could use you to bring about, to use you to bring about change in somebody else. So how do we get this back? How do we make sure that we don't go too far, which we we tend to do sometimes? How do we make sure that we don't go too far in just even the simple thing of language? Start with your language and staff meetings, because that's where it starts, at least with your team. Say congregation, not audience. Maybe you're not a big congregation person, but audiences is just it's a more businessy type of a thing. Say ministry, maybe, and not programming, say calling and not job description. Ask, how is God moving before what were our numbers on Sunday? And numbers are important. I hear people say all the time, we count numbers because every person, every number is important to God. Absolutely buy into that. Numbers are important, but numbers aren't everything. We need to make space for the spirit and not just to look forward to putting a number in our spreadsheet. The reality is, your staff feels this tension every single day. They got into ministry to serve God, not to hit KPIs, okay? And when everything becomes a metric, ministry becomes can I say it? Mechanical. People burn out faster in corporate church culture than they do in a ministry church culture, and they need to remember why this work is sacred and why it's ministry. Bottom line for today is your church is not a nonprofit with a God problem. It's God's people with a mission problem. And this week I'd love for you to audit one staff meeting and just count how many times you use business language versus kingdom language. It's subtle. It's subtle, I know. But language matters. And how you coin words, how you put out words, how you talk makes a difference. Alright, that's it for today. I hope I challenged you a little bit, at least to think about kingdom language and introducing that. If you've kind of lost that along the way, remember you're not running a business, you're stewarding the bride of Christ, and there's a difference, and it matters. And I hope if this helped, that you share it with another church leader who maybe needs to hear about it. All right, that's it for today's Healthy Church Staff Podcast. Tomorrow we're going to talk about some more leadership things. We're going to talk about some of those sneaky mental traps that sabotage staff members, perfectionism, people pleasing, the need to control everything. Boy, that's I've got some really practical ways to help you break through if you're seeing some of those patterns, even in this new year. So I hope you'll join me again right here tomorrow on the LD Church of that podcast. Todd Rhodes.
