What Stops Forward Progress in a Church?

Pastors, what stops progress in your church? It's not always an easy question to answer. But if we're honest with ourselves, we can usually identify a few things that are holding us back. In this post, we'll take a look at some common roadblocks to forward progress and offer some solutions to help you move past them. Are you ready?

1. A lackadaisical attitude towards evangelism and discipleship. If the members of a church are not actively engaged in sharing their faith and making disciples, the church will soon stagnate. It's as simple as that. Don't let your members be passive in their faith – challenge them to make a difference for Christ! A failure to connect with the community. A successful church is one that has good relationships with the people and businesses in its local area. If you invest time and effort into building strong relationships, you'll find it easier to reach out to those who are outside of your church family. When the responsiblity to evanglize and disciple is tossed over on the pastor and staff to perform, then progress will come to a screeching haul. The laity must be involved in the work of the church if it is to move forward.

Keeping everyone engaged and informed with missistry oportunities and needs keeps the progress in the church moving forward. Celebrate testamonies of how the mission is being lived out in the church and community.

2. A focus on numbers and growth at the expense of spiritual depth. A church may chasing after numerical growth, but if that growth is not accompanied by a deepening of faith and maturity, it will be difficult to sustain. It's important to focus on quality as well as quantity. An inward focus instead of an outward focus. A church that is focused on itself will soon find that its members are more interested in serving their own needs than the needs of others. This kind of self-serving attitude will eventually lead to a decline in membership and involvement. The tendency is to measure sucsess by the people in the pews instead of how many were impacted by Kingdom work.

Focus on Kingdom health and not just your local church health. Provide interesting and new ways to grow in their faith through guest speakers and oportunities outside of Sunday School. Serving oportunities in the community can shift focus to mission health.

3. A refusal to change or adapt. As the world around us changes, churches must also change in order to remain relevant. If a church is unwilling to adapt, it will eventually become irrelevant and die out. What was done and worked 50 years ago may not work today. The pandemic showed many churches that they needed to have a social media presence to reach more of the generation today. Including online services is a normal now for most churches.

If your church is reluctant to change, be able to talk about and show how simular churches have benefited from the proposed change. Bring a visiting pastor thast has made the change talk about their churches experience and outcomes.

4. A lack of vision. Without a clear vision, it can be difficult for a church to move forward. Everyone needs to be on the same page in terms of what the church is trying to achieve. If there is no shared vision, it will be difficult to make progress. In the Lord's work we desperately need an elevated vision of what it is all about . . . we need greater goals (what can be done) and greater objectives (how it can be done). 

Meet with church leadership and spend quality prayer time and discussion of the needs of the community that your church is uniquely qualified to address. Target, response, and goal should be part of every vision statement.

5. Routine and complacency. It’s easy for churches to get stuck in a rut of doing things the same way year after year. But if a church is not intentional about trying new things and reaching out to people, it will eventually become stagnant. Status-quo is the slow death of a church. Routine and complancy is doing the same thing over and over, wanting different results from it.

Periodically review and examine each and every program and activity, and if it does not fit the vission statement, then it needs to stop.

6. A focus on the wrong things. Churches can often get caught up in focusing on the wrong things. This can be anything from an obsession with the building and property to infighting and drama among the members. A misguided focus will distract us from the mission of the church. We need to refocus and have the right focus for our work in the Kingdom. The ones that lose in this wrong focus are the lost souls that we should be looking to interact with.

Assessment tools for leadership and church health are great aids in seeing the areas that need work and areas that are strenghths for the church.

7. Fear of the unknown. Fear can hold a church back in many ways. It can keep people from evangelizing or from taking risks. It can also cause a church to become inward-focused and exclusive instead of welcoming and inclusive. But if we let fear dictate our actions, we'll never be able to move forward. We need to have faith and trust that God will guide us as we step out in obedience.

Start with small steps of faith. Each obedient step will help build confidence and courage.

8. No Direction. If a church does not have a clear direction, it can be difficult to move forward. Without a sense of where the church is going or what it is trying to achieve, it can be easy to get sidetracked or bogged down in petty issues. Running on the treadmill of busyness and activity with no goal or objective.

Vision statements tell us where we are going and mission statements tell us how we are getting there. Lay out a roadmap for where you want the church to go one step at a time. Logical and deliberate actions that will get you where God wants your church.

9. Apathy, lack of concern. When people stop caring about their church, it can be very difficult to get things moving again. If members are not invested in the life of the church, it will be hard to generate excitement or interest in anything that the church is doing. The most dangerous of apathy is the lack of concern for the people that are not in the church.

You can not make someone to care about anything until they have been touched personally. Personal connections cause people to get involved with anything. Find the connection for your congregation.

10. Success can hinder a church. When a church is successful, it can be easy to become complacent and satisfied with things the way they are. But if a church is not careful, success can lead to a decline in faithfulness and commitment. If a church stops moving forward and growing, it can quickly become irrelevant in the world around us. Members begin to think that because of the recent success they have arrived and can coast from here.

Reminding the church that success is not how big they get but how many lives that are changed. That changing lives never stops.

11. Overall Burnout. It’s not uncommon for churches and church leaders to experience burnout. When this happens, it can be difficult to muster the energy or motivation to keep things going. Success can be a leading factor for burnout. Everyone has given everything they had for so long that they have nothing left in the tank.

Making sure that every leader and every worker has times of rest and times of being able to take a break from responsiblity is healthy for them and for the church.

All of these things can stop a church from making forward progress. But the good news is that they can all be overcome with prayer. One of the most important things for a church is to have a clear vision and to be intentional about moving forward. If a church is not careful, it can easily get stuck in a rut of complacency and stagnation. It is important to always be looking for ways to reach out and evangelize, to grow deeper in faith, and to adapt to the changing world around us. But self care is essential for the leadership and workers of any church to keep them healthy physically, mentalily, and spiritually.