100 Days to a Healthier ChurchSample

Day 26

Today’s Big Idea: Deeper and more effective. What do you do when everyone in church is in agreement, but no one follows up on anything? I pastored a church like that once. They were great folks—loving, kind, and enthusiastic. But they hadn’t been equipped to do the work of ministry, so they had no depth. New ideas were met with eagerness, but the congregation expected it all to be done for them instead of pitching in.

Shallow soil needs to become deeper. This happens through relationship, teaching, and worship, but mostly it happens through equipping. As long as the pastor or a handful of church leaders does everything for everyone, they’ll let you. So the leadership needs to start creating an environment in which people are trained, equipped, assigned duties, followed up, and sent out again.

Key Verse: Some fell on rocky places, where it did not have much soil. It sprang up quickly, because the soil was shallow (Matthew 13:5).

Thoughts to Consider: It’s easy to mislabel equipping as delegating. But you can’t delegate a task to someone who hasn’t been equipped. So if you’ve had previous frustrations trying to get people in the church to step up and help out (maybe even in this 100-Day process) it may be that you’ve been delegating tasks to people who haven’t been equipped to do them. They may not be as unwilling as they are untrained.

Ask yourself what you might have done to contribute to a culture of Shallowness in your church. Are you doing things for people, instead of equipping them to do it? Are you spending more time alone in tasks than with a team? Are you burning out good people because they get as overworked as you are?

If any of this applies to you and your church, consider seriously what steps you need to take to shift the way ministry is done. We’ll get into some details about how to do this in Week 12 with an in-depth look at how Jesus mentored seventy-two of his closest followers, but today it’s important to honestly assess where you and the church are currently.