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Preventing Unhealthy Growth: Strategies for Sustaining a Thriving Church Community
52 Plays6 months ago
In this episode, Dan Sanchez and pastor Ridley Barron discussed the characteristics of unhealthy churches and the crucial role of leadership and accountability in maintaining a church's health. The conversation highlighted the tendency of leadership failures to contribute significantly to church health issues, emphasizing the importance of accountability at all levels— from pastoral roles down to congregation members. Pastor Barron pointed out that a lack of biblical literacy among churchgoers further exacerbates the problem, preventing effective oversight and correction. The sermon also touched on practical steps for fostering a culture of accountability and ongoing spiritual growth, urging listeners to support and pray for church leaders while also staying diligent in their personal engagement with scripture.
Timestamps:
00:00 Church lacks accountability, poor leadership, voices lost.
03:44 Scriptural guidance for leadership and accountability.
09:34 Unaccountable behavior leads to church's downfall.
13:31 Pastor's failure could destroy congregation from within.
16:36 Count to 10 before reacting emotionally.
19:32 Church gossip can hurt, but we can resist.
23:39 Grow with intentionality, plan for success in planting.
24:17 "Share episode, read Bible, impact lives. Mission."
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Transcript
Introduction & Sermon Overview
00:00:01
Speaker
Welcome back to Scripture Unfiltered, the podcast series where we're breaking down the previous Sunday's sermon. This Sunday, Ridley Barron, who's joined with me today, was preaching out of the book of Acts on what it means to be a healthy body or a healthy church.
00:00:17
Speaker
And what's fun is, before I just have to record, we were talking about some of the pains of leadership. And I'm like, oh, this is timely. Because a lot of times I find that unhealthy church probably comes from unhealthy leadership.
Leadership & Accountability Issues
00:00:34
Speaker
What would you say about that, Ridley? Oh, absolutely. I mean, I think the formula probably leans heavily to leadership that does not know how to lead.
00:00:44
Speaker
Sadly, too many times in the church, we follow charismatic people who don't necessarily translate into good leaders. And so you get somebody who has a lot of energy or maybe is a good speaker or things like that.
00:00:59
Speaker
kind of sell your soul a little bit, just to have those things and wake up one day and you got a mess on your hands and your organization. So I do think there's probably equal responsibility on the other end. You've got some congregations that are sick and unhealthy because they're poor followers. But I would say the overwhelming majority is typically because leaders aren't doing what leaders need to do.
00:01:20
Speaker
So I thought we could focus on this for the episode because your sermon did a fantastic job of highlighting like what a healthy church looks like. But oftentimes a lot of us are coming from unhealthy churches. So I'd like to unpack a little bit about like why that is, why are there so many unhealthy churches? What leads to that? What would lead to Grove Hill becoming unhealthy from the, I think a fairly healthy place that we're in right now. So that way we can all become a little bit more diligent to stay on course for healthy. Right, right.
00:01:50
Speaker
So I think one of the keys to good leadership is accountability. A man or a woman who is willing to be open and vulnerable to the accountability of their peers and even the people they lead. So two examples that I can tell you of how that doesn't work well, one of them is the mess we have in our federal government right now. Our federal government is no longer accountable to the people because the people don't, they don't vote
00:02:20
Speaker
their conscience or they don't vote at all or whatever, you know?
Tolerance & Biblical Standards
00:02:25
Speaker
And so we have turned leaders loose to just do whatever they want to. Now, we were joking about this before coming online.
00:02:32
Speaker
We'll sit at Facebook and whine and complain as loud as we can with our keyboards, but when it comes time to vote or to run for office ourselves or to speak up, we just won't do that. When it comes to the church, I think one of the reasons why we have such poor leadership in so many churches is because the church long ago fell prey to this idea of tolerance. And the idea of tolerance is that we don't speak about anybody else's shortfalls or sins or whatever, because we just all love each other, right?
00:03:01
Speaker
but the scripture is very clear that part of love is to hold somebody accountable. And so we've got generations now, I would argue at least the last three generations in the church of leadership that has led without anybody really holding them accountable. In most cases, people either stay quiet and just gossip behind closed doors. Other cases, they just leave the church.
00:03:28
Speaker
And so what they do is they just, they go and they take away their voice and they leave these churches in the hands of very poor leaders that don't have the ability to do what they got to do. And nobody's going to hold them accountable to it. Where does accountability come from for a church?
00:03:44
Speaker
I think straight from scripture, I mean, you've got the guidelines there for what leadership looks like. I mean, Paul was kind enough in 1 Timothy N and tied us to write down some really good ideas about, hey, this is what a godly man looks like who's going to lead your congregation.
Challenges in Accountability
00:03:59
Speaker
But, you know, probably one of the best illustrations I can think of is the whole idea that an elder, it says, as well as a deacon should be, you know, one who runs his family well and has children who are respectable, those kinds of things.
00:04:14
Speaker
I can't tell you the last time I heard somebody sit down with a friend and say, I need to talk to you about what's going on with you and your children because I see some lapses in your parental skills or some lapses in your relationship with them because heaven forbid that we actually speak about something like that in somebody else's life. Either the leader's not going to receive it well and it's going to become defensive or the person who should be holding them accountable is afraid to speak up in that manner because they might lose a friendship or something.
00:04:44
Speaker
Again, just one example, there's a list there of all these different things that we really should be holding up as the standard for people we allow to be leaders in our lives. For most of us, we're just settling for whatever comes down the pipe. That's a hard one. It is hard. Have you ever had that conversation? Because I've done it once and that friendship is still going, but dang. If it hadn't been decades in the making already, it probably would have ended the friendship.
00:05:13
Speaker
Yeah. And let's be fair, um, I can't walk up to just anybody and have that kind of conversation because there is some trust that has to be developed in the relationship. You had to develop some really good, strong ties to handle those, that kind of that level of intense accountability. Um, there are some things that my wife can say to me that other people can't say to me. So, you know, I get that I get that it's hard, but
00:05:44
Speaker
There comes a point where you got to say some things, you got to speak up some things, maybe just not necessarily, maybe accountability is not even the right word in some instances. Maybe it's just an encouragement to say, hey, I'm praying for you and your kid. And maybe that's enough for them to go, well, why is he praying for my kid? Maybe I need to be doing a better job raising my kids, whatever, you know? But there's got to be some kind of dialogue and conversation going on between leaders and followers on a regular basis.
Accountability Practices
00:06:10
Speaker
If a leader's supposed to have permission to speak into a follower's life, then the followers should have permission to speak into the leader's life just as much. Tons of touchy subjects, but it does help a lot for leaders to be held accountable because where you don't have accountability, then generally anything goes. I've worked at some organizations where
00:06:30
Speaker
Things generally don't get done or excuses. You know, you always miss your targets because at the end of the day, there's no consequence for not hitting the targets, even agreed upon targets, right? Step number one, but it is a big deal. Who holds, like as the leader of Grove Hill, are you held accountable two ways from the elders and then from the Southern Baptist Commission? You know, the Southern Baptist, because the way we are organized, the Southern Baptist,
00:07:00
Speaker
have permission to say some things to us, but they really kind of stay hands off because the way structured churches are autonomous, they kind of are running according to how they want to. For me personally, I will tell you that I have four
00:07:14
Speaker
And some of these are by my choice. It's not the way it's necessarily always set up for everybody. I have four places that I receive accountability from. One of them you have mentioned, which is the elders. Our church is structured, unlike many Southern Baptist churches, is structured to have elders who actually are the leaders of the church, who are my peers and have the ability to speak to me and hold me accountable in that regard. The second one I just mentioned, that's my wife.
00:07:40
Speaker
I believe that the Bible teaches your wife, a good wife, is like the Holy Spirit in your life. They have an ability to speak to you, again, on subjects that most people don't have authority or permission to speak to you about. And so I have to be willing to listen to my wife and, you know, I'm blessed because I have a godly woman who's not afraid to do that. And I think that's what makes me hopefully a better leader. The third area for me is obviously the Bible.
00:08:11
Speaker
The Bible itself should be holding me accountable. If I'm in the Word like I'm supposed to as a leader, it should be regularly giving me a check on my heart. I mean, that's what the Bible's there for. And then a fourth area that I intentionally have opened up to is the other staff members here. I've given them permission that even though I am technically their boss by hierarchy, they're my peers and I don't want to be untouchable to them.
00:08:39
Speaker
Even the newest guy on the staff, I've encouraged him if he ever has any issues or problems just to come sit down and let's talk about those things so we can work those things out before they become a real issue.
00:08:51
Speaker
I've run into and it's with when it comes to the elders, I guess this would be in the bylaws, which I'd have to look up like it'd be the elders working together in order to bring accountability to you. But there's not a I ran into a situation once at a nonprofit I worked out long ago where the
00:09:10
Speaker
And this is a parachurch, but like the CEO, the only way the CEO could be removed was from a unanimous decision from the board. Mine is him. The problem was his wife was on the board. Even if they did manage to come together, they're like, Hey man, you've gone too far, which he did eventually. And now that ministry is not around anymore. Those are the scenarios. I see a lot, Dan, is those situations where guys,
00:09:40
Speaker
either intentionally or sometimes unintentionally rise above the accountability that's there. And the situation changes to the point where, for instance, one guy that I knew who I would have never guessed this would have happened to, but he became the pastor of a church that rapidly began to grow. They had elders in place. The elders over time changed to be some of the closest friends he had in the congregation.
00:10:03
Speaker
Well, they were all benefiting from the church and how it was growing, not monetarily, but just, you know, that they were all in a prestigious place. And so none of them wanted to rock the ship. So nobody spoke up. Nobody said anything. This guy moved from pastor to dictator, probably in a matter of two, three years. And the church, although on the outside looked like it was good, it was rotting from the inside and suddenly came crashing down when he was discovered to have an affair.
00:10:31
Speaker
with one of the white people who's working at his church. Man, there's story after story like that. I mean, Mars Hill was a big one with Mark Triscoll that happened about the same time in the ministry. I'm thinking of different ministry, but that kind of stuff happens. So I'm glad to know we have an elder and a pretty strong elder board.
Biblical Literacy & Church Health
00:10:48
Speaker
I mean, I know some of our elders, I'm like, those guys, they love, I'm like, they love you, but
00:10:56
Speaker
They're going to call it too. That's what they do. And that's the thing. That's the beauty of the whole balance there is because I do feel like I am completely supported and loved by every one of those guys, but all four of the current elders were currently in the process of getting ready to, to select a couple more, but the four we have, every one of those four have some point spoken to me about, I need to talk to you about something. Maybe it's something we didn't agree on or.
00:11:22
Speaker
In several cases, hey, I'm seeing some warning signs. You look like you're getting a little worn out. I think you need to take a day off. You need to go away with your wife. You need to cancel some meetings. So I hope my response to them has not been one of defensiveness, that I have been open and receptive to that, and they have felt like that they had permission to do that. Again, as many times as they need to.
00:11:44
Speaker
There are so few churches healthy. And I'd say Grove Hill is probably one of the healthiest I've been to. And I've been to a number of decently healthy churches, but I've also seen a lot of very unhealthy churches. What do you think some of the most common causes are? One of them is biblical illiteracy. We just don't know the word. If you don't know the word, then you can't hold anybody to that word. And I think that part falls primarily on the congregation.
00:12:12
Speaker
Most pastors know the word pretty well. Sadly, they don't all live by it, but most of them know it pretty well. But when the congregation does not up to par on the word enough to hold their leaders accountable, then there's that opening there. I do think, obviously, we have to be reminded over and over and over again that even though men are called by God, they are not gods.
00:12:36
Speaker
and they are still broken and fragile and lust or corruption or greed or whatever can eat up a man on the inside even as he's serving God in a congregation. So we don't hold them accountable enough. I've already talked about that, but do we pray enough for these guys? Do we pray enough for our leaders to make sure that their hearts are protected and that they're doing everything they can and that we're doing everything we can to surround him and protect him?
Risks & Accountability Strategies
00:13:06
Speaker
I'm a firm believer that when a man or a woman steps into a leadership position in church, they become a primary target of Satan. So as he ramps up his attacks on those people as a congregation, we must ramp up our prayers for those people. What do you think some of the ways, what would be the most likely ways for Grove Hill to get derailed from being at the healthy place that it's currently in?
00:13:31
Speaker
Well, I'm gonna start with the most uncomfortable and probably most natural is for this pastor to screw up. To become selfish, to become greedy, to take the focus off my own want with God and focus on things that don't matter. Me, and I would add the whole staff, but me dropping the ball is the biggest success story that Satan could have for this congregation. It'd be the quickest way for it to fall.
00:14:02
Speaker
I think the other side, flipping over to the other side of it, it would be for our congregation to lose its willingness to hold each other in accountability and to continue to disciple each other in the Word. If we get off of the focus of growing our roots deeper in Christ and begin to make it about us and our comfort and our convenience, then sadly,
00:14:28
Speaker
It won't be as fast as a pastor who fails morally, but it will become a slow, degrading, corrupting disease that will eat this church up from the inside out. Accountability is a tough thing. I've not been to a lot of places that were really active in holding people accountable, except for maybe one discipleship program I was in. And honestly, a lot of people have left that program and now have like said like, Oh, that was too intense. That was too extreme. And I'm like,
00:14:57
Speaker
Maybe so, but we ended up holding people accountable until the point where people were being called Pharisees. I mean, 19-year-old Pharisees walking around, but I'm like, we weren't doing it. It wasn't wrong. We were actually just holding people accountable in love, and maybe just because 19-year-olds don't have a really great sense of how to have crucial conversations, it came out a little harsher than it needed to, but I'm like, still, it's the only place I've ever been where it was happening consistently.
00:15:27
Speaker
Yeah. So and you know, I think the primary thing you've got to remember if it's true Christian accountability is done in love for the purpose of restoration. And it's such a fine line between that and people who are out for revenge or are jealous of somebody's authority or are embarrassed because something happened to them and they just want to they want to make it up by getting somebody else in trouble or whatever.
00:15:54
Speaker
There's all kinds of ways that you can veer off course, but the one and only one right way to do accountability is out of love in order to restore somebody back to their Christian righteousness. I wonder if the tell for whether you're doing it in love, because in my mind I'm like, I think I can justify doing it in love, but really there's an ulterior motive. But I'm wondering, I know the check in my heart for whether this is true in marriage is if, if there's a strong emotion attached to it and it's probably not being in love.
00:16:24
Speaker
in that moment, at least. If I'm emotional about it, I don't know if there's an ulterior motive. That's just what I assume with myself. I'm given a crucial conversation at that time. I just recently heard a parenting expert talk about dealing with kids who said, if you come across a situation that has the potential to be emotional, count to 10. I know it sounds simple and primitive,
00:16:52
Speaker
but just count to 10 and he said, as you count to 10, ask God to say, okay, is this worth fighting about? Is it worth? Is it worth this really hard conversation with my child? And am I handling it with the right emotion? If not, then I need to step away. I need to count to a thousand or go do something else. But if I get to 10 and I feel like this is really the course of action I need to take, then I just need to take it and do it head on and get it done.
00:17:21
Speaker
I think many of us could benefit from that. I think there's a reason why the scripture tells us to be slow to speak and slow to become angry, to evaluate the condition of our own heart before we start talking about others. And maybe that's primarily what Jesus had in mind when he said, you know, don't try to pull the, the, what is it? The, I can't remember the translation now the thorn out of somebody's eye when you have a plank in your own eye or whatever. Yeah. So, um,
00:17:51
Speaker
Just evaluate your heart, figure out where you're coming from. I probably have one friend who's good at confrontations and he taught me something that I'll never forget. He's like, always ask for permission to give somebody a confrontation because if they say no.
00:18:08
Speaker
Then I've actually read this in management books and business too. If you have a direct report and they're doing something that you need to give them some feedback on, always ask for permission because if they say no, they weren't going to hear it anyway. They say yes, then they're ready. They've kind of given them a, hey, brace yourself, kind of moment, sit down. You're going to give it a second because then they've invited it and they can't get as mad because they've opened it up.
00:18:34
Speaker
I have another friend that is, like you said, very good at handling these hard conversations. And he will go into these hard conversations. He always has a piece of paper with him and he basically does an outline and says, here's why I'm here. Here's what I hope to happen. Here's what I want to hear from you. Now let's begin the conversation. And it kind of just lets him know, you know, although we're starting at a very rough place,
00:18:58
Speaker
If we go where I want to this conversation, it's going to have a happy ending and you and I are going to wind up working together towards a goal that both of us want. But the key is, like you said, doing it in love, trying to bring restoration, not when it gets bad is when it turns into gossip, right? Yes. Like you're talking to everybody else but the person about the thing. And it's probably another sign of an unhealthy church right there.
Gossip & Church Health
00:19:20
Speaker
It's like gossip's just gone crazy, which I'm pretty sure you called out at the sermon this last Sunday. I did.
00:19:26
Speaker
I did. And every time you do that, I'm like, something happened somewhere over the last two weeks. That's the first thing that everybody thinks is there's something really bad going on. And the truth is, because we're humans, there's always going to be a chance that somebody in the church is gossiping. I actually had a lady come up to me after the service who said Sunday that her particular D group had been struggling a little bit with that, and she felt like she needed to speak up. So I had a chance to pray with her and encourage her, and it went very well when she chose to do that.
00:19:57
Speaker
I think most of us have an awareness in our heart, especially for followers of Christ, we have awareness of our heart that it's not what we're supposed to do. The problem is that we turn our filters off and we start to run our mouths and we quickly stop thinking about, is this the right way to handle this conversation? Is this who I should be having this conversation with? Would I be doing this if Jesus were standing here? You know, those kinds of things.
00:20:24
Speaker
So if you're listening to this, we want to keep Grove Hill from slipping into an unhealthy state, which means we need to stay grounded in the word. We need to be praying for Ridley because that's where devil, devil always goes after the head. Uh, the leader needs lots of prayer, lots of prayer. Yeah.
00:20:45
Speaker
and accountability, not just for staff and for Ridley, of course, but also for each other. And that's how we're going to stay a healthy church. Yes.
00:20:55
Speaker
Which I think is the reason why I'm here is the reason why a lot of people come here and stay here is because they love the community, which is an overflow of just general healthiness in our congregation. I think it's a very hungry and healthy church. I wonder if almost a church can grow too fast and outgrow and healthiness because too much has come in all at once that maybe you're unhealthy or came from unhealthy backgrounds or whatever. So the culture shifts because of an increase.
00:21:24
Speaker
It's a great question, I think, absolutely. It's no surprise churches are very much like families. It's not that you can adopt four kids at one time and add a whole bunch to the family, but you gotta know there's gonna be challenges. If you just go out and you adopt four kids without thinking ahead and planning ahead, then you're gonna probably have a whole lot of chaos and a whole lot of heartbreak following.
Managing Church Growth
00:21:45
Speaker
But if you look ahead and know, hey, we're going to we think we're going to adopt four kids and you sit down and have conversations among the existing family members to prepare everybody for what that's going to look like, that transition is still going to be bumpy, but it's going to be more manageable. So as a church staff, we have
00:22:04
Speaker
a responsibility to prepare for the growth we believe God wants to bring here. We have a responsibility to continue to think forward and talk about, okay, do we have enough small groups? People get here, they need to be connected to small groups. Are we prepared for those kinds of things? Do we have enough spaces and resources and facilities and chairs? I mean, all the things you gotta think about. But if tomorrow God dumped 200 new people into our church, you better believe there would be chaos and I don't think it would be healthy for our environment.
00:22:34
Speaker
So while we absolutely pray that God will continue to bring people, we pray that God brings them at the right pace and that we have a right plan for them when they get here.
00:22:43
Speaker
sometimes success can become a problem in and of itself. If you grow too big, too fast. I've seen it happen in different organizations or different companies I've worked at where you grow too big, too fast and things fall apart. Luckily, we aren't growing too big, too fast. I could see a lot of the decision making you're doing with the leadership academy and the draining you're doing to try to raise up so that we can accommodate for a larger congregation.
00:23:09
Speaker
Uh, the even the sermon series we just went through Oh What is it? What do you believe? No Something along those lines. I can't remember the exact phrase and now the axe series because now with axe we're going through Well, what does a childly church look like beyond the core beliefs now we're going into what we should be doing together All very strategic in helping grove hill grow But not just grow for the sake of growing but grow in a healthy manner that can disciple more people And get the gospel out there into chapel hill and beyond
00:23:39
Speaker
Yeah, I think you've got to grow with intentionality and with a forward plan. If I went out, and I've done this from past experience, so I know this for a fact, if you go out and you plant a tomato bush and expect it to grow, but you don't put any stakes around it, that tomato bush is gonna wind up laying on the ground with nothing but rotten tomatoes because it'll eventually become too heavy and fall over.
Conclusion & Call to Action
00:24:00
Speaker
But if you start from the very beginning with the right steak or tomato cage, whatever your preference is, or, you know, attaching it to a fence, a latticework, whatever you do, you have growth that occurs, same growth that occurred on the first bush, but now it's got some intentionality because it's growing in the right places in the right directions. Well, fantastic. I think we're on the episode there.
00:24:21
Speaker
Remember the mission of the church and this podcast is to impact the life of every person with the whole gospel by any means possible. So go share this episode with someone. And if you haven't today, go read your Bible, start with the private over the day. But if you haven't gotten in there, go in there. Cause that's how we usually end most of these podcasts is certainly a big, big topic of how we talked about how churches need to stay healthy.