HUMILITY:  The #1 DYNAMIC IN REVIVING A DYING CHURCH

My ministry has a focus on pastoral coaching and church revitalization that encounters dying churches, not just declining, but dying.   Bringing dying churches back to health is extremely hard work.  The root obstacle to renewed spiritual health is pride—a selfish digging in of the heels against desperately needed changes.  Pride brings a destructive fall in individuals and churches.

How Humility Brings Health to a Dying Church:

• Humility starts with the pastor and the church leaders.
• Humility admits the church is critically unhealthy and dying.
• Humility is willing to make significant difficult changes to be healthy, not merely tweaking what is being done now.
• Humility repents of the sins of conflicts and divisions in the church and pursues unifying reconciliation.
• Humility is giving up personal preferences that are in the way of making disciples and not insisting one’s personal preferences are the only way to make disciples.
• Humility is seeking and listening to outside qualified help, including getting a second opinion.
• Humility accepts responsibility for the church’s lack of health, does not make excuses, and won’t play the blame game.
• Humility graciously accepts short term losses of the people against changes for church health, knowing long term growth in new believers and in believers’ spiritual maturity will come due to the changes that bring church health.
• Humility means the people humbly let the pastor lead and the pastor humbly unleashes the people to minister without micromanaging.
• Humility knows systems are not trendy growth techniques, but necessary pathways to achieve the mission--no systems, no fulfilling the mission.
• Humility makes intentional major reallocation of resources and focus from comfortable inward focus to sacrificial outward focus.

Humility achieves great things for a great God empowered by a great God, saying, “I can do all things through Christ who gives me strength.”  Pride fails to achieve great things by one of two common ways of failing to trust in God’s power and relying on self by saying (1) “I can do all things,” or (2) “I can’t do much of anything.”