Churches and church leaders face significant challenges on a constant basis.
- What is the role of elders and evangelists and how can they work together more effectively?
- What are our core beliefs?
- Where are we going as a church?
- How can we focus our resources to accomplish essential Kingdom business?
- How do we grow our people up into the image of Christ?
- What do we do about unproductive staff members, moral lapses in church members, sacred cows and outworn traditions?
- What do we expect of members and what should they expect of us?
- How can we strengthen marriages and families?
- Which ministries really make a difference and what should we do about the rest?
- How do we, as leaders, handle conflicts, criticisms, and difficult personalities?
- How do we find the right man to serve as our next pulpit minister?
It isn’t unusual for church leaders to address several of these issues on a weekly basis! Sadly, where matters like these are concerned, elders and ministers find themselves either “repeating the past” (doing what they’ve always done—whether effective or not), “reinventing the wheel” (making up solutions when good, effective options are readily available), or “refusing to rock the boat” (hoping that issues will simply resolve themselves and go away). For many of the concerns above, church leaders are not only ill-equipped, they are too close to the events and people and history to recognize and implement good solutions.
Finding help
Enter the church consultant. Someone with decades of experience in handling situations just like the ones described above. Someone with a proven track record of handling those situations effectively. Someone who understands the way churches work. Someone who brings in an outsider’s objectivity and a leader’s vision. Someone who has a heart for the church, an eye for solutions, a mind for options and out-of-the-box prescriptions, a theology that results in spiritual answers to spiritual problems, and the skills to lead churches towards godly answers.
If your car needed an overhaul, you’d take it to an “auto consultant.” If your marriage was in trouble, you’d seek out a “marriage consultant.” If you wanted advice about your stock portfolio, you’d talk to an “investment consultant.” In almost every area of our lives, we recognize the value of well-trained, proficient, highly-skilled specialists, people to seek out when we are in need of advice, repair, or big-picture-thinking. If there is wisdom in consulting with “experts” about our gadgets and our businesses, how much more wisdom is there in finding the right person to consult about our churches!
Finding the Right Person
Who is right for your church? I can’t answer that for you. What I can do is: 1) offer you my credentials and experience for doing this kind of work with churches, and 2) offer you the names and contact information of others who serve the church in this capacity. It’s up to you to make the decision about who seems right for your church and circumstances.
