Every church teeters on the brink of anxiety-inducing events that can tear it apart.
Church leaders delude themselves if they believe their churches are immune to such forces. Stability in the past is no guarantee of stability in the future. The future is ripe with looming crises. A traumatic and church-threatening event may not occur in your congregation tomorrow or next week. But it will occur eventually . . . in every church . . . and it can happen at any time.
However, it is not this potential for crisis that most threatens the health of churches. It is, rather, how crisis is handled. Certainly, handling the crisis itself—circumstances and consequences and communication—is a primary leadership task when churches are threatened. But it is also critical (and equally important) for leaders to handle anxious members.
