How a Mighty Church Falls - Christianity Today

Soon after I finished my theological education, I was asked to become pastor of a congregation in Southern Illinois. This was my first great awakening to the realities of pastoral leadership, and it was an uncomfortable experience.

The skills (or gifts) that led the congregation to invite me to be their spiritual leader were probably my enthusiasm, my preaching, and my apparent ability, even as a young man, to reach out to people and make them feel cared for.

The position description called for me to report to a board of deacons who, while well-intentioned, were not highly experienced in organizational leadership. It also said that I was responsible to lead a staff that consisted of a secretary, a Christian education assistant, two day-school teachers, a part-time choir director, and a janitor.

What it didn’t say was that the congregation was seriously divided and disillusioned due to an acrimonious split in which the previous pastor had persuaded a hundred people to join him in leaving the church to form a new one down the road.

It took me only a couple of months to realize that I knew very little about how to lead an organization of such size, complexity, and woundedness. At age 27, I was in over my head. Somehow I had made it all the way through seminary believing that all one had to do was become a dazzling preacher and an enthusiastic visionary and everything else about church life would fall into place. No one had told me about staffs that required direction, boards that wanted results, and congregations that needed healing.

I liken it to that discovery some young married couples have at the end of their honeymoon that, in addition to being affectionate and fun-loving, there are bills to pay, chores to share, and personality differences to resolve, all things they didn’t know came along in the marital package.

Churches and marriages have something in common: they are both organizations. One had better know how to run them. I didn’t.

It was in those “awakening” days that I was introduced to my first organizational leadership book: The Effective Executive by Peter Drucker. It became one of the most important books I ever read. It opened me up to understand how people are empowered to attain objectives that are otherwise unreachable. That book probably delivered me from a first-round knockout in my life as a pastor.

Since that time more than 40 years ago, countless other writers have tried to improve upon Drucker’s insights. In my opinion no one has succeeded quite like Jim Collins, who has given us books like Good to Great and Built to Last. I’m not sure that Collins had people like me in his crosshairs when he wrote those books, but many of us in faith-based and pastoral leadership have learned much from him.

Recently Collins and his team of researchers produced a smaller work titled, How the Mighty Fall, which he says began as an article and ended as a book. Being a preacher (and a writer), I understand that.

Collins says How the Mighty Fall was inspired by a conversation during a seminar at West Point where a few dozen leaders from the military, business, and social sectors gathered to explore themes of common interest. He had posed this question to the group: “Is America renewing its greatness, or is America dangerously on the cusp of falling from great to good?”

The conversation came during a break when one of the CEOs approached Collins to say: “I found our discussion fascinating, but I’ve been thinking all morning about your question in the context of my company. We’ve had tremendous success in recent years, and I worry about that.”

The CEO went on to express the fear that success itself tends to cover the warning signs of decline. So he was haunted by the question: How would you know that your organization is heading into trouble when things on the surface appear to be so good?

That CEO now has his answer in the pages of How the Mighty Fall.

Collins begins with a personal story that illustrates the point the book addresses. He describes a day when he and his wife, Joanne, went for a run on a mountain road near Aspen, Colorado. His wife, a well-conditioned runner, quickly outdistanced him, stopping only when she reached an altitude of almost 13,000 feet.

Yet a little more than two months later, Collins relates, she was diagnosed with cancer and faced two mastectomies. Collins’s point: on the day of that run, his wife appeared the picture of health, but she had to have already been carrying her growing disease within her.

“I’ve come to see institutional decline like a staged disease: harder to detect but easier to cure in the early stages, easier to detect but harder to cure in the later stages,” writes Collins. “An institution can look strong on the outside but already be sick on the inside, dangerously on the cusp of a precipitous fall.”

That reminds me of words written to the Laodicean church: “You say, ‘I am rich; I have acquired wealth and do not need a thing. But you do not realize that you are wretched, pitiful, poor, blind and naked.”

In the book, Collins identifies five stages in the process of organizational slippage. Each one, he suggests, is a section of that proverbial slippery slope that grows more dangerous as time goes on, and the problem is enhanced by the fact that, in most cases, leadership is apparently (or deliberately) oblivious to what is going on.

Any thoughtful organizational leader would want to know Collins’ five stages well and would also want to make sure that his or her leaders were aware of them. What a menu they would be for a five-point discussion on a leadership retreat. When I first read them, I was impressed with how easy it was to match many of these observations to biblical descriptions of leadership and organizational life.

Take, for example, the first stage of organizational decline. Collins calls it, “Hubris born of success.”

Hubris born of success

“We do ourselves a disservice by only studying success,” writes Collins. A search and scan through the business and even church leadership literature suggests that few books explore the roots of failure. Most dote on promises of success.

Interestingly, the biblical writers are unafraid to write of failure. Mixed among the stories of great achievements in the older and newer Testaments are a host of accounts of personal and corporate failure.

Hubris—an arrogant conceit (Collins: “an excessive pride”) that paves the way toward failure and its consequences—is all over the Scriptures. I’m tempted to say, without doing the homework, that there may be more failure stories arising from hubris than success stories rising from humility.

Samples: Goliath and his fellow Philistines are full of hubris when the giant takes on David, the shepherd. David himself is later caught in the thrall of hubris when he gets into trouble with Bathsheba. Uzziah, a 50-year king of Israel, is nose-deep in hubris when, it says, “he grew proud to his destruction.” In each of these cases, no one could conceive that anything under their control could go awry. There was simply an assumption that they deserved success and didn’t consider any downside consequences.

Israel’s national story is pockmarked with hubristic performances that open the door to humiliation and suffering. The shock of defeat at the small crossroads town of Ai, for example, happened not long after the stupendous victory at Jericho. No one before the battle of Jericho would have predicted Israel’s success, and no one before the battle of Ai would have predicted Israel’s defeat. Humility won Jericho; hubris lost Ai.

Hubris, a state of over-confidence in ourselves, our systems, and our successes, often makes leaders blind to points of weakness that are already bubbling up within an organization.

So it was with Ai. When spies scouted this two-bit town, they returned to Joshua and said, “Not all the people will have to go up against Ai. Send two or three thousand men to take it, and do not weary the people, for only a few men are there.”

That’s high-density hubris: Understate the problem; overstate your ability to accomplish.

By contrast there is Acts 6:1. “As the disciples were increasing in number, there arose a conflict in the church.” This describes surface success while all the time a split-threatening issue is heating up underneath. It is to the apostles’ credit that they quickly picked up on the situation and initiated a problem-solving process before things got worse.

After the horrific tsunami devastated many countries in the Pacific a few years ago, scientists began to plant sensors on the sea beds that could offer early warning of any seismic action that generates tsunamis. Perhaps this is what organizational leaders must do. Find people, design specific indicators, identify spiritual “winds” that signal a problem is birthing: small now, but destined to enlarge if not addressed.

Undisciplined pursuit of more

Collins admits that when he started to study organizational decline, he expected to find complacency at the root of most trouble. But he found that he was wrong. Overreaching (in some ways the opposite of complacency) was the real issue.

Overreaching is the undisciplined pursuit of growth accompanied by the neglect of those core principles upon which an organization was originally built. It is about getting larger and larger, more and more expansive, even if it costs the organization its soul.

I wonder if this is not a way of describing the problems of the Corinthian congregation. Paul’s challenge to this organization is tinged with irony. Speaking of himself in self-deprecating, contrasting terms, he nails their overreach: “Already you have become rich … you have become kings … you are so wise … you are strong … you are honored.”

Overreaching stems from a temptation to think that if we’re good at what we’re doing, we can do anything else just as successfully, and that’s the Corinthian situation.

Certain kinds of leaders, whether business or faith-based, become blinded by the elixir of expansion. All too often it flows from the need of leaders to always be proving their self-worth, and they know no other way except to build larger and larger barns no matter what the consequence.

It’s the incessant idea that everything has to enlarge, grow larger, be more impressive. Consider Solomon, who as a youngish man ascended to the throne of his father, David. Early on he was “smart” enough to recognize his need for “wisdom,” and he prayed for it. God granted the request, and the early pages of Solomon’s story are marked with amazing success.

But along the way a pattern of personal overreach began. More horses and chariots, more money, more wives: in spite of the fact that Moses had warned in earlier days that a king in Israel ought to avoid all three and remind himself of their danger on a daily basis.

Putting it bluntly: Solomon migrated toward “more” and away from “wisdom.”

My bet is that if one of us had interviewed Solomon when he was at the peak of his career, he would have had airtight, maybe even theological, reasons for his expansion. Perhaps his rationale would have muted the best of us. But the overreach ultimately led to decline. We wonder: why did this wise man have to have more and more and more? And why did Israel have to suffer as a result?

Are there Solomonic overeaches in our time?

I’m impressed that Jesus’ charge to the apostles had much more to do with making disciples than building larger organizations. He seems to have known that properly trained platoons of disciples in every town and village would take care of the movement and keep it cleansed. What Jesus may have feared was the very thing that has been tried again and again over the centuries: systematize the Christian movement, centralize it, and balloon it up in order to make an impression.

Denial of risk and peril

Collins’s third stage of decline emerges when leaders and organizations ignore or minimize critical information or refuse to listen to things they do not want to hear. The result: risks that are not properly assessed and that later take a serious bite out of organizational life. One of my favorite secondary Bible stories (just a chapter) features the conversation between Kings Ahab and Jehoshaphat. The two meet to consider declaring war against Ramoth Gilead. A prudent Jehoshaphat says, “Let’s first seek the counsel of the Lord.”

Dutifully, Ahab rounds up 400 prophets and solicits their opinion. The unanimous answer is that war is a smart decision. But Ahab had tilted the scales of opinion by bringing in false prophets.

Jehoshaphat, smelling a rat, asks, “Is there not a prophet of the Lord here of whom we can inquire?”

Ahab’s answer is remarkable: “There is still one man through whom we can inquire of the Lord, but I hate him because he never prophesies anything good about me, but always bad. He is Micaiah …”

When Micaiah arrived in the kings’ presence, he acts exactly as Ahab expected. He outlines with clarity what would happen if Ahab and Jehoshaphat go to war. And he was right on the money. Ultimately, Ahab dies in the battle.

Collins worries for organizations who base their decisions on the basis of inadequate or mismanaged information. Perhaps he would worry even more for church congregations that don’t even bother to gather data and rely on hearsay or impressions.

Yes, early in my own leadership, I learned the danger of listening to comments that began, “They’re saying …” or “The other day I heard …” or “Lots of people feel …” I grew to appreciate the unreliability of this “data.”

The most valuable information came through trusted, wise people who were empowered to systematically engage the community in conversation and with questions designed ahead of time. This made it possible for us to assess the will and the faith and the alignment of the people whenever we were testing next steps in our organizational life. And, of course, nothing was more useful to me than the information I gathered myself from face-to-face conversations with individuals and small groups.

Grasping for salvation

Stage four begins, Collins writes, “when an organization reacts to a downturn by lurching for a silver bullet.” He gives examples such as betting big on an unproven product, an image makeover, hiring promise-making consultants, or seeking a new hero-type leader who can ride in on a white horse and singlehandedly save the day.

When I tried to find biblical precedents for this principle, I was drawn to King Saul. Israel, desperate for a king so that they could be like other nations, picked the man because he came from a prominent family, had good looks, and was great with words. The people were delirious with the kind of optimism you see when a professional team acquires a superstar and is sure that they are now on the way to a championship.

In their own words: “We want a king over us. Then we will be like all the other nations, with a king to lead us and to go out before us and fight our battles.” Sounds like a silver bullet to me.

Sometimes silver bullets actually work, but Jim Collins seems to be saying, probably not in most cases.

Silver-bullet Saul prospered for a short time, but the truth was that he didn’t have the inner character to be the kind of leader that could build Israel into a stable kingdom and draw out its potential greatness. As the pressure rose, a hidden, more real Saul began to reveal himself until God simply withdrew his support. Saul’s death on a battlefield where he was desperate for a victory is pathetic.

I remember times when I felt desperate for a breakthrough victory to stem the tide of what seemed to be a church sliding backwards. Instead of examining how our congregation was doing in its fundamental practices of being servant-like people centered on the Lordship of Christ, there was the temptation to swing for the fences: the overnight revival, the special program, the high-performance staff member. I remember trying to write the perfect and passionate sermon that would realign everything over night. Now I see it for what it was: the search for salvation in a gimmick, be it a presentation, a person, or a program.

Thankfully, I learned, as did those around me, that gimmicks almost never worked. Only when we went back to caring for people, disciplining teachable leaders, introducing people to Jesus, and worshipping with a hearty spirit did things get back on track.

It all leads, Collins writes, to stage five …

Capitulation to irrelevance or death

If businesses run out of cash, organizations like churches run out of faith and spirit.

I think the Temple in Jerusalem must have been nearly like that when Jesus walked out of it and said, “I’m not coming back.” He was anticipating a day in the near future when the Temple would be little more than a pile of stones.

Not long ago I stood in front of a church building in Wales. A “For Sale” sign is tacked to the door. The cornerstone showed that it was built at the highwater mark of the Welsh revival. Now it is ensconced in weeds, clearly in a state of disuse for many years.

At what point did it start down the slope of organizational death? Who missed the hidden signs? Who ignored the core convictions? Who misinterpreted the information? Who went for the home-run ball, swung and missed?

Great questions. Ignored, the mighty fall.

Gordon MacDonald is editor at large of Leadership and lives in New Hampshire.