Surprising Statements I’ve Heard during Church Consultations, Part 2

If you read yesterday’s post, you read some surprising statements I’ve heard during church consultations. Here are more: 

1. “It’s impossible to worship without hymns.” In fact, in this church it was hard to worship with hymns. Or with praise choruses. 
2. “We’ve done this before, and we won’t do anything with your report.” Those are defeating words for a consulting team. In this case, they were also accurate words.  
3. “Our current worship service isn’t working well, so we’ve decided to go to multiple services.” It’s never that easy. The same leadership team that leads one failed worship service will likely add only another failure.  
4. “Is it okay if I cry?” It was actually my wife who heard these words from a layperson she was interviewing. The sister in Christ had been deeply grieving about her church, but she felt she had no opportunity to express her concern. 
5. “Our church can’t do 100 surveys of unchurched people because we don’t know any unchurched people.” We usually ask for enough members to interview 5 or 10 unchurched people each. When the church can’t even locate that many unchurched folks, they’ve just identified part of the problem.
6. “Do you want to go to a friendly class?” I promise you that a volunteer at the welcome center asked me this question when I asked for directions to a class. I said, “Sure,” and she directed me to a friendly one.  They weren’t . . . .  
7. “Why should we do a demographic study of our community?” This church hadn’t even considered their community. They assumed we’d help them fix their internal issues, and suddenly the community would come to them. 
8. “We’re really evangelistic. We send several mission teams overseas each year.” This church did, in fact, send multiple teams overseas, and they spent considerable dollars on missions. They just didn’t reach anybody who lived near them.
9. “Well, those results are just wrong.” This angry leader was convinced that our findings were skewed. Here was the problem, though: we were simply reporting what his own people told us about the church through a Church Health Survey and interviews.
10. “We use the baptistry as a storage area.” I learned this information during a building tour. I knew from their records they weren’t reaching non-believers, but I had no idea they didn’t even plan to use the baptistry. 

COVID has seriously slowed down the opportunities for onsite consultation, but stay tuned. I’m sure we’ll hear more statements in the days to come. . . .