We're Putting the Church's Eggs in the Wrong Basket

And we’re running out of chances

With the church’s troubling outlook in the coming years (see ‘The Slow Death of the Churches of Christ’), we must acknowledge two uncomfortable realities:

1. We do not have time to spin our wheels with efforts that make little difference

2. We do not have the resources to do everything we want

Instead, we have to concentrate on the efforts that offer the biggest return on investment.

In other words, we have to leverage the Pareto Principle.

The Pareto Principle, proposed by Italian sociologist Vilfredo Pareto, states that 80% of results come from 20% of causes. For example, Pareto noticed that 20% of his plants yielded 80% of the produce, 20% of Italians owned 80% of the land, and other manifestations that point to the idea of concentrated production.

Leveraging the principle, then, is accomplished by identifying the 20% and pouring extra attention into them. That doesn’t mean the 80% are ignored. As one put it, there is a useful many (80%) and a vital few (20%).

Though the disciple-maker crew insists that everybody should be able to take on a teaching role, that’s just not what the text teaches. (For more on this, check out my latest Church Reset episode).

If this sounds unbalanced, remember that Jesus did His own version of it by having a select 70 He sent out (Luke 10), an even more exclusive 12 apostles (Matthew 10:2-4), and an inner ring of 3 (Matthew 26:36-38, Mark 9:2-3, Luke 8:49-56). Paul emphasized a similar idea of a “vital few” in the passages on elders, along with Ephesians 4:11 and 2 Timothy 2:2.

So, choices must be made.

I believe, consciously or not, we’ve operated under some sense of the Pareto Principle for years. We just picked the wrong 20%.

Preachers and preaching have received a tremendous percentage of our focus.

Spiritual young men are guided toward future preacher camps (one of which I attended and benefited greatly from). After that, we have developed ministry programs inside our Christian colleges, along with standalone preaching schools (seminaries, to some readers—another resource I benefited from). Our biggest events (youth rallies, conferences, lectureships, meetings) are all preaching events.

In many congregations, the preacher is the hub at the center of the church’s work. He’s not just there to preach the Word and make disciples—he’s expected to be a marketer, scheduler, website builder, social media manager, and so forth. Because of that, he is the de facto face of the church to most people within and without.

And now, for numerous reasons including burnout from the unbalanced expectations, pulpits are getting harder and hard to fill. (see my article, Why I Won’t Be Encouraging My Sons Toward Ministry). We’ve put nearly all of our eggs in this basket, and now the eggs are drying up.

Despite all of this focus on preachers and preaching, we remain in decline.

I’m not blaming the preachers for this decline. I’m only pointing out that the 20% we chose to emphasize was not actually the one capable of 80% impact. That’s not their fault—but it is time we learned our lesson.

Add to this that the average lifespan for a preacher at a congregation is well under 10 years and the question must be asked: who’s responsible for keeping this place healthy?

It might be time to try to put our eggs in another basket.

By our resource allocation, we’ve essentially decided that preachers are more important than elders. How many small, decades-old congregations are languishing in the hopes that the right preacher will come to town and spark a turnaround? Would they be in the same dire situation if they had their own local leadership pipeline?

I don’t think most would argue with this point:

It is exponentially better to have elders without a preacher than a preacher without elders.

Elders must be able to teach (1 Timothy 3:2), so they can take on the teaching and preaching duties in a preacher’s absence—even though they may be less polished at it. On the flip side, a preacher can’t claim the authority of an elder and operate as one. One role is hard to replace. The other one is impossible to replace.

I’ve served as a preacher without elders, and the blurring of lines regarding responsibility is such a challenge to navigate. He isn’t the singular head of the church and shouldn’t act as such, but without a clear group of Spirit-appointed leaders, church shepherding becomes democratic in a hurry.

So, you end up with a preacher who is given responsibility without authority, and a congregation that has authority without responsibility. And we wonder why small churches are dying.

But it’s not just about elderless churches. Plenty of churches who do have elders have men who were not given any kind of proper training for the job.

Current resources are often limited to a regional elder workshop on one or two Saturdays a year, or an elder track at a conference. These aren’t bad resources to have, but they’re nowhere near enough.

Consider all the exegetical, theological, and homiletical training typically expected of preachers, then weigh it against what is given to elders. It is genuinely unfair to them to be thrown into the most consequential spiritual role on the planet without being trained how to do it.

So, what can we do?

In every church that doesn’t have elders, identifying and developing potential elders must be their #1 priority. For every church that does, they should know exactly who they’re developing to step into the role next.

On a local level, what if we reoriented the role of preacher toward this task? After all, isn’t that a big part of what Timothy and Titus were commissioned to do? What if, instead of small churches hiring a guy to hopefully come in and bump the numbers up, he is hired as the man responsible for installing a leadership that can sustain the congregation even if he has to move on?

On a broader level, what if we started looking into what a Future Elders Training Program would look like? What if we put some of our preacher- and preaching-focused resources into such an effort?

This will not be a quick fix. There is no two-day conference, podcast, or book that can restock elderships. This takes a commitment to pointing and training men toward the eldership from early adulthood.

To be honest, the “what can we do” section above is a bit of a thinking out loud addition to the article, because I always aim to be practical. But a major shift from one 20% focus to another is going to take some workshopping.

However, it’s worth the effort. If we want to turn around the church’s decline, we need to start finding ways to shift the church’s central focus from preachers to elders.

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