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Strategic Missional Consulting

Are You Leading a Zombie Congregation?

Take this 10-Question Quiz and Find Out

By Ken Howard

We thought that since Ken is away on vacation, this might be a good time to bring back his much requested blog post, “Are You Leading a Zombie Congregation,” originally published in the Episcopal Church Foundation’s Vital Parishes newsletter.

In case you haven’t noticed, zombies are becoming more popular these days. Gone are the old-time zombie movies with their slack-jawed, shuffling zombies. Nowadays the undead are appearing in zombie action movies, zombie romantic comedies, and zombie Bollywood flicks.

Zombies have even made their way into business literature. Companies and non-profit organizations that are operating but not growing have come to be called Zombies, because they are in a state of limbo – not dead, yet not exactly alive either – and because they maintain their undead existence by draining resources away from healthy organizations.

So what about zombie churches? Could there be congregations in which the individual members were alive, but the congregation as a whole was undead, having lost both the desire and the capacity to grow? It’s not just possible but true. By the standard just articulated, a significant portion of our churches (perhaps even a plurality) could be classified as zombies. In fact, churches may be more at risk of becoming zombies than other kinds of organizations, because they can blind themselves to their condition by convincing themselves that their lack of change and adaptation to new contexts is due to the strength of their traditions, or by saying to themselves, “If we could just bring back [insert favorite “Make Church Great Again” memory here], everything will be fine. Worse, they often maintain their undead existence for decades by consuming their own endowments and/or denominational resources that might otherwise go to healthier congregations.

Are you leading a zombie church? Take this ten-question quiz and find out…

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A Lesson from Gardening: Why Church Planting Isn’t Always a Good Idea

By their fruits you shall know them.
Y’shua bar Yoseph
(Matthew 7:16-20).

By Ken Howard

Church planting isn’t always a good idea.

I know that may be a shock to some of my church planting friends and colleagues, especially those who believe that church planting is a “silver bullet” for growing the church.

But it’s true. Sometimes planting a new church is a bad idea.

And I say this as a person who loves starting congregations, who has started two congregations and consulted with dozens of others.

I’ve come to this realization over time. In part, it evolved over 25 years of studying church growth and church meta-demographic trends. But it crystallized during a discussion with a congregant at my last church who was a certified Master Gardener, while he was planting a flower garden at the church.

He told me that perhaps the most common and most detrimental mistake made by new gardeners is over planting: too many plants, too close together. The thinking is “how can there be such a thing as too many flowers?” But according to this former congregant, apparently there is such a thing. [Read more…]