Some days, I think we should shut down The Church.
I don’t just mean my church, but The Church; the whole darn thing.
I absolutely love watching a show called Restaurant Impossible, where host and chef Robert Irvine and his staff, take over a struggling business. They close the doors; assessing the decor, the menu, the staff, the owners; unearthing every bit of dysfunction, mismanagement, and waste – and mercilessly tearing it out.
In a matter of just two days and 10,000 dollars, Irvine manages to stop the financially hemorrhaging, re-ignite complacent, burned out leaders, clarify the restaurant’s lost vision, and reintroduce them to the neighboring community that had turned its back.
Recently I caught myself thinking: “Man, imagine what this guy could do with The Church!”
I don’t know if Robert Irvine is a Christian, and frankly I don’t care.
What I do know, is that he brings out the best in people.
I know that his passion and standard of excellence are infectious.
I know that he takes organizations that are lethargic, polluted, and fragmented, and he finds the greatness which has been buried beneath the crushing debris of past mistakes, unchecked egos, and wasted opportunities.
If there’s ever an entity that needs such a reboot, it’s the American Christian Church.
Too many church pastors, when faced with the alarming reality that more and more people these days, are passing on their product, saying “no” to their programming, and declining their outdated invitations, simply choose to blame it all on a “sinful culture” that is rejecting God.
Instead of looking in the mirror, they continually curse the darkness, (or rather, the emptiness); thumping their Bibles, throwing-up their hands, and looking for cheap battles to rile-up their base, the way restaurant managers slap together $5.99 buffets to fill the place at lunchtime; all the while, drifting from the vision and diluting the brand.
But the hard truth for churches, much like the eateries in Restaurant Impossible, isn’t that the customers have stopped craving and loving food; they’ve just come to the conclusion that this place doesn’t deliver.
We, Church, are flat-out failing hungry people.
That isn’t our intention, of course. No one, whether a pastor, or a head chef, or anyone who starts anything whose center is serving people, wants to become unhealthy, uninspired, or irrelevant. Those things never happen in a day, anyway. They’re a slow, sad erosion over a time; the long-term result of a million bad decisions and countless, nearly microscopic compromises.
That’s why what Irvine and his crew do for restaurants is so invaluable and so brilliantly simple; they help leaders see what had become invisible to their own eyes. They tune their ears to the white noise of those who they used to hear so clearly. They recalibrate their hearts, to beat again to the drum of the initial mission.
The Church desperately needs this kind of correction… and frankly I’m afraid it will never happen, or until it’s far too late.
As I watch episode after episode of Restaurant Impossible, there are a few key elements that require the whole thing to work:
1) A leader who knows that their ship is sinking.
2) A leader who realizes that they’re not as great a leader as they thought they were.
3) A leader who is willing address the problems… even if the biggest problem turns out to be them.
4) A leader who believes that stopping is sometimes the greatest thing to do, in order to keep going.
5) A leader who is ready to be a listener.
Those kinds of leaders are getting harder and harder to find in The Church.
It’s difficult for all of us to hear criticism, and it’s certainly no picnic to address our shortcomings in front of others, but often, what is birthed for the restaurants and the owners who do the show, is something more beautiful, more focused, and more life-giving than it had ever been before.
I wonder what could happen if all of our churches shut the doors for a couple of days, invited someone smart and passionate to speak into our ministries, and if we all made the hard choices needed, to better serve people in a rapidly changing world.
People are hungrier than ever, Church.
We still have the most satisfying meal any menu has ever offered.
We may just need to recapture our passion, reassess the plan, and reset the table.
(P.S. Robert, if you’re listening, I might have a few hundred thousand episodes for a new series, if you’re interested).
