You don’t have to look far to see how the church is losing its respect and priority in people’s lives. Just this morning two articles came into my news aggregator.
“19 Numbers Which Prove That America is Turning Away From Christianity”
“The Inevitable Collapse of Organized Religion in America”
I see articles like this every day. A couple of weeks ago I asked the question
“What Happened?”
There is no silver bullet but I would like to begin answering that question today from my perspective.
The church is dead, dying, and irrelevant partly because we have promoted high capacity doers over equippers.
Let me explain by using a football analogy.
We’ll use football, mostly because I love it, but also because stats are easy to get and evaluate.
After a very quick Google search I found:
There are just over 1 million high school football players in America.
About 67,000 of them go on to play in college.
There are currently 1,696 players in the NFL.
.166% of high school players will go on to play in the NFL.
.003% of high school players will go on to be head coaches in the NFL.
These 32 coaches must be pretty talented football players right? Let’s take a look.
Of the 32 coaches only 9 played in the NFL. The top 15 have a winning percentage over .500 and only 3 of them played a single snap in the NFL and only 5 played at a division one level. The old adage “if you can’t play coach” is true but for different reasons than we thought.
Leading/equipping and doing are different skillsets. There are a very few who can do both. Art Shell and Mike Ditka are among the 100 greatest football players of all time and were also pretty good coaches but they are the only two in the top 100.
When you’re looking for leaders do you go looking for the best “doers” or the best “equippers”? Do you look for Tom Brady or Bill Belichick? We definitely want Tom Brady on our staff but we want Bill Belichick to lead the team.
More on this later but today I leave you with this.
If we want the church to become vibrant again there are many things we need to focus on however; from a leadership perspective a top priority must be to put equippers in places of leadership.
Your thoughts?
