by Ken Morgan | May 20, 2025 | Uncategorized
The single greatest determinant of the future of the world Christian movement is its capacity and commitment to making disciples. And aside from crises like scandal and disaster, capacity and commitment to disciple-making will determine the future of your church too. In reaction to the steady decline in church participation following a western-world peak around 1960, debate has proliferated over church style and structure: attractional vs missional, congregational vs community, big vs small, contemporary vs traditional, addition mindset vs multiplication. While some of the debate has been useful, much of it has been at the level of how we organise and operate, rather than the deeper level of who we’re serving and who we’re becoming. Meanwhile, waning church participation in the west has continued. Having spent much of my adult life working in and on Christian organisations to help them fulfil their calling to further the mission of Jesus, I’ve become convinced that you can’t fix heart-level problems with structural solutions. I’ve worked with churches embracing the very latest missional community trends. Some have flourished, some have floundered. I’ve served very conventional and traditional churches that steadily grow, and others that continue to shuffle toward oblivion. Style and structure matter, but they’re not the primary determining factors for effectiveness. Jesus seemed unconcerned with style and structure – There’s certainly no record of him teaching about such matters. He issued or re-issued a small number of commands about whom we should love (God, neighbours, enemies and each other – i.e. pretty-much everybody) and a commission to go make disciples. Disciples, it seems, are those who...
by Ken Morgan | May 1, 2025 | Uncategorized
“I had to, I had no choice.” Statements like this are not uncommon in coaching and supervision conversations. But they’re only absolutely true in the most extreme situations: where certain and imminent catastrophe leaves one with a single viable option. In most cases, while it feels like there are no other options, a more accurate appraisal would be to concede, “I didn’t want to consider other options, I just wanted to alleviate my unpleasant feelings of anxiety as quickly as I could.” The quick fix leaves us acting on our feelings, compelled by narratives of ‘gottas’ and ‘havetas’. In the world of Freudian psychoanalysis, a patient using phrases like “I have to”, “I must”, “I should” would be a tell-tales of neurosis – an impulse from outside our conscious mind designed to protect us from intolerable thoughts or memories. . Family Systems Theory thinks about ‘gottas’ and ‘havetas’ as possible indicators of over-responsibility: “I’m afraid that ‘x’ bad outcome may happen so I’ll do ‘y’ to prevent it even if it’s not my responsibility to manage.” It’s more impulse than thoughtful. We kid ourselves that it’s just for the short-term, or just in this crisis moment. In the bestselling book ‘The Anger Fallacy’ Laurent and Menzies apply a cognitive behavioural approach to our thoughts and beliefs about what others should or ought to do. They posit that these often-unexamined expectations, of ‘shoulds’ are the basic driver of anger. When others don’t come through, sometimes their ‘shoulds’ become our ‘havetas’. While we may find ourselves giving in to gottas and shoulddas as a way of calming ourselves down in the short term, in time these behaviours take their toll. On top of the fatigue...
