by Ken Morgan | Apr 15, 2025 | Uncategorized
I once had a minister tell me that he worked 168 hours a week – i.e. he was always available. Most people would place him high on scale of risk to burnout. In the church and NFP sectors, burnout is both a ubiquitous concern and widely misunderstood risk. It’s not uncommon for my coaching and supervision clients to report feeling ‘burnt out’. When I probe further, they’re actually feeling deeply tired – often attributed to working too many hours. Fatigue due to overwork is only a part of the burnout picture. Many leaders ‘work tired’ for years on end without burning out or becoming symptomatic. Conversely, I’ve coached leaders whose role – on paper – should be comfortably fulfilled in the work hours for which they’re paid, yet they sincerely report that their energy is spent, their emotional reserves depleted, and the prospect of quitting seems inviting. Clearly, there’s more to burnout than tiredness. The Maslach Burnout Inventory (MBI) is the standard measure for burnout, measuring three key indictors: Emotional Exhaustion – feelings of being emotionally drained and overwhelmed by the demands of your work. This is broader that simply physical tiredness. Depersonalization – a sense of detachment or cynicism towards your job or colleagues. Sometimes this includes a loss of compassion for others. You may find yourself thinking, “No one else cares, so why should I?” Reduced Personal Accomplishment – sense a diminished of efficacy and achievement in your work. A sense that your effort is not making a difference. A complicating factor is the human capacity for misattribution. We’ll sometimes attribute our fatigue, disillusionment and hopelessness to our employment when...
by Ken Morgan | Mar 6, 2025 | Uncategorized
Sure, it was a thinly-veiled act of sabotage – but its efficiency and elegance was breathtaking. The attractive mid-sixties cream-brick church in a well-to-do suburb was ripe for revitalisation. Situated in the middle of a pedestrian suburb, literally dozens of young families walked past the building every day taking their kids to school. The congregation was aged and had dwindled well below the size of viability. The previous two ministers had departed after short incumbencies, stating they had ‘burned out’. The new minister decided to start an afternoon contemporary-style service, more likely to be relatable for the couples with little kids who were moving into the area. The service launched with promising attendance. Perhaps the church could ‘j-curve’ back toward flourishing. That’s when the gatekeepers sprang into action. Waiting outside the church as those attending the new congregation were leaving, the old guard were armed with clipboards and disingenuous questions. The ‘new congregation survey’ successfully communicated to the newcomers that they were invaders who were threatening the heritage of the church. The fledgling congregation dwindled and discontinued soon after. This really was the church’s last shot at a future. The frustrated minister departed and within a couple of years the church was closed by the denomination. To the average church minister, footy club president or not-for-profit CEO, gatekeepers seem like bloody-minded conspirators who would rather the organisation die than change. As ‘pillars’ of their organisations, gatekeepers’ sometimes destructive actions seem to make no sense. To understand gatekeepers and what drives them, we need to appreciate that humans...
by Ken Morgan | Feb 12, 2025 | Uncategorized
Mum was the first of our family to become a believer. Over the next couple of years, we kids each made faith commitments. It took Dad another year or two. This is my family’s story, which, according to research by Thom Rainer, is an example of the most common pattern for unchurched families coming to faith. This pattern, combined with earlier research by Starke and Finke, helps us understand why ministry to families with young children – especially preschoolers – is one of the most fruitful areas of mission focus for local churches. Based on my work over the past 25 years with a couple of hundred churches, I estimate around 80% of local churches identify families with little kids as a primary mission focus. Nowadays it’s unusual for find a church that’s not running a playgroup, mainly music or similar. For some churches, these programs form the centrepiece of a fruitful mission pathway. For others, it’s a lot of effort just to provide a community service. How do we understand the difference? Let’s dive into the research. In their groundbreaking work on the sociology of religion, Rodney Stark and Roger Finke found that religious conversion is most likely to occur in a context where a person has made a geographical move and has experienced a change in their social position: new place, new friends. In the western world there are a couple of life stages where these changes are common. In the US and UK, young adults leave home to go to university – a change in location and social position all in one go. It’s why ministry to university students is particularly fruitful in these nations. In Australia, young people have more diverse patterns of transition to independent adulthood. But it tends to...
by Ken Morgan | Jan 14, 2025 | Uncategorized
Just the same as individuals make new year’s resolutions, churches will sometimes use the dawning of a new year as an opportunity to kick off some new initiatives. It’s usual that new initiatives are designed to bring some kind of growth – either in the form of new people coming to church or deeper discipleship among those who already do. Later in the year we’ll take a look at discipleship, so for now let’s have a think about new year’s initiatives to produce numerical growth. It’s very, very common for a church leadership team to ask, “What can we do to grow?” and the most common type of answer is to do something additional to what the church is already doing, which usually means spreading the church’s human and financial resources just a little thinner. It’s an uncommon church that has ‘spare’ capacity just waiting to be put to use. New initiatives usually involve the committed people committing a bit more. A common effort at growth involves a focus around a single event, often with a very broad focus in the hope that lots of new people will attend. Church fetes and festivals, concerts and community carols are common in this category. Less common is consideration around ‘What’s next?’ I asked this question of a church that planned to revitalise their fete targeting its appeal to families with primary school aged kids. Their ‘next’ was a school holiday program.. The whole design of the fete was to engage families (not raise money) and to promote the school holiday program. The fete was ‘successful’ because the school holiday program (same mission focus, one step forward in the pathway) was filled to capacity. If you’re contemplating a new one-off event, consider how people will be invited to a ‘next step’....
by Ken Morgan | Dec 10, 2024 | Uncategorized
The lead-up Christmas is called the silly season for good reason. All of those endless breakup parties, various seasonal activities that have become must-dos for churches, plus numerous family events to wrangle. No wonder we take most of January to recover. Then comes February and we restart all of our regular programming, hoping we’ll have enough volunteers to get all of the previous year’s wheels turning again. With people working extra hours to cover cost of living increases, parents enrolling their kids in numerous extra-curricular activities, and congregations aging, it’s getting harder to secure volunteer hours . Meanwhile safeguarding, OHS and other compliance obligations soak up volunteer time. We can fall into the habit of just assuming that everything we did last year will continue into the new year. We try to do the same things with less resources and by Easter we’re all exhausted again. Working with a couple of hundred different churches over the past 25 years, I’ve observed that most churches try to do too many activities and try to reach too many people all at once, the result being reduced effectiveness and increased fatigue. Effectiveness is not just keeping the wheels turning, it’s creating opportunities for people to become followers of Jesus. I’ve developed rough rule of thumb to help churches figure out balancing sustainability with effectiveness: for every 50 people that attend your weekend public worship services, you can pursue on Mission Focus Group (MFG). If you haven’t heard the term before, an MFG is a demographic, or associative slice of your local community that have a common set of needs or interests. Churches do well to identify specific Mission Focus Groups and tailor...
by Ken Morgan | Nov 12, 2024 | Uncategorized
Church leaders are anxious for their churches to grow. Staying the same is effectively going backwards as congregations age, become more insular and less flexible. Anxiety’s effect on our thinking is narrow our focus and shorten our planning horizon. Anxious thinking makes us vulnerable to casting about for simple solutions that promise quick results. Just run this training package from a mega-church, copy this program that’s working across town, get in a bunch of consultants to diagnose the malaise. Any or all of those options may be useful – but unless they address the underlying culture, they run the risk of just consuming time and energy with little sustainable outcome. Programmatic interventions sometimes promise cultural change, but by themselves are relatively impotent. Culture is personal – based on deeply-held presuppositions that are rarely recognised and even more seldom questioned. Culture is reinforced by hundreds of decisions and behaviours that have often become presumed and habitual. People can undergo training, run a new program and read a consultant report, nodding in enthusiastic agreement while simultaneously perpetuating a counter-missional culture simply by their unchanged, everyday actions. We may spend money, time and effort trying to change, and all too often find ourselves stuck in the same groove. Leaders have a disproportionate influence on culture. Those leaders may be paid ministry staff, members of a leadership team, or longstanding gatekeepers. It’s not unusual for gatekeepers to exert seemingly insurmountable influence on church culture. Sometimes a pastor’s efforts at culture change are swiftly and elegantly extinguished by well-entrenched...
