When Momentum Hurts
Pastor Doug Beutler
I remember going to a conference and hearing a speaker say, “Momentum makes you look better than you are and the lack of momentum makes you look worse than you are.” Most of my ministry life I have been taught that momentum is a good thing. You need it to grow. You need it to convince people what you are doing is right. You can’t go anywhere without momentum. Recently I have been thinking about what happens if momentum hurts you? Is that even possible? Even writing that sentence makes the hair on the back of my neck rise. It goes against everything that I have been taught but I now believe is true.
Momentum is defined as the quality that keeps an event developing or making progress after it has started. So many times the church uses the word “momentum” for vision, numeric growth, and greatness. I have experienced momentum many times but I have rarely heard the term related to disciple making. I usually hear it used in relation to attendance, number of services, or satellite campuses. I have learned the hard way over the 27 years of pastoring a church under 100 people that momentum hurts the small church. There are 3 reasons:
1. Momentum is seductive.
I remember when I was a youth pastor of a large church in the 1980’s. When I started as their youth pastor the youth group was about 50 kids. The church was over 1,000 people. As I started sharing with the kids my vision for the youth group they got really excited. I started seeing some good leadership in the youth and I started to give them responsibility. The group grew to over 100 in the first year. By year 3 we were averaging 150 kids and our outreach events were over 400 kids. It was an exciting time. It was more than that. It was seductive. People were calling me from all over the country asking me what I was doing. I was asked to serve on many district and denominational committees in my denomination as a result. Looking back I can see how it fed my evil inner self. It was addictive that feeling of superiority. I was now an expert. Everyone knew me or wanted to know me. People almost worshiped the words that I spoke.
That is what momentum can do. It puts you in a place where you take credit for what is happening. You take the glory and give little or no glory to God. You find yourself saying things like, “I did this…” or “I made this decision” or “I made this happen”. Jesus had something to say about this in Matthew 22:37 when He said, “You must love the Lord your God with all your heart, all your soul, and all your mind…” When we place anything above our relationship with Jesus that is Idolatry. It is no wonder that so many pastors fall because they start believing what is being written about them.
2. Momentum is distractive.
I remember after I came on full time at LifeWater after being their bi-vocational pastor for 9 years we saw our church begin to gain some momentum in our attendance. We started seeing our average attendance grow over 100 people. We started feeling good about our church and we started asking the question, “What is next?” We had our leadership retreat shortly after I came on full time. Our big question was “What does God want us to do next?” We wrestled through the pluses and minuses of being an attractional model church and being a disciple making church. We felt the Lord speak very clearly that we were to be a disciple making church. So out of that retreat we formed LifeGroups, the church started discussing the sermons, we developed curriculum for these LifeGroups, we started preaching about disciple making, and we had testimonies for those who were beginning to experience disciple making. For the next several years we started gain traction in disciple making. We helped start a new church plant and we started having discussions about future plants.
During these 5-6 years there were 2 to 3 different times when we started seeing real momentum in growing numerically. Every time we started averaging over 100 people we would start talking about our parking lot, space in the sanctuary, and the need for 2 services. As we started talking about those things more we talked less and less about disciple making. I remember one particular leadership retreat where we spent the majority of the time talking about moving to 2 services and what that would take. We worked on the details of what that would look like. We talked about how the people would have to adjust. We didn’t discuss disciple making once at that retreat and I went home confused. “What had we just done?” We were so distracted. Paul said in Romans 12:2, “Do not conform any longer to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind…” I fell right into Satan’s trap. I confessed that to God and 6 months later there was no more need for 2 services because people had moved away or passed away.
3. Momentum is destructive.
You may be thinking, “How can momentum be destructive?” It can destroy relationships, God’s call on our lives, and proper priorities. What if God has called us to a small disciple making ministry? What if God has called us to focus on individuals and not the masses? What if God has called us right where we are right now? Momentum, or the lack of, can cause us to doubt our call with a sense of disappointment with our present circumstances. Momentum creates a drive in our hearts that makes us not satisfied with where God has us. We keep pushing for more, bigger, bolder, better and are not content with where God has called us to. It reminds me after B.J. Thomas became a Christian I watched an interview with him and he made this statement, “All I need is one more hit song”. I still remember how odd that comment was because he had found a relationship with Jesus but it didn’t seem like it was enough.
I remember one time a good friend of mine, Bill Armstrong, who was a church planter planting in California told me a story. He said that when he had moved out to California before he planted his church he spent about 6 months building relationships with people. He got to know this one person, I’ll call him Tim, and he spent a lot of time with him. He had won Tim to Christ and Bill was discipling him. After 6 months it was time to plant his church and so he started preparing the teams to launch his church plant. He became very busy trying to get everything organized and didn’t have as much time to spend with Tim. About 3 months after Bill successfully planted his church Tim came to him to tell him that he was going to go to another church. He missed the time he spent with Bill and he felt like Bill was too busy to have a relationship with him. He told Bill, “I wish you would have never started this church!” That always bothered Bill because the desire for that momentum forever hurt his relationship with Tim.
Creating a disciple making movement in our churches does not require momentum. You don’t need a minimum amount of people, a band, fog, lights, a dynamic series, many programs, an amazing communicator, or a spectacular children and youth programs to create momentum. We only need to love people, spend intentional time, and follow the Holy Spirit’s leading. When we try to substitute these precious gifts from God with momentum is when momentum hurts.