Posted on October 8, 2007 - by Anthony

Programs vs. People

Something that has always driven me mad (other than watching the Boks and Liverpool) is the consistent tension within our churches (maybe not yours, i don’t know…) to emphasise programs which ultimately come at the cost of building up people.  It’s a weird phenomenon within many churches at least, where they are even Gospel driven churches seeking to minister to, encourage and teach the wider congregation.  And so the right and natural step is to plan some kind of strategy in order to accomplish this.  Thus the “program” is born; a planned effort to achieve certain goals which may include that of teaching, training and evangelism.  Sounds great?  Of course, that’s how things are achieved, you achieve your goals by setting up these planned programs.

So what goes wrong?  Well, along the way the program seems to takes over, the plan overrules something very important; the people within the structures.  And so a church might be able to create many ministry opportunities and yet have a congregation of uncared-for people.  Goodmanson has come interesting ideas on how to remedy this problem, his take (in a general sense) however is to start over in the form scratch by planting a new church.  Question is, how do we avoid and fix this problem in our established church?