Several years ago, a mentor gave me some important advice: “Don’t survey the general crowd for what you need to do. Survey your leaders.”

Ask everyone, he warned, and you’ll get a lot of answers that are about individuals’ personal needs. You’ll get “consumer” feedback. Regardless of how you frame it, I think asking for people’s feedback in a large forum will ultimately be heard by many as, “What do you like? What do you not like?” Essentially, “how can we please you as a customer?”

By even asking in this context, you’ll be promoting a consumer mentality. Later, people will come and say, “I told you I thought we needed a ______, and there’s still no sign of it. Why not?”

Ask your leaders, and the focus of the responses should be different. If your leaders are good leaders, they know the people. They know what a lot of your people are thinking. What your people need. If you have found/chosen your leaders wisely, they’re mature. Spiritually mature, emotionally mature. And if you’ve worked with and trained your leaders the way you should have, they understand the larger mission you’re after, the values and culture you want to develop, and even some of the reasons that certain things sound like good ideas but are fraught with problems in reality.

Your leaders should be able to speak well to what your people need, but they’ll speak to it differently. It won’t come as a list of demands or personal desires. It will come from a desire to make the whole better, to advance your common cause.

I spent a good chunk of time recently with our community’s leadership team, and it was a great experience. Refreshing. Refining. We took an honest look at how our community is doing and made a number of hard assessments.

Now I’ll admit I’m often quick to defensiveness and rationalization when it comes to hearing about weaknesses and missed opportunities. It usually doesn’t feel good to hear those things, and I tend to want to qualify and contest them. There was none of that this weekend. There was no need for it. There was a sense that we’re all in this together. And a sense that we all want the same thing: to be better.

Could I have gotten a lot of the same assessment from our larger congregation? I think so. I think these leaders have a pretty good read on the larger group, so I hope their responses reflected a lot of the things we would have heard from the larger group.

And please don’t get me wrong — many others in the congregation (I’d go so far as to say most), given the same focus and environment would have come to these assessment questions with just as much of a team-spirit and charitable attitude. I’m not trying to draw a clean line here between the “official leadership team,” who can be trusted to handle honest assessment well, and all the rest, who will just tell you what they want. That’s not how it is.

But in a number of settings, I’ve also witnessed how that “consumer” mentality takes over when assessment is open to the general public. It’s not that everyone begins to demand what they need, but a few do. And those squeaky wheels will squeak louder and louder. And they’ll begin to influence others to start thinking about their wants and needs. And in the end, the majority of what you’re able to hear and take away will be squeaking wheels.

Now there’s something to be said for allowing everyone to be heard. When you give everyone a chance to share their feelings and ideas, you help them feel like they haven’t been silenced and ignored. I’m still trying to find the best way to handle that. I see its need and its purpose. I’ve seen it done in the form of a “listening session,” where the goal isn’t to resolve or explain anything, but simply to listen to the people.

But I’ve also seen this: after those listening sessions, people came back and asked, “So what did you do about it?” They had shared a felt need, but their desire wasn’t just to be heard. Their desire was that something happen. And they had every right to expect that. If it was just about them being heard, but nothing changing, they might as well have spent that hour doing something more useful. We set people up for disappointment when we tell them we want to “listen” but have no follow-up. So then, the idea of a “listening session” being all about listening isn’t really true. It implies action. Are you ready to take action? And is the general public the best group for you to survey before you take action?

In all, I’ve found it most productive and helpful to ask my leaders for their gut-wrenching honest assessents of how we’re doing. I’ll talk to many others one-on-one, and certainly if they seek me out to discuss something they’re seeing, but I think my mentor’s advice on this was good. “Don’t survey the general crowd for what you need to do. Survey your leaders.”

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• Your church has a communication problem

A while back, I wrote about why “Your church has a communication problem.” I said that I feared I didn’t have solutions for this problem. In fact, one of my best solutions right now is just to help everyone understand why the problem is occurring.

But I also promised a second post with some suggestions and tools that I’ve found helpful.

I’ve found that post more difficult than expected. I’ve given it two or three shots. One time it sounded cynical and condescending, the next time it didn’t actually seem helpful. And it was a little embarrassing each time because I recognize how badly my church and I have failed at some of these, and I felt ashamed to put out any suggestions as if I were any expert.

What I want to try to show the frustrated, under-communicated-with church member:

1 – Leaders aren’t trying to hide things from you. I’ve never seen something done that the leaders were intentionally trying to hide from the congregation. I’m sure it happens, but I don’t think it’s often.

2 – Leaders also aren’t trying to exclude you from a decision you should be part of. As I mentioned in the previous article, the lines for decision-making aren’t all clear-cut. And sometimes they are clear-cut, and we just make a mistake. I received a very kind e-mail from my lay leader earlier this year telling me she was thrilled about a decision I had made, but also stating that it was the kind of decision she should be in on from the beginning, not learning about after the fact. She was right. I should have known better. That kind confrontation was helpful.

3 – Some of the most damaging things I’ve seen have come when people who didn’t have the correct information began making assumptions, getting emotional about those assumptions, and sharing both the assumptions and the emotions with others. That just hurts us all. If you don’t understand something or you’re not sure you have the whole story (i.e. any information that you only have second-hand), you’ll do everyone a favor by going to someone directly involved.

4 – An announcement from the pulpit usually isn’t the answer. For almost every new program or event, the magic bullet for awareness is the pulpit announcement. But you don’t really want them all announced from the pulpit. Here’s why:

a) If everything was announced from the pulpit that people would like announced, it would likely consume 15 minutes of the worship service.

b) With that many announcements, people zone out. They may hear your announcement, but most of them aren’t listening. [See my suggestions to leaders below.]

c) You’ll think that announcement was the magic bullet you needed and that you’ll get a great turnout for whatever it is you’re doing. You’d probably be much better to focus energies on personal invitations.

See Phil Bowdle’s great post: “7 Reasons Why You’re Not Getting a Stage Announcement”

For most of this, you can replace “pulpit announcement” with “bulletin insert” or “prominent spot in church newsletter” or whatever mass media your church uses. In my experience, at least, though these are the first answers for communicating about events, they’re not all that effective.

5 – Go easy. I’ve seen a lot of anger and animosity in the church because people wanted more communication. I’ve hopefully shown why communication in the church is so tricky. Why part of it is our leaders’ fault, but why part of it also is beyond their control. And at the end of the day, communication isn’t, and shouldn’t be, the top priority for pastors. It’s not their primary area of training, and it’s not truly what you most need them doing. Top priorities need to be preaching well, leading a faithful worship service, being with people in times of need, and equipping people as disciples. There are times that those priorities will need to squeeze the others out.

What I want to try to show the frustrated, blamed-for-under-communicating church leader:

1 – You probably are under-communicating. You live in church world. You talk to lots of people. Something that you’ve known about for days, weeks, and months is still news to most others. You must keep communicating it!

2 – You need a decision-making structure. Do you have a clear structure in place that helps your leaders and your congregation know who should be in on which decisions? Are there guidelines you’ve established about when a decision requires a larger group’s input? (e.g. You make the call on the $80 repair, but your building committee wants input before the $800 repair.)

3 – You need a system for communication. A helpful starting point: take notes/minutes at each meeting. Leave a section dedicated to “decisions made” so that you can clearly see what decisions you have made. Whenever you make a decision, then ask, “Who else needs to approve this before it’s finalized? Who needs to know about it before it goes public? Who needs to know after the fact? How should we notify them all?” Put your answers to all of those in the “action items” portion of your meeting notes. Then follow-through.

For a lot of great help on church communications systems, let me refer you to Phil Bowdle. He’s doing this in a pretty large setting, as a full communications director, but you can still implement a lot of what he’s suggesting.

4 – Keep it simple. Have you found yourself giving 20 announcements each Sunday? If so, your people are hearing so much that they’re probably listening to almost nothing. Worse, they may be giving attention to the things that you’re less interested in them hearing (e.g. they take note of the scrapbooking party next week and miss your core discipleship groups, as if the two are equal a la carte options).

What are your top priorities? One or two or three. Keep those consistently in front of people. That means axing a lot of the rest. Which will not endear you to the people who want their bake sale announced for a month leading up to it. You can cave, but it’s more for your own benefit, not the benefit of the church. Or you can find ways to help people use other channels and preserve the pulpit announcements for only the top priorities.

5 – You’ll never be perfect. You’re probably going to continue being criticized for under-communicating. You’ll hear “we didn’t know about that” for things that have been announced in newsletters, worship services, board meetings, on Facebook, etc. It’s just the nature of church communication, I’m convinced. Don’t get yourself too worked up about it. And please, don’t forsake your pastoral duties to spend all your time ensuring that everyone is receiving the communication they want. Ultimately, your pastoral duties are more important. Forsake those, and you’re just the communications director for a social club.

Okay, there’s my attempt at a helpful, non-cynical set of suggestions for church leaders and members. How’d I do? What questions do you have? What would you add?

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• Your church has a communication problem

Follow-up now available: Some help for your church’s communication problem

If your church is like most American churches, you have a communication problem. If you surveyed active church members across the nation, I’d guess that the vast majority would list “communication” as one of their church’s greatest failings, or say that their church isn’t “transparent” enough.

My church has a communication problem. If you’re a church leader and hear that complaint/lament regularly, I can empathize with you. If you’re a member of my church, I apologize to you. We have a communication problem. I know it. I wish we didn’t. You can go somewhere else, but unless they’re not doing anything, or are a mega-church (I’ll explain that below), they probably have a communication problem, too.

I usually try to suggest solutions where there are problems, but I’m afraid my goal here is a bit less optimistic. I think the best I can do is provide more understanding of why this is such a frequent problem. And then I’ll offer some suggestions to the frustrated, under-communicated-with church member and the frustrated, regularly-blamed-for-under-communicating church-leader.

A Diagnosis – Confused Constituencies

Here’s my hypothesis: the church’s (and other social organizations’) constituencies fall into a very different category than the standard organization’s constituencies. Because of that, we have a very difficult time communicating with them the way they think they want to be communicated with.

The Church as a Family

Many complaints about “transparency” come when we frame the church in familial terms. If your church is a 15-person house church, that might be pretty legitimate. But let’s face it, in larger churches, the family analogy just doesn’t hold all the way through.

A family doesn’t have full-time employees.

I don’t know any families (in this case, ones comprising more than 15 people who don’t all live together), with a single, large combined budget.

A transparent family is one that all knows each other rather well, whereas in all but very small churches, the people don’t even all know each other’s names.

And so, when we hear complaints like, “We have a right to know all the details about [insert difficult situation/decision]. We’re a family!” it doesn’t really work. Whenever there’s a complaint about communication not working like a family’s would, we should ask whether the situation is a typical family situation. Families don’t hire and fire people. Families don’t have professional communication departments to inform them of events in the family. They call or e-mail or visit each other. If that sort of organic, non-professional communication isn’t happening in your church, it’s probably a good sign that we’re not truly dealing with a family situation.

Which takes us into the realm of the organization…

The Church as Organization

Most organizations have three primary constituents: employees, customers, and owners. There’s a relatively clear and distinct strategy for communication with each group.

Which constituency would we associate active church members with?

Customers

Some would want to consider church members like customers. But that’s not usually the reality. The decision-making expectations are different. So is the expectation for how much information is available.

If your favorite restaurant changes the menu, decides to open a second location, or decides to close on a particular day, you don’t expect to be consulted. Good businesses will let their customers know about decisions like that — usually through their marketing departments. Some might even get customer input through surveys. But the customer doesn’t typically expect to be brought into the decision-making process. Nor do customers expect to receive regular information about that business’s budgeting, staffing, or property decisions. Customers don’t expect “transparency” about all of those areas.

Church members usually expect to be brought into the decision-making process much earlier than a typical customer would. And they expect to receive more information than customers do. They’re not customers.

This is where some mega-churches may get an exception. Their size and centralized leadership structure make it clear that they’re religious service providers to their members, who are religious service consumers. Nearly all decisions are made by the staff, with only the biggest decisions going to some sort of “board” (compare to “owners”), and then communicated to the members by a marketing/communications department. Andy Stanley’s North Point Church in Atlanta is a great example of this employee-driven model.

So there’s actually a solution in this: make a more clear divide between employees, owners (i.e. church board), and customers (i.e. members). It’s much easier to communicate if the “church board” expects only to be brought in on the biggest decisions (think in terms of the most crucial 3-5 decisions of the year), the employees are fully charged with operations, and the members expect to be communicated with like customers.

Of course, I’m not advocating this. I don’t like it. But it would make communication easier.

Owners

In a small company, there are usually just a few owners. How do they get their information? Mostly through one-on-one communication with their managers. That doesn’t work unless only a handful of church members want to be treated this way.

If we look at this more like a large organization, though, we have two options:

1. We treat members like shareholders. That probably looks like a quarterly update and annual meeting. I don’t know many who would be satisfied with that. They want to know more and know it earlier.
2. We treat the board like owners and the rest like customers. Now we’re back to what I laid out above.

Employees

The place I see the most complaints comes when active members would probably like to be communicated with like employees. And this makes some sense in any church that relies heavily on volunteers for ministry and committee work. Those volunteers are like employees — they’re the ones making it happen — they just don’t get paid for it.

But there’s another difference: most of those volunteers have day jobs. That means they don’t spend the majority of their week immersed in the details of the church, like the actual church employees do.

If they were actual employees of the church, it wouldn’t be unusual for them to meet weekly – perhaps even daily when a crucial decision needs to be made. If they were actual employees, it wouldn’t be unusual for them to exchange rounds of e-mails every week. That’s highly unusual for volunteers, though. And it should be. Most of them have day jobs!

But the problem is that in most people’s day jobs, the other people who are needed to make a decision are also at their day jobs. And so the decision turn-around can be reasonably fast. Employees are unsurprised by multiple inter-organizational e-mails per day.

I receive 20-30 church e-mails per day and send as many. And I attend no less than 5 or 6 church meetings each week. And I spend a considerable amount of time in the office, learning about things just because I was present when they happened or because of inter-office conversation. So I know a lot about what’s happening in the church. Even with that, I occasionally learn things late and get caught by surprise. By comparison, a daily e-mail and weekly meeting is far too much for most church members (and I don’t blame them), and it still wouldn’t be enough to get them fully up to speed.

So I would argue that we can’t communicate with church members like customers. They’re more than customers. They want more information, want it earlier, and often want to be part of the decision.

We can’t communicate with church members like owners. There are far too many of them to give them the personal communication a small group of owners gets, and they want far more than what typical shareholders get.

We can’t communicate with church members like employees. They can’t handle dozens of e-mails per day and multiple meetings per week. They can’t handle the volume of information typical employees receive, nor can we produce that volume for our members without stopping a lot of the other things we’re doing.

And so our problem: churches and their members (and other social organizations) are confused about what kind of constituents their members are. The volume of information desired is often something just short of what employees receive, but that’s too much volume for the church to produce and for most people to truly be able to handle.

The Church as Pastoral, Strategic, and Social Organization

A final problem relatively unique to the church in its communication is that it serves as a pastoral, strategic, and social organization. Here’s what I mean…

As a social organization, the members of the church have relationships with each other. They talk regularly. It’s not uncommon for them to receive more church information (and occasionally misinformation) through casual conversation than through actual church communications.

So for instance, several church members notice that a family hasn’t been around for a while. They know that family had been upset by something that happened in the youth ministry a while back and now assume that’s why they left. They don’t understand why the pastor never did anything. What they don’t know is that the pastor met with that couple several times in a counseling situation, and the reason they left had to do with marital problems totally unrelated to the youth ministry problem.

But the pastor can’t say that. (S)He can’t announce it in the church newsletter each time a person leaves for reasons (s)he may fully understand, yet the church doesn’t know. Most people would generally disapprove of any sort of public announcement of their leaving when it’s not because of a move, and it would usually be inappropriate.

And yet, because of that lack of information, our social networks fill in the blanks with whatever we can most easily fit into them. There’s a legitimate lack of communication here. But it’s an appropriate one.

The church as strategic organization has another communication challenge. As a strategic organization, any significant decisions need to pass through a process. But as a social organization, a large number of people are emotionally invested in those decisions. If people learn about something in its earliest stages of the decision-making process, it may produce undue speculation, rumor, and consternation over something that will never come to fruition. If they’re not let in at those earliest stages, they’re likely to be hurt and offended for not knowing sooner.

Managing emotions and strategic decisions in a social organization makes communication particularly difficult. We’re not just dealing with formal lines of decision-making, we’re dealing with all the social and emotional aspects of this peculiar organization.

Your church has a communication problem. And it’s not as easily fixed as you might think.

Suggestions for better communication and better communication expectations

I’ve laid out many of the problems we’re dealing with in some detail. And as I said at top, I’m worried that I don’t have a great solution. I think so long as we continue operating churches as large, professional organizations, there will always be a gap between communication expectations and realities.

But I do think we can do better. I’ve realized several of my own failings in church communications, sought advice, and am trying to do better. In my following post, I’ll try to offer some resources and suggestions for the frustrated, regularly-blamed-for-under-communicating church leader. I’ll also offer some suggestions for the frustrated, under-communicated-with church member.

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