Is your church a turtle church? Stuart Kellogg can tell you.
As a businessman, including a stint as president and general manager of a television station, Kellogg specialized in how organizations work. He also had experience with helping church leaders “think things through organizationally.” When COVID hit and churches were forced to close their doors, Kellogg began to observe how churches responded to lockdowns as organizations.
His observations sparked conversations with church leaders in his area and around the country. Seeking more input, Kellogg created a Facebook page, then a podcast, and then a website. After interviewing nearly 100 pastors, lay leaders, and leadership experts, Kellogg wrote a book: The Post COVID Church: An Action Plan to Thrive, not just Survive.
As the book explains, thriving after COVID will be tough for turtle churches.
Hunkering Down vs. Going Out
What is a turtle church?
When COVID lockdowns hit, churches tended to respond in one of two ways. “Turtle churches hunkered down and waited for everything to return to normal,” says Kellogg. “I realized early on that that approach wasn’t going to work.”
The lack of activity frustrated many members of turtle churches. “What are they doing all day?” some told Kellogg. “No one is going in the church building.”
While turtle churches seemed paralyzed, other churches saw COVID lockdowns as an opportunity to fulfill their mission to go out into their communities and serve. “That type of church said, ‘This is why we're here,’” Kellogg explains. These churches recognized that, after lockdowns, a return to “normal” was unlikely. Things would be tougher. Gatherings would be smaller.
And there likely would be fewer churches. Not just because of COVID, but also because of what is happening in culture.
The Perfect Storm
According to Kellogg, the traditional model for church evangelism is a “come and see” model: come to our church and let us show you what we do. That model was appropriate when the culture was open to Christianity, and the primary question about Christianity was whether or not it is true.
Now, says Kellogg, the culture is generally antagonistic to Christianity. The question is not whether or not Christianity is true but whether or not it is good. As a result, the “come and see” model doesn’t work. “People need evidence that your church is doing good outside the church building,” says Kellogg. “Without that, your witness doesn’t matter.”
Against a backdrop of rapid secularization, COVID lockdowns created a “perfect storm” that battered many churches. The people who bore the brunt of that battering were pastors and other church leaders. The experience bordered on the traumatic, but many church leaders – already struggling with burnout and depression – did not deal with it in healthy ways.
Kellogg, who has battled depression himself, makes a point of discussing depression with church leaders, especially men. “Guys don’t talk about it,” he says. An additional challenge for pastors is that many have no one in whom they can confide. Their tendency to isolate was exacerbated by COVID lockdowns, which made every isolate.
But not all churches. “I spoke with many church leaders who were not negative at all,” says Kellogg. “They viewed it as an opportunity.”
The first step in realizing that opportunity was to rally the troops. One church that did so was Mississippi’s Pine Lake Church which, according to Kellogg, has about 10,000 members across a half-dozen campuses. Church leadership ensured that, within the first few weeks of the lockdown, every member of the church received a phone call.
In forward-thinking churches, every leader – staff or volunteer – was expected to continue regular communications with everyone they served in the church family. And the communications needed to be conversations, not broadcasts. As church leaders reached out, they learned about the struggles of people in the church family, and beyond. Prayers were raised, friendships forged, and relationships deepened.
And opportunities uncovered. That included opportunities for men who previously hadn’t been very active in the life of the church.
Photo Credit: ©GettyImages/Jacoblund
Tapping into Men’s Abilities and Experiences
For most churchgoers, the primary experience with the church occurs on Sunday morning. According to David Murrow, author of Why Men Hate Going to Church, most men don’t excel at the “soft, interpersonal skills, verbal skills, and artistic skills” required on Sunday morning. They don’t enjoy singing. They struggle to listen attentively to a long sermon with no visuals. They don’t like to read aloud, which is done often in a liturgical service. They may be uncomfortable with socializing before and after the service.
“If you take those skills and look at the population,” Murrow suggests, “there are more women than men in the population who possess those gifts. Now there are certainly men out there who are verbal, studious, sensitive, and musical, but their numbers tend to be smaller.”
The skills that men do have – skills that these men have honed through experiences in the workplace and in other environments outside – often lay fallow in traditional church settings. Many church leaders are unaware of the wealth of talent that the men in the church possess. Others fail to tap those skills, says Kellogg, because those leaders are insecure that a layman will be more respected than the leader.
“When I was a member of a church in Georgia,” recalls Kellogg, “the pastor there, who was a very dynamic speaker, was having some personnel issues. I was in a Sunday School class there, and a few months into it I approached the pastor and offered to help. I said, ‘Pastor, did you know that the retired head of Human Resources worldwide for Union Carbide is in the Sunday school class downstairs? Do you think maybe he's got some good ideas here?’ Plus, the man had put out his shingle as a consultant helping nonprofits.
“The pastor sounded very excited and eager to meet the man. But I spoke to the man a month later and asked him if the pastor had ever called him. Nope. Never got in touch with him.”
When a church taps into its men, those men can be a powerful and motivating force for effecting positive change in the community. When a church doesn’t tap its men, those men get frustrated and complacent.
A Different Mindset
What’s needed, says Kellogg, is a different mindset, one that values collaboration and teamwork.
“The pastor and the staff must be willing to look at things differently,” he says. “The pastor is not running a top-down organization himself. He has people in the congregation who lead organizations themselves. These people have leadership skills and experience that he can leverage.”
Relinquishing control and relying on people outside of the church leadership team may seem risky in a church that hasn’t done it before. But, even though COVID lockdowns are over and churches are able to meet freely, a “business as usual” approach to running your church is unlikely to work for long, says Kellogg.
“The old way may work for a little bit,” he says. “A decade from now, however, those churches will be dead or dying. Everything has accelerated, and churches need to adapt.”
Our culture, he continues, needs the Christian worldview more than ever. People are not walking inside church buildings to get it, so the church needs to go into the community and lead by example.
“As Chuck Colson said, the problem isn't the world being the world, it's the church not being the church,” says Kellogg, who studied under Colson and is a commissioned fellow with the Colson Center for Christian Worldview. Two other apt quotes from Colson are:
- “The church's job is to equip the saints for works of service in the world.”
- “The church does not draw people in; it sends them out.”
When you are serving your community, continues Kellogg, you earn the right to engage people in conversations about what the Bible says, and what Christians believe, about a variety of issues, even contentious ones, such as race, sexuality, and justice.
“I don’t care how big your building is,” says Kellogg, “you aren’t going to fill all the needs there, because some people aren’t going to come in. So you have to go to them. And that’s how it should work anyway.”
Photo Credit: ©GettyImages/digitalskillet
Chris Bolinger is the author of three men’s devotionals – 52 Weeks of Strength for Men, Daily Strength for Men, and Fuerzas para Cada Día para el Hombre – and the co-host of the Empowered Manhood podcast. He splits his time between northeast Ohio and southwest Florida. Against the advice of medical professionals, he remains a die-hard fan of Cleveland pro sports teams. Find him at mensdevotionals.com.