Preventative Maintenance

An article by Matt    No Comments

Early in December we bought a new water heater.  This wasn’t something that we were excited about, it was just something that we had to do.  As the plumbers disconnected the old water heater they told us that we were making the change just in time.  The old unit was seventeen years old and was about to flood out our newly remodeled basement.  While we didn’t know the severity of the situation with our water heater we did know that it was old and needed to be replaced.  I shudder to think of what our basement would have looked like had we put off the decision to replace the unit.

Early last week Fast Company posted a story about the levees in central California.  From the story it would seem that the levees that were built in the mid-1800s have not had a whole lot of preventative maintenance done to them of late which opens them up to the possibility of a serious disaster when the next earthquake comes.  The post gives the standard reason for the lack of care: levees aren’t sexy.  Levees don’t have the immediate wow factor that stadiums do.  They aren’t as visible as roads and buildings, and they don’t make people feel that they were given anything.  Levees aren’t flashy, but they are important, and like so many other important things that lack flash the levees languish in the bureaucratic wasteland.

While it is easy for us to shake our heads when we hear about the California levees being compared to the Katrina disaster and work up a momentary outrage at the incompetence of a government, it is even easier to miss the plank in our eye when it comes to the churches that we lead.  In the crush of life and the juggling act that is ministry, how often do we find ourselves avoiding the preventative maintenance that we need to be taking care of?  Whether it is caring well for our family, developing leaders, or working through relational issues while they are still minor there are things that each of us, if left to our own devices, naturally avoid.

When you look around the church in which you serve, what is it that you are neglecting?  As I have spoken with church leaders and served in ministries there are some typical areas that get neglected, but this list is far from exhaustive:

• Stewardship.  I mean, who really likes to talk about money in the church?  The truth is that if you do not have a plan to work through stewardship issues you will have a difficult time fully funding your budget.
• Relational issues.  No one likes to have an awkward conversation.  In many churches there are relational tensions that are simmering just below the surface.  While we like to tell ourselves that no one knows about this stuff it is evident to any first time visitor.
• Leadership development.  It is very easy to keep putting off investing in leaders.  These are people who are already committed to the church and will hang around even if you don’t spend time investing in them… for a while.  I have worked with several churches who complain about the lack of people owning parts of ministry, only to find out that they spend no time investing in leadership.
• Staff development.  Again, this is a group of people that is easy to neglect and put off till later.  But the team breaks down after long periods of neglect and the church suffers.
• Family.  This group tends to be the most forgiving when it comes to not spending time with them, but it is the most important.
• Tending to your own soul.  We have seen far too many pastors go off the deep end because they spent way too much time doing ministry and far too little time really developing their relationship with God.  This is often the first thing to go when the ministry season ramps up, and this will affect the entire ministry.

What do you find most easy to neglect?  How do you ensure that it isn’t neglected?