Diagnosing the Heart of Your Church

Host: Dr. Jamie Mitchell

Guest: Mark Barnard

Note: This transcript is taken from a Stand in the Gap Today program aired on 4/7/26. To listen to the podcast, click HERE.

Disclaimer: While reasonable efforts have been made to provide an accurate transcription, the following is a representation of a mechanical transcription and as such, may not be a word for word transcript. Please listen to the audio version for any questions concerning the following dialogue.

Jamie Mitchell:

Welcome again, friends to another Stand in the Gap today. I’m your host, Jamie Mitchell, Director of Church Culture at the American Pastors Network, where we are concerned for the church and its leaders. And that’s the focus of today’s broadcast. Let me share some statistics about the evangelical church in America you may not be aware of. The best estimate is that there are 300,000 to 350,000 Protestant churches in the US and about 100,000 of them are labeled evangelical. Of those 100,000 churches, 1,800 of them called themselves mega churches, meaning there’s a thousand or more in attendance. In 2024, 4,000 churches closed their doors, mostly mainline Protestant churches, but in 2025, it projected that a record 15,000 churches closed across the United States. A third of those considered evangelical churches. 70% of evangelical churches are under 140 to 50% of all evangelical churches are around 50 members.

The largest denominations across America, Southern Baptist, Assembly God, and non-denominational churches, which would include the smaller independent churches. So I would describe the condition of most evangelical churches as shrinking, struggling, stagnant, or sadly, shuttering, closing their doors. The natural response as a leader is to find some quick, external, programmatic solution. This is why most churches run to fads to rescue their flocks. But as you examine carefully what happens in these churches, these fads only hide for a time what’s really wrong. The fact is you got to get to the heart of the problem. We need to determine what is the heart of these churches issues, and more importantly, your church. And today I want to discuss how to help struggling failing churches and look deep inside those congregations. And to help me is the author of a new book, Diagnosing The Heart of Your Church.

And he’s a return guest, Mark Barnard. Mark, thanks for coming back to Stand in the Gap. I am very excited to discuss your new book. I’ve read through most of it. It’s really great. Welcome again to Stand in the Gap.

Mark Barnard:

Thank you, Jamie. I’m happy to be back again. I look forward to talking with you about this topic.

Jamie Mitchell:

Mark, you serve with a ministry called Blessing Point, which helps struggling churches. So you have to deal with a variety of stagnant or struggling congregations. However, where did this book come from and why is it so significant?

Mark Barnard:

This book came from a recognition that there are a lot of churches out there that don’t realize they’re in the condition that they are. Outsiders look at these churches, denominational leaders look at them and say, “Hey, this church definitely has issues.” But the church itself, like the church in Laodicea, they did not know that they were poor, blind and naked. And you have that kind of blindness to the corporate condition of your own congregation sometimes. So this book was written to help church leaders assess what’s really going on below the surface of church life. And we have to get to that point. J. Edwin Orr many years ago wrote a book with a very apt title, The Church Must First Repent. And if we want to see God things happening again in our culture, people coming to know Christ in mass at a time when we desperately need to see that happen, individual churches have to take a hard look at who they’ve become over time, do some spiritual house cleaning and restore God’s blessing on their ministry.

That’s why this book is so urgent and so important.

Jamie Mitchell:

Oh, that is great. And Jay Edwin Orr, he’s one of my favorites, a great church history person who really understood how revival comes. Mark, we’re going to get to this book, but early on something caught my eye. There was a chapter that said, “Diagnosing starts with discomfort.” We got about a minute or two or so here. What did you mean by that? Diagnosing starts with discomfort. Well,

Mark Barnard:

In the book, I use my own personal life as an illustration. I am related to a doctor and a nurse, but I do not like going to the doctor. I don’t even like going for my annual wellness visit because of what it might reveal. And so for me to get motivated to go to see a doctor, there has to be some pain. There has to be some discomfort. And not the discomfort that goes away by taking two aspirin, but the kind that lingers over days and weeks, that’s what motivates me to go to the doctor. And for a church leader to pick up a book like this, there’s going to either need to be some real curiosity about the true condition of their church or they’re going to be in some kind of discomfort. There’s pressures, there’s stress, there’s problems that won’t go away in the church.

There’s ongoing conflict that just leaves them feeling like they’re in over their head. Their family’s affected by stress. And typically they see that, they might try to fix it with a program or a policy change, but it’s ongoing and it doesn’t quit because they haven’t gotten to the root of the issue. And so to really seek the Lord about what’s going on in your church, he uses pain to motivate us. And that’s what the discomfort I’m talking about. A leader’s going to have to have some level of discomfort and that’s a good thing. The discomfort’s a blessing if it leads to renewal and revival.

Jamie Mitchell:

You know, Mark, a person’s church family is much like our own family. We look at our family and we see the problems, but when someone outside of the family says there’s something wrong with your family, it affects you. It hurts you. Isn’t that part of the reason why churches don’t get at these issues? They either don’t want to deal with it or they’re offended that you’re telling me there’s something wrong with my church.

Mark Barnard:

Well, if they’re going to be offended, then they really have a problem with the Lord because he wrote seven letters to seven churches in the first two chapters of Revelation and he called five of those seven churches to repent for things that were going on inside them. What it takes to go through kind of this self-assessment is a degree of humility or a degree of desperation. And if they’re offended, that’s a tough thing to overcome. Hopefully they have some wiser people in the congregation and say, “Hey, what’s it going to hurt us to take this a little further and examine for our benefit, what’s really going on

Jamie Mitchell:

Here?” Amen. Amen. Friends, listen, today is an important day here at Stand in the Gap because what we are talking about today affects everybody. If you are a Bible believing person, you’re a part of a Bible believing church, and so you’re part of a church family that’s not perfect and maybe healthy in many respects, but most churches, as we have seen today, are struggling. And by statistics alone, the chances are you are attending a struggling church and the one that needs to take a hard look at your heart condition. And when we come back, we’re looking for symptoms or are we looking for systemic problems? Are we just looking at the external or going deeper into the internal elements of church life? Don’t go anywhere. Stay with us here at Stand in the Gap Today. Welcome back, friends. My guest today is Mark Barnard who has just published a new book and what’s called, I love this titled The Church Cardiology Series.

It’s called Diagnosing the Heart of Your Church. Mark, a central idea in your book is discovering systematic problems in a church. What do you mean by systematic health? And is that the same as we talk about in the church all the time church growth? Is there a difference? Explain that to me. Well,

Mark Barnard:

It’s systemic health and the idea of systemic has the word system in it. And it’s based on the analogy the Apostle Paul uses in one Corinthians 12 that the church is a body and just as a human body is a system of systems that work together. The local church is the body of Christ and you have a variety of spiritual gifts in that body that are supposed to work together in a healthy, functioning, alive, spiritual entity. And when there is a problem in one area, just as Paul’s analogy says, if the eye says to itself, because I’m not an ear, I’m not a part of the body, there’s some dysfunction and attitude going on there. In effect, if those things are left and not dealt with, those kind of problems tend to spread throughout the whole body. Those kind of issues tend to be relational.

They tend to be spiritual and they tend to be historical. There are issues that are rooted in wounds that have happened in the church’s history that reshape the culture of a church. And aside from just spoiling some of the relationships, it hinders God’s blessing on that ministry. So what we have is a lot of churches that are struggling because of internal issues that the Lord’s not willing to overlook. Now how that differs from church growth or church health teaching is that really for about the last 30 years or so, the church has kind of been enamored with the church growth movement. And if you compare all these different attempts at making churches healthy, they all share the same ideas. And honestly, they’re rooted in scripture. They’re not … Well, they didn’t come out as rooted in scripture in the beginning, but they are rooted in scripture.

Things like multiplying leaders, finding a role in ministry, powerful worship, home groups. A lot of churches focus on those things, thinking it’s going to transform their ministry by coming up with a new ministry model, but it’s not going to get any traction if there are underlying issues that the Lord is not willing to overlook that we’re not dealing with. So you have the below the water issues, the systemic part, and the above the waterline issues, which is the programmatic part. And that’s how I would differentiate between those two.

Jamie Mitchell:

Mark, I want to be practical and specific for our listener. As they’re listening here and they’re trying to ascertain where their church is at, can you give our listeners maybe five or six symptoms, things that they would be able to identify, some symptoms that would help them discover or get to this idea of systemic health and what might be happening below the surface. We’re going to get to the systemic health issues in a moment and how to deal with those, but they’re attending church and they look at their church. What are some things that if they see these things happening, there’s probably something wrong or something going on that’s not good?

Mark Barnard:

Yeah. In the book, there are probably two pages of self-reported symptoms. In other words, these are symptoms that churches have articulated to us about what they’re sensing in their community of believers. So let me share just five of those things. We can talk about them briefly. The feeling that we have lost our sense of identity as a ministry, how does a church lose its sense of identity? I think probably it’s become worn down. They have a long history of problematic behavior, and they’re not seeing the fruitfulness they hoped for, and they don’t know who they are anymore. And we see this happen to hold denominations these days where their sense of identity has changed over time. They don’t know who they are. Here’s another self-reported one, a sense of bewilderment that what has worked in other ministries is not working in ours. Well, why if the church across the street is running these efforts to reach the Lord being successful, we’re doing very similar things, but we’re not being successful.

And that, if it happens repetitively over time, could be a sign that the Lord has got a spiritual block on your ministry because he’s not willing to overlook things in your history the church has chosen to overlook. Difficulty identifying our vision as a church is another one. We can’t get a handle on what God wants us to do, and sometimes that’s because the church has become way too comfortable. Another big one is struggles around the issues of authority. Oh my goodness. Oh my goodness. How many churches are struggling with issues around authority? How many churches are independent because they’re struggling with issues of authority? And then the final one I’d share, and it’s probably the most common one that I hear. People visit our church, but do not stay. People visit our church, but do not stay.

One author said that it’s like there’s an invisible neon sign on the church that only visitors can see that says, “If you visit, don’t stay. Move on to another congregation.” There’s something going on in a church when people don’t resonate with the ministry, and it has not always to do with the ministry model or the style of the worship. There’s something going on there, especially if it happens along over time that is indicative of a lack of God’s anointing and blessing on that ministry. And those are some of the symptoms that churches see before them and some of those may resonate with your listeners today as well.

Jamie Mitchell:

You know, Mark, as I was looking through that list in the book, I’m telling you, having interacted with churches as much as I do, I hear about some of these things. One jumped off the page. Just comment on this if you could. You say here, “Our community has a high rate of divorce and we divorce ourselves from our pastors and others and marriage have issues.” Is that a thing? I mean, is that something that a church should be concerned about, about the condition of even the marriages in the church being a reflection of what’s happening in the church?

Mark Barnard:

Yeah, there’s a lot of ways I could answer that question, but I would say that the church that reported that to us, I think they were located in like the highest, the county with the highest per capita divorce rate, either in their state or in the nation. And the church had a long history of disposing of pastors, just divorcing themselves from them and moving on. And that was a localized problem, but it points to a bigger problem that often goes unnoticed. And that is that local churches tend to adopt the local cultural values without putting them through a biblical filter. So we end up absorbing the things that make our community unique without really even realizing it. And that becomes a way that the church leadership ends up operating because they don’t know anything else. So this is something we have to be very aware of.

I think you’re especially sensitive to how broader cultural issues are impacting the church, but this happens every day on a local level and it happens so subtly and without realizing it, that you end up incorporating the local values into how you act and behave as a local body.

Jamie Mitchell:

Mark, when we come back from the break in a moment here, we’re going to delve into, within the book, you talk about spheres for systemic health and some specific things that need to be addressed. But one of them, as I look through this list of symptoms, one of the things that, again, jumps off at the page as I read through all of them is the failure by leadership to communicate. How big is that issue within a church? Are leaders really communicating to the people and the people to the leadership?

Mark Barnard:

Yeah. We have a free online church assessment that you can find on our website, the blessingpoint.org. And we’ve had about 500 churches take that. And when you look at the results, composite results for all those churches, communication is one of the main, if not the main problem in churches. And it’s not communication like, are there enough leaflets in the bulletin on Sunday morning? We’re not talking about that kind of communication. We’re talking about churches where they don’t talk about the things they need to talk about, where they don’t exercise biblical church discipline, that kind of communication. And when they do have communication, sometimes it becomes very reactive or it goes underground and becomes gossip. So communication is a minefield for a way to a church to get itself in trouble.

Jamie Mitchell:

Yeah. And if leaders hold back information, it can cause all kinds of confusion and misexpectations, not only that, but the church is kind of savvy enough to know that there’s something going on and it leads them to make their own conclusions or even to state their own ideas about what’s happening. Well, we’re going to delve into that more this next coming section. Friends, my guess is that each of us, if we were honest and took time to prayerfully reflect, we could identify issues that could help you diagnose your church’s systemic health or lack thereof issues. Now, when we come back, Mark is going to unpack for us from his book, Diagnosing the Heart of Your Church. We’re going to look at the spheres that will bring about health or things that we have to address to bring health to your church. Hey, if you haven’t already done it, call or email your pastor right now and tell him to jump on and listen to the rest of this stand in the gap today.

Well, thanks for staying with us. And if you are just joining us, welcome. Today we’re talking about church health and how to examine and determine the heart of your church. Mark Barnard is our guest. Mark, in your new book, you point out spheres of systemic health. I want to walk through them and gain insights on them. First is our corporate pulse. Unpack that for us. What does that mean and what is that?

Mark Barnard:

Yeah, there’s a wonderful snapshot in the scriptures in Acts chapter two of the early church functioning and a very healthy early church. It was. And what you look through and see in the list of attributes there are some things you find in every church, even today, things like teaching, fellowship, communion, prayer, large group meetings, home groups. They ate together. They shared Christ. Those are things every church has on its to- do list. They’re all seeking to fulfill that agenda. But there’s another set of items that are kind of under the radar in that description. It says there was a sense of awe. There was selflessness. There was gladness of heart. There was sincerity. There was unity. There was praise. They enjoyed favor with all the people and their community and the Lord was adding to their number daily. So you have this spirit that’s animating the activities of the church.

And I think a church could ask itself, “Hey, do we have the activities of a church?” Yes, clearly we have the activities. Do we have the same spirit animating those activities that we see in the Book of Acts? Because some churches do. I was on a Easter Zoom call with my kids last night and they live, one lives in San Diego, one lives in Tampa, two live up in the Carolinas, and they were all sharing things God was doing either through their friends or in their churches. And I was encouraged because I know I was going to be on this podcast this morning talking about the downside of church health, but there are churches that do have this spirit. And this spirit is the corporate pulse or the corporate spirit of a church. Is it strong or is it weak? And a lot of times you can walk into a church and just immediately feel the spirit of the church.

I don’t mean to feel the Holy Spirit, but the spirit, the disposition, the attitude of that body as soon as you encounter it. But really what it boils down to is this spirit of God animating the activities of our church life.

Jamie Mitchell:

Yeah. I love that because I usually delineate the difference of what we are doing, but more importantly, how we do it. We can become enamored with the programs and the outcomes and the activities, but if it’s not done in the right way, boy, it leaves those activities hollow, which kind of brings me to the second one, Mark, I want you to talk about. You list it as trust in leadership. I know that’s important just saying that it jumps off as, “Hey, this is a systemic health issues,” but how do you cultivate that in a healthy manner? How do we form and grow and cultivate this idea of trust in leadership?

Mark Barnard:

I think every leader is … I mean, when the church’s historical slate is clean, a new leader coming in is granted a certain number of, I don’t know, call it coins of trust and he can add to his account by doing some good things. Now, conflicts are going to come into every church. It’s really how you handle those things that can either lead to a break in trust or an increase in trust. If there’s one word I would harp on about how to build trust with a congregation, it’s transparency. We see so many churches not disclosing issues to the congregation that need to be brought up, that need to be discussed openly and forthrightly. And as a result, people don’t know what reality is. They don’t know where the boundaries are because we’re not talking about these things. Now you have to be extremely tactful.

We live in a litigious day, but there’s a lot of room for healthy communication when difficult things happen in the congregation. I think biblically, there’s a great example from Joshua when he’s deceived by the Gibeonites. And when it comes out that he was deceived, it says the whole congregation of Israel had an angry reaction to that because they didn’t seek the Lord about what they should have done. They just took their own human initiative, and that’s a great way to break trust. But Joshua was completely transparent about how that happened, and he came up with a workable plan that satisfied the congregation, and he was able to build some of that trust back. So I think transparency is a big thing. I think coming up with a workable plan that resonates with the congregation is a big thing, but hopefully we just don’t put ourselves in that position where we need to pull our trust back up again.

Jamie Mitchell:

And some of that, Mark, when we talk about the trust in leadership, within the context of a family, kids watch the mom and the dad, how they get along, how they interact, they put their trust in those parents and they look to the leaders to have a good relationship and they then trust the leadership. I guess part of that is if the congregation is looking at the pastor and the elders and the maybe other key leaders, deacons, if your church has that, if there’s some things going on there and you think there’s some unrest there and maybe even a breach in that relationship, the congregation hard time trusting the leaders if they don’t think they’re getting along, do you see that as a viable issue that really needs to be addressed in churches today?

Mark Barnard:

Yeah, absolutely. Now we’re talking about a book called Diagnosing the Heart of Your Church, and it’s raising issues that often need to be healed. So the next book in the church cardiology series is Healing the Heart of Your Church. And so when there’s been a history of broken trust, let’s say you’re a brand new pastor coming into a church, you don’t have any real clue about what went on before you got there, but what really went on was the last three pastors broke trust with the congregation, and this is a common scenario. So here you are the new guy, you haven’t done anything wrong whatsoever, but because you are fulfilling the office that the previous three guys held who broke trust, the trust level for you coming in is a nil. And where that exposes itself is when you share your vision for the future, because the congregation says, “Wait a minute, we actually have to trust this guy.

We have to follow him. No, let’s put the brakes on. ” Now that’s a sign that there’s something wrong in the heart of your church. It’s not just a leadership problem. That new pastor could bang his head against the wall a lot of times, never realizing that the problem is not in the present, it’s in the past.

Jamie Mitchell:

And a lot of times they never even find out the past until they’re there for two or three years and then it’s too late. I want to deal with number three and number four of these five, and we’ll handle five in our last section, but three and four, they kind of go together, mission and vision and communication. And you’ve already talked a little bit about communication. Mark, mission and vision, churches need that. That is a sign of systemic health. Explain that.

Mark Barnard:

I think the key here from a diagnostic perspective is if you have a stated mission and clear vision, but you are not getting traction on that stated mission and clear vision, that is more a symptom of a systemic problem. “Hey, we’ve got this vision in place. Why aren’t we making any headway? Why are our efforts at fruitfulness turning into famine? Why are we using these resources with no good return on our investments, so to speak? “Again, this is the spiritual component of this whole situation where God sees a church that has these internal unhealed wounds and pain and sin. He’s not going to be blessed in that. He can’t bless it. He calls those kind of churches to repentance. And I don’t think we need to demonize churches that need to repent. Church repentance should be as common as personal repentance. And Jesus called us to confess our sins every day.

So we don’t need to shame churches that have these issues. We need to just help them understand how to deal with them before the Lord so they can get their blessing back.

Jamie Mitchell:

And so developing a mission and vision for a particular church, it kind of serves as a magnet. It pulls the church to where they should be going. Isn’t that one of those systemic health issues that are so important?

Mark Barnard:

I mean, if you have good systemic health, that’s number one. Then your vision and mission will probably become a lot clearer than it was before because there’s too much static floating around in the congregation. There’s too much static and history floating around among the leadership to really latch onto something in a unified way. And absolutely, it’s a symptom, it’s a condition, it’s a revealer of what’s really going on and the church. And Jesus addressed this issue too. I think it was the church in Philadelphia where he said,” You have a little power and I’ve left you an open door. “If there’s an open door before you, but you’re not able to get any fruitfulness, there’s usually a systemic problem behind it.

Jamie Mitchell:

Amen. And that is where every church has got to get their eyes clear so they can see directly. Well, we’ve handled four of these issues, corporate pulse, trust and leadership, communication. We’ve mentioned mission and vision. When we come back, we’re going to deal with historic Back wounds in a church and then a word of encouragement to you and your churches. Look, our desire is we want to see God’s church healthy. But as we look across the landscape of the evangelical church today, there’s a lot of sickness. There’s a lot of stagnant churches. And so when we get back, we’re going to deal with this last sphere of systemic church health. So don’t go anywhere. Stay with us for this last segment. Stand in the gap today. So good to have Mike Barnard from Blessing Point Ministry with us today. Mark, can you take just a moment and share where churches can connect with you, how to get the book, and how you might be able to help a church who after today says to themselves, “Man, we are struggling”.

Mark Barnard:

“Yeah. Well, you can reach us most simply at blessingpoint.org. And if you suspect your church has these kind of issues that need to be addressed, there’s a free church healing kit on our homepage you can ask for, and it’s sent electronically to you. Some wonderful lessons about how we can work to heal churches and assessment. You can fill out all this is our gift to churches. We would style our work as a ministry, not as a business dressed up like a ministry. Our heart is for the church. We do work with churches of all different flavors as long as they submit to the authority of God’s word. And we just help churches discern what the Lord is saying to them about their history and what they need to do to clean house and become a more fruitful expression of his bride. Our vision is to restore the radiance of Christ’s bride.

And so we have to do that by working with individual churches to bring them into a place where the Lord says to them, in the end, well done as a church.

Jamie Mitchell:

Amen. Well, I encourage you to do that. Check out Blessing Point ministries. Mark, the fifth sphere of this idea of systemic health is historic wounds of a church. Speak on that. Why is that important? And I guess this is that painful part of going back into a church’s family history.

Mark Barnard:

Yeah, exactly. So historical wounds or sins, and there’s a difference between the two, but we all know that there are personal sins we commit, we repent of, we move on. But there are also corporate sins, sins that take place in a congregation that impact the whole congregation and they can wound a whole body. Now, they don’t always have to be overt sins. They can be just something that happened like maybe a long tenure of short-lived pastors whose tenure averages three years or so each. That creates a disconnect between the next pastor who’s coming down the pike because the people there are looking at their watches saying, “Well, how long is he going to be here? Do I need to even bother investing my time with him?” So that’s more of a wounding thing than a sin thing. But by and large, most of the problems we see that impact whole congregations tend to be on the sin side.

And here’s some examples, a church split. I would be hard pressed to ever identify a church split that in retrospect you could justify. There’s some ill problem going on that causes a fracture in the body of Christ. And if a listener’s ever been through a church split, it’s like having an amputation without anesthesia. It’s that painful. And then worse, you’re still going to see these dear people at Walmart when you go shopping. You cannot escape the implications of that kind of a corporate wound. There’s also abuse of a church by a pastor. That’s a common one. Sometimes the pastor is abused by the church. Sometimes there’s issues of sinful reactivity, acting out, lashing out in church board meetings or congregational meetings. Things like that just have a way of causing a church to lose its sense of identity. Shameful events. Racial prejudice has been a big one.

Economic prejudice, silence in the face of wrongdoing. And the most common one I think most people think of is a moral failure by a leader. And unfortunately, that is so common. And yet it can be healed. A church can move on. But these kind of issues impact the congregation. And because these five spheres we’ve talked about are interrelated, when you have problems in one, it tends to leak into the other spheres as well. But a lot of times it’s this area of historical wounds that we have to go back and rectify before the Lord. And the Lord is more than willing to heal these churches if they come to the great physician and ask for it.

Jamie Mitchell:

Mark, you can’t do a proper diagnosis of a church heart without both willing shepherd or shepherds and cooperating sheep. What word do you have for both pastors and elders and deacons, the leadership of the church, and then the congregation, if they really want to get at this, what word do you have for them today?

Mark Barnard:

First, I would say these are corporate issues. We cannot say that pastor or those elders are bad. Who elected those elders? Who called that pastor? The congregation had approved those decisions. So when we talk about these issues, it’s never us versus them, it’s just us. We have to come to the Lord as a body and seek his face together. The word I would have more specifically for people involved in leading these kind of congregations is B, courageous. I think the key issue, and a lot of this stuff going non-addressed is a failure of nerve. That leaders, for whatever reason, decide not to search out, not to do their work, to keep the body healthy. That’s part of the job of an elder. And who knows what the reason is? It would be different in every situation. My word to them was be courageous. To each of those churches in Revelation that Jesus wrote letters to, they all had something to overcome.

And with that overcoming, if they succeeded, there were great promises afforded to those churches. And I believe the Lord has great promise and favor on churches that are courageous enough to look under the hood of their ministry, to see what’s really going on, to check the oil of their minister, change the oil of their ministry, so that there’s less friction in the body. There has to be some new fluid that keeps the bones of the body operating in a smooth way. And it takes tremendous courage to go forward in faith. We call it the attack of the big chicken. When churches are considering this issue, they have to decide if they’re going to go forward with their fears intact and follow the Lord, even if it might cost them something. So it’s not an easy path. It’s a very effective path, but we need courageous leaders.

Jamie Mitchell:

It’s so interesting that you say that because you may or may not even know this, but at the end of most programs, like today, I will end by saying live and lead with courage. And I believe that, and I say it because having interacted with a lot of churches and a lot of church leaders, one of the missing elements today within the Christian heart and mindset is this issue of being courageous in our faith. Part of it is we lack faith. Sometimes we don’t believe God could do certain things or we just are overwhelmed by fear, fear of man, fear of ridicule, fear of rejection, fear of the rest of the church turning against you, ostracizing you, but also this unwillingness to put yourself in a position where you might suffer. We like our safety, our security, we like to feel good. We don’t want to be put out, but the avoidance of suffering is important.

But wow, Mark, we need to do a follow-up and we will. And thank you so much for being with friends. I hope today you got a taste of what’s needed to maybe deal with the real issues struggling in your church. Reach out to Mark Barnard and Blessing Point, get his help, get this book. And as always, live and lead with courage. You’re not going to fix your church problems without courage, and that’s what our prayer is. God bless you. Have a great rest of the day, and we’ll see you tomorrow for another stand in the gap today.