Give Them a Person, Not a Program

by Brian Rutherford

When I moved to Albany in 1996, the church I joined as an intern was still a toddler.

Our staff was large for a church of a couple hundred people. Three full-time pastors. One part-time. Three overqualified interns. Nobody was making a livable wage. All of us were working second or third jobs just to make it work.

We told ourselves we were staffing for growth.

What we did not see was what we were building underneath it. A culture where the staff carried the mission and the congregation watched. We were not doing it on purpose. It just happened. 

When you hire talented, committed people and pour everything into them, the congregation slowly learns, without anyone ever saying it out loud, that the mission belongs to the professionals.

I was not the only one who lived this. 

In Radical Alignment, Rodney Elliott, Executive Pastor at Pathway Church, says it plainly: “For those who have grown up in church, it can be easy to get stuck in a consumer mindset. They've never really been a part of the Great Commission. They've never lived out the mission of Jesus, instead consuming things that the church provides and thinking it's the finish line.”

The question most leaders ask is some version of this: why will our people not engage?

But that may be the wrong question.

The better question is this: have you ever handed them a personal mission?

Not a program. Not a serving opportunity.

A purpose worth living for. A person they already know who does not know Jesus. Someone to love, serve, and treat the way Jesus would treat them if He were in their shoes.

That is the difference between mobilizing people and merely activating them.

Activation gets people busy. Mobilization gives them someone to move toward.

Pathway Church figured this out. Elliott describes what it looked like when it worked: “A couple thousand people would find one person who doesn't know Jesus, be a good friend, legitimately care about them, pray, and see what God does.”

That is not a campaign. It is a culture.

And it starts with one honest question:

Have the people in your church been given a One to pray for by name?

The shift does not require a new series or another training event. It starts with something much simpler.

Name your One. Pray for your One. Move toward your One.

Give your people a person, not a program.