The Leadership Blind Spot No Assessment Can Find For You
by Bart Rendel
Every church I've worked with has a list of challenges they can name. Budget. Facility. Staffing. Volunteer fatigue. Cultural headwinds. These are real and they're worth addressing.
But none of them are usually the deepest problem.
The deepest problem is the one the leadership team doesn't know is there. And in my experience, every church has at least one.
Doug wrote a few weeks ago about teams that think they're aligned but aren't. I wrote about institutions that think their programs are advancing the gospel when people are the only ones who can. Last week Doug wrote about churches that think they're going deeper when they've quietly separated discipleship from evangelism.
Notice the pattern? In every case, the church didn't know.
The challenge you're aware of and working on is rarely the one holding you back. It's the one operating underneath your awareness that you've never named.
It shows up in predictable places. Your budget, your calendar, your job descriptions, your weekend experience. But those are organizational blind spots. There's a harder version of this conversation, and it starts with you.
When was the last time you questioned an assumption you've been leading from for years? When was the last time you looked at something on the calendar and asked whether it was still earning its place?
I'm not asking to be provocative. I'm asking because I've had to answer these questions about myself. When Doug and I started Intentional Churches, we had blind spots of our own. We thought strategy was the answer. We thought the right model would produce the right results. We were wrong about both, and we couldn't see it until the work forced us to.
That's the uncomfortable reality of blind spots. You don't discover them by thinking harder. You discover them by putting yourself in a position to be honest, and by surrounding yourself with people who will be honest with you.
If you're a senior pastor, ask yourself when the last time was that someone on your team told you something you didn't want to hear. If you can't remember, that might be the most important blind spot to start with.
The organizational stuff matters. The Radical Alignment Assessment can surface what's hidden across your whole church. But the leader who takes it has to be willing to be changed by what it reveals. That's where it starts.
If you want a more structured way to do that work, the Radical Alignment Assessment (alignmychurch.com) gives your team a common framework to rate where you actually are — together — before you talk about where you're going.