What I Would Tell My 2011 Self: Stop Thinking Organizationally
by Brian Rutherford
Before I became Lead Pastor, our church met in a small industrial office park. We had run out of space and were renting offices in an adjacent building. (None of these details matter, but it is fascinating how your brain remembers where you were when things happened.) I was the Associate Pastor, and one day the leadership team sat down to map out how we connected people to the church.
We were proud of what we came up with. It made complete sense to us. Every program, every entry point, every next step was accounted for. We put it on paper and it looked comprehensive.
Then our youth pastor looked at it and said, "It looks like a crazy spaceship."
From that day on, it was known as “the Spaceship.”
He was not wrong. We had built something that made perfect sense from the inside and looked completely alien from the outside. The reason was simple: we started the conversation from an organizational perspective. How do we move people through our programs?
The problem is that people are not organizational. They are relational. And we had built a system that treated them like inputs.
My lean toward the organizational did not come out of nowhere. My brain is wired more like an engineer than a shepherd. I am an introvert. My education talked a lot about the church as an organization. And the church growth model of the 80s and 90s focused heavily on organizational design and thinking.
So I came to drawing a spaceship pretty honestly.
I carried that thinking with me when I became Lead Pastor. The Spaceship diagram eventually went away, but the mindset behind it did not. I kept adding programs and offerings, kept building structures, and kept trying to organize my way to growth.
The church I was building existed mostly in my head. Org charts, systems, flow diagrams. The church that actually existed was in the rooms, the conversations, the people. And I was so busy managing the organization that I was not tending the relationships.
What is funny (and tragic) is how obvious this should have been from the New Testament. The early church was almost entirely relational. It spread through homes, meals, and personal invitation. The letters Paul wrote were not to 501c3 organizations. They were communities of people who knew each other by name.
If I could go back and talk to 2011 Brian, I would say this: stop trying to fix the organization. Start tending the relationships. The people in your church do not need a better system. They need to be known, and they need to be equipped to know others.
One of the best things about working with Intentional Churches is that we get to gather with leaders in person every year. The IC Conference is May 5 and 6, 2027, in Chicago, IL. If that sounds like your kind of room, we hope to see you there. Learn more at intentionalchurchesconference.com.
