By Fr. George Elsbett LC
How is a growing church organized? Good question. I find the reflections of the recently deceased Timothy Keller in “Church Growth Dynamics“ very helpful. One of his basic theses is that there are certain “growth barriers” of a growing church. In other words, at certain moments of growth, growth itself becomes a barrier. And this barrier is difficult to break through, because the structure no longer does justice to growth and leadership becomes a bottleneck that prevents further growth.
At the John Paul II Center we have once again reached such a point. Recent structural challenges have been:
Three Challenges
1)Work overload on the part of leadership. Our leadership team consisted of 5 people (Klemens Höfer – our „Operations Manager“, Maria Schlachter, Stephanie Lapka, Fr. Georg Rota and myself). In fact, however, only our operations manager and myself were able to implement things operationally – because the others do not work full-time in the JP2