Twelve Little Fires: What Happens When a Healthy Church Meets an Old Habit?

I have been watching a ministry go through real change over the last couple of years, and it has been one of the more encouraging things I have seen in a while.

Transparency is showing up in places it never used to. Leaders are stepping into roles better equipped than the people who held those roles before them. The church is being led from vision and mission instead of nostalgia and history, which is harder than it sounds, because nostalgia is comfortable and vision costs something. Best of all, people who once had very limited participation are now stepping into leadership as volunteers.

That last part is the whole ballgame. Watching someone move from thinking like a volunteer to thinking like a person who leads a ministry is what mobilization actually looks like. It is not a program. It is a shift in how someone sees themselves and their part in the mission.

So the news here is good. But healthy change always brings something else along with it, and if you lead a church or a ministry that is in the middle of getting better, you need to know what to watch for.

Because there is almost always a remnant.

Not a rebellion. Not a faction. Just a group of people who are still operating out of the old thinking and the old ways of doing things, because that is what they know and that is what worked for them. They are not enemies of the change. They are just carrying habits that the new environment no longer needs.

Here is what that looked like last week.

The setup

This ministry has been doing everything you would want a ministry to do. Raising up new leaders on purpose. Hiring part time people who used to serve in volunteer roles. Raising expectations and responsibilities across every level of leadership, and raising the bar for participation in the ministries themselves.

One of those new hires stepped into a coordinating role under a pastor who oversees a department. And this person has done something genuinely well. They established a higher level of expectation and made it plain what is involved if you want to participate. Those expectations were communicated in meetings, in training, at events, in email. Everywhere you would want them communicated.

Then this new leader started scheduling short conversations with each of the volunteer leaders. Not to correct anybody. Not to evaluate anybody. Just to make sure each person had what they needed to do a good job, understood the expectations, and did not feel additional pressure from everything that has been changing around them.

That is a healthy approach to team building. Person by person, face to face, raising the bar in a way that supports people instead of squeezing them.

What happened instead

One of the key volunteer leaders got the meeting request and started talking.

She went to other people on the team. She went to individuals outside the department. She went to pastors in the church. She told them she had been asked to have a conversation with this new team leader, and she shared how worried she was about it.

She talked to more than twelve people.

I knew about the meeting. It was nothing. It was a five minute check in squeezed between two events. Nothing formal, no agenda, no concern, no correction. The day came, the conversation happened, it went fine. Everyone left on the same page with a good plan going forward.

The meeting was never the problem.

The problem is that over a dozen people now carry a story about a meeting that did not deserve a story. She played out the scenarios, and she did not play them out in her own head where they would have died quietly. She played them out loud, with other people, inside a church that is actively trying to build trust through better communication.

In an environment like that, this kind of thing does more damage than it would have five years ago. It plants seeds of discord and confusion in exactly the soil the leadership has been working so hard to prepare.

And here is the part that stings. Most of the people she talked to did not know what to do with the conversation. So they listened. They nodded. They sympathized. Nobody said, I do not think you should be telling me this. Nobody said, that sounds like a great question to bring to her directly. Without meaning to, they enabled the very pattern the church has been trying to leave behind.

She created twelve small fires that did not need to exist. They will probably burn out on their own. Most of them do. But she could have sent one message to the new team leader that said, hey, I have a couple of questions about our conversation coming up, and every one of those fires would have been out before it started.

This is not a story about a difficult woman. This is a story about muscle memory. She learned somewhere along the way that this is how you handle uncertainty in a church, and nobody has ever told her otherwise. That is a leadership problem before it is a character problem.

So what do you do? Because this happens constantly, in churches and ministries everywhere. Three things.

1.) Make healthy communication the public standard

Celebrate direct conversation out loud. Name it. Praise it when you see it. Tell stories about people who went straight to the person and worked it out.

And be just as clear that triangulation, gossip, and side conversations are not how this ministry operates. Not whispered in a staff meeting. Said plainly, in the room, to everyone.

You cannot have this conversation individually with every person in your church, and you should not try. But when you are building teams and raising up leaders, the people in those roles need to hear it directly. Direct communication is the standard here. Going around someone is not. If a person keeps working the room instead of talking to the person, that eventually affects what they get to be part of.

That last sentence is uncomfortable to say. Say it anyway. A standard nobody is ever held to is not a standard. It is a preference.

2.) Do not send new leaders in alone

When you are making changes and those changes require conversations, bring another person whenever you reasonably can. This matters most when there is a known chain of authority or responsibility.

If you are a pastor or a department leader and you have placed someone new in a role to run something on your behalf, go with them. Sit in on the meetings early on. Do things jointly for a season.

Two things happen when you do. Your presence reinforces that the new leader carries real authority, which quietly removes the temptation to route around them. And it lets you model, in real time, what healthy communication looks like and who the right person is to talk to about what.

A new leader with a title is not the same as a new leader with backing. You provide the backing by showing up.

3.) Be consistent

Of everything on this list, this is the one that will hurt you most if you get it wrong.

When you introduce change into a church and you are genuinely trying to move things in a good direction, inconsistency does more damage than the old system ever did. If you celebrate direct communication in January and quietly tolerate side conversations in March, you have not raised the standard. You have taught people that the standard depends on who is involved and what kind of week you are having.

People are watching how you respond the second and third and tenth time, not the first. Consistency is what turns a new expectation into a real culture.

The encouraging part

Here is what I want you to hear underneath all of this.

The reason this situation was even noticeable is that the ministry got healthier. Nobody would have blinked at twelve side conversations three years ago. That was just Tuesday. It stands out now because the bar moved.

That is what progress feels like from the inside. It does not feel like everything is fixed. It feels like the old patterns are suddenly louder, because the room around them got quieter.

So when a remnant of old thinking shows up in the middle of your best work, do not read it as failure. Read it as evidence that something changed. Then address it directly, kindly, and consistently, and keep going.

The people who are learning to lead are watching how you handle it. Teach them well.