The Program That Worked
Churches love a program that worked.
Something clicks one year. People show up. Lives get touched. Somebody says, “We should do that every year,” and they’re right, so we do. It gets a team, a line in the budget, a spot on the calendar, maybe even a banner. And somewhere along the way, without anyone actually deciding, it stops being something we try and becomes something we do.
That’s the moment it gets dangerous. Not because the program is bad, but because we quit asking what it’s for.
A program is a tool. We keep treating it like the mission.
Every program started as an answer to a question. How do we reach our neighbors? How do we help families who are hurting? How do we get people through the door who’ve never been in one? The answer worked, and we fell in love with the answer. Then the question changed, or the ground shifted, and we kept running the answer anyway.
You don’t have to be a church to do this. Look at Blockbuster. At the end of 2004 they had more than 9,000 stores. The model had worked brilliantly. Just walk in, rent a movie, bring it back. Late fees alone were around 15 percent of their revenue in the late nineties. A model that profitable is almost impossible to walk away from.
Then Netflix showed up with DVDs in the mail, no late fees, and eventually streaming. By Netflix co-founder Marc Randolph’s account, he and Reed Hastings even offered to sell the company to Blockbuster in 2000 for $50 million, and Blockbuster’s CEO could barely keep a straight face. Ten years later, Blockbuster filed for bankruptcy.
I think that’s the trap. The thing that worked so well was the very thing they couldn’t let go of.
Same garden. Different year. And we’re still planting what we planted last time but forgot no one eats that food anymore.
A program is a row. The mission is the harvest.
Picture a church that has run a food pantry for years
It’s helped real people, and the folks who served there were faithful.
Then the landscape shifts. Other organizations, some of them government-funded, start covering the same ground, and the lines of who does what get territorial. The church could keep pushing. More effort, more hours, more volunteers, and call that perseverance.
Or it could ask the better question. What was the pantry for?
It was never really about the food. It was about meeting neighbors with real, practical help and putting the gospel right alongside it. The pantry was one way to do that. It’s not the only way. A pantry is a tactic. Serving our neighbors with the gospel attached is the mission.
And here’s something we need to understand. Retiring a program is not an insult to the people who ran it. Their faithfulness wasn’t wasted. It was the thing that got everyone to the better question.
The ones that stayed alive
Every year we run something we call Fall FunFest. It started as advertising. A way to let the community know we existed. It’s no longer just advertising. Now it’s mission. And we’re heading into its fifteenth year. It’s stayed alive because somewhere along the way we kept asking what it was for and let the answer change it.
This year we moved our Easter walk-through indoors, and we had double the previous year’s turnout. Same story. Different setting. Double the kids.
The programs that survive aren’t the ones we protect. They’re the ones we are willing to change.
Four questions to ask about anything that worked once
1. What is it for? Not what it is. What it’s for. If nobody on the team can say it in one sentence, you’ve found your first problem.
2. If we were starting from scratch today, would we build this? Not “should we keep it.” Would we build it. Those are very different questions, and the second one is the honest one.
3. Who is it serving? The people it was built for, or the people who run it? Programs drift toward serving their own survival. It’s the quietest way a ministry or business dies.
4. What could this energy do if it weren’t tied up here? Every hour has a cost. The volunteers running a program that’s lost its edge could be doing something that matters. The honest question isn’t just whether the program is working. It’s what we’re not doing because we’re doing this.
Then do the harder thing. Say thank you out loud to the people who gave themselves to it. Tell them what their work made possible. And let them be part of what comes next, because they’re the ones who know the ground.
The row worked last year. The mission is still the mission.
Love the harvest more than the row.
