In the Springtime on some roads in the Colorado Rocky Mountains, there are major ruts that develop due to melting snow which turns to water and runs down the roadways.
I have not gotten stuck in one of these ruts, but I have spoken to a few people who have.
When you get stuck it's very difficult to get UNstuck!
That sounds a lot like Church life.
Here's an example. I have pastored in two churches where the conventional wisdom was that we had to teach a four-week series on financial stewardship every January.
We believed that people would give more all year if we did the series - and it had to be in January, and it had to be for at least 4 weeks.
I look back on this and realize we were in a rut, which actually may have slowed us down and made us a bit complacent. We had to do the hard work of digging away the rut and driving on level ground again.
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In a very real sense, "good enough never is." Many times government workers have the attitude of, "that's good enough." Sadly, so do churches.
Perhaps churches articulate it a bit more subtly than that. When a church is in a rut it's prevailing mantra is,
"do no harm." That is, don't make any decisions which will insult, offend, or annoy any segment of the congregation.
What this often means is that few risks are taken, decisions are made very slowly, and (lo and behold), the church finds itself in a rut.
No church is immune to ruts. I have led churches that were in ruts, I probably got them into the ruts! Big, strong, successful churches get into ruts because the status quo works pretty well, thank you very much.
The problem with a rut is that it has little to do with the Kingdom of God, and what Jesus is calling the Church to as part of his mission on earth.
Being in a rut impedes Kingdom work. It is that simple and that stark. The challenge to leaders is to identify the rut(s) that we are in, pray and ask God how he wants us to get out of the rut, and then to take bold leadership decisions to do so.
