I hear a lot of people playing the blame game when churches are not growing and reaching their potential. The blame usually falls into one of two camps, the pastors who are not leading well or the people who will not follow.
After observing this for many years and spending time both in the pew and behind the pulpit I have reached some personal conclusions. Overall, the majority of times when there are serious problems the churches have not had effective pastoral leadership.
The ultimate tragedy is that in most cases the issues have nothing to do with theology. It comes down to the character and spiritual immaturity of the man or simply poor leadership skills in the area of knowing how to work with people.
With that said an even greater tragedy is when churches react to poor pastoral leadership by assuming the role of pastor and becoming a lay lead church. All great churches have strong key men and women who help lead the church but there is only one God called person that has been delegated the role of being the pastor of the church.
Romans 13 makes it incredibly clear that God in every aspect of life works through designated human authority to accomplish his will. Ephesians 4 also states that God gives church’s pastor leaders to help equip the laity for the work of the ministry.
If your pastor is not leading well then give him all the help you can and if that does not work then fire him and find God’s man. The one thing you must not do is change God’s plan. Once you do that you might as well hire a permanent interim and stop playing the games because your church will never be successful again.