Our church had become a machine that ran on burnt-out volunteers. So we stopped

I arrived as the leader of a small church and did what I always do. I listened first.

Coffee. Walks. Kitchen tables. I asked people why they’d joined and what they thought was actually happening. Some had strong opinions. Some had none at all. I was building a picture, the way you do, planning what I’d change once I understood the place.

One conversation went somewhere I wasn’t expecting. 

She was studying part-time with a demanding job. She’d been on the rota for the midweek children’s work, which the church had been running for years, trying to reach local families.

They were short of volunteers. They were always short of volunteers.

I looked at what she was already carrying, and I told her she didn’t have to do it.

She said the ministry would fold. She said the children who came had nowhere else to go. She asked who would take her weeks. I said that if we didn’t have the people, we wouldn’t run it. She went quiet for a second.  

Then she said: “You mean we don’t have to do this?” 

I’ve thought about that sentence more than almost anything else anyone has said to me in ministry. Not because it was wise. Because of the relief in it. She’d been serving for years and had never once considered that stopping was available to her. 

She wasn’t the only one. One woman had been dreading my visit. She was raising a child alone and working a job that followed her home, and she assumed I’d come to ask for more. 

As I kept listening, the same thing surfaced in different vocabulary. People were worn out. We had built a machine that ran on volunteers and produced tiredness. Everyone could see it. Nobody could say it, because saying it sounded like giving up on children, or on mission, or on God. 

So we stopped. 

When everything stopped

One man told me it felt like giving up, and I didn’t have a good answer for him. Nobody left. Nothing collapsed.  

The thing that came apart was me. 

It started as a small noise, a few months in. All we had were Sunday mornings. And a midweek gathering for discipleship. I secretly feared it wasn’t enough. If someone had asked me what our church ran, I’d have had nothing to point at. No noticeboard. No weekly timetable. 

I started to question what makes a church a church. But deeper than that was a feeling closer to shame. I’d sit in a room with other leaders talking about their youth work and their toddler groups and their meals for older people, and I’d feel like a man faking the title of church leader. What I missed was having somewhere to hide. 

I started dreading the question. So what have you got going on? 

Underneath it was something I’d never had to face before. I’d assumed I believed church was people. I discovered I believed church was activity. The two had been indistinguishable for so long that I’d never had to choose. 

We had built a machine that ran on volunteers and produced tiredness. Everyone could see it. Nobody could say it

All we were doing was helping people work out how to follow Jesus inside the lives they already had. A man who worked seven days a week wanted to be the person who collected his daughter from school. He brought it back to the midweek gathering four times before anything shifted. Someone finally asked him what he thought would happen if he stopped working so much. It took him most of a year, and even now, he still slips back into the cycle of non-stop working. 

It was slow. It was largely invisible. It produced nothing I could display on a noticeboard. 

I confessed this to another leader over lunch. He’d been curious about what we were up to, and I told him the truth. I no longer felt like a real church leader running a real church. Now we’d stripped everything back, I couldn’t tell whether we were being faithful or just failing with better language. 

He asked what we actually did on a Wednesday night. I told him. He said, “Isn’t that the thing?” 

I changed the subject. 

I’d like to say I’ve made peace with this. I haven’t. I still catch myself wanting something to point at. When a new family visits, some part of me still reaches for the programme we don’t run. Still wants to hand them a timetable that proves we’re serious. The instinct hasn’t died. It’s just been named, which is a different thing. 

But I keep thinking about her face in that first conversation. The permission she’d been waiting years for and had never thought to ask for. 

I’m still not sure what makes a church real. But I know she needed someone to tell her she could stop.