The American church faces a dual crisis: an aging congregation and deteriorating facilities. Dealing with deferred maintenance in the church has become a significant obstacle for leaders and revitalizers alike. When an aging population combines with neglected infrastructure, the resulting financial strain can overwhelm a ministry’s budget. While the initial impulse for a leadership team might be to walk away, God calls leaders to stewardship and revitalization rather than retreat. Addressing these facility challenges is a vital step in turning around a struggling church.
There are four critical areas for evaluating your next steps as you begin to tackle deferred maintenance issues within the church.
1. Review the facility from an inspector’s perspective.
When updating a facility, leaders often prioritize the guest experience. However, effective maintenance requires moving beyond temporary patches applied with limited funds or insufficient expertise. To ensure the long-term viability of the ministry, churches must invest in professional, sustainable solutions. Many congregations struggle today because previous generations relied on well-intentioned in-house repairs that failed to address root causes. This cycle of patchwork maintenance only delays the essential fixes that must be confronted today.
If you do not know what to do, bring in a general contractor or even a real estate inspector to review the facility and provide an overview of suggestions that the church board can review with real-time costs. The assessment will help get the board to review the same data points simultaneously rather than what they might feel should be done. By taking out feelings and focusing on facts, the board can devise a plan of action to help the church begin to tackle the crises they find themselves in.
2. Develop a plan to begin to solve the problems.
Once the church knows what they are facing, the leadership team needs to rank the needs from critical to commonplace, with the major issues being dealt with immediately. The vital problems found in the inspection of the building might be hidden from most of the church, as it is a lot of behind the wall’s issues, such as wiring or even a new roof, and it will take all the leadership to speak about why the needs must be addressed and how it will help the church in the long term. As the church team begins to lay forth a plan, the plan should be incremental as it assists the church in progressing forward one project at a time. It will take tactical patience and foresight for a church revitalizer to see the larger picture when others only see the project or the momentous challenges.
As you rank each item and begin championing the plan, know there will be those questioning why one project is starting before another. Your role will be to explain the why behind the what, proclaim the project’s value and virtues to the larger church, and reclaim the plan if it gets off track by lay leaders.
3. Stay focused and do not chase the fire.
As the maintenance projects from the list begin to see completion, other unanswered questions or projects will come to view, and well-intentioned people will try to pull the vision away from the project list and rank order to what most people are talking about. This mission creep will destroy any positive momentum and derail future plans. I encourage you to stay focused. Do not allow the fire (the loudest voices) to get in the way of God’s plan for the local church. Sadly, too many churches fail, not because they do not have a plan but because they do not work it.
There will always be projects that could take the number one spot on the work order list, but when you work the plan and not the program working the church, the project list will be completed, and the people will see the results and be willing to invest in future projects. Staying calm in the fire and directing the team (board or members) to maintain the course while you field the church’s concerns will enable the church to see better days through a solid structural and financial footing. Your goal as a leader should be to put out the fires and not help spread them.
4. Review where you can cut to invest.
With the project list developed and ranking of what projects will go first, the issue of ‘how do we pay for these projects?’ will come up in conversation. As a leader, you must help the church board see the broader picture by walking them through the current realities of where the church finds itself. At this stage, they must know the cost of deferred maintenance, the cost of repairing them, and where they find themselves financially. This stage is the death stage. The people must die to the image of who they thought the church was and where it is today to rise in Christ vision for the church. As part of this stage, the budget has to be updated with adjustments to prepare to increase ministry in the future. Painful cuts might have to be made to staffing, programs, or other ministries so the church can invest in the future by fixing deferred maintenance issues.
By evaluating today, you create a new opportunity to minister in a new way tomorrow. Once the church board or leadership team backs this plan, this must be explained over and over again to church members as the shock wave of change reverberates. This is not an easy stage because some members will leave, and others will disagree loudly at the differences they have with the plan, but hold steady as you help the church right-size from the deferred maintenance nightmare and watch how God restores what could have closed the church.
Deferred maintenance does not have to kill the church if the leadership is willing to address the issues head-on by reviewing the facility with fresh eyes, developing a plan of action, staying focused during the process, and investing in the future.