Jim Collins is a popular leadership author and a former Stanford University professor. His New York Times bestseller Good to Great is a introduction into what makes great leaders. Many church leaders have read it.

I have found How the Mighty Fall, another one of his books, is even more helpful for church leaders. It demystifies the slow process whereby seemingly healthy organizations start a downward spiral from which they cannot recover. In this book Collins analyzes organizations that were seemingly too healthy to fail, that eventually failed too soon and the stages that led to their downward spiral.

These stages are relevant for churches that decline long before their leaders envisioned.

Many church leaders have a vision regarding the future impact of a church (e.g. innovation, unity, impact, reach, etc.). But too often, slowly at first almost unperceivably, these healthy churches began a slow but steady decline. And over time, the decline increases because church leaders don’t perceive when they are in early stages of decline. Pride, immorality, factions, ethical lapses, and the like are just a few of the outcomes that come from ignoring the stages organizational decline.

The Five Stages to Decline are:

Stage 1: Hubris Born of Success

Stage 2: Undisciplined Pursuit of More

Stage 3: Denial of Risk and Peril

Stage 4: Grasping for Salvation

Stage 5: Capitulation to Irrelevance or Death

A leadership exercise to address decline.

1. I encourage clients of healthy, or once healthy, churches to read this book and honestly analyze when the church has entered each stage. Leaders often point out that their church is somewhere between Stages 1-3.

2. Then I ask leaders to go to the Scriptures and find the theological cure for each stage. Church leaders who are leading once healthy churches, that are now in decline, usually benefit from Collins’ five-stage analysis, when combined with biblical solutions.