The Two-Hump Camel - Why Churches Struggle

Every year, many pastors undergo a tradition as perennial and written into nature as a jacaranda’s bloom or a salmon’s journey home. 

The tradition is the dreaded leadership drive. “We need more Bible study leaders!” “We’re losing a bunch of musos!” “Sharon wants to step down from Sunday school teaching next year because she’s doing her CA” “Benjie doesn’t want to do youth group anymore; he wants to give welcoming a try” “Can Leanne play the drums??”

Panic sets in as the roster holes grow wider. How is it we have hundreds of members in our church, and yet so few people to serve?

A framework for thinking about church ministry

In The Vine Project, ministry trainers Colin Marshall and Tony Payne lay out a discipleship framework which they call the 4Es. The 4Es are a pathway of bringing lost people from non-Christian to Christian. They hold this out as a way for churches to think of doing productive gospel ministry. The 4Es are:

Engage: This is when the church engages non-Christians through social events to build relationships and gospel opportunities. Activities that might fall under this category are church picnics, community service, or socials that you invite your non-Christian friends to (e.g. going rock climbing, Korean bbq, making dumplings)

Evangelize: In the “engage” phase, you aren’t actively preaching the gospel, but the next step is to actually share the gospel and call people to faith and repentance. This might include church activities like evangelism nights, dialogue dinners, or running formal courses such as “Christianity Explained”

Establish: In addition to reaching the lost, the Church needs to continue establishing their Christian members in further maturity. Here you might include Bible study groups, 1-1 discipleship, and of course the Sunday service.

Empower: Finally, as people grow towards Christ, they must be empowered to serve God in ministry themselves. This might include formal ministry like encouraging people to go to Bible college, or simple church equipping like teaching people to lead Bible studies. 

Together, the pathway looks like this: 

Not every church follows a ministry paradigm like this one, but it’s pretty general enough to cover pretty much what every church should be doing. Each of the 4Es are biblical and essential to the church’s mission. So you would expect every church’s resources to be more or less laid out like such:

But here’s the interesting thing. According to The Vinegrowers, a church consulting project based on The Vine Project, most churches actually allocate their resources more like this:

This is what’s sometimes called the “two-hump camel”. Churches devote lots of time and energy to reaching non-Christians. We have tons of activities like community fairs, Biggest Morning Tea, sports rec comps, Easter and Christmas events, picnics, Minecraft, and other stuff that are designed to attract non-Christians to the church and give us an opportunity to build genuine relationships with the mission field. But oftentimes our energies stop short of actually proclaiming the gospel and calling the sinful to repentance and faith in Jesus. 

Similarly, we hold TONS of “establishing” things in church. We have small group Bible studies, Sunday school, accountability groups, 1-1 Bible reading and prayer, KCC Conferences, topicals on marriage and work and family and child rearing and singleness and sex and politics. But amidst all that activity, we seem to devote very few resources to training up more Christian leaders and calling people into full time ministry.

We engage the lost, but we don’t evangelize them. We establish the saved in maturity, but we don’t empower them to follow the gospel call into ministry. 

Now let me emphasize here that the two-hump camel is a vast generalization. Of course there are exceptions, and of course you will be able to point to things that your church is doing to evangelize and empower. But it is still a useful generalization with truth to it. The Vinegrowers suggest that this kind of imbalance leads to all sorts of problems common in the church. It can explain why your church isn’t actually growing, and if it is growing in numbers, many of them are due to transfer growth (Christians coming from other churches) rather than genuine conversions. It can explain why you never seem to have enough Bible study leaders or elders or deacons. It can explain why 10% of your congregation does 90% of the ministry. It can explain why year after year, your lay leaders flirt with burnout and discouragement. 

So why does this happen? I’m not across all the pew research, but I think this is a big enough question that everyone can use motivated reasoning to attribute it to their hobby horse cause. 

“Because we aren’t praying enough”

“Because there hasn’t been enough training and education among pastors”

“Because we don’t teach enough leadership skills in our seminaries”

Here is my theory. And from the outset I’ll confess that this is absolutely one of my hobby horse causes that I bang on about too often. I believe the points of failure in the 4Es discipleship pathway are the points that call for maximum sacrifice in your life. If you’re a non-Christian, it’s not that much of a commitment for you to give rock climbing a try with your Christian colleague and his church friends. But accepting the gospel and giving your life to Jesus is a maximally costly thing. I think we in churches intuitively recognize that, and so we are willing to trouble our non-Christian contacts up to a certain degree, but we’re far too uncomfortable to do something as invasive and offensive as calling them to repentance. 

Similarly, if you are a regular pew-dwelling Christian, it’s not that big a deal to for me to ask you to be “established” in your faith. Attend a weekly Bible study group, pray and read the Bible, occasionally attend special interest seminars like marriage courses or topical seminars on work, and try not to neglect your kids. But it’s a maximally costly thing for me to ask you to prayerfully consider giving up your stable, comfortable job and go to Bible college. For most people, it’s not too invasive to ask that they bring their kids to Sunday school. But it’s a whole different story if the pastor calls them to give up Saturday sport or violin lessons or test prep in order to attend a leadership training day at church. 

I don’t think the two-hump camel is intentional. All of this reasoning happens subconsciously. But one of my a priori beliefs about human nature is that we instinctively and consistently look for the easier path in life. Engaging non Christians and Establishing Christians isn’t easy, but it’s easier. Evangelizing and Empowering is hard. This is one of the never-ending challenges for those in pastoral ministry.