Change

One of the things that I have noticed is that great churches are not afraid of change---in fact in a lot of ways they thrive on it. You can bet though that even within those churches that embrace change there are those people who oppose it. The leaders responsibility is to lead the people to change, and then through the change and finally not to get too comfortable because there is going to be more change!
I actually enjoy change. At Foothills we change a lot of things. We are in the process of changing things from a physical appearance standpoint. our lobby is being reconfigured for more room. We have changed the entrance areas to our Chidren's area (they now have a seperate entrance to expedite the check-in process). We are about to tweak that again. We create different stage designs on a regular basis, etc.
I have found that if change does not become part of the culture from the get-go, chances are that when you finally do want to change things, there will be resistance. We have all heard the horror stories about the Pastor that was fired because he moved the pulpit----how ridiculous!
It is easy to become too predictable. If people become conditioned to the point that they already know what you're going to do before you do it----it's time for change.
We are going to be messing with the order of service. We have become WAY too predictable. We want people to expect the unexpected.