Collins’s concept applied to church: you need a stop-doing list as much as a to-do list. Every internal event, committee meeting, or member-facing program occupies time that could otherwise be spent on relationships with unchurched people.
Churches that are internally over-programmed produce members who are busy — with church things. Their social bandwidth is fully consumed by Sunday service, small groups, ministry meetings, training events, prayer sessions. Good things. But they crowd out the one thing that actually drives growth: genuine relationships with people who aren’t in the church.
Hendricks cites this as one of the key tactics for transitioning to a growth culture: deliberately reduce the number of internal events to give members space to maintain relationships outside the church.
This isn’t about eliminating community life. It’s about the ratio. A community that runs 5 internal events per week and no externally-focused events has quietly decided that internal maintenance is the mission. A community that runs 2 internal events and actively creates space for members to invest outside has made a different choice.
The diagnostic: if you asked members what they did last week in service of the church’s mission, how many answers involve unchurched people? If the answers are all internal — serving at events, attending programs — the internal programming has successfully consumed all the available bandwidth.