Most organisational dysfunction develops gradually and subtly, embedding itself in the relational patterns of the system. It is often invisible to those within the church until it has become so entrenched that it is genuinely difficult to address. The environment and culture become so familiar that it is difficult to discern that anything is actually wrong. Dysfunction can occur in growing and struggling churches alike and may be present at every level of the system. This is why it is extremely important to recognise the indications that something unhealthy is occurring. They provide early warning that an issue needs to be addressed before it causes serious and potentially irreversible harm.
Dysfunction is often an organisation’s unhealthy way of attempting to meet a healthy need. As humans, we do this all the time. Jeremiah 2:13 captures something of this dynamic. God describes his people as having forsaken “the spring of living water” and having dug “broken cisterns that cannot hold water.” We are remarkably good at creating counterfeits. This is true for us personally as well as in our churches and organisations. We find and use counterfeit solutions that appear to stabilise us but cannot sustain health. When a system is not working, people find ways to stabilise themselves that feel like solutions but are actually symptoms. Understanding those symptoms and recognising where in the system they are arising is the first step towards addressing what is actually wrong.
These indicators need to be understood as recurring patterns rather than isolated events. Every healthy organisation experiences tension, avoidance, informal conversations, and failures of judgement. The issue is not that they occur occasionally, but that they happen repeatedly. The key question is whether, when those moments occur, they can be named, discussed, and repaired. Dysfunction becomes entrenched when the same patterns continue, truth-telling carries a relational penalty, and the system repeatedly returns to an unhealthy equilibrium because of unhealthy homeostatic forces.
Below is a list of indicators that an underlying issue may need to be explored. It is not exhaustive but highlights some of the patterns that commonly emerge.
In the Leader
One of the first signs that something may be wrong is when the leader no longer feels able to be fully honest with their board, their team, and often themselves. In a growing church, this can look like a leader projecting confidence while privately carrying significant strain, unable to acknowledge difficulty without feeling that it threatens the culture of success they have built. In a struggling church, it can look like a leader who has learned to manage expectations downward. They no longer share their genuine vision or the full extent of the challenges they face because doing so feels too exposing amid persistent difficulty or continual power struggles with those seeking to impose their own will and judgement. In both cases, the leader becomes increasingly isolated, without the honest support and accountability they need.
In the Staff
Among staff and volunteers, self-silencing typically develops after failed previous attempts. Someone raises a concern, and nothing changes, or worse, they experience a relational consequence for raising it. They learn that honesty is unsafe here. Their opinion or concerns are not valued, so they stop.
They may continue to show up and do their job, managing the tension between what they say and what they actually think. Over time, they either leave or settle into a resigned compliance that is costly to them and damaging to the organisation. This pattern can show up whether you are a part of a small, declining church, where the weight of shared disappointment makes honest conversation feel too painful, or you are in a large, fast-moving one, where the culture of momentum makes slowing down to raise a concern feel like disloyalty or negativity.
In Governance
At governance level, self-silencing develops differently depending on the context. In successful churches, boards may make excuses for poor internal behaviour because the fruit looks good—the leader is a “superstar” and losing them would feel catastrophic. What develops can be a collective accommodation of the leader’s dysfunction because of what the leader produces.
In struggling churches, boards often go quiet for different reasons—out of genuine care for a leader who is clearly under strain, or out of the slow erosion of confidence that comes from years of unrealised hopes. In both cases, the board has stopped doing one of its most important jobs, and the church is suffering because of it.
Triangulation is one of the most common patterns to emerge when relationships become unsafe or unstable. When we do not feel safe or confident enough to address a difficulty directly, we will often turn to a third party for emotional support rather than approaching the person concerned. Instead of going to the leader, a staff member goes to a colleague. Instead of raising a concern with the board, the leader discusses it with a staff member. Instead of raising a concern directly with the leader, board members talk among themselves. The conversation that needs to happen can end up taking place with everyone except the person concerned.
Triangulation relieves immediate emotional pressure without addressing its cause, which means the underlying issue persists and usually intensifies. This does not mean that turning to a third party for support is inherently unhealthy. The distinguishing factor is the orientation of that support. In the healthy involvement of a third party, they serve as a resource while the focus remains firmly on resolving the difficulty and enabling the necessary conversation. This may involve processing how to raise a concern or preparing for a difficult discussion. Triangulation occurs when the third party becomes a substitute for that conversation rather than a step towards it.
Direct conversation is not always safe or appropriate, particularly where there is serious misconduct or a significant power imbalance. In those situations, involving governance, using a formal complaint process, or seeking independent support is not triangulation. The distinction is whether the third party helps protect those involved and moves the issue towards appropriate resolution, or whether the third-party relationship becomes a substitute for addressing what is wrong.
When triangulation becomes normalised at any level of a church system, it is a strong diagnostic indicator that honest, direct communication has broken down. Triangles tend to multiply wherever honest conversation feels too unsafe or too costly. When they begin multiplying across an organisation—up, down, and sideways—the issue is not simply who is talking to whom, but why direct, honest communication has become too costly for the people involved.
Closely related is the pattern of significant conversations occurring outside formal processes. It might be the alignment conversation with a few that happens before a governance meeting, or the hallway debrief after a team meeting in which the real thoughts are expressed, or the car park conversation where what will actually happen is determined.
These conversations become concerning when they become the primary place where honest views are expressed or decisions are effectively made. This may indicate that honest conversation within the official space does not feel safe, or that a power manoeuvre is taking place. Either way, it suggests that something has broken down relationally and honest engagement within appropriate settings is being avoided.
When people lose trust in their leadership or no longer believe that open disagreement is possible, they begin operating independently. They may appear to agree with a decision but quietly delay, alter, or disregard it afterwards, resisting what has been requested of them and what they have apparently agreed to. Some may simply fail to do what has been asked, while others may attempt to “fly under the radar” and do what they want without consulting the leader or gaining their agreement.
While some will underfunction and withdraw into a form of learned helplessness, others will overfunction. These patterns can reinforce one another. Overfunctioning may involve rescuing people by doing for them what they are responsible for doing themselves or assuming responsibilities that belong to someone else. People may even speak on behalf of the leader or governance, exercising authority they have never formally been given. In each case, responsibility and authority become blurred, and difficulties that need to be addressed directly are instead expressed through behaviour. The tension within the system is being managed in counterfeit ways.
Every safe driver knows they need to be aware of their blind spots. It is in a blind spot that a driver can inadvertently strike a cyclist or another car while changing lanes. Churches also have blind spots, and these often exist in the shadow of the values they hold. Every value an organisation holds casts a shadow, and the stronger the value, the longer and deeper that shadow can become. When we regard something as good, it can be difficult to see or believe that anything negative or unhealthy could be connected to it, so we fail to look.
Different Christian contexts give particular weight to different values and words, including commitment, calling, faithfulness, honouring, loyalty, anointing, and spiritual authority. In their truest forms, each represents something healthy and important. However, unhealthy assumptions and behaviours can hide behind them.
Spiritualising dysfunction occurs when harmful, controlling, or otherwise unhealthy behaviour is given a spiritual frame that places it effectively beyond scrutiny. Language around faithfulness, anointing, spiritual authority, divine calling, or the importance of honouring leadership may be used, whether intentionally or not, to insulate decisions and behaviour from honest challenge.
Calling and commitment to mission. At the governance level, this might be a board that excuses poor behaviour from a senior leader because they have served faithfully for many years: “Sure, they’ve got some rough edges, but they are never going to change, so we just keep loving them.”
Among staff, it might be expressed as spiritual obligation: “I feel like God has called me here, so I will grin and bear it until He moves me on.” A sense of calling is important, but if you find yourself enduring a difficult situation with a combination of resentment and spiritual language to justify it, that warrants honest examination.
Honouring and loyalty. In the shadow of these values, raising a concern may be regarded as negative or dishonouring, while disagreement or complaint may be interpreted as disloyalty. It is never dishonourable to tell the truth to a leader. It is considerably more dishonourable not to. How that truth is communicated matters, but when loyalty becomes more important than health or truth-telling, something has gone wrong.
Now, there is nothing wrong with any of these values in themselves. The issue is what may hide in their shadow while pretending to be the value itself. When this happens, the system continues to produce outcomes that no one intended, and the people within it absorb the cost.
The stronger the value we hold, the more carefully we need to examine its shadow.
When conflict becomes entrenched or embittered, it too can become spiritualised. The narrative told by one or both parties becomes binary. By this I mean that the conflict is presented in black-and-white terms: it is a story of good versus evil, with the person telling it inevitably placing themselves on the honourable side, alongside God and His angels. There is no room for grey, complexity, or mixed motives. One of the first casualties of conflict is often personal responsibility. A person minimises or denies their own contribution to the difficulty and focuses attention instead on the wrong being done to them.
This does not mean that responsibility is always shared equally or that clear wrongdoing should be blurred in the name of balance. It means that even justified concerns need to remain open to truth, scrutiny, and appropriate process.
Although this pattern is common in conflict, it becomes more serious when a person turns agreement with their account into a test of loyalty. Those who disagree may be regarded as disloyal and relationally reprimanded. There is no allowance for others to hold an independent viewpoint or maintain their own relationship with the other party. Blacklisting occurs when a person expects everyone who wishes to remain loyal to them to withdraw from or “cancel” the person with whom they are in conflict, along with anyone associated with them. Maintaining a relationship with or offering support to the other party is then treated as disloyal, dishonouring, or even ungodly and may be met with emotional and relational pressure.
This response stands in direct tension with Jesus’ command to love our enemies, bless those who curse us, and pray for those who mistreat us (Luke 6:27–28; see also Romans 12:14). Forgiveness does not remove the need for truth, accountability, or appropriate boundaries, but it does reject demands that others prove their loyalty through hostility or estrangement.
Jesus likewise rejects leaders who “lord it over” others, calling His followers to lead through service rather than domination (Matthew 20:25–28; Mark 10:42–45). Spiritual authority is never meant to be used to control relationships, demand unquestioning allegiance, or punish those who refuse to join a leader’s conflict.
In church contexts, dual roles are almost unavoidable. A pastor may also be someone’s manager, friend, relative, or spiritual leader. The question is not whether dual roles exist—they often will—but whether we recognise them and are honest about which hat we are wearing at any given time.
When dual roles go unnamed or unmanaged, they can create conflicts of interest. When conflicts of interest go unaddressed, they create conditions for the misuse of power, which is often unintentional but genuinely harmful.
We also need to recognise that when roles come into conflict, one will usually take precedence. Many churches have family members serving in leadership or on staff. If a dispute involves a leader’s relative and the leader intervenes, they need to ask which role is driving their response. Are they acting impartially in their leadership role, or are they responding as a parent, sibling, or spouse while using organisational authority to protect their relative? What is presented as a leader managing a difficulty between two team members may actually be a family member using positional power for the benefit of another family member. At that point, the dual role has become a conflict of interest, and the conflict of interest has become a misuse of power.
In these situations, a leader’s intentions may be entirely good, but good intentions do not remove the conflict of interest. It needs to be named and managed by others with appropriate authority, with the leader stepping back from the decision where necessary, so that power is both used impartially and seen to be used impartially.
When a church or organisation has a revolving door of staff, team members, or pastors, it needs to pause and ask: what is the common denominator? It can be easy to find a different and seemingly specific reason for each person’s departure. However, when several people leave within a short period, the same position repeatedly becomes vacant, or people regularly leave after working with the same leader or team, the pattern itself becomes important information.
Some turnover is normal and healthy. People leave because of changing circumstances, new opportunities, family needs, relocation, or a genuine sense of calling elsewhere. The concern is not simply that someone has left, but that departures become frequent and the organisation shows little curiosity about why. Repeated turnover may point to problems with leadership, culture, workload, role clarity, conflict management, psychological safety, or governance.
How departures are explained is also revealing. If every person who leaves is described as the wrong fit, difficult, disloyal, or unable to handle the role, responsibility is consistently placed outside the organisation. Those explanations may sometimes be accurate, but when they recur, governance needs to consider whether the system is protecting itself from uncomfortable feedback. The absence of formal complaints does not necessarily indicate that no problem exists, particularly when people do not trust the process or believe they can speak honestly without relational consequences.
Patterns of staff turnover are a form of organisational feedback. Governance needs to ask who is leaving, where they are leaving from, how long they stayed, what reasons they gave, and whether common themes are emerging. Each departure will have its own circumstances, but when the same outcomes occur repeatedly, the organisation needs to examine what within its leadership system or culture may be contributing to them.
The Cumulative Cost
Taken together, these patterns share a common consequence: the progressive erosion of trust. Trust is the foundation of every relationship, and when it breaks down—between leader and staff, between governance and leader, or between different parts of the team—the church or organisation pays a price that grows increasingly significant.
The breakdown does not typically arrive through a single dramatic event, although it is often revealed in a single dramatic event. The damage accumulates through the small failures of honesty and accountability represented by these patterns. By the time it becomes publicly visible through a relational or organisational rupture, it has often been developing for years.
Repair after a rupture requires more than restoring calm and settling people down. It may require protecting those who have been harmed, establishing the facts through a fair and independent process, acknowledging what occurred, taking responsibility, making practical amends where possible, correcting structures and leadership practices, and reviewing whether those changes are working. It also requires an honest exploration of the underlying causes. Reconciliation should always be hoped for, but it cannot be forced or declared prematurely as a substitute for truth, safety, accountability, or time.
These patterns do not belong to any particular size or season of church life. They become entrenched in systems that are unwilling or unable to examine themselves. Whatever a system is currently producing, the starting point is the same: naming these patterns honestly at every level before they become crises.
As you consider these indicators of dysfunction, which are most pertinent to your church or organisation? Which, if any, need to be named and addressed before they become a crisis?
