Church Conflict Story – 2/24

I interviewed Dave Drury at the beginning of February.
Dave told of a story at a church that he knew of that put on an Easter Pageant every year. This was a big production for the church for many years and when it started, this production was well known in the community and there would be a large number of people who made decisions to follow Christ out of that pageant. This was a huge production, it took almost 250 people to produce.

Over the years, this production would take a large toll on the budget and slowly started to become a hassle to the staff and congregation to the church. The staff became less involved and over its 20ish years of running, the pageant went from being produced by 250 people to about 150. So the staff decided that since it wasn’t being as productive as it was before and it was taking a large part of the budget, they decided that they would take that money and put it towards other things.

So when the worship pastor made the announcement at the church, he promised to do something productive with those funds that would be beneficial to the church. They honor those that were involved that gave them public thanks for what they had done, but decided that they would stop doing this production.
Some people in the church were upset, but nothing was done because of this announcement and there was no big fallout. But several years later some people did decided to leave the church and when they were questioned as to why they were, they said that the pageant situation did play a part in their leaving. And those promises that were made as to replace it with something never worked, so people were hurt that those promises never happened. This should have been more delicately handled and a plan should have been put into place as to what would replace the pageant.