Don’t Skip Leg Day!

We do it all the time.

We fall in love with one part of the picture and neglect the other – to our detriment.

Take the exercise world. Many people only work their upper body. They want bulging biceps or washboard abs and really don’t care if all those muscles sit on top of chicken legs.

Foundation Focus

But health experts say strengthening our lower body is actually more important. Our legs provide our foundation.

As we age, a weak foundation leads to limited mobility, lack of endurance, and potential falls that can result in a life cut short.  

Trainers encourage their clients to alternate workouts: upper body one day, lower body the next. When people fixate on the waist up, their trainer will say, “Don’t skip leg day!”

Love & Neglect

Many churches do the same thing. They fall in love with serving others in the community (which, of course, is a good thing), but neglect the work of leading people into a personal and transforming relationship with Jesus Christ.

As a result, they build an ever-increasing network of doing good on an ever-decreasing foundation of faith sharing. It seems obvious that sooner or later a church will collapse under its own weight.

But no one seems to notice at first. Serving others is so core to following the One who came to serve, the inherent rightness of it is undeniable. “Why would we do anything different?” church leaders say.

Their resolute confidence keeps their church serving others in the community and the world, even though their numbers begin to slip.

When people start to get nervous about the decline, someone will say, “God didn’t call us to be successful, just faithful.”  

Double Down

In fact, in response to an attendance dip, churches will often double down and expand their serving opportunities, assuming that will turnaround the trend.

Of course, it doesn’t, because it doesn’t deal with the real issue. More often, the trend accelerates.

Now the church has expanded its demand for servants while the available pool has shrunk.

It’s not long before turf wars break out over which ministry will get which servants, and people find themselves wearing several different hats to cover the gaps.

It only goes downhill from there.

Doing Good to Death

Churches caught in this cycle are doing good to death (as my friend Shane Bishop says). It’s not that serving others is wrong. The problem is they have skipped leg day – for decades!

As they have fixated on serving others, they’ve neglected their faith-sharing foundation.

It’s been so long since they focused on leading non-Christian people into a personal and transforming relationship with Christ, all those muscles have atrophied. Their weakened foundation can no longer support the upper body of serving, so they fall. Soon after, they die.

I’ve seen this cycle play out more times than I could count. It grieves me every time, because we know how to turn it around. Just alternate our workouts: upper body serving one day, leg day faith-sharing the next.

Start With Leg Day

But there is one counter-intuitive shift still to make. Our workouts must start with leg day.

Jesus was crystal clear on his mission:

“For the Son of Man came to seek and to save those who are lost.”

Luke 19:10 (NLT)

His first invitation to a couple of guys casting their nets was,

“Come, follow me, and I’ll show you how to fish for people.”

Matthew 4:19 (CEB)

Jesus is still angling for the people he loves, those who have drifted far from his Father.

As his followers, that’s our primary mission too. It’s our foundation.

And when the foundation is strong, all that sits on top of it can grow healthy and full for years to come.  

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