Palliative (Pal-lee-ah-tive) - Alleviating pain and symptoms without eliminating the cause.

Palliative care is what you get when you check into a hospice in the end stages of life. It is the care you get when treating the illness is no longer an option and the only thing left to do is provide as much comfort as possible. Sadly, it is also the care that many churches unknowingly receive from their leadership.

I realize that palliative care has a level of intent about it. It is a cognitive decision to stop medical treatment and begin medical comfort. But what if it wasn’t? What if with full intention of treating the cause all that was being accomplished was treating the symptoms? Would the net result be any less palliative?

This is precisely what many churches are struggling with and why they grow weary and frustrated. Think back to your last board or committee discussion. You may have spent hours trying to come up with a treatment plan to solve a “problem” in your church.

Actually you didn’t: More than likely, without recognizing it, you spent hours discussing symptoms rather than the underlying cause. In other words, you were practicing unintentional palliative care! We see this all the time in our consulting practice. Seriously, we see it in every church we work with!

Providing “medical comfort” to a church that can still respond to “medical treatment” is a significant contributor to the plateau and decline of the majority of American Churches. Granted: Palliative care is not their intent - it’s just their unintended reality.