Conference-itis.
I see it happen all the time. Someone goes to a conference and comes home with changes they “must” make. A new program to start. A new way of doing things. These changes often don’t fit their culture and uniqueness and fail miserably. Should we learn from others? Yes, but don’t blindly adopt with out consideration of your context of uniqueness.

To find out the uniqueness of your church, I am highly, highly, highly recommending a book called Zag: The Number One Strategy of High-Performance Brands =by Marty Neumeier. His argument (moved to a church context) would be, if another church in your area does something extremely well (recovery ministry, etc.), you should probably not be doing it. Find your God given uniqueness and hammer away at it (for example, at NorthWood we mobilize our laity using their vocations and passions to engage restricted countries through an open front door approach engaging their domains of society. Vietnam is our key example of this). Marty has an incredible exercise to go through as a church staff. Easy quick read but so rich in content. It’ll prevent conferenceitis big time.

(for more conference soapboxes see our arguments see here and here. )