With an average weekly attendance of 1,961 in 2010, Central Christian Church (Beloit, Wisconsin) is one of the largest emerging megachurches on our list. This is CCC’s Dream Center auditorium, where the church conducts its contemporary worship services.

By Kent E. Fillinger

Less than 20 years ago, a megachurch was an anomaly. Today there are roughly 1,500 Protestant megachurches—56 from among the Christian churches and churches of Christ, representing a 250 percent increase from the 16 megachurches recorded in 1997, the first year Christian Standard reported megachurch attendances.

But while the number of megachurches has dramatically increased during the past decade, the size of the average church has not changed since 1998.

The median conservative Protestant church in the United States has 117 regular participants in worship on Sunday mornings. The median refers to the point at which half the churches are smaller and half the churches are larger.

The National Congregations Study estimated that smaller churches draw only 11 percent of those who attend worship. Meanwhile, half of all churchgoers attend the largest 10 percent of congregations, which includes churches with 350 or more regular participants. Therefore, 90 percent of churches have fewer than 350 attendees.

The good news is God uses churches of all sizes to achieve his purposes. In this and the next two issues (April 24 and May 1), Christian Standard will spotlight four categories of churches, ranging in size from 250 to almost 20,000. Timothy Keller wrote, “There is no ‘best size’ for a church. Each size presents great difficulties and also many opportunities for ministry that churches of other sizes cannot undertake (at least not as well). Only together can churches of all sizes be all that Christ wants the church to be” (“Leadership and Church Size Dynamics: How Strategy Changes with Growth,” Redeemer City to City, 2010).

The hope is the stories and statistics of these churches, combined with relevant trends and important findings, will spark significant conversations among your church leaders, generate deeper-level analysis of your church, and motivate the leaders to dream together of future possibilities for greater kingdom impact.

A dozen years ago, Gary McIntosh’s book One Size Doesn’t Fit All assisted me in navigating the leadership and organizational transitions of a growing church. McIntosh wrote, “The most useful system is to group churches by size. Comparing churches by size reveals more helpful information for faithful ministry than looking at their denomination, location, or any of the other numerous methods of comparison.”

McIntosh developed a “typology of church sizes” that he explored and explained throughout his book. The book still has value for small- and medium-size church leaders attempting to gain a better understanding of the leadership and organizational shifts necessary to grow past certain size barriers.

But McIntosh’s work included only small, medium, and large churches, with the final category including any church that averaged more than 400. Given the subsequent explosion of churches with more than 1,000 in attendance, McIntosh’s typology is outdated.

Using McIntosh’s model as a springboard, I developed the “Church Size Matrix” (see chart, below) to highlight the transitions that take place as a church continues to grow past specific size points. While McIntosh devoted an entire book to this topic, I provide a snapshot in this two-part article.

The Church Size Matrix explores six types of organizational change that take place as a church grows, including: orientation, structure, the senior minister’s role, leadership and decision making, staffing, and culture. The Church Size Matrix identifies six size categories of churches, four of which are profiled in this and the following two issues.

Keller wrote, “One of the most common reasons for pastoral leadership mistakes is blindness to the significance of church size. Size has an enormous impact on how a church functions. There is a ‘size culture’ that profoundly affects how decisions are made, how relationships flow, how effectiveness is evaluated, and what ministers, staff, and lay leaders do. . . . A large church is not simply a bigger version of a small church.”

Orientation

Every church has a central organizing principle or orientation. The small church is driven by a family or relational orientation, with high value placed on everyone knowing one another. Often these churches are comprised of one or two extended families that play a key organizing role for the church.

As a church grows and the possibility of knowing everyone decreases, a medium-sized church begins to function as a collection of family groups with several ministry groups or teams. Programs begin to take precedence over what is acceptable to the key families, and the collection of groups and the programmatic focus create an environment for growth.

As a church reaches the large-sized phase, it is critical that another shift be made to an organizational orientation where there are additional structures and more organized group life.

The emerging megachurch can function like an oversized large church or begin to function in such a way as to truly become an emerging megachurch; this grouping of churches, therefore, receives the classification of having a hybrid orientation. Depending on the philosophy of the leadership, the emerging megachurch can either maintain the same menu of groups and ministries, or it can once again explore new structures to spur continued growth.

Upon reaching the megachurch level, a church’s orientation resembles a corporation where the bottom line drives more decisions and the number of relational entry points is simplified and clearly defined, and people are guided into specific environments.

If a church reaches the gigachurch level (10,000 or more in weekly attendance), then based on sheer size, its orientation assumes that of a minidenomination, and often the by-products include specialized church conferences, self-published curriculum and books, and other resources that support and reinforce the brand or flavor of that particular church.

McIntosh notes that if a church does not make the appropriate and required adjustments, then it will either plateau for a time, or decline back to the previous smaller-size category. The pull downward, he adds, is stronger than the pull upward.

Structure

The small church is best characterized as a single cell. Most times, the single cell small church is internally focused on meeting the needs and concerns of those who are already in the circle. McIntosh says it is difficult for someone new to be accepted in a small church unless he or she meets one of the following criteria: he or she is born into one of the key families, marries someone from one of the key families, has an outgoing personality, has something of value to offer that the church needs (e.g., spiritual gifts, money, prestige), or has experienced a crisis along with the key families.

When a small church experiences growth, the single cell is stretched as it becomes a medium-sized church. The medium church is comparable to an awkward teenager experiencing the growing pains of adolescence. McIntosh defines a stretched cell as one that “has grown numerically large enough to be considered a medium church but has not added new leadership to its governing board.” The church leaders are still solely comprised of the original single cell or members of the key families.

The multiple cells of a large church set it apart from a medium church. In a large church, most attendees are involved in a mix of small and large groups, with most having little or no contact with one another. The focus often includes a balance between the external and internal, and new people find quicker, easier entry points into community. Also, the leadership is representative of multiple groups within the church.

The emerging megachurch continues to expand as it focuses on multiplying cells or the number of new groups and ministry options available in an effort to meet everyone’s needs. Oftentimes, the strategy of emerging megachurches becomes somewhat fragmented or diffused as it tries to mirror the megachurch rather than creating the new functional structures that best fit its inherent strengths.

The book Simple Church has been used by churches of all sizes, but recently the book’s concepts have permeated many megachurches, which have called a time-out to address the scope creep they have experienced as the number of attendees, groups, and ministries has reached unmanageable proportions. Megachurches best achieve a structure of simplified cells as they work to redefine their ministry strategy and hone in on a few intentional pathways for future growth.

Finally, the structure of the gigachurch is often best reflected by multiple locations. Gigachurches are still the primary drivers behind the multisite movement, and now online worship venues have opened a new stream that can include defined virtual and physical groups meeting in several states or even countries around the world that identify with a particular gigachurch.

The reality is the more groups your church has per 100 in attendance, the better cared for people are, and the faster your church will grow.

Kent E. Fillinger is president of 3:STRANDS Consulting and associate director of projects and partnerships with CMF International, Indianapolis, Indiana.

New Life Christian Church (Chantilly, Virginia) regularly sponsors free, family events for the community.

By Kent E. Fillinger

The Church Size Matrix looks at six types of organizational change that take place as a church grows. In Part 1 of this article (April 10/17), we looked at two of these changes, Orientation and Structure. This week we consider the remaining four.

Minister’s Role

In his book One Size Doesn’t Fit All, Gary McIntosh wrote, “As the size of a church increases, the perception of a pastor changes from an emphasis on relational skills, to functional skills, to leadership skills.”

It is essential, therefore, to understand the progression of roles required by the senior minister to avoid bottlenecking the church’s growth potential and to successfully transition the church to the next size category. Many times the elders or church board, because of preconceived notions or expectations of a senior minister, can hinder the church’s potential by imperceptibly restricting a senior minister’s opportunity to transition to the next required role.

The small church minister functions as a pastor or shepherd who is expected to know and love his flock. The medium church minister must transition some into the role of an administrator who can manage more ministries and staff. As the church evolves into a large church, the minister must become a leader who can envision and implement a ministry growing ever more complex. In the emerging megachurch, the senior minister’s role shifts to that of being a better teacher, and his communication gifts continue playing a more vital role. The increasing size of the church and staff combined with a growing level of organizational complexity demands that the megachurch minister function more like the CEO of a successful, growing corporation. The gigachurch (attendance 10,000 or more) senior minister takes on a larger-than-life persona and receives celebrity or icon status in spite of his best efforts and intentions to spurn such associations.

Leadership and Decision Making

Who sets the direction in the church? In the small church, leadership and decision making normally is driven by a few key families, a couple of strong personalities, or a congregational vote of the entire church. In a medium church, the direction of the church falls to several major committees.

As new leaders are assimilated into the large church, the source of power resides with the elders and staff, with the elders typically taking a stronger leadership role in decision making. This scenario flip-flops in the emerging megachurch, as the church transitions to a more staff-led, elder-protected leadership structure. This adjustment frees the staff to make decisions within defined boundaries, allowing them to be more nimble and responsive to trends when making needed changes.

In the megachurch, the decision-making circle shrinks to the senior-level staff, which is managing various staff teams; elders offer input and feedback only in major policy or organizational change situations. The gigachurch relies on an executive core of staff to set the direction of the church, and the role of the elders or church board varies according to the agenda item and the professional expertise of the eldership or board.

Staff

Gigachurches use a smaller percentage of paid staff, as the staff-to-attendee ratio changes with increased size. The average emerging megachurch and megachurch has 1 staff member per 80 attendees, compared with 1 staff member per 131 attendees at a gigachurch, according to Leadership Network’s 2010 Large Church Finances and Staffing Report.

In the small church, the senior minister is often the only person on staff and must function as a generalist by wearing many hats. Multiple paid staff members are increasingly common, though, for churches with fewer than 250 in attendance, with staff typically hired to serve a particular generation within the church. This can sometimes result in additional growth that moves the small church into the medium-sized category.

The medium church often employs several specialists to lead certain high-priority ministries within the church, and the senior minister moves from being a shepherd to being a rancher. A large church continues to add more specialists, as more groups in the church feel a need for professional staff attention.

The emerging megachurch sometimes moves toward hiring a few ministry generalists to integrate with the specialists on staff, based on the priorities and passions of the church and its leadership. In the megachurch setting, staff members are grouped into teams of specialists, with multiple people focused specifically on certain ministries within the church. And in the gigachurch, given the scope of the ministries, there are multiple layers of staff with highly skilled division leaders providing oversight for specialized areas of ministry.

Culture

In Cracking Your Church’s Culture Code, Samuel Chand writes, “Organizational culture is like the air; it’s all around us, shaping every moment of every day, but we seldom notice it at all.” And Keller noted, “Every church has a culture that goes with its size and which must be accepted. Most people tend to prefer a certain size culture.” Knowing that people tend to have a “size preference” helps explain why sometimes a positive, key leader at one stage in the life of the church chooses not to continue on as the church grows to the next size category.

The small church is marked by a traditional, or static, culture where change is often avoided out of fear of disrupting the relational life within the church or the fear of losing members.

As a church grows, it is subject to more frequent and sudden change. As a result of these changes; growing churches tend to lose more members. But usually leaders of growing churches are more willing to lose members who disagree with the direction and decisions of the church.

The medium church is in the midst of a turnaround culture as it tries to grow beyond the single-cell structure and stretch the church toward continued growth. Inherent with the turnaround culture are significant structural and stylistic changes that often result in conflict, as the once influential core begins to realize its power is diminishing and attempts to push back to maintain control. A church’s elders and staff must be united in their ownership and support of the church’s vision and direction to effectively navigate this change cycle, while also being willing to give up some people to continue on the journey.

The large church is transitional in nature as it strives to continue to grow and evolve. This is the stage where many churches plateau because they develop a level of comfort—the churches have added a team of ministry specialists to serve their various groups, and the churches feel large enough to be exciting without being so large they are overwhelming or unfamiliar to longtime members.

The emerging megachurch is best defined as a transforming culture. Such churches wrestle with feeling like an oversized large church that has attracted a diverse group of members. The compounding impact of changed lives and an increasing diversity of personal needs are more evident in such churches, as the leadership finds its footing in this new culture while it attempts to continue to grow.

With a cadre of specialists on staff and an awareness of, or connections with, other like-minded churches, megachurches excel at creative imitation; they adopt and adapt ideas that have worked in other megachurches while adding a personal signature that makes the idea feel homegrown.

A culture of innovation marks the gigachurch, as the wealth of staff time and resources enable them to explore new realms of ministry creativity while carving a path for other churches to follow. The innovative ideas employed by gigachurches often are sold in prepackaged resources to much smaller churches that hope to realize similar results.

Closing Thoughts

Lyle Schaller said in 44 Questions for Congregational Self-Appraisal, “The majority of North American Protestant congregations founded before 1970 are in a state of denial.” Too many churches and church leaders have resigned themselves to “do church” rather than striving to “be the church.” This has resulted in the American church’s declining social role and influence, and has left the church grasping to maintain a presence in people’s lives and the cultural landscape.

Organizational arrogance among church leaders is often connected with this denial. In Equipped for Adventure, Scott Kirby says, “Arrogance means that we think that we know all the answers and understand all of our problems and their solutions. It means we don’t need advice or input because we already have it all figured out. . . . The longer people are in a position of leadership, the more susceptible they are to this.” In Change Is Like a Slinky, Hans Finzel puts it this way: “We naturally think we become experts by virtue of longevity. Yet a common effect of all those years of practice is an isolation and conformity to traditions.”

Henri Matisse said, “To look at something as though we had never seen it before requires great courage.” In other words, as the saying goes, “You can’t read the label from inside the bottle.” So while we often talk of “insight,” a better goal might be “outsight,” that is, perspective from those outside your church or decision-making team to help you accurately gauge your church’s status.

Kent E. Fillinger is president of 3:STRANDS Consulting and associate director of projects and partnerships with CMF International, Indianapolis, Indiana.

By Kent E. Fillinger

Why do churches pay more attention to Christmas than to Easter?

If you surveyed a group of church leaders, the common response probably would be, “Evangelism—we want to create welcoming environments for people to bring guests, and Christmas is an optimal opportunity to do so.”

Really? Businesses measure “return on investment”—whether a product or venture yields a return that warrants the investment required to offer it.

From the standpoint of a return on investment, Easter consistently dominates Christmas in attendance. For example, the average megachurch experienced a 74 percent increase in attendance on Easter, compared with a 41 percent attendance jump at Christmas. The margin was even greater last year for the emerging megachurches, where attendance increased 63 percent at Easter and only 17 percent at Christmas. Similarly, with large and medium churches, Easter attendance jumped 59 and 48 percent, respectively, compared with only a 5 percent attendance increase at Christmas.

What would happen if your church shifted some resources away from Christmas and focused more of its energies and efforts on planning for and following up with the hosts of guests who attend at Easter? What would happen if your church spent less on Christmas “presents” for your community? What additional organizational energy could you harness in a new direction if you were not so consumed by trying to fulfill everyone’s Christmas wish lists?

The facts consistently show that Easter provides a significantly greater opportunity than Christmas for reaching more people with the good news of Jesus Christ. So why don’t you use that to your evangelistic advantage as a church?

Start the discussion now. Pray for God to guide your church as you discover what “could be” instead of settling for what “has always been.”

Some new churches have opted to meet in church facilities that had once closed their doors. Common Ground Christian Church of Tampa, Florida, for example, refurbished and reopened a church facility originally used by Central Christian Church.

By Justin Horey

Everything that begins also ends. We may recognize that fact when we’re talking about businesses or vacations or even relationships. But what can we do when it’s time for a local congregation to shut its doors?

True North Community Church found itself $500,000 short on a building project it had undertaken, so it went in search of a loan. True North, planted just a few years ago, ultimately found financial help from a small, aging church on Fire Island in New York.

By Bert Crabbe

One of the greatest growing challenges for church leaders is to figure out how to put the resources of older churches into the hands of younger ones.

By Steve Hinton

By Steve Carr

“Of course God cares about numbers. There’s a book in the Bible called Numbers!”

“Each number represents a soul, and God desires every one of them.”

These statements are simplistic but serve as an apologetic for both tracking congregational size and aiming for larger attendance numbers. They affirm what we seem to know innately—that bigger is obviously better when it comes to the church. It makes perfect sense, doesn’t it? The more people in the pews, the more ministry being accomplished, and the better off the kingdom of God.

As a student of the church growth movement, I accepted this model. Since the beginning of my vocational ministry, attendance figures were the primary rubric of my ministerial success. When I served as an associate minister on the staff of a fast-growing suburban megachurch, every event I oversaw was numerically monitored to ensure I was facilitating growth. This obsession over numbers was inescapable: view the pages of this very magazine, which spends multiple issues tracking our movement’s largest congregations; and listen to conversations between fellow ministers, where the commencing moments of dialogue always include the question, “So how many people do you have now?”

But for the past five years, I have ministered with an urban church plant of a few dozen people. I find myself working harder than ever yet reaping a much smaller harvest. As a result, attendance figures have begun to rub me the wrong way—existing as a defeating reminder of my pastoral inadequacy.

But some of my greatest ministry triumphs have occurred in this church, and so I live in tension: in order to affirm God’s work in our congregation, I feel obligated to produce an increasing head count to justify his moving. I’m left with three choices: (1) produce “preacher’s counts,” generously overselling our numbers by rounding up to the nearest 10 or 20 (or 100, if the Spirit so moves); (2) reject my reliance on attendance as a measure of success; or (3) get some more people.

Let’s assume that fudging statistics is not a desirable option. Is there an acceptable position within the spectrum of those second and third options? How passionately should we pursue numerical growth?

Biblically Speaking

As people of the Book, we feel obligated to proof text our beliefs, and we do so even when it comes to numbers. Yet while the Scriptures are filled with references to counting, there are times when we misinterpret the significance of these texts to justify our actions.

The most common example of this is found in Acts 2. Here we find not only the clearest explanation of the plan of salvation (Acts 2:38, 39) but a numerical response to the plea. Luke records the 3,000 individuals who responded to Peter’s sermon. Thus, some of us reason, God is interested in a precise accounting of who responds to the gospel. While “angels rejoice when a soul is saved,” we need to clarify some of our misconceptions.

First, some deem these 3,000 as “the first megachurch.” While the church universal started on this day, these converts did not automatically form the first congregation. Pentecost was a Jewish festival where tens of thousands of worshippers descended upon Jerusalem to worship at the temple. The context of Acts 2 implies that these first converts to Christ lived all over the Roman world, likely dispersing to their towns after the experience. True, the church in Jerusalem rises after Pentecost, but that phenomenon also tilled the fields for the spread of the gospel around the world.

Second, some readers neglect to view the 3,000 number in light of the whole of Scripture. Luke is showcasing the miraculous moving of God over 14 centuries. In Exodus 32:28, after the sin surrounding the golden calf, Moses ordered the Levites to execute the idolaters. On the very day the Lord gave his people the Law, 3,000 Israelites lost their lives. The response at Pentecost is a biblical lesson on redemption: when the Law was delivered, 3,000 people died; when God released his Spirit on the church, 3,000 people experienced life. When our Western minds are fixated on the tabulation of Acts 2:41, we overlook this second lesson of salvation.

We must be cautious of using Scripture to justify our fixation on attendance numbers because there is always another biblical perspective. For example, where does Jesus’ parable of the lost sheep from Luke 15 fit into this conversation? And what about 2 Samuel 24? We may remember this passage because David boldly declared to Araunah that he would not sacrifice offerings that cost him nothing. But we may overlook the fact that when David took a census of his army (conducted to affirm his kingdom’s earthly power), it brought a curse that cost the lives of 70,000 people.

Tracking the Growth

Beyond hermeneutical issues, my concern is that if numbers remain our dominant measure of success, we will cease to examine the means by which growth occurs. It is critical that we explore how our churches are growing.

While Restoration Movement churches are still committed to seeking and saving the lost, I would contend much of the congregational growth in past decades is derived from a reallocation of believers from other churches. This has come from two sources, the first being denominational transplants. A Pew Forum study showed that more than 40 percent of American worshippers have switched church loyalty in their lifetime. The ideals of our movement are foundational to those of broader Evangelicalism, and our simplistic approach to biblical Christianity is attractive to church consumers.

But the second source of transfer growth appears to be coming from other Restoration Movement churches. I do not believe this is “sheep stealing.” It’s simply a result of the American cultural trend toward suburban sprawl. As Christians moved farther from cities, those churches within the urban core and first suburbs (communities which developed soon after the World War II) struggled to retain members. The result yielded larger Christian churches in the exurbs that are an amalgamation of attendees from other smaller congregations.

While this trend is not necessarily bad, it has the potential to distract us from a truly evangelistic focus. My fear is this: if numerical growth is continually lauded and perceived as the ultimate goal, we will program our efforts solely to produce those results. We will be inclined to claim victory when we actually are less successful in the work of the gospel than those before us.

Numbers Plus

So how can we avoid this stumbling block?

I do not advocate dismissing attendance figures altogether. We are still a movement, which implies we are advancing, so we must measure progress. But we cannot rely on these numbers alone to determine how well our congregations are performing. Perhaps we should begin to gauge success not only numerically but with an equation that factors in the surrounding population. If we did so, the Croton Church of Christ in rural Ohio, whose average worship attendance is roughly half the size of its small town, would be deemed more successful than a large congregation in a burgeoning suburban community.

Our mathematics must also include the receptivity of the gospel where the church ministers. The soil of the Bible Belt is much more fertile than that of the East Coast. Therefore, Christian churches like Forefront on Manhattan Island or The Verve on the Las Vegas Strip, despite being in the midst of large population centers, could be viewed as more extraordinary because they are thriving in locations where the gospel rarely does.

There are still other figures that we could include in our equation, including giving, real estate holdings, number of Timothys produced, etc. It could take years to perfect an objective system, but with the technology at our disposal we should be able to manage it.

If this sounds silly, let’s ask if it is any more ridiculous than judging a church’s proficiency by a digit or by immediately following a church’s name with the statement, “a 20,000-member church”?

If we must count, we ought to deal with those numbers shrewdly, recognizing there are always multiple factors at work. We should simply expect that our congregations remain faithful to the Lord and to ministry in their community so that numbers don’t become an idol in our movement.

Steve Carr serves as teaching minister with Echo Church in Cincinnati, Ohio. His website is www.houseofcarr.com.

By Brian Jones

I think two of the most dangerous influences any church faces are (1) spiritual leaders who have lost their first love and (2) the onslaught of church hoppers.

Having wavered before in my faith and flirted with losing my first love with God, I know firsthand how dangerous the first one can be. But that’s something we spiritual leaders have control over. The second one . . . not so much.

I call church hoppers “connoisseurs of fine churches” because they’re continually on a quest to find the church that is spiritual enough for them, will endlessly gorge themselves on the “services” of the churches they attend, and always have a critical word to say afterwards whenever “church” doesn’t meet their standards.

Here are seven things we try to do to change their mind-set (or keep their butts from staying in the seats of our church for very long):

1. Ask church hoppers to commit to tithing and serving. That usually takes care of it right there. Because church hoppers are consumers by nature, anything that strikes them as sacrificial will surely turn them off. As a ministry friend of mine used to tell me, “At the first sign of trouble, raise the bar.”

2. Tell your people to stop inviting their Christian friends to church. Right before Christmas, I may have been one of the only pastors out there who stood up and said, “Please DO NOT invite your Christian friends to our Christmas services. We want other churches in the area to know we have their back. Also, we want to grow this church through conversion growth, not transfer growth. Let’s pack this place out with people who are keeping God up at night because they are living far from him.”

I strategically do that three or four times a year.

3. Preach short sermons. 
Howard Hendricks used to say, “Keep them longing, not loathing.” I buy into that philosophy. I try to speak anywhere between 24 and 28 minutes max (my staff will read this and say PLEASE . . . OK, I TRY to preach 24-28 minutes!).

Shorter sermons drive church hoppers nuts because they want to “be fed” (i.e., listen to long expository sermons). I’m not interested in “feeding people” unless they are in the early stages of their spiritual journey. Church hoppers, as well as Christians further along their spiritual journey, need to be feeding themselves. Anything I provide on Sunday morning is in addition to their own self-directed spiritual nourishment.

One point, one Scripture, 24 to 28 minutes, that’s it.

4. Don’t sing 9,345 worship songs. 
Church hoppers, 9 times out of 10, came from a church background where they were taught to need five or six worship songs to really connect with God. That needs to be retaught.

Where did we get the idea that worship = singing anyway? That’s part of it, but only a small part of it. Every part of the service is worship. Every part of my life is worship. Limiting your worship songs, except for occasions when you are led by God to expand the repertoire, forces people to recognize this or leave.

5. Keep your services short. 
We keep our services to 55 minutes, period. That’s it. That’s because we believe “church” is more than the official service that happens on a Sunday morning. It’s what happens before, during, and afterwards. It’s what happens during the week when two or three gather.

For the church hopper, experiencing a well-conceived, 55-minute service is like spending one’s whole life overeating and then sitting down for a healthy, well-proportioned meal that someone else serves you (“Hey, I’m used to eating 16 pieces of fried chicken! Why do I only get two?”).

6. Eliminate Christian “insider” language. 
The fact that I say “Leader” and “Forgiver” from the stage drives church hoppers nuts. “You meant to say ‘Savior and Lord,’ didn’t you?” At issue is an old missions word called contextualization, which basically means we need to speak in the language and culture of the hearer, not the speaker.

The Greek word kurios doesn’t mean “Lord” in 21st-century American idiom. Your old Bible translation from 50 years ago may read that way, but people aren’t talking that way today. Challenge your “insider” language and watch how church hoppers and their friends file right out of your services.

7. Sing non-Christian songs in your services. 
Trust me, that will weed them out. A few years ago we opened a church service with Jet’s “Are You Gonna Be My Girl” The theme of the song perfectly set up what I was going to teach on later in the service.

On Monday I promptly received an e-mail about it . . .

This past weekend, I could not believe my ears. When worship opened up, I heard the opening chords for Jet’s “Are You Gonna Be My Girl.” I was expecting the Apologetix parody version, “Are you gonna be Ike’s girl?”

But in listening to the lyrics, it sounded like the actual Jet song—a song about figuring out how to get a one-night stand, for a girl who came to some club or party with another guy.

I am hoping that I was mistaken and they were playing the Christian parody version because I am having a real issue with wrapping my head around why it would be remotely “OK” to play this content in a worship service.

There is a line between having a light fun service to reach the new/nonbeliever and cheapening the value and truth that the gospel can stand alone to reach out to someone. This may have crossed it.

Frustrated . . .

Name Withheld

Here was my response . . .

Frustrated,

I got your e-mail and appreciate you taking the time to shoot me your thoughts.

I must say that while I appreciate your concern, this is certainly not the first nor will it be the last time we sing non-Christian music in our worship services.

We do this because we are trying to reach both non-Christians as well as Christians in the same service, and playing a non-Christian song up front in the service, we have learned, puts people who are far from God at ease and can powerfully illustrate a teaching point.

Our philosophy has always been that Christians should be the ones that should be made the most uncomfortable in church, not the non-Christians. The way I put it is this—we will always choose to offend the Christians before the non-Christians.

Seeing that you are frustrated, and given the fact that I talked with a bunch of people far from God on Sunday who loved the energy of the song and felt connected to the service because of it, it appears that we have achieved our goal.

My suggestion is this—weigh carefully whether or not you want to be a part of a church that sings music like this, and plays difficult-to-watch video clips, and a host of other things to reach people who are far from God. If not, then now would be the time to look for another church before you put down roots too deep.

If, on the other hand, this is the kind of church you want to be a part of, I would welcome you to join in with everything you have and start reaching out to people far from God.

I hope this helps.

Thanks!

Brian

Church hoppers can be a lethal bunch, so don’t make them too cozy. However, please remember that God can also be leading some of those people to your church too. But that’s a topic for another day.

Brian Jones is the author of Second Guessing God and Getting Rid of the Gorilla, available at StandardPub.com. He is senior pastor of Christ’s Church of the Valley in Royersford, Pennsylvania. This essay first appeared on his blog at BrianJones.com.

By Kent E. Fillinger

A recent Family Circus cartoon showed Dolly telling her mother, “Billy says he doesn’t hafta’ go to church anymore ‘cause his phone has an app for that!” The reality is, Billy may be right!

By Brian Jones

In all my years of following Christ, there are only two prayers I really regret praying.

The first was a prayer asking God to direct me where he wanted me to serve as a missionary.

“OK God,” I remember praying. “I’m going to lean back, close my eyes, and the first country that pops into my head—I promise you that I will move there and spend the rest of my life trying to reach those people.”

With all the impulsive recklessness a newly converted 18-year-old with the gift of evangelism could muster, I leaned back, cleared my mind, and waited.

Seconds later the word Greenland came to mind.

OK, let’s try this again, I thought.

The second prayer I regret praying was another promise. But unlike the first, this one I’ve kept.

As I was packing the Ryder truck in 1999 in preparation for our move to the suburbs of Philadelphia to start Christ’s Church of the Valley, I told God, “I promise we will grow this church through conversion growth only.” And I’ve been dealing with the joys and travails of that promise ever since.

Conversion Growth in Action

Every church leader I know agrees that transfer growth (one Christian deciding to leave his or her church to attend yours) is rarely a win for the kingdom. But few take steps to prevent it from happening, as if the matter were completely out of our realm of influence.

Not quite sure how to make good on my promise to God (and with few models to learn from in this regard), we have tried a number of strategic measures over the years to fend off the tide of church transfers:

• We’ve taken time during our biggest Sundays (Easter, Christmas, etc.) to de-invite Christian visitors from coming back the following Sunday.

• We continuously remind our people NOT to invite Christian friends to our church.

• During our 101 class called “Welcome to CCV,” we take time to explain why 80 percent of the Christians in the room should never come back to our church.

• When I meet visitors after the service and find out they are from a Bible-
believing Christian church, I always encourage them to go back to their former church.

• When picking elders, staff, or volunteer team leaders, we first look for those converted from within the ministry of our church.

• If a churched visitor attends our church and we find out he or she has unresolved conflict in a previous church, we deny that person membership until he or she goes back, resolves the conflict, and we receive written verification from that church’s leadership.

• We never advertise our church on the church page in the newspaper, on Christian radio stations, or in the Christian Yellow Pages.

• Occasionally, for no reason, we instruct our ushers to punch people in the face if they look like they’re visiting from another church.*

• We don’t design worship services that cater to consumeristic, self-interested Christians who “want to be fed.”

• We don’t ever allow Christian community groups like the local homeschooler’s association (i.e., groups that gather Christians interdenominationally from various churches) to use our facilities.

• We never play in a local church softball league.

• We have poker groups at our church.

• We offer comedy nights with a mixture of Christian and non-Christian comedians.

• We broadcast non-Christian music through our outdoor speakers as people walk up to the building on Sunday mornings.

• We preach in-your-face, sin-convicting, gospel-centered, prophetic messages that call people to repent, take up their crosses, and suffer for the sake of the kingdom.

Finally, when all else fails . . .

• I strategically mention that the Left Behind series, Amish-based Christian fiction, and Thomas Kinkade paintings are blights on the Christian community.

That usually does the trick.

Has It Worked?

I’d say our strategy has been successful. Christians coming from other churches HATE our church. And I use the word hate in the most gracious way possible. Despise is more accurate. And that’s a good thing.

Without the complete derision of just about every single churched visitor who has come through our doors in 11 years, we never would have been able to baptize 1,286 non-Christians. Ever.

We would have compromised our vision. One Christian would have brought another, then another, until finally I would have been staring at a sea of people wearing “I Love John MacArthur” T-shirts.

And over time we would have become a bloated, highly touted, Christian-famous megachurch with little-to-no kingdom impact.

What’s the Downside?

Why don’t churches strategically focus on kingdom growth? It’s simple: money, attendance, and ego.

Money—New Christians don’t automatically start giving the way churched attendees give. They must be taught. And they don’t respond to the time-tested gimmicks that have floated around Christian churches for years. If you’re trying to teach stewardship to new Christians the way you did it in 2006, you’re grossly out of touch.

Building a church around new converts has also limited our pool of big givers for capital campaigns. Everyone knows a person’s greatest giving potential comes between the ages of 45 and 65, which is, through no coincidence, the sweet-spot age of the average churched visitor. Try doing a capital campaign with newly converted 20- to 30-year-olds. You don’t break giving records with folks skipping trips to Starbucks to give to your building program.

Attendance Stability—Wide fluctuations in attendance come with the territory when focusing on conversion growth. Attendance is up one week and down the next—no rhyme or reason. Churched people go to church. That’s what they know. That’s what they do. That’s what their parents did. And that’s what their children hopefully will do.

New Christians go to Valley Forge National Park and jog on a beautiful sunny day. Because that’s what their parents did. Because in their mind that’s what any thinking person would do on a beautiful Sunday. They haven’t grown to a depth in discipleship that radically changes their attendance patterns.

That’s why, in any outreach-focused church, the rule of thumb is this: the people who actually consider your church “home base” is 2 to 3 times your Sunday attendance. For us that means anywhere from 3,300 to 5,000 people are loosely connected to our church. If those same 3,300 to 5,000 people were all from churched Protestant backgrounds, our attendance would be significantly larger.

Ego—Finally, the biggest downside is the toll it has taken on my ego.

Yes, there are amazing benefits to focusing on conversion growth:

• You don’t have to try to build a church with people who can’t resolve conflict and are running from obeying Matthew 18 in their former church.

• People converted in your church are 100 percent sold on the church’s vision and philosophy.

• No one invites unbelievers like people who have come to Christ in your church.

• And, of course, no one believes in Calvinism or other kooky belief systems. You rarely have to unteach bad theology with new Christians.

But the downside has been personally costly.

Making that promise to God to focus on conversion growth has put a dent in my quest to become the pastor of the largest, fastest-growing church in the history of human civilization. How does God expect me to become “Christian famous” and validate my self-worth without building an insanely large megachurch of people that I cherry-picked from other churches?

Growing a church solely through conversion growth is rewarding, but painful.

The only upside to all this, I guess, is that I’m not trying to do this in Greenland.

Yet.

________

*Good news—due to the overwhelming pressure we received from certain Christian groups, we stopped the practice of punching Christian visitors in the face years ago. So if you are ever in Philadelphia, please feel free to stop by for a visit.

Brian Jones is senior pastor at Christ’s Church of the Valley in the suburbs of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. He blogs at BrianJones.com and is the author of three books, none of which is Amish-based Christian fiction.

By Phil Scott

Of the more than 350,000 churches in America, 85 percent are stagnant or declining in membership. This means that “average” churches are actually unhealthy. Healthy growth comes to churches that rise above being typically average. The need of the day is unaverage churches.

By Darrel Rowland

For decades Americans fled the city for suburbs, and their churches followed them.

But the trend has reversed—at least for now—with more people moving into the city. Will churches return with them?

That’s a key question because the statistics showing the new boom in city growth collide with findings on spiritual beliefs, such as those compiled by pollster George Barna.

The country’s current demographic upheaval is stark.

From 2001 to 2010 only five U.S. cities grew faster than their surrounding suburbs. Now most cities are outstripping the ’burbs, which hasn’t happened since the 1920s.

A U.S. Census Bureau report in May showed that 647 of 729 cities grew from April 2010 to July 2012. In fact, the only cities with populations of at least 300,000 that didn’t add residents in the 27-month period were Cleveland, Detroit, and St. Louis.

New York City alone added nearly 162,000 people, almost eclipsing its gain of 166,000 over the entire previous decade.

“It’s probably too soon to declare an urban revival, but it’s certainly something to keep an eye on,” said William Frey, senior fellow with the Brookings Institute’s metropolitan policy program and a University of Michigan professor.

The test on whether city growth continues will come as the economy recovers further and housing prices rebound, Frey said. But the return to urban living already has topped many demographers’ expectations, he said.

To Marie L. York, president of southwest Florida planning consultant York Solutions, the question of whether churches will settle in the city is practical.

“I think that is a reasonable assumption if the population base is sufficient,” said York, also a senior fellow with the Center for Building Better Communities at the University of Florida.

“The demand for churches, like retail and other entities, gets created when population numbers are high enough to support it. Assuming that Christians are contributing to urban infill and the movement back to the city centers in sufficient numbers to support churches—churches will follow.”

She wondered about what kind of buildings leaders will use as their “starter church.”

“There are churches still standing that have been converted to other uses that could be converted back. The trend could be a real renaissance for historic preservationists who have been struggling to keep old structures from being torn down,” York said.

Urban Stereotypes

A key factor behind cities’ recent growth is a change in the urban stereotype—at least outside the industrial Midwest and the old South—of cities as sinkholes of poverty, crime, filth, racial turmoil, and run-down neighborhoods, Frey said.

Now new condos and residential high-rises are appearing in the city, along with such attractions as modern mass transit, trendy restaurants, upscale shopping areas, arts districts, and redeveloped areas around sporting venues.

“By the turn of the 21st century, U.S. cities were cleaner than they had been in the days of smokestack industry, and crime rates were falling,” wrote demographer Richard Florida in the January 31 issue of Urban Land, the magazine of the Urban Land Institute.

“All of a sudden there were young couples pushing strollers down streets in neighborhoods that even the police used to avoid; seedy waterfront precincts were becoming parks and entertainment centers; once-derelict industrial complexes were housing tech startups, luxury apartments, restaurants, and high-end retail establishments,” said Florida, a professor and head of the Martin Prosperity Institute, part of the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto.

Areas that blend a high-tech, knowledge-based economy with the educational and cultural amenities surrounding a university, Frey said, can achieve a “cool factor” as desirable places to live. Young people are willing to move across the country to settle in such “hip” locales as Austin, Texas; Portland, Oregon; Denver, Colorado; and parts of Washington, D.C.

The census report indicates America’s migration to the Sunbelt has resumed: The 27-month period saw Fort Worth, Texas, grow by 4.8 percent, Charlotte, North Carolina, by 5 percent, Atlanta by 5.6 percent, and Austin by almost 7 percent.

The growth was not all in the South, however.

Boston increased by 3 percent, Oklahoma City and Lexington, Kentucky, by 3.3 percent, Nashville by 3.5 percent, Seattle by 4.3 percent, Washington, D.C., by 5.1 percent, and Denver by 5.7 percent.

Even post-Katrina New Orleans attracted an additional 7.4 percent, with more than 25,000 people moving into the city.

In all, city populations jumped by almost 2.7 million—or about 100,000 a month.

Urban Dangers

In March, a Scientific American column pointed out hidden dangers of the growing urbanization, which likely will include two-thirds of the world’s population by 2050: metropolitan populations are significantly more likely than rural ones to suffer from mental illnesses, such as depression and schizophrenia, and the pressures of city life can actually change brain physiology, thereby increasing the risk of emotional disorders.

“Historically, urbanization has brought about stupendous changes—the Renaissance, the industrial revolution, globalization. Yet this urban migration represents one of the most dramatic environmental shifts human beings have ever undertaken,” observed the magazine’s Mind & Brain columnist, Andreas Meyer-
Lindenberg.

“Some researchers have calculated that children born in cities face twice, if not three times, the risk of developing a serious emotional disorder as compared with their rural and suburban peers.”

At the same time, the very distinctives of what constitutes city and suburban living are growing fuzzy.

The World Health Organization notes: “It’s not just our cities and urban cores that are changing; our suburbs have, too—and to such an extent that the very categories of urban and suburban are becoming increasingly outmoded. More and more suburban households are made up of singles, empty nesters, or retirees. Even families with children are seeking a more compact, less sprawling, less car-dependent way of life.”

Frey added, “Being urban doesn’t always mean being in a city, or at least what we think of as being cities.”

Even in still-shrinking Cleveland, Ohio, “there are signs of a revival, particularly in Cleveland’s downtown district,” said Richey Piiparinen of the Center on Urban Poverty and Community Development at Case Western Reserve University, in a study of population change of Ohio’s second-largest city.

Over the past two decades, Cleveland’s downtown population almost doubled to more than 9,000.

“Downtown residential occupancy rates now stand over 95 percent and developers are eagerly looking to meet residential demand,” Piiparinen wrote.

But most of these new city dwellers don’t look like their suburban counterparts.

The CWRU study found that much of Cleveland’s growth came from residents aged 22 to 34, which makes city planners happy.

“In all, this could foretell a turning point for Cleveland, since it is those areas attracting the ‘young and the restless’ (as this cohort has been dubbed) that will be best positioned in an evolving knowledge-based economy,” Piiparinen said.

Brey and Florida agree the young are leading the urban renaissance across the country. USA Today dubbed the trend a “youthquake.”

Urban Church

But it is the church that may feel the most serious tremors from this twentysomething trend.

That’s because millennials (those aged 18 to 29) are much more likely than their parents or grandparents to answer “none” when asked about their religion. An oft-cited poll in October 2012 by Pew Research Center’s Forum on Religion & Public Life found that almost one-third of millennials declared no religious affiliation. Other studies since have generated similar results.

In May, the Barna Group examined members of that age group who used to identify closely with Christian faith and the church. Between high school and turning 30, Barna discovered that “43 percent of these once-active millennials drop out of regular church attendance—that amounts to eight million twentysomethings who have, for various reasons, given up on church or Christianity.”

Half say they have been significantly frustrated by their faith, according to Barna. Unlike previous generations that eventually returned to their spiritual roots, this generation so far has stubbornly gone its own way.

The veteran pollster did find a bright spot: “There are millions of millennial Christians who are concerned for the future of their faith, have a strong desire to connect to the traditions of the church, and feel a sense of excitement about church involvement.”

About 42 percent of these millennials with a Christian background say they are very concerned about their generation leaving the church, while almost a third say they are “more excited about church than any time in my life.”

“While these engaged young adults are good reasons not to despair over the future of American Christianity, the trend of disengagement provides a sobering backdrop,” Barna said in his study. “The reality is that more than one-third of millennials who grew up in the Christian faith say they went through a period when they felt like rejecting their parents’ faith. How they deal with such struggles often defines their spiritual trajectory.

“They can be the people reconnecting with a vital faith; they can be nomads, claiming vestiges of their previous faith while mostly rejecting the church that fostered that faith; they can be prodigals, leaving Christianity in the rearview mirror; or they can be exiles, struggling to connect their Christianity in a complex, accelerated culture.”

Darrel Rowland is an adult Bible fellowship teacher at Worthington (Ohio) Christian Church and public affairs editor for The Columbus Dispatch.

By Mark A. Taylor

Some dialogue about Paul Williams’s October 30 column reminded me that the tension never ends between large and small or the “stars” and those serving in more simple situations. Paul wrote about meeting with a group of smaller-church ministers whose wit and wisdom and commitment to ministry he’ll never forget. And one reader wrote to ask, “Since this is true, why do we invite only church ‘celebrities’ to speak at our national conventions?”

I’ll admit we played up tension between smaller churches and megachurches when we publicized our October 24 Beyond the Standard Blog Talk Radio program. “The Small Church/Megachurch Standoff” was the title, based on articles by Steve Wyatt and Aaron Brockett posted earlier at this site and published in our October issue.

If you missed their pieces, be sure and look them up. These two fellows have similar but different perspectives: Steve moved from the megachurch to plant a new church; Aaron moved from a struggling church plant to lead a megachurch. Their experiences have equipped each of them with advice for the worlds they left.

But we talked more about ministry in general than church planting in particular in this program. And a significant section of the hour dealt with the issue of numbers.

“We have a tendency to want to place a moral value on church size,” Aaron said. “Whether you prefer large or small churches, human nature pushes toward a tendency to demonize the one we don’t care for. That’s not wise.”

He said he believes God can use churches of all sizes but added, “Growth is not a bad thing; healthy things grow. . . . We want this church to grow, but we don’t want it to grow for anybody but Jesus.

“I think it’s a sin to try to manipulate growth for the sake of a particular person’s glory, but I also think it’s a sin to say, ‘We don’t want to be big. We’re just going to intentionally stay small.”

Steve approaches the issue from another angle. He quoted statistics that he’d used in his article: churches today are reaching only about 17 percent of the population according to his research, and in Phoenix the percentage is 11 percent. Too much “church growth” in America is the result of church members leaving one church for another. “We’re competing for a smaller and smaller percentage of the population,” Steve said.

“As our culture changes, our larger churches are growing larger, and our medium to smaller churches are emptying. If that trend continues, we’re going to have a problem, especially in some of the outposts of our country.”

He’s dreaming about new models, perhaps a co-op with the megachurch “leading the charge” and providing centralized services for smaller congregations whose personality can remain intact. “I think we ought to at least be talking about that.”

And from Steve’s point-of-view, we won’t win the world if we continue to isolate ourselves in camps with other congregations of our own size and circumstance. “I want to challenge church leaders to circle up with other like-minded pastors to talk about how we can cooperate instead of compete.”

Listen to the whole discussion between Steve Wyatt and Aaron Brockett here.