By Mark A. Taylor

In this space last week and the week before, I reported, evaluated, and shared comments about the Pew Research Center’s May 12 report on religion in America. It is a thorough and detailed study, full of implications for church leaders today.

Especially interesting is the fact that Evangelicals are the only Christian group whose numbers grew between 2007 and 2014. The growth did not keep up with population growth, however, which means the influence of Evangelicals on the American scene is not growing. This is especially concerning when added to the fact that those claiming no religious affiliation multiplied during the same period.

How should conservative Christian churches react to this news? Kent Fillinger, compiler of our annual megachurch report and veteran church watcher, has several ideas. With his permission, I’m giving most of my space this week to his challenge.

Church leaders need to repent from loving the status quo and ministry comfort more than they love the lost, the broken, and the hurting.

Many churches have given up on discipling believers and developing servant-leaders and opted instead to hire more staff to manage the programmatic machine we call the church. And sadly, I’ve seen many ministry staff members who are content to “phone it in” and to hide behind the guise of busyness to work little and produce even less. This report should serve as a true “ice bucket challenge” and wake up leaders to the need to serve well and engage fully in hopes of reaching more of the “nones.”

The report showed that more than one-third of the millennials (adults ages 18-33) are unaffiliated. This reality will have far-reaching impact on the church as a whole for decades to come unless we can create some effective “off ramps” in this mass religious exodus and divert more millennials back into the church.

I think our children’s ministries, student ministries, and college-age ministries need to get serious about wrestling through the difficult questions of the faith and make discipleship (i.e., teaching them to obey) a priority. I know of one megachurch canceling its student ministry’s worship and teaching time for the entire summer. But the church can’t make up lost ground by standing still!

Jesus called us to be “fishers of men,” and the pool of “nones” is the largest it’s ever been. So we need to get serious about fishing. I’m reminded of an old Max Lucado story where he said, “When fishermen don’t fish, they fight.” Too many churches and church members are expending all of their energies fighting with each other instead of getting creative, embracing change, and throwing their nets into the water in an effort to obey Jesus’ command to go and make disciples.

Jesus’ words from Matthew 9:37 still apply today. The harvest is so great, but the workers are few. And too many of the potential workers are busy taking their kids to sports tournaments instead of church on the weekend. Or they think being a committed Christian means showing up for church once or twice a month. Or they aren’t prepared to share the reason for the hope they have because they seldom read their Bibles, as if listening to one sermon a week will satisfy their spiritual hunger.

Kent Fillinger is president of 3Strands: Consulting (www.3strandsconsulting.com).

By Eddie Lowen

Before you decide you want your church to grow, let me tell you the price you will pay.

After taking the staff and elders of a former church to a leadership simulcast in the late 1990s, I learned that I still had a lot to learn.

For several years, Rick Warren’s book The Purpose Driven Church had been making a huge impact on churches applying its principles. The simulcast was a way for our leaders to catch this kind of vision. Our church was already growing in size and health, but I knew there was another level awaiting us. The simulcast event would be part of the next step. I was certain our leaders would have their vision lifted and their determination strengthened by the event.

I shouldn’t have been so certain.

Man Overboard

Within days of the simulcast, I learned one of our elders was responding very negatively to what he heard. He didn’t like the emphasis on change, even though our church had already experienced a lot of change. Also, he had done some “research,” which led him to believe this Warren guy was not to be trusted. Ambitious pastors were being seduced, and I had fallen under a spell, he feared.

Despite our established value of bringing leadership concerns directly to the leadership team, the man did not approach me or ask our elders to meet. Instead, he expressed his alarm to his family, friends, and the folks in his Sunday school class. You know where this is going, don’t you?

I’d love to tell you it ended well. The man was likeable and sincere. His children were friends of my wife and me. In his professional role, he had been important to our family. I admired his generosity with our church. But in just a few weeks, he did significant damage to the unity of our body. Not far into the future, he stepped away from the leadership team and, ultimately, left our church.

This story line could never produce a best-selling novel because it’s far too common. When churches grow, challenges always increase, especially in the early years of growth. Every church struggles, but church leaders who are passionate about reaching the unchurched experience opposition more often and with greater intensity.

Jesus said it’s wise to count the cost before building. So, before you decide you want your church to grow, let me help you forecast a budget. In other words, allow me to help you anticipate some specific ways it will cost you.

Your Motives Will Be Questioned

As your church grows, some people will admire your growing ministry. However, you’ll sense the opposite tendency in some people, too. Without reason or evidence, some will view you more skeptically. Are you willing to be appraised more cynically by more people with each new phase of growth?

When I was invited to speak for a university graduation ceremony several years ago, I arrived a day early. That night, I attended an event for graduates with a friend. During the event, another guest speaker took some cheap shots at large church pastors during his talk. After he appeared to be moving on, I leaned toward my friend and whispered, “Ever been the victim of stereotyping?”

A few seconds later he whispered back, “Yes, some people think I always sit with jerks.” Nice one.

If your church grows—and especially if it enters a category that includes the term mega—get ready. Your motives will be impugned.

People Will Leave

Whether your church grows or not, people will leave. The reasons are many, but there is also a sense in which it’s basic math. People leave churches. But, oddly, the rate of departures may increase during seasons of growth.

My primary concern is how people leave. Some leave poorly (without concern for how they discourage others or damage the ministry). But there are some people who leave well. The best-handled departure I remember was by a woman whose husband was not a believer. When he formed a positive impression of another local church and said he would attend it with her, she wisely chose to go. She made no comparative statements about the two churches. She spoke to me before she left to explain the reason.

Based on that experience, I plan to add a segment to my church’s newcomer event called “If You Ever Leave West Side.” We should train people how to leave well.

I can’t pretend to have never been stung by a church departure. Some have hurt. Some who’ve left have wanted it to hurt. But over time, I am more able to see how losing people who are decidedly opposed to the church’s direction blesses our church. So, if you want your church to grow, accept the likelihood that even more people will leave.

Complexity Will Come

You may think I’m referring to problems. Not really. I’m referring to everything! The more people you have on your campus, the more people you involve as volunteers, the more people you add to your staff team, the more complications you’ll encounter.

Adding one person to your staff team doesn’t seem like a big deal. But even one additional team member multiplies the number of staff and congregational relationships that exist. It can strain your administrative resources. Adding staff multiplies complexity. What’s the answer? Paradoxically, growing complexity requires leaders to find ways to simplify the organization so that its energy can be channeled into ministry, not processes. But making the complex simple is complicated work.

The primary difference between pastors who serve small churches and pastors who serve large churches is not talent. Neither is it work ethic. The difference between small and large church leaders is often the level of fulfillment they derive from engaging complex challenges. While the large church pastor is energized by these challenges, the small church pastor may feel overwhelmed or oppressed. Some people are wired to enjoy the madness of larger ministries, so they gravitate in that direction.

If structures and strategies don’t fascinate you, consider whether or not you really want your church to grow.

Morphing and Moving Roles

Growing churches require adjustment. As the church I serve has grown, we have sometimes needed to ask members of our staff team to surrender familiar responsibilities and accept others. We’ve even taken the radical step of asking people to move to different office spaces to allow teams to be together! But even for church staff who keep the same responsibilities, growth requires flexibility.

One of the biggest shifts in a growing church involves volunteer leaders. In smaller churches, volunteers often hold most or all of the decision-making authority. That’s how they like it. But the reason some small churches do not gain momentum is because there are too many cooks in the kitchen. Too many people are clamoring to be decision makers, while too few are seeking to truly serve in ministry.

In a larger church, the staff receives a set of broad boundaries within which they are free to make strategic decisions about day-to-day and seasonal ministry. In other words, there are fewer daily decision makers and many more actual ministry-doers. I believe this more accurately represents the New Testament model of church leadership. It also just happens to produce healthier, faster-growing churches.

Eddie Lowen, lead minister of West Side Christian Church, Springfield, Illinois, writes the “Ministry Today” column semimonthly in Christian Standard and serves on Standard Publishing’s Publishing Committee. 

By Tim Harlow

On a recent trip to Malawi, my wife and I had a brief layover in London and were able to travel into the city for a spot of tea. We found a shop in the back of the sanctuary of a 900-year-old Anglican church.

The place was incredibly beautiful and ornate, with lovely stained glass. However, it became painfully obvious the church wasn’t selling tea as a way to connect with the community, but because it was desperate for money. There was even a sign saying how much it cost to keep the building open.

As I sipped my Earl Grey, I was overcome with sadness, and then indignation. There are so many people in London who need Jesus. What gospel work could be funded with the money being spent on this ornate building?

The church had free Wi-Fi (thankfully), so I was able to check my e-mail.

I found our local newspaper in Illinois had just published an article about a new campus our church is building in a city 20 minutes south of us. I remembered news I’d received just the day before about another church that was going to allow us to have their building for a different campus. These great people put much sacrifice into their church building, but things just weren’t working, so we will give it our best shot.

There has been a church on the site of St. Mary Aldermary, Church of England, in London for more than 900 years.

It occurred to me our church has several million dollars invested in facilities, and I’ll be raising money for more. Yes, I believe the cost is worth it as we reach our mission field, but who am I to judge those who built the London place of worship?

We’ve been in our buildings only 13 years. What will people be saying about them in 900 years? How will a “cost per person reached” analysis of our Illinois buildings contrast with the number for the London church?

Don’t get me wrong; I’d love to have the Church of England revitalized for the gospel. The time is short. If it were up to me, I’d sell the London church building and give the money to someone who could make sure more people were in the kingdom sooner. But will someone be asking for donations to keep our Illinois buildings open someday?

My friend Hugh Halter will be preaching while I’m in Africa. He’s one of those missional fanatics who believes churches should meet in bars. I think the discussion and the tension about the mode of doing ministry is healthy.

Times Change

There is no right way. Even if there were, times change. When I came to this church 25 years ago, there was no such thing as multisite. The biggest innovations were coming from churches moving from hymnbooks to overhead projectors.

Bus ministry was popular when I was growing up. I was part of a puppet ministry. If you were high-tech, you had two levels of puppets going at the same time. Different things work at different times. Our job is to make sure we do the best we can with what we’ve got.

Paul said, “I have become all things to all people so that by all possible means I might save some” (1 Corinthians 9:22).

If a building makes sense, build one. If it doesn’t, don’t. If you aren’t using your building, sell it or give it to someone who can do something for Jesus.

I know some would say it’s wrong to put money into buildings when so much of the world lives in poverty and/or needs Jesus. That may be true in some places, but my job is to make disciples—everywhere. My job is to send missionaries—everywhere. When I moved to this church, we were giving a much higher percentage to world missions because we were doing a poor job of reaching the mission field around us. Now we do both. The percentage we give to world missions is less, but it’s a lot more money. Most missionaries tell me they think more about actual money than percentages.

I don’t know if the money spent on St. Mary Aldermary Church of England has been worth it for the cause of Christ over the past 900 years, but I repent of my judgment.

“To their own master, servants stand or fall” (Romans 14:4).

I still think buildings help us in our ministry area. If puppet ministry works in yours, go for it. Just please figure out what works and do it. I doubt we have 900 more years to get it right.

Tim Harlow serves as senior pastor with Parkview Christian Church, Orland Park, Illinois.

By Tim Harlow

There are some wonderful benefits to leading the same church for 26 years. It’s actually very difficult to make much headway into your community as a church leader without longevity. However, when people ask me for the hardest thing about longevity, this is my answer—what got us here doesn’t usually get us there.

I don’t mind change. I don’t mind that I’ve preached through the years of overhead projectors to slide projectors to video to HD video. I don’t mind that I grew up in a church with a bus ministry and a puppet troupe, but I’m guessing my children’s ministry would not find that effective today.

Times change, methods change, doing church changes. This is especially true if the size of your church grows. That part I understand. The hard part has not been letting go of old technology; it’s been letting go of old friends.

Another Chance

In the early church, we find a story about a young man named John Mark. He was a sharp young leader who seemed eager to help the kingdom, but evidently got homesick at some point and bailed on Paul in the middle of a journey. Later, when Paul and Barnabas were discussing a second chance for John Mark, Paul didn’t give him one but Barnabas did.

I believe most people think Paul should have lightened up a little and given John Mark another chance. “Jesus gave YOU another chance, Paul!”

But Paul didn’t budge, and the issue brought Paul and Barnabas into such sharp dispute that it broke up the dream team of church planting.

When you hear of “splits” in the church, it’s usually a bad thing for the kingdom. My favorite story is of a castaway who was found on a desert island with three huts.

“What are the huts for?” the castaway was asked.

“One is my house and one is my church,” he replied.

“What is the third hut for?”

“Oh, that’s where I used to go to church.”

A split usually hurts God’s work. Jesus prayed for unity. But at what cost? Does unity require unanimity? Or is it possible to disagree, and even decide to go in different directions, while still loving and respecting your brother or sister in Christ?

I wonder what would have happened if Paul and Barnabas had just decided to mend their ways and work together, taking John Mark with them.

As it is, we never hear from Barnabas again, but we know what Paul went on to do. That doesn’t mean Paul was right. I’m hoping Barnabas’s work was equally productive and beneficial. However, we do know John Mark became a great leader. He was the author of the Gospel of Mark, which came from his direct connection with Peter. Did that connection happen because he wasn’t with Paul? Matthew and Luke seem to lean heavily on Mark, so where would the Gospel story be if things were different? I don’t know.

But I do know this painful truth: many times, progress depends on making some tough decisions. It may mean you do not move forward together with people who have been on your team. I’ve lost plenty of friends who have decided not to move forward with us as a church because they disagreed with our direction.

We could have made decisions based on making everyone happy, but what’s the end game here? Maintaining friendship with people on this earth—who I’m going to spend eternity with anyway? Or introducing Jesus to people who would otherwise never meet him?

Leading the church forward may also mean role changes for members of your team. The greatest single leadership moment in our church’s history came when the elders made a very unpopular decision to relocate. The congregational vote was only 56 percent in favor, but a majority was all we needed. We knew what God was calling us to do, and we decided to follow the shepherd instead of the sheep. That was 18 years ago. I believe that was THE defining moment when God took the lid off of our church.

But here is my point: none of those men are elders today. Some of them moved, one was hired, and some had other life issues going on. But even though several of them are still in our church, they aren’t the ones making those decisions anymore.

The church is literally 20 times larger now because of their leadership in 1997. But now we need elders who can understand the size and scope of leadership at this level. So literally, they led themselves out of a job. The only reason I haven’t done the same is I have surrounded myself with people who keep making me better.

Different Directions

It’s hard to sit down with a loyal friend and church member and realize it’s time to go in different directions. It’s very difficult to go to a staff member—a loyal, hard-working team member who has been like family—and say, “We need to have someone else do what you’ve been doing.” It’s so hard. But if we hadn’t done it, we wouldn’t be here. And they are better off being where they need to be, as well.

To be clear, no one asked any of the elders from 1997 to resign. There was a natural progression of leadership. And while I may come off as a hard-nosed leader, I have never, and will never, make hard decisions like transitioning a staff member by myself. The leadership axiom says, “Hire slow and fire fast,” but unless there is a direct reason, the church is no place to call security and ask for their keys. We are the family of God. There is no place in the family for meanness or callousness.

I don’t think Paul took this decision lightly. How hard was it to say goodbye to the “Son of Encouragement” (which is what Barnabas means)? He sounded like the exact kind of guy you wanted in your corner. I’ve had some tremendous people like Barnabas in my life. I need to catch up with some of them. I do miss those times.

Leadership is hard, and that’s why not everyone is interested.

Hey, someday the elders will need to put me out to pasture . . . tell me to turn out the lights because the party’s over. Someday they will say, “Tim, what got us here won’t get us there.” I hope I am mature enough to accept it.

Until then, I will lead. I will look forward to the future God has in mind. But I’ll always miss the good old days and honor those who got us here. I’ll look forward to Heaven, where I can introduce a bunch of people to leaders they’ve never met—who are very responsible for helping them find Jesus. Because they did get us here.

Tim Harlow serves as senior pastor with Parkview Christian Church, Orland Park, Illinois.

By Mark A. Taylor

Since 1997 CHRISTIAN STANDARD has been publishing annual lists of megachurches among the Christian churches and churches of Christ. In those 19 years, the megachurch phenomenon has exploded, not only in this fellowship but across the whole evangelical world. And with the growth has come criticism, cynicism, and complaint.

Two years ago I interviewed Jud Wilhite, Dave Stone, and Don Wilson for our Beyond the Standard program. Each of them led one of the largest megachurches on that year’s list. I still remember what I wrote about that experience. These three “shared practical ideas and thoughtful strategies—always with a spirit of humility. But too many questions from listeners contained veiled accusations of compromise to achieve numbers.”

All of us can agree that bigger isn’t always better. After all, a wide variety of charlatans, many of them claiming to be Christians, have attracted crowds larger than those we report. Numbers by themselves do not authenticate a blessing from God. But neither do small numbers or slow growth prove that effective ministry is not happening.

Ministers in an uncounted multitude of small churches around the world are leading believers to turn from sin, pore over God’s Word, pray, and recognize God’s claim on their finances. The mature Christian lives that result are beautiful and strong, even if few in number.

As Chris Travis pointed out earlier this year, not all healthy physical bodies grow. We do see new growth in their offspring. But we’re content to witness remarkable physical changes in those children without expecting the parents to become taller or to sprout new limbs.

Nevertheless, I agree with Edward Sanders who reflected on all this at this site five years ago. “Numbers don’t mean everything and shouldn’t be the reason we work,” he agreed, “but when the numbers add up, isn’t it fun to see God working on a numerical and tangible scale?”

And, indeed, it seems sure God has been working since CHRISTIAN STANDARD published its first megachurch report in 1997. That list contained 58 local congregations, only 16 of them averaging above the 2,000 mark we now use to distinguish megachurches from “emerging megachurches.” But our latest report lists 58 megachurches alone, plus 74 more emerging megachurches, for a total of 142. (And we know some Christian churches have decided to quit responding to our annual request for numbers.)

The 1997 report listed only one congregation with an attendance average larger than 6,000 (Southeast Christian Church, Louisville, Kentucky, with 10,355 in 1996). This year’s report includes 11 churches averaging more than 6,000. Southeast’s number this year is 22,927! The largest church on this year’s list is Christ’s Church of the Valley in Peoria, Arizona, with a 2015 average of 24,548. (Their 1996 number was 2,081, less than a tenth of those they’re reaching today!)

Comparing the growth of many churches since 1997 gives us a thrilling picture. A few examples:

A line-by-line analysis would show some churches on this year’s list were too small to be included in 1997. Several reporting this year didn’t exist then!

We can rejoice at these numbers without forgetting or discounting the significant, unsung work done by smaller churches serving outside of the spotlight. We know from Scripture that God often works in out-of-the-way places and situations deemed obscure by human standards. But Scripture also tells us about thousands baptized at Pentecost and hundreds who saw the risen Christ and multitudes fed from one boy’s small lunch.

How do we feel about the numbers reported this year? We feel good about them! Each one represents new crowds of people pointed to Heaven by ministerial staffs working more effectively than ever before. We think God is smiling to look at the totals, and we hope every reader feels exactly the same.

CHRISTIAN STANDARD’s annual megachurch report is just one part of the dynamic May issue, in the mail now. If you are not a subscriber, get your own copy of this issue by purchasing it for only $2.99 inside the free CHRISTIAN STANDARD app for your smartphone or tablet. Get a whole year of digital editions of CHRISTIAN STANDARD (plus a 13^th issue free to new subscribers) by subscribing there for only $14.99.

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 BlogTalkRadio 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.

By Will Thomas

All churches count “noses” and “nickels.” That’s a good thing. Most of the time, attendance and finances provide a helpful barometer of what’s happening. But other factors also matter. Churches count what they do because they can. The harder-to-measure goals may too often remain hidden beneath the surface.

Some churches look beyond the obvious. All churches could. In fact, looking beyond the obvious is probably one of the common characteristics of larger, growing churches. They know numbers for the sake of numbers seldom lead anywhere. Their leaders know a big church needs a big foundation. Churches that have grown large and stayed that way over time have found ways to look deeper and monitor other factors that matter.

Contrary to what some cynics argue, most large churches didn’t get that way by compromising their message or accommodating the latest corporate fad. Nor did most start large. They grew large because they did some things right—important things.

Measuring a church is like going to the doctor. Every visit starts the same way. The nurse takes your weight, height, and blood pressure. But the doctor doesn’t stop there. The doctor listens, probes, and queries. A good exam never stops with the simple weight and blood pressure checks.

Churches of all sizes could benefit from a more comprehensive exam. Church leaders might want to assess a few of the factors that are harder to measure. After checking worship attendance and financial statistics, what else could a serious church consider in order to monitor its true health and vitality?

Here are five markers of a healthy church. No congregation will shine in all five areas, but at least two or three are a must. Progress begins with asking the right questions.

The Harvest Test

How many lost people have come to a personal trust in Christ alone as a result of the church’s efforts? Of course, the transfer of believers from other congregations matters. So does the conversion of members’ younger children. But these internal factors don’t really measure a church’s outreach. To the contrary, such things can create a distorted perception of what’s really happening. Research suggests more than half of the more than 350,000 congregations in the United States fail to win a single convert in any given year. Surely a healthy church will do better—much better!

Once a church begins to think and pray about the “harvest test,” leaders can begin the hard work of developing a strategy for the future.

The Generational Test

How many of the young adults who grew up in the church and were a part of its ministry 10 years ago are still practicing followers of Jesus today, regardless of where they live? This may require some investigation. Needless to say, following up on student ministry “alumni” may not be easy. But imagine what revealing information a few “exit interviews” with former students might provide.

The “generational test” assumes youth ministry aims at outcomes, not just participation. If so, a simple head count at last week’s event could be misleading. No church maintains 100 percent of its young. But if the “fall away” is too high, leaders need to ask some hard questions. A better tomorrow begins with an accurate exam today.

The Leadership Test

How many new ministers, missionaries, Bible teachers, elders, or other significant leaders have been produced by the congregation in the last 10 years? Some congregations produce leaders. Some consume the leaders produced by others. Every minister, minister’s wife, and missionary grew up in somebody’s congregation. Why not yours? Healthy churches produce local and global leaders.

The recruitment and training of leaders may be formal or it could be organic. But it seldom happens by accident. It begins as a prayer, then a goal, and ultimately a plan. But none of that happens until leadership development is part of the measure of a church.

The Transformed Life Test

How many individuals in the church are demonstrating significant, observable, positive spiritual growth? This can be a difficult thing to assess. But two measurable areas of growth are worth a close look. How many individuals are newly involved in praying with others? How many tithing now weren’t tithing last year?

There are no doubt other important (perhaps even more important) areas of life change. But any meaningful area of spiritual change should be observable and measurable. Subjective evaluations or claims without accompanying actions seldom reveal any helpful information. These two indicators meet both criteria by providing clear evidence of movement in a believer’s inner spiritual life.

The Multiplication Test

How many other gospel-preaching churches have been launched through the direct, intentional efforts of the congregation in the last 10 years? This might be a solo effort or a result of teamwork with other congregations. The multiplication could be nearby or at a distance. It might be a multisite project, which has become more common in recent years.

One thing is clear: healthy congregations reproduce themselves—on purpose. Analyses demonstrate an indisputable fact—long-term, sustained, cultural-impacting kingdom growth takes place when new congregations are planted and multiplied.

How does your congregation measure up? Remember, few congregations, even the healthiest, do well in all areas all the time. But strong, high-impact, effective congregations should expect to do well in some of these five areas and strive to do well in all.

Celebrate what you are doing well! Then evaluate. Try to discover the keys to the success so that those strengths can be leveraged in other areas.

Knowing the areas to work on is the first step. But knowing the areas of needed improvement is helpful only if that knowledge leads to planned change. Prayer-filled planning and goal setting are the necessary follow-through.

Here’s the process: measure, evaluate, act, and evaluate again—all the time praying. When that takes place, good things happen.

That’s the real measure of any church, large or small.

Will Thomas is a retired teacher and freelance writer living in Darien, Illinois.

By Mark A. Taylor

Everyone serving the Lord struggles sometimes with tension between external actions and internal motives.

Am I singing or preaching or teaching because I love to be in front of people, or because I love to communicate God’s Word?

Do I give out of guilt or out of gratitude?

Do I approach Bible study, prayer, or weekly worship solely out of duty, or are they a delight to me?

And when it comes to ministers who lead growing churches, the tensions multiply. Am I seeking church growth to build the kingdom or to build my ego? Am I more concerned about my reputation or the needs of those we’re serving? Who’s glorified most because of our ministry, those leading it or God?

Ministers with the three largest Christian churches/churches of Christ in America talked about this in my Beyond the Standard discussion with them May 15. I asked them, “How do we balance concern for numerical growth with attention to spiritual growth?”

Dave Stone, minister with Southeast Christian Church in Louisville, Kentucky, said, “I prefer to talk about church health as opposed to church growth. When an organism is healthy, growth is a natural by-product.” But he pointed out that seasons of plateau or times for pruning are sometimes natural or necessary. And he admitted that he had his own struggle with ego when church attendance dropped by 1,500 in the first year of his ministry after longtime Southeast minister Bob Russell retired.

Don Wilson, who serves Christ’s Church of the Valley in Peoria, Arizona, looks at three external indicators of internal spiritual growth for any Christian: Are you generous? Are you serving in ministry? Are you sharing your faith?

And Jud Wilhite, minister with Central Christian Church in Henderson, Nevada, referred to 2 Corinthians 5:12, where Paul speaks about external success contrasted with internal sincerity:

Are we commending ourselves to you again? No, we are giving you a reason to be proud of us, so you can answer those who brag about having a spectacular ministry rather than having a sincere heart (New Living Translation).

Wilhite’s interpretation: “Paul’s alluding to the fact that people in his day were bragging about numbers, if you will. If you just look at the numbers, he wouldn’t have a spectacular ministry. But he has a sincere heart.”

Each of these three fellows has what could be called a “spectacular ministry.” (Their three congregations are reaching a total of more than 60,000 worshippers every weekend!) And not everyone is comfortable with their success. Questions from those who called into the program all hinted at skepticism or concern about why and how megachurches achieve their numbers.

But as each of these leaders offered gracious answers to those questioners, I heard indications of humility and concern that underlie every ministry led by someone with a sincere heart.

Listen to the whole discussion with Wilhite, Stone, and Wilson, including how ministry has stayed the same for them, no matter the size of their congregations. Find the hour-long program here.

By Bruce Webster

The Bible’s mandate is to grow quickly, not to grow large. Look what happens when believers today take their strategy from the New Testament instead of the church in the West. 

Are you like me? For many years when I read the parable of the mustard seed¹, I pictured a tiny seed growing slowly like an oak tree, attaining good height as it matured. But when the people listening to Jesus heard him tell that parable, they had a very different picture. They knew the mustard plant didn’t grow very big—maximum height about 10 feet—but it grew very rapidly.

The mustard plant is an annual. Its entire growth takes less than a year. Jesus was saying that he expected explosive kingdom growth!

The early church did grow rapidly, starting with 3,000 on the Day of Pentecost. Soon there were 5,000 men (Acts 4:4), and the total probably exceeded 20,000 when counting women and children. Should we expect that kind of growth today?

Late in 2000, Ying Kai and his wife, Chinese-American missionaries, began working with a large, unreached people group in Asia. In the beginning, they worked with 30 farmers. Ten years later they could document more than 1.7 million baptized believers!

Can that kind of explosive kingdom growth happen here? Yes, and no. Yes, in a few places it is already beginning to happen here. But no, it can’t happen here without a major change in how we think and do church.

The ministry of Porch Church, a house church in Alabama, resulted in more than 10,000 “professions of faith” in 360-plus daughter, granddaughter, great-granddaughter, etc., churches in just 14 months.²

Sugar Creek Baptist Church, a megachurch outside Houston, is an example of what a megachurch can do to rapidly expand the kingdom. I’ll say more about both later.³

Can we make the changes necessary to have rapid kingdom growth here? Those changes will happen only if we face the brutal fact that, from a kingdom perspective, we are failing. What we’re doing, especially in large, growing churches, often appears to be good, sometimes very good. People are baptized. Lives are changed. Christians grow and become more like Christ, but Christianity is dying in America.

Good Isn’t Good Enough

The first thing Jim Collins says in Good to Great is “Good is the enemy of great.” Does Satan tempt us to do something good to keep us from doing something great?

We see the large growing church as the ideal. We honor the leaders of those churches. But as the number and size of such churches has grown, the number of people actually participating in church has declined. We’re losing more people than we’re reaching. That’s now true even among the independent Christian churches.

Our focus on the large gathering prevents us from obeying Jesus’ command to “love each other as I have loved you” (John 15:12). That’s part of the reason Barna Group research shows that people in church frequently behave more like the Pharisees than like Jesus.⁴ It’s a big part of the reason Rick Wood, editor of Mission Frontiers, could write, “We have failed miserably to equip the people in our churches to be disciple-makers and church planters.”⁵ Those two things are largely responsible for Christianity’s declining in America.

Church leaders usually try hard to do what they were taught to do. However, a lot of what they were taught to do comes not from the New Testament but from church tradition. We’ve been taught to focus on the wrong things.

When we look at individual churches, it often looks like they are doing well, sometimes very well. However, when we dig deeper, and especially when we look at the church (kingdom) in any of our cities, we are doing very poorly.⁶

We’ve been taught to focus on gathering a large crowd, and the bigger the better. We’ve been taught to focus on growing our church rather than growing the kingdom. We’ve been taught to focus on teaching what we know, not how we should live. We’ve substituted “worship” for loving (obeying) God.

Jesus focused on one small group. He focused on loving that small group of men. He spent a lot of his time teaching by example. Jesus commanded us to love one another “as I have loved you.” A person can do that only with a small group of people. You can’t do that while looking at the back of someone’s head in a large group.

Shifting the Focus

Both Porch Church and Sugar Creek Baptist Church have shifted the focus from the large gathering—though Sugar Creek still has one—to small, easily reproduced small groups that multiply disciples. Both are focused on growing the kingdom rather than growing a church. Porch Church has deliberately stayed small. Some of the people Sugar Creek reaches become part of the church. Many do not. Some of the small groups become house churches, while others combine with other small groups to form a new church. That is a key part of their kingdom strategy.

How are Porch Church, Sugar Creek Baptist Church, and similar groups able to rapidly reproduce small groups and disciples? Some use Training for Trainers, also called T4T, developed by Ying Kai and his wife.⁷ Others use Discovery Bible Studies (DBS).⁸ Both are similar, and both focus on behavior.

At the end of every meeting, participants are encouraged to pray about and share how they will apply what they have learned; participants are also asked to list the names of people in their oikos (their network of family, friends, neighbors, and coworkers) whom they will tell what they have learned. The next week the participants are held accountable by being asked to provide details about how it went when they shared the information with others.

Both programs use a very simple leader reproduction system. In T4T, leaders teach this week what they learned last week. In DBS, the leaders are primarily facilitators asking a predetermined set of questions—the same questions every week—related to a passage of Scripture.⁹ The Scripture and the Holy Spirit do the teaching.

In both T4T and DBS, people who have been Christian for less than a month can lead groups; these new Christians normally will be in two groups, one they are leading and the other where they are being trained and held accountable.

We see another version of this strategy as it was applied in Erdenet, Mongolia, a city of 65,000. There’s a Sheep in my Bathtub is the account of Brian Hogan’s family as missionaries there.

When the first missionaries arrived early in 1993, Erdenet was totally unreached. When the Hogans arrived to work with them a year later, there were five growing, reproducing house churches made up almost entirely of teenage girls. Just two years after that, Easter of 1996, the team passed the baton of leadership to the Mongolian church elders, and soon after, the team members left Erdenet. Subsequent trips back found the church continuing to grow and reproduce and sending missionaries to other parts of Mongolia and beyond.

Rapidly Multiplying Small

How could so much be accomplished in such a short time?

• The missionaries and church leaders looked to the New Testament, not the church in the West, to guide what they did. They quickly trusted God (the Holy Spirit) to guide the Mongolian Christians and their leaders rather than thinking they needed to maintain control.

• House churches regularly reproduced themselves.

• The missionaries also found that when they brought all the house churches together for a weekly celebration service, their growth stopped, but occasional large celebration services worked fine. Is this a lesson for us?

Are we rewarding failure when we honor the pastors of large, growing churches while most Christians fail to live like Christ and Christianity is declining in America? Do we need a different reward system?

Great movements to God are never about growing big. They are always about rapidly multiplying small. Whether it’s the Wesley revival and classes, Ying Kai, T4T, church planting movements in Asia and beyond, or Porch Church in Alabama, it’s always about multiplying leaders and small groups/house churches. Leaders are not trained and then put in leadership. They are trained as they lead.

Let’s work to rapidly multiply leaders and reproduce small groups/house churches and come up with ways to honor those who do so.

________

¹The parable of the mustard seed is found in Matthew 13:31, 32; Mark 4:30–32; and Luke 13:18, 19.

²Curtis Sergeant, “Growing U.S. Movements to the Lost and the Unreached,” Mission Frontiers, March–April 2014; www.MissionFrontiers.org.

³Steve Addison, “From Megachurch to Movement Catalyst,” in Pioneering Movements (Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 2015). The Lighthouse in Cape Town, South Africa, also described in Pioneering Movements, is a church with a similar story. See also Steve Addison’s website, www.movements.net.

⁴Accessed at www.barna.org/faith-spirituality/619-are-christians-more-like-jesus-or-more-like-the-pharisees#.V3VYSbsrJ5Q.

⁵Accessed at www.missionfrontiers.org/issue/article/editorial-comment106.

⁶For example, the Cincinnati and St. Louis metro areas have both grown in the last 15 years, but today there are 15,000 fewer people attending church in Cincinnati than in 2000; in St. Louis, the decline in church attendance has been twice that.

⁷For information, see http://t4tonline.org/.

⁸A description of Discovery Bible Series, and why each of the eight parts is important, is available at http://bit.ly/1Y74Fkn. Another website, https://app.box.com/v/10storiesofhope, provides 10 examples of DBS in a slightly simplified form.

⁹Sample questions include, “What does this passage say about God? What does this passage say about people? What does this passage say about obedience? Based on what we learned from this passage, what does God want you to do this week?”

Bruce Webster serves as president and consultant/coach with Kingdom Expansion, Indianapolis, Indiana.

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First Responders

BRUCE WEBSTER COMMENTS, “Christianity is dying in America.” But Soong-Chan Rah wrote: “As many lament the decline in Christianity in the United States in the early stages of the twenty-first century, very few have recognized that American Christianity may actually be growing, but in unexpected and surprising ways” (The New Evangelicalism, 2009, p. 12). 

While the primarily white church in America may be declining, many “ethnic” churches, many African-American churches, and churches among immigrants are growing rapidly—but these churches just don’t get the attention of the pollsters!

This fall I sat in on a presentation about the status of the church in America presented by Ed Stetzer, director of the Billy Graham Association in Wheaton, Illinois. He said that three-quarters of Americans self-identify as Christians. This group is evenly divided between those who are cultural Christians (i.e., “Of course I am a Christian, I was born in America”), those who are celebratory Christians (go to church on Christmas and Easter), and those who are committed Christians. The percentage of people in that last group has not changed and is not projected to change in the next decade, though the other two groups are expected to decline in the coming years. 

Webster also talks about strategies that are working around the world, like disciple-making movements and church planting movements, which I support and have seen in numerous places. However, his article is primarily about the church in the United States, and it has been pointed out there is no significant church planting movement in the West (see David Harrison’s Church Planting Movements, 2004, for a definition of that term).

—Doug Priest, executive director, CMF International (www.cmfi.org)

___

THERE’S A MASSIVE sea change taking place in missions today. Practically everyone is transitioning to the simple teachings of the Bible—that is, disciple making movement (DMM) approaches. So in that respect, Bruce “nails it.” 

At this point, probably 80 percent of all our Team Expan-sion workers in more than 40 countries are using DMM principles and practices. And it’s yielding amazing results. 

In one field (a Muslim land), we had seen around 30 believers come to Christ after nine years of “traditional missions ministry” (seeking to establish “beachhead churches”)—and we didn’t feel bad about that because that’s what we had come to expect among Muslims. 

In July 2014, the leadership of that field participated in one of our training programs on DMM approaches (we sometimes refer to it as “Jonathan Training” or “JT”). The team embraced JT and fully began implementing T4T approaches (as referred to in Bruce’s article). In the next 24 months, our team there was able, through God’s power, to launch more than 150 three-thirds groups—or discovery Bible studies—with more than 1,000 people attending. More than 500 people were baptized. All this took place within 24 months—and there’s no end in sight.

If I were to humbly differ with Bruce on anything, I would meekly say we’re trying very hard not to discourage anything at this point. I am a product of “program” church (with a building and a full-time preacher), not a house church. So, in this new age of DMM, let’s seek God for the best approach in our own context, whatever that may be. 

So join me in praying that God will continue to bless the megachurch movement just as he’s blessing the simple church approach.

—Doug Lucas, president, Team Expansion (teamexpansion.org)

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BEGINNING IN GENESIS, the Bible’s mandate for all things is to grow. All things living are either growing or dying, and the church, a living organism, is no different. It can grow larger, wider, deeper, higher, or faster . . . the point is to grow. 

In this article, I am once again reading about how large, growing churches are somehow seriously flawed because they are, in fact, large and growing. With indictments such as, “Focus on the large gathering prevents us from obeying Jesus’ command to ‘love one
another . . . ,’” and that we are doing poorly in “any of our cities,” it’s clear that this is an anti-megachurch opinion.

I’m not pro megachurch, anti-house church, sans Internet campus, or missional, or multisite, or whatever . . .
I am pro growth. I desire growth in the kingdom, evangelism, discipleship, leadership, in movement, and in life! 

Robert Coleman wrote The Master Plan of Evangelism, a foundational work on discipleship, more than 50 years ago. It has sold more than 3 million copies and been translated into more than 90 languages. Coleman’s book talks about the power of discipleship in small groups, but Coleman worships at Southland Christian Church in Lexington, Kentucky, a gigachurch. My point? Let’s just grow.

—Jerry Harris, senior pastor, The Crossing, Quincy, Illinois

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.

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*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.