There is an important element of the church, at least over the past 50 years or so that we need to examine and look at with somewhat of a critical lens but really more with an honest lens. Over the past several decades the topic of church growth has taken on a life of its own. Certainly we all want the church to grow but what does that really mean? There is a church growth industry comprised of consultants, publishers, conference promoters and speakers etc. And actually while church leaders have focused on church growth, attendance has grown, buildings have been built and people have been attracted to mega churches. However, I call this the myth of church growth because to accomplish this “growth” we actually had to redefine what church is. If you have to move the target to reach the goal, you never did actually reach the goal.
What am I really saying here? The New Testament characterization of the church was a collection of believers. At least metaphorically if not directly, the church is recognized as the bride of Christ. She is exhorted to be pure and spotless and ready for her bridegroom. In the past 50 years in the evangelical church, the church has been functionally redefined as an evangelistic gathering. In other words, biblically the church is defined as a gathering of believers being sanctified. In the modern church, the church is defined (for growth measurement purposes) as simply a gathering of people even specifically targeting unbelievers. In other words, biblically the church was seen as a group of believers. The church growth industry has told the church to bring in everyone they can and measure that. There is a massive difference. There will be those who push back challenging that statement and in your specific case, you may be right but I would ask a few questions.
- What extent of your church programming is geared toward the unbeliever/unchurched?
- How much money do you spend on attracting or retaining the unbeliever/unchurched?
- Evaluating your church’s priorities, where does bringing unbelieving/unchurched people in to your service to hear the gospel land?
- How do you measure church growth? Is it based on church attendance or some other metric?
- If someone from the outside were to observe your church for a month, how would they characterize your church?
I listen daily to a political podcast. Often I am frustrated because I hear this broadcaster say something that is right on target and really important. I want to share that nugget for others to hear but often I can’t because either there is some language in context that I don’t want to have coming from me or he used a tone of voice that would not be received well by those who are not familiar with this person so I don’t share something I find important and helpful to others. He as gotten some criticism for this but his response is very telling. He says, “I can’t do a show for people who don’t listen to me.” Honestly that frustrates me sometimes but he is right. Why tailor his show to people who don’t listen to him? Yet that is what we do as the church all the time. In fact many if not most Evangelical churches tailor a message for people who don’t listen to us or who aren’t even there because we hope at some point they will come. At the same time we have a whole group of people who are there and are hungry for God’s Word but we often minimize them and focus the majority of our efforts on the visitors or those who may come in the door or those who aren’t even there. If we look at this critically it is a little insane.
Don’t get me wrong, I understand that Jesus instructed us to make disciples and to go into all the world. I get that. But let’s dig into that a bit. The most obvious issue here is that Jesus was talking to His 11 disciples who were not part of an organized church but who had been on itinerant ministry with Jesus for 3 years. There is no indication that Jesus was telling His disciples to gather unbelievers into an organized service so they could present the gospel. No, Jesus modeled presenting the gospel wherever He went on a daily basis. The other thing Jesus modeled was pouring into His disciples so they would be equipped to share the gospel wherever they went, whether that be a jail cell, a centurion’s house, in the Temple courtyard or on the town’s magisterial steps. Discipling them if you will.
What has been labeled church growth is actually a euphemism. If we truly look at the church growth movement, at its core it is nothing more than marketing. The truth is that the church has spent hundreds of millions of dollars on church growth and as we saw in the prologue, it just does not work. We see church growth in the book of Acts but it is not what the popular church growth models of today are. In the book of Acts we see the church growing by new believers being added. Church growth today is seen as simply the number of people attending often focused on unbelievers. We hope that someday they will become believers but even in our language we want to see unchurched become churched. This is not the model of the New Testament and it is neither a viable metric nor a biblical goal. Churches have given away a car in order to entice people in their doors. We have spent hundreds of millions of dollars simply on technical equipment let alone buildings to attract people to our services. I’ll go out on a limb here and say that I have to believe that it must be offensive God when we are essentially saying, “Your Word, that double edged sword, Your creation, the majesty and grandiosity of the universe and the world around us, Your Son who left heaven and died for us is not really enough. We need moving lights and emotional videos and giveaways and gimmicks to attract people to the message of Jesus. We’ll bring Hollywood movies into the church and theatrical set design and concert style music. Maybe those things will attract people to Jesus.
Church growth favors metrics and quantification but if we are honest, it is difficult to quantify the effectiveness of a worship service. How do you quantify how many people are truly worshiping or being convicted by the Holy Spirit? How do you quantify the glory of God? How do you quantify brokenness being healed or pride being broken in a congregation of people sitting in a service? How do you quantify worship or fellowship or the Holy Spirit? More often than not, church growth is reduced down to the number of people attending and whether we see a rise or fall in attendance. There is a massive problem here. We cannot quantify church growth by the number of people attending. To do so is a misleading and meaningless statistic.
If we quantify our worship service effectiveness with only attendance numbers, we could achieve massive church growth by simply inviting Taylor Swift, Drake, Miranda Lambert of fill in your own personal favorite to do our music. By our own definition we would have amazing church growth and incredible worship. Most pastors would say that is ridiculous and it is. But measuring worship or church growth by butts in seats is no different. Butts in seats measures only that, butts in seats. This measurement is an oversimplified, reductionistic metric that can only measure the effectiveness of our marketing. It cannot determine the heart or intention of the person there. It certainly does not reflect a biblical understanding of the growth of the church.
Not only is the metric faulty, our method is equally as faulty. Consider a company like Coca Cola or Proctor and Gamble or Johnson & Johnson hiring a sales force. Rather than training them well to represent and sell their products, they give them minimal training and give them this instruction, “Go out there and tell people that we have amazing products, products that will change their lives. Then encourage them to bring those people back to HQ at a specified time each week so they can hear about those products from the experts, we’ll even have cookies.” That is a horribly inefficient sales model and a company would not survive with that sales model. But, that is essentially the model of the modern church. That is what the evangelical church has been invested in for the past half century. I’m sorry but it is no wonder that the world around us finds us irrelevant.
The real church growth model lies elsewhere. It has nothing to do with marketing and it in part made itself real to me ironically in a business class. During this class we studied case studies of all different kinds of products from Apple Computer to Benihana restaurants to toothbrushes and the list goes on. What I found was that the more I learned about the history and the inner workings of that product, the more I knew that product, the more I wanted to have that product. I could bypass all the other toothbrushes for that one I was studying, not because anyone was trying to sell it to me but because I learned all that went into the making of that item. Let me try to relate this to the church.
Imagine a church that is immersed in knowing God deeply. The more deeply that church knows God, the more their love for Him grows. The more their love for Him grows, the more they naturally and organically tell others about Him. They can’t help it because they see the awesomeness of God not only in His majesty but also in His love for them. Imagine the effectiveness of this model with the church. The depth and width of her reach would be unending. Imagine this difference. One pastor preaches to tap into a “felt need” of either a subset of the congregation or even to those who aren’t even there but the church hopes will come. Another pastor preaches to his congregation with a message that ignites that church in the understanding and appreciation of who God really is with a message that transcends particular pain points but relates to all of life. The colloquialism would say he changes the water level that raises all ships. Which would prove to be a more effective strategy?
Let’s further put this into context. At our discretion we have the opportunity to talk about the star breathing, earth shaping, ocean filling, mountain building creator of the universe who has given us His Word written down so that we may know Him, the God of the universe intimately. But not only did He create the physical world around us, He also holds the spiritual world in the palm of His hand. He created a physical order, a social order, a spiritual order that all fit together like pieces of a puzzle and come together to form a mind blowing universe of beauty, revelation and symbolism beyond our comprehension. And then Oh, by the way He sent His Son from the glory of heaven to die the most humiliating and horrific death in order to make a way to bring us into relationship with this God while we were still His enemies. He even invites us into the Godhead as adopted children. How utterly breathtakingly amazing is that?! Is there really a limit to the depth and breadth of the knowledge of God (Job 11:7). Would our congregations not be better served by this than finding a temporary pain point of a segment of our congregation that week and give our wisdom on that subject until we whip the car around to the point of . . . and Jesus loves you so you should give your life to Him.”
If you are of an exegetical/expositionally preaching church this still applies. Just because you may be pulling God’s Word apart in digestible but deep morsels, do people leave your service excited about who God is? Are they blown away by the infinite God? Have they truly gotten to know Him more? Are their lives changing to reflect more the mind of Jesus or are their words closer to, “Great sermon today pastor.”? I once had a seminary professor say, “If you are not preaching expositionally, you’re not preaching.” But the truth is we can treat expositional preaching the same way we treat topical preaching. Today we are talking about a godly marriage OR today we are talking about 1 Timothy 3. There may be less difference than we think. There is a deep problem here and I find myself not only troubled by it but guilty of it as well. Let’s set that aside and come back to it in a minute.
When we talk about church growth, we often speak in terms of evangelism and discipleship. I’ve heard the metaphor of evangelism and discipleship as being wings on an airplane. The church needs them both. That is a nice word picture and it both simplifies and balances out the approach of the church. The problem is that it doesn’t work. An organization with a divided mission will at best have lackluster results for both but more likely it will fail at both. In fact, if we structure the church in this way, evangelism and discipleship are for the most part mutually exclusive in the current format when we talk about church structure.
By definition the two competing priorities cannot thrive together. I have watched this scenario happen multiple times. When the church focuses on evangelism, by necessity two things must be true. One, the message must be very simple, we cannot do a deep dive because we are starting at the beginning with the non-believer every week. Secondly the message is repetitive. If the goal is evangelism of the non-believer, the message every week is the simple gospel. This caters to our evangelistic priority but it does so at the expense of discipleship. This does not promote growth for the believer (discipleship). Often, eventually the believers leave because there is nothing for them. You may argue that there are multiple meetings that cater to both needs but at best you are making one a lesser priority. And in reality have you ever seen that work effectively? I have not and the data bears this out.
On the other hand if the church focuses on discipleship during its services the opposite is true. The believer is now being fed but the evangelism priority is diminished (in the church service) because the target has been for the believer. One may argue that an evangelism priority can still be maintained outside of the service time and I would hope that would be true. Once the church builds up the believers and believers experience the depths of God, words of life naturally will come from their mouths and not because they are taught what to say but because they are living out the life of a Christian and experiencing life in Christ. But when we are talking about church service content the two are in large part mutually exclusive.
If we are to look at real church growth, we need to put the target back where it belongs. Church growth ultimately is not about numbers. Don’t get me wrong, if we do this right, the numbers will follow but that is not our responsibility. In the book of Acts we see multiple times, “. . .And the Lord added to their number. . .” Numerical growth is His responsibility and He is faithful. The target is clear. Church growth is not measured in people, it is measured in believers, in sanctification and depth of knowledge and wisdom. If we grow our congregations deeper I believe God will exponentially grow us wider. But if we focus on the numbers, even what we have will fall off as we have seen in the deconstruction of faith in so many people and in the shallow cultural Christianity so many are content to claim.
Prologue
Relevant?
Defining Church
The Purpose of the Church
The Radiant Bride
Worship
Worship in the Church
Holy Huddle
Myth of Church Growth