Healthy Congregations Constantly Start New Units 

 

Some years ago while serving as the director of missions of an urban association, I was asked to meet with the deacons of a small church.  This church had experienced Sunday attendance of 300-350 persons in the 1960s and 1970s.  They had gone through a long, gradual decline to a point that they had fewer than 80 in attendance.  They owned their property which had a value of about 3 million dollars, but they were having difficulty paying the utilities and maintenance costs along with paying a pastor and part-time secretary.  

They came to my office to say, “We are desperate.  Tell us what we should do to save our church, and we will do it.  We are ready to try anything.”  (The motivation of reaching people to “save our church” is problematic, but that is another article.) I had my staff meet with their church leaders, and together we engaged in a ten week process of studying the church and its possibilities.  We developed a detailed plan to have the church do some very creative things that we believed would result in growth.  They could finance those actions by taking a small “equity” mortgage on their debt-free property to pay the cost.  Our reasoning was that if the church grew they could easily pay off the mortgage; if they went ahead and died their property would still have enormous value even after paying off the equity line.  

We presented our proposal to the church that had said, “we will do whatever…”  They voted by an overwhelming majority not to do any of the things we recommended.  That experience, along with others, has taught me that unhealthy churches are usually unhealthy by their own choices.  They have made “anti-growth” decisions.  And the same mistakes that led to their downhill slide are likely to continue to be made even when faced with disaster.  

There are some widely accepted church growth principles to which nearly all the people who study church life.  Yet many plateaued and declining congregations refuse to implement and operate by those principles.  Let me mention just a couple of those:  

1.  Effective small groups in a church should to be composed of eight to twelve persons.  If the groups are much smaller than eight or much larger than twelve, the essential dynamics that would allow for growth are greatly diminished.  A group that is consistently having sixteen or more persons will have little motivation to reach out, and often won’t have physical or emotional space to accommodate new attendees.  You can be sure that group isn’t going to grow.    Since the small group life in many of our churches depends mostly or totally on Sunday School, that means a church that allows large, lecture-type Sunday School classes is opting not to grow.  The class that digs in its heels and refuses when asked to divide to make two smaller classes, is essentially saying, “We like what we have (e.g. teacher, meeting room, each other) and want to keep it for ourselves, and we are more interested in pleasing ourselves than reaching new people.”  

2.  Newly formed groups tend to grow more rapidly and effectively than large established groups.  For this reason, a church that sincerely wants to grow will be starting new groups every year.  Established churches should sponsor and start new churches, understanding that those new churches will reach more people more rapidly for the Kingdom.  New Sunday School classes, new ministry groups, new worship opportunities, and new interest groups can provide new people with a less threatening place to enter into the life of a church.   Healthy congregations are constantly starting new things.

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