Is there a reason why 90% of churches have less than 200 people attending? Most of us are painfully aware of this figure. The question is, “what can we do about it?” According to Bill Easum and Bil Cornelius, authors of the above titled book, there is much that we can do.
Here are ten action steps that I distilled from my reading of the book:
1. Examine my leadership: “Lead pastor, if your church is not growing, you are the stopping point. If your church is growing, you are the catalyst. It’s that simple” (9).
2. Seek to evaluate church’s leadership structure: “The rule of thumb we see in the thriving churches today is the less democracy in the church, the more authentic and effective church can be in advancing the kingdom of God…the Bible is void of any reference to Representative Democracy or Congregational rule and the pastors of these thriving churches are hamstrung by boards or committees that micromanage the day-to-day ministries of the church” (21).
3. Seek to clearly define role of staff vs. members: “In most dying or plateauing congregations the laity make most of the decisions, both missional and tactical” (29).
4. Prepare for the people God wants to send: “It is not good to ask God to double your attendance without preparing for the inflow of people. You have to expect it and prepare for it…If you’re not prepared for God to respond, why are you asking God to provide?” (43).
5. Do “Big Days”: Churches talk a lot about evangelism and reaching people but seldom make any big, outlandish push. What you need to do is focus all your efforts on one big, single day—you’ll see your church make jumps of 20-80 percent on Sunday because you focused everything you were doing on one day” (51).
6. Understand the relationship between the weekend worship service and small groups: “Most people think that small groups will help their church grow. That’s not usually the case. Small groups help to retain the people who are already coming to your church. For that reason you should never focus primarily on small groups and forget on reaching out to the community” (51).
7. Do “Big Days” on special days: “The best special days are secular holidays, like September 11, Fourth of July, or Super Bowl Sunday, Christmas, and Easter” (55).
8. Staff wisely: “In studying many thriving churches we’ve noticed there is a logical progression in adding staff. The first paid staff person to hire is a worship leader. Failure at this point usually results in a small congregation” (61).
9. Use your time where it will yield greatest results: “Sometimes pastors are so busy writing messages that they have no energy or time left to focus on strategic pursuits like adding a service or staff member or advertising or getting out among the public. Instead of spending so much time in the office, we recommend buying another pastor’s sermon series, whoever’s teaching you happen to like, and teach his or her series for a month” (70).
10. Emphasize the importance of service within the “service”: “Great service allows guests to feel at home and comfortable in their surroundings, and that enables them to pay attention to your message. We don’t need to change our content. God’s word doesn’t need improving. The problem is the people who are supposed to hear the good news aren’t there because the week before no one said “hi” to them when they visited, the child care stunk or wasn’t even provided, the music was terrible, and the place looked like a wreck” (94).
I am so disturbed by what I just read. Here’s why:
1. “Lead pastor, if your church is not growing, you are the stopping point. If your church is growing, you are the catalyst. It’s that simple” (9). First, this sounds like a not-so-clever way of explaining John C. Maxwell’s “Law of the Lid,” which has a lot of truth in it, but doesn’t always apply to Christian leadership. What bothers me most is the sentence, “If your church is growing, you are the catalyst.” What a horribly misleading thing to say. We hype up characters from the New Testament like Peter and Paul, but in reality, these NT church leaders were probably 3’s and 4’s on the leadership scale, to use Maxwell’s terminology, and yet the church experienced genuinely explosive growth under their leadership—far more so than what churches experience today. It wasn’t, however, because of their leadership abilities (i.e., they were not the catalyst of growth), but instead because they listened to and were led by the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit is always the catalyst for growth. If a pastor is the catalyst for growth in a particular church, I guarantee the growth is quantitative rather than qualitative.
2. “The rule of thumb we see in the thriving churches today is the less democracy in the church, the more authentic and effective church can be in advancing the kingdom of God . . .” (21). I see where the authors are coming from here. We do need to discover ways to get our pastors out of committees (i.e., waiting on tables [Acts 6:2]), but it seems to me that the underlying philosophy here is, again, that it’s all about the pastor. It’s true that democratic rule, as we understand it today, is not mentioned in Scripture, but we do find representative rule (e.g., the structure Jethro proposed to Moses, upon which God looked favorably [Exodus 18]). Furthermore, Scripture doesn’t necessarily look favorably upon monarchial rule (1 Sam 8:7), which is what these authors seem to be promoting to some extent.
3. “In most dying or plateauing congregations the laity make most of the decisions, both missional and tactical” (29). Are we still in an age where a distinction is being made between clergy and laity? I don’t see such a distinction in the New Testament. Again, I understand that there is need for leadership, but I simply don’t see much (if any) biblical support for making a distinction between laity and clergy.
4. “Sometimes pastors are so busy writing messages that they have no energy or time left to focus on strategic pursuits like adding a service or staff member or advertising or getting out among the public. Instead of spending so much time in the office, we recommend buying another pastor’s sermon series, whoever’s teaching you happen to like, and teach his or her series for a month” (70). Wow, I can’t believe a statement like this actually made it into print. I strongly disagree with this statement for two reasons.
First, this is in stark contrast to what we find in the New Testament. It is entirely unbiblical. When one reads about the leaders of the church in the New Testament, one finds little (if any) strategizing, but a whole heap of preaching. Preaching is almost all the NT church leaders did. When Paul went on his missionary journeys, Luke gives the impression that Paul and Barnabas (or Paul and Silas) didn’t have much of a plan. They simply depended on the guidance of the Holy Spirit and preached in every city along the way.
My second beef with this statement is that it belittles the power of preaching. When a preacher spends “time in the office,” he or she digs into God’s Word and engages in conversation with the Holy Spirit. It is “in the office” where the pastor witnesses Christ, and without that experience, of what will the pastor testify? The greatest sermons have come from the overflow of the preacher’s experience with Jesus Christ—not from Rick Warren’s website. When a pastor buys sermons from another preacher, he or she is robbed of the one thing that gives his or her ministry power, and robs hi
Wow, thanks for those thoughtful comments! Easum and Cornelius are certainly on one end of the spectrum concerning church growth stuff. I’ll just make a few comments:
1. Th authors make a distinction, which I tend to agree with, between being a board/committee led church vs. a staff led church. The churches that are growing, which correlates to NCD findings (functional structures), are churches that are not primarily board led. Biblically, I think this model is correct. God spoke to Moses, and he led the people where God told him to go. That doesn’t mean that the pastor is a dictator, but he should lead. It’s kind of like the metaphor of a pilot flying an airplane. Air traffic control tells the pilot where to go, the pilot flies the people there. What often happens in our churches is that people want to get into the pilots plane and take it in many directions.
2. Concerning the laity/clergy comment you are absolutely right. The authors mirror the same sentiment. They said they just used that terminology because it was helpful in differentiating between church leaders vs. members, and how in a lot of congregational churches everything is voted on by the entire church body.
What the authors continue to point out is that most churches (including ours) today are modeled after the federal government, becoming a bloated bureaucracy. This multi-level system of checks and balances is not found in the NT. Instead we have a very streamlined system of church leadership where appointed elders and apostles would lead the congregations.
This is mostly a method book, that doesn’t get too much into the role of the Holy Spirit, unfortunately.
Thanks, again, for those comments!
It’s easy to read quotes out of context and think they mean more than they really do. I completely agree that there is too much red tape that pastors must get through in order to lead. I also agree that pastors are called to lead. I’m still not sure, however, that Easum’s and Cornelius’ methods are necessarily a solution to the problem. (And I still wholeheartedly stand behind my comments concerning preaching.)
By the way, I have really appreciated reading your blogs, Rodlie. Thanks for promoting this kind of dialogue.
Hi friends, interesting dialogue here. There is much to the summary of church growth methods that sounds “out of the box-ish,” so in that respect I will have to agree with Luke. However, after having pastored several years and preached my heart out – literally, my heart falls out and starts bleeding on the pulpit! ok, not really, but you get my drift – I find that passionate preaching and enthusiastic holiness also form a box-like paradigm of their own, and fail to result in the transformational change I believe God wants for our churches.
“Church” has largely come to be defined both in traditional and ‘contemporary/megachurch’ circles as a PLACE where a PROFESSIONAL presides over a ‘religious’ PROGRAM, which creates a subtle consumerist mentality of Jesus as a PRODUCT. I call these the “4 P’s of Apostasy” which was a result of Christendom replacing the movement-like ethos of the early church.
In reality, while there are dimensions of these four P’s in genuine Christianity. Most Evangelicals and Adventists, while rejecting the theological beliefs of Christendom, still in effect ‘follow after’ Christendom in ecclesiastical nature and structure. We simply substitute the priest for a pastor and the mass for a sermon. But upon closer analysis, we can soon see that if we keep the same essential paradigm we will not really solve any problems by adding more priests/pastors or by making our mass/sermon more relevant and marketable, or able to sustain a larger consumer-base.
We need something more than purer zeal and spiritual revival because the very wineskins are old and fading away. But just adding more staff or empowering that staff with greater freedom also falls short in my view. Both are needed desperately, which is why the arguments of both sides continue round and round in the church today. But there is an even more fundamental problem – or should I say – the problem is so much bigger than we even realize!
I don’t know what the solution is, but I’m getting a broader and more true picture of the problem. First, the church has essentially defined itself as attractional in mode, while the early church did not have a lot or any dedicated buildings or professionals or market-tested liturgies. We need to figure out a way to be more incarnational to our local contexts. Services that paid leaders run are not bad in themselves, but that isn’t the biggest problem – it is the consumerist attitude that prevails and that is reinforced when this is seen as the primary mode of the church, rather than a more wholistic, all-of-life spirituality that literally invades the ‘secular’ spaces of society. Why do churches spend millions on their gathering places when large percentages of their communities live below the poverty line? If you can describe Jesus approach to mission in one word, I think it would be incarnational. I confess that I sometimes wish I could sell my church buildings and build a recreation and educational facility that could be used as a community center and strategic mingling zone. What our community really needs is not another expensive facility with spiritual programming, but strategic and sustained efforts to help young people choose education and wholesome recreation in the name of Jesus instead of the alternatives of gangs, drugs, stealing, vandalism, and violence.
Another, second, point, which might affirm the multi-staff principle, is the need for a more team-based model of leadership on the local church level. No matter how spiritual, how skilled administratively, or how persuasive as a leader, one pastor is still one pastor. We need to move away from the hierarchal mode of ministry where one leader is expected to perform roles that really require more spiritual-gifting than any one person could reasonably have – Moses no exception! I think a team-based model is needed that equips leaders and members in separate but complementary roles of “apostles/forward leader; prophets/upward leader; evangelists/outward leader; and pastor-teachers/inward leader.” And I think the