Four Changes Your Church Should Make

Change 1—Move From Membership Attraction to Discipleship

Statistical Data on Church Membership in the US

  • Finke and Stark, The Churching of America.

  • Lyman Stone, The Promise and Peril of American Religious Life.  I encourage you to read the full 81 page report. 

    Main take-away--Previous generations could persuade a believing public to  belong to a congregation.  TODAY, we speak to an increasingly non-believing audience.  (There's a plethora of writings you can find online by googling, "the rise of nones people who indicate "none" when asked for their religious affiliation.")

Five Models of Church Growth

  • Coercive

  • Attractional

  • Missional

  • Incarnation Model

  • Discipleship Model

    Some Books You May Find Helpful

Hunter, George. The Celtic Way of Evangelism: How Christianity Can Reach the West . . . Again. Abingdon Press, 2010 (Tenth Anniversary Edition).  See also, Frank Tillapaugh, Unleashing Your Potential and Church Unleased. 

Hays, Katie. We Were Spiritual Refugees. Eerdmans, 2020. (see also Nadia Bolz-Weber, Accdiental Saints: Finding God in all the Wrong People) 

Darwin-Weaks, Dawn. Breakthrough:  Trusting God for Big Change in Your Church. Chalice Press, 2022. 

Session, Irie Lyne, Kamilah Hall Sharp, Jan Aldredge-Clanton. The Gathering: A Womanist Church, Wipf & Stock, 2020. 

Main take-away--Mission and Incarnation are essential (necessary but not sufficient), they are simply not enough.  People need to hear, understand, and receive non-threating invitations to unite their lives with Christ. 

 WHAT TO DO?

  • As a congregation answer the following question--If an adult became a Christian at your congregation and devoted themselves to being the kind of Christian found at your church, what kind of Christian would they be?  What would they know--what Biblical stories would be most familiar to them?  What beliefs of God would they hold most dear? What would be their habits?  What would be their disposition toward other people? 

  • Plan-->How specifically are you working toward being and building Disciples like the ones you describe. 

  • Share--> Practice sharing your faith story with one another. 

Change 2—From Leadership Selection to Development

Main Take-Away—A Church’s capacity to “Call” pastoral staff is shrinking.  A church capacity to cultivate leaders is unlimited.

 What To Do

  • Commit to the Ministry of all believers. 

  • Develop Ministries for vocational discernment. Meaningful service, in the name of Christ, is an essential element of Christian thriving.  It is as essential as prayer, worship, fellowship, Bible devotion and study, and stewardship.  It is through serving in the name of Christ (aka ministry) that Christians become fully alive in Christ.  The only healthy remedy for the shortage of authorized ministers is for the church to see authorized ministry as that which emerges out of the ministry of each believer.

    • Provide spiritual direction for people at points where they are discerning

      • Career and career choices

      • But also around their individual ministry (their own expression of the ministry of each believer).

  • Investigate Lay Training Academies and Seminary Opportunities nearby.

    • Brite has just announced that for the next three years, admitted Masters students will receive free tuition.

    • Center for Ministry and Lay Training, housed at Phillips Seminary, provides affordable, assessed, vocational training for ministry.   

Change 3—From Contribution-dependent income to diversified income

  • Mark Deymaz, https://www.markdeymaz.com/ and especially his book

  • The Coming Revolution in Church Economics: Why Tithes and Offerings Are No Longer Enough, And What You Can Do About It.

Main take away: Diversifying congregational income in faithful, missional, and creative ways enables the church to speak competently to people who are living economically complex lives.

Change 4—From Property maintenance to mission alignment

 

 

Andy MangumComment