Monday, September 17, 2007
Aging Churches
David Wayne is looking for comment. Who am I to turn him down?
The church, of which a congregation is but a single manifestation, is the Body of Christ on earth and as such it has many functions. One of its functions is evangelism, but it is only one. In its totality, the church is simply "home" for the Christian - for parent and child, for family. It is a place of nurture, it is a place of safety, it is a place of growth, and it is a place that grows.
Like a family, growth is generational. A church grows as it makes children, but the age of childbearing ends, that is until the original children reach maturity and then they too bear children and the growth begins anew. The problem with the church as it is in America today is that we never bring the original children to maturity, they never want to move out, they never want to get married and make children of their own. In essence, we are really good at making babies, but once they reach toddlerhood, we are lost as a church.
Babies are very demanding of their parents, there are only so many babies that a family can handle at one time. If those babies do not grow and begin to help the parents, there simply will be no room in the house for more babies.
The hope for renewal that David seeks, to my mind, lies not in learning how to make babies better, but in learning how to make adolescents of the babies we already have. And then, tunring those adolescents into adults.
There is a huge problem with this, babies in congregations don't really want to grow up. It is kind of unavoidable for acutal babies (to some extent, but the percentage of at-homes in their 20's these days is a bit terrifying) but we make it very easy to remain a church-baby forever. Mostly this is true because we have built the home for baby-making - if the focus of the home is on babies, then everybody wants to remain a baby because that is where all the attention, resources and fun is.
This means that we have to be satisfied with smaller churches - at least until the initial generation we have spawned has grown to maturity.
The vision for the church has to be much larger than baby-making. It has to be full-grown Christian making. We are in the business of making the next generation - let them make the babies.
Help - Why are church plants the most successful at reaching people and does my established church stand any chance of being renewed?I view this problem a bit differently. The fact that established churches gain 80-90% of their growth through transfer is a problem, a very notable one, but the answer does not lie is learning how to do evangelism better. Let me lay out why.
[...]
Peter Wagner says that church planting is the most effective method of evangelism on the planet and lots of people say things to the effect that established churches just don't evangelize well. Ed thinks this is basically because of established churches' unwillingness to change.
[...]
Churches under 3 years reaching 10 people for every hundred church members
Churches 3-15 years old win an average of 5 people for every hundred church members.
Churches over 15 years old reach an average of 3 for every hundred church members.
The average new church gains the majority of it's members from people who had not previously attended a church, The average established church gains 80-90 % of it's members from transfer growth from other churches.
The church, of which a congregation is but a single manifestation, is the Body of Christ on earth and as such it has many functions. One of its functions is evangelism, but it is only one. In its totality, the church is simply "home" for the Christian - for parent and child, for family. It is a place of nurture, it is a place of safety, it is a place of growth, and it is a place that grows.
Like a family, growth is generational. A church grows as it makes children, but the age of childbearing ends, that is until the original children reach maturity and then they too bear children and the growth begins anew. The problem with the church as it is in America today is that we never bring the original children to maturity, they never want to move out, they never want to get married and make children of their own. In essence, we are really good at making babies, but once they reach toddlerhood, we are lost as a church.
Babies are very demanding of their parents, there are only so many babies that a family can handle at one time. If those babies do not grow and begin to help the parents, there simply will be no room in the house for more babies.
The hope for renewal that David seeks, to my mind, lies not in learning how to make babies better, but in learning how to make adolescents of the babies we already have. And then, tunring those adolescents into adults.
There is a huge problem with this, babies in congregations don't really want to grow up. It is kind of unavoidable for acutal babies (to some extent, but the percentage of at-homes in their 20's these days is a bit terrifying) but we make it very easy to remain a church-baby forever. Mostly this is true because we have built the home for baby-making - if the focus of the home is on babies, then everybody wants to remain a baby because that is where all the attention, resources and fun is.
This means that we have to be satisfied with smaller churches - at least until the initial generation we have spawned has grown to maturity.
The vision for the church has to be much larger than baby-making. It has to be full-grown Christian making. We are in the business of making the next generation - let them make the babies.
