Understanding Megachurches, Part 1: Growth

by: Ed Stetzer

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One of the more popular series last year on the blog dealt with the question “Can Megachurches be Missional?” It was part of a continuing– and important– dialogue within the Christian world.

Several people have written and researched at length the trends found in megachurches. Whether it is our LifeWay Research/Outreach Magazine list of the 100 Largest Churches in America or John Vaughan’s helpful research, Elmer Towns’ articles for Christian Life, or what Warren Bird and Scott Thumma are researching, megachurches are of interest to many.

The fact is that many practices found in smaller churches trickle down from larger ones, but also because we are a numbers-oriented culture– we want our church to grow, so we try to copy what the growing churches are doing.

While imitation is often the greatest form of flattery and many copy their methods, their terminology, and their programs, megachurches tend to face scrutiny– some fair and some unfair. In the process, several unhelpful things are said about them either out of jealousy or ignorance. One piece of misinformation spread about megachurches is that they are a dying breed.

I have heard this over and over again– that the megachurch is dying out. That people are wising up and getting into organic churches. That the mindless robots who blindly follow a the charlatan megachurch pastor have seen the light. The day of the megachurch is done.

One problem: the claims are just not true (and some of it is quite insulting to many passionate believers who attend megachurches who actually have higher levels of involvement and service according to the best research).

Facts are our friends– and we need some here. And the fact that Christians are choosing megachurches– and megachurches are thriving– is not a matter of debate, it is simply a matter of math. (This is not to say that there are issues to consider, but it is helpful to get this fact straight.)

So, the number of megachurches is not declining. Recent analysis from Scott Thumma and Warren Bird show the opposite, actually. There are more megachurches every year, not less. And, they have exploded in number in the last few decades.

You are entitled to your opinion about megachurches, but not to your own facts. The fact is, they are not going away. Instead, they keep coming.

The graphic might show a slowdown in the last two years from the explosive growth (from explosive to electric?) we saw over the past decade, but Warren and I don’t think so (yet). Two years does not make a trend, and the trend is quite remarkable when it comes of the number of megachurches.

For example:

• The number of megachurches in America has nearly doubled during every decade over the last half century.
• In 1960, there was 1 megachurch for every 7.5 million Americans. In 2010, there was one for every 200,000 Americans.
• There are as many megachurches today in the greater Nashville area as there were in the entire country in 1960.

Now, I don’t think that every megachurch is good– I assure you, I think some are quite terrible and fulfill every stereotype out there. Yet, there are also some great ones, and for that I am thankful. I want to understand them more and, when possible, to encourage them on their journey.

We are actually considering some learning communities (with D.Min. credit available) for megachurch pastors who want a peer group to considering that question. More soon on that, but for now… you have the facts.

For more information on megachurches and many of the stats cited in this article, visit Leadership Network’s megachurch resource page.

Read more from Ed here.

Tags: Church Growth, Ed Stetzer, Local Predicament, Megachurch

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Avoiding an Organizational Growth Cap at Your Church

by: Ron Edmondson

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When I consider companies like Apple, Facebook, Google and Amazon, the one constant I think of is change. Interestingly, after I typed that first sentence, I Googled “Most Innovative Companies” and found Fast’s list for 2012. How close do you think I got to their list? See for yourself HERE. But, don’t be impressed with my guesswork. You could have done the same thing, because it’s obvious to us that these companies are all about change.

Then I think of churches I know…some of the most growing, Kingdom-impacting churches I know are also the most innovative…the most open to continual change. I think of LifeChurch.tv, for example. Not only have they impacted many with their vision for multi-site/video venues, but they’ve also helped us discover or been a part of YouVersion and Open, a resource website for churches and ministries. I also think of Andy Stanley’s North Point and how their version of doing church and Andy’s preaching style has impacted so many others. Both LifeChurch and North Point appear to be a culture of change. From what I read about their culture, change is continually being introduced.

Let me be clear. I’m not advocating that either of the church models is the right one for every church. Neither are they the exact right model for the church I pastor. I am interested in church growth. I do like to see progress. I do want to avoid capping Kingdom growth.

I am suggesting that there may be something about growth we can learn from the two examples…business and church. My personal experience, and watching other organizations succeed, has led me to believe that there is something about continual change that produces continual growth.

In fact, I wonder if:

The level of growth an organization can experience may be determined by its level of tolerance or resistance to change.

I’m still processing that thought.

Read more from Ron here.

Tags: Change, Church Growth, Innovation, Ron Edmondson

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What’s the Deal with the Church Growth Movement, Part 3

by: Ed Stetzer

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In my last post I highlighted three negative unintentional outcomes of the Church Growth Movement. I champion missiologists like Donald McGavran, Win Arn, and others who wanted a missiological focus. I don’t blame them for all of the negative outcomes of Church Growth thinking. Our American consumer-driven culture, as well as an unhealthy obsession with success, has resulted in a formula-based approach to God’s mission. The movement became less missiological and more Americanized, particularly under the leadership of Peter Wagner.

The obsession with formulas and numerical results pre-dates McGavran and Arn, but it might help to see the history. A Mississippi clothing salesman, Arthur Flake, designed an approach to reaching people in the early 1920’s. His five principles became known as “Flake’s Formula.” The short version of the formula was enlarge, enlist, train, provide space, and go after people. Many denominations experienced incredible results through Sunday School, much of which is credited to Flake’s influence. He taught, among other things, that is you get __ leaders, you will get __ new attendees– and he was right. New leaders tend to gather new folks– that’s why we start new small groups.

So, if I think Flake was right, why bring him up? Well, the questions about Flake’s Formula are not questions about Arthur Flake. Neither are my questions about his lasting impact on adult Sunday School work in countless churches since the 1920’s. The danger is when we misappropriate ideas and the successful practices of others to become driven primarily by formulas. Often our desire to be successful can overshadow the mission of God in our community. Our obsession… our scorecard must always must be shaped by a desire to see lives transformed by the power of Christ, not just to run certain mathematical formulas to grow.

So, it’s hardly new in the Church Growth Movement (launched in the 50s, after Flake’s ideas). However, then soon the Church Growth Movement expanded and the formulas flourished. As I see it, the focus of many in the Church Growth Movement was more on formulas than on faithfulness.

Yet, formulas themselves are not the problem, nor are methods, but methodological mania is. When formulas ruled the day, soon everyone had a new formula to sell. Formulas became the focus and experts flew the country focusing on steps, formulas, and guaranteed results.

Two things happened. First, the formulas over-promised and under-delivered. In a sense, the movement lost much of its credibility because many tried the formulas and did not have the fruit– I would say because they did not have the evangelistic passion seen in the movement’s founders. In other words, Church Growth formulas without evangelistic passion leads to frustration and failure– as it should.

Second, the formulas became too much of a focus. You see, ultimately, I think that many in the Church Growth Movement lost their way because they confused tools with goals. The formulas became the goals, which is why the Church Growth Movement was embraced by people and movements that no longer believed in, for example, conversions (so central in McGarvan’s thinking). You did not need to believe in conversions, you just needed to implement these formulas, and your religious organization would grow.

So, where do we go today? Why do I believe that you should still value the movement?

Well, for one example, formulas still matter. You should shoot for 80% involvement of your church in small groups, for example, and 60% of your church serving, etc. That’s part of the reason why I am thankful for the Church Growth Movement (and you should be as well). Actually, I will explain next time why you are greatly influenced by it without knowing it– and you should be glad.

Before the Church Growth Movement, many people did not care if they church was growing, if it was reaching converts, and if people were involved and serving. It may sound strong to say that many did not care, but it was often accurate. Before the Church Growth Movement, things like the “remnant mentality” kept many thinking that they should just pray and preach and leave strategic thinking up to God. Thankfully, most don’t think that way today (though, regrettably, I still find it in some places, particularly among the most theologically minded, who are turned off by pragmatism.)

However, formulas are our servants and not our masters. We do research (and create formulas) from a theological grid with a missiological focus. That’s something that many of the early thinkers of the movement did, and some have tried to keep that focus throughout. For example, Gary McIntosh has both worked in the field, but also brought critical thinking about how to see the Church Growth Movement in his book Evaluating the Church Growth Movement.

So, feel free to share your comments, criticism, and disagreements in the comments. I will post one more installment in this series that will focus on the things we have learned from the movement and why it still matters.

Read previous parts of this series here: Part 1; Part 2.

Read more from Ed here.

Tags: Church Growth, Ed Stetzer, Vision Frame

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What’s the Deal with the Church Growth Movement, Part 2

by: Ed Stetzer

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As I continue my series about the Church Growth Movement I want to look at three ways the Church Growth Movement evolved. As I said previously, it is easy to take issue with something that was birthed in the 60’s (Volkswagen vans and the Beatles were not all bad). But the misapplication of the principles always happens when you get beyond the headwaters of a movement. Although the Church Growth Movement was well intended, all the results have not been good. Here are three ways the Church Growth Movement evolved that was not helpful to mission of God in North America.

1) Americanization of the Movement – When the movement became americanized, there were consequences. Some Church Growth leaders sounded like sales consultants. Some reminded me of greatest pitchman in history, the late Billy Mayes. I see him swinging his arms passionately, in his blue denim shirt, pitching the power of Oxiclean. A money back guarantee was included, of course. Some (certainly not all) Church Growth leaders, as with good pitchmen, address a pain point. The pain point that birthed the Church Growth Movement was “Are you tired of the lack of results at growing your church in spite of your best efforts?” The answer, it appears, was better plans.

To be honest, we Americans are guilty of turning anything good into a business. The Church Growth movement is no exception. In The Church Between Gospel and Culture, Richard Halverson wrote, “When the Greeks got the gospel they turned it into a philosophy, when the Romans got it they turned it into a government, when the Europeans got it they turned it into a culture; when the Americans got it they turned it into an enterprise.” An unfortunate by-product of the Church Growth Movement is that growing God’s church can be as simple as 1-2-3 with guaranteed results. I call it methodological mania. Some in the Church Growth Movement lost their way when they became more driven by methodological mania than by a central focus on mission.

2) A New Kind of Mission Station Mentality – I have heard the church called a mission outpost in a positive sense. I agree the church is a mission outpost if you are describing a place from which missionaries are sent across the street and around the world. But McGavran took issue with an approach to the mission of God that resulted in missionary isolationism. Another unintended dark side of Church Growth is that it produced another mission station mentality. Our best hopes focused on making the church so attractive that even a lost person would want to come inside to discover Jesus. What happened however, for the most part, is that we made the church become a great place to be for Christians or a “warehousing effect.” With all our best intentions we must guard against, yes, that’s right, guard against making our church “the place to be.” We must avoid “come and see” mentality that tempts our people to “do life” at church 24/7.

The church can never become the place where I live, work, and play. My neighborhood is where real people live. I am not sent by God to a church facility, ever how convenient and impressive it may be. I am sent away from the church gathered to my tribe and household with the Good News of the Gospel. That is where transformational movements take place that engage every man, woman, and child with the Gospel. So, too many in church growth focused on the barn, rather than how we might live on mission among the white fields. When focusing too much on the barn, we sometimes forget that the wheat will not harvest itself.

3) A Sociological Phenomenon – Much of Church Growth theory was based on sociology– and sociology is not a bad thing. We use sociology in missiology because we can understand social structures. For example, in missiology, we understand the sociological realities of the people are are trying to reach. We know, for example, that some cultures see family in a certain way and we take that into account.

Thus, the focus became (at times) focused on using sociological tools and realities to reach people. As such, evangelism was mistakenly depersonalized by making it the responsibility of the institutional church as it engaged its society rather than individuals who were reaching and serving others. Bricks, mortar, and programs do not take away my responsibility to be a living epistle in my neighborhood through word and deed. The end result was, as I see it, too much sociology and not enough focus on the mission itself.

Now, it is important to note that all three of these problems were caused, in some ways, by reactions to the issues before them. For example, I believe that the missio dei movement (1950-1970) gave birth to the Church Growth Movement (1960-1990) which gave birth a the missional church movement (1990-today). Though I do not have the space here to unpack that all here, I think it is important to note that most of the Church Growth proponents, were asking questions about how best to reach more people for Jesus when many in the mainline traditions had lost that focus (when the missio dei became so overwhelmingly focused on societal transformation– see an earlier blog post here).

In my next post I will conclude my series by telling you how the Kingdom of God has gained because of the Church Growth Movement.

Read Part 1 of this series here; read Part 3 here.

Read more from Ed here.

Tags: Church Growth, Ed Stetzer, Vision Frame

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What’s the Deal with the Church Growth Movement, Part 1

by: Ed Stetzer

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Today, I begin a blog series that takes a closer look at the Church Growth Movement. Our approach to church today has been shaped by this movement whether we are conscious of it or not. Good and bad have evolved from the early days. By taking a closer look at the movement I hope we can learn and become more focused on lostness issues in America. So where were the thoughts and dreams of the early voices in the Church Growth Movement?

Now, church growth (as attendance) is not the same as Church Growth (as a movement). Most people would be in favor of growing a church, but Church Growth has become controversial (see the Google search on the movement to see how many links are to critiques).

So, what is Church Growth (when using capital letters). The American Society of Church Growth (now the Great Commission Research Network) defines it as:

Church growth is that discipline which investigates the nature, function, and health of Christian churches, as they relate to the effective implementation of the Lord’s Great Commission to make disciples of all peoples (Mt. 28:19-20). It is a spiritual conviction, yet it is practical, combining the eternal principles of God’s Word with the practical insights of social and behavioral sciences.
Over the next few weeks, I want to talk a look at the movement, starting with the person widely seen as the founder of the movement.

Donald McGavran, was a missiologist and third generation missionary born in India. He is universally considered the father of the Church Growth Movement. He was, interestingly, a missiologist and that was related to his emphasis.

As a missiolgist, when he suggested the need to transition our strategy from “people” to “peoples” in his work Bridges of God in 1954, it impacted his views (and the Church Growth Movement) in big ways. His study of groups (or peoples) on how they respond, undergirded the movement’s emphasis on statistics, sociology, analysis, and more.

Let me say that I am a fan of Donald McGavran. We may learn more by understanding what McGavran was not saying, particularly from the beginning. For example, McGavran took on the most popular, long standing approach to international missions and evangelism. He declared the “mission station approach,” that had existed for over 150 years, was ineffective for reaching the masses. He determined that by measurement– he analyzed and came to statistical conclusions that undergirded his missiological decisions that led to the Church Growth Movement.

For background, the mission station approach encouraged new converts to leave their tribe and isolate themselves. They took advantage of Western churches, hospitals, and schools (goods and services) established on international mission fields. He did not deny the positive outcomes through this approach but called for a “new pattern” when it comes to results (peoples being converted to Christ):

A new pattern is at hand, which, while new, is as old as the Church itself. It is a God-designed pattern by which not ones but thousands will acknowledge Christ as Lord, and grow into full discipleship as people after people, clan after clan, tribe after tribe and community after community are claimed for and nurtured in the Christian faith.(Bridges of God 331,332). Other names that shaped the early thinking of the church growth movement included Win Arn and C. Peter Wagner. (More on them, particularly Wagner, later and how they altered the direction of the movement.)

But, before discussing these leaders and the movement, it’s important to understand the heart of what they were thinking. In moving the Church Growth lens to the West, they wrestled with the question: “How do we reach peoples (as opposed to a few random individuals) with the gospel in the U.S.?” Church growth thinkers, simply put, were trying to answer the question a different way in light of the struggles of churches in the West.

Some people I know would respond to the question of our missionary ineffectiveness with “Well, you don’t need to worry about that. Just read the Bible and preach the gospel, and leave the results up to God.” But that response is, in my view, not the best.

What if you were to take two missionaries and send them to the Pokot in Africa? Then you told one of them, “Preach the gospel, love people, but learn the culture. Learn how the people work, think, live, and speak.” Then you say to the other missionary, “Listen, just preach the gospel and love people.” You would find very different results between the two missionaries don’t you think? Both of them preached the gospel and loved people, but they engaged their culture on different levels.

McGavran’s challenge was to dig into existing relational networks. Do not encourage believers to isolate themselves from their greatest place of Gospel influence– their family and neighbors. That was a missiology question and it assumes that missiology (with its research, sociology, and cultural understanding) has some value.

Obviously, I think there is much we can learn from the Church Growth Movement. However, in my next post I will talk about three unfortunate outcomes of Church Growth thinking.

Read Part 2 of this series here.

Read more from Ed here.

Tags: Church Growth, Ed Stetzer, Vision Frame

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8 Principles for Churches that Want to Grow

by: Mark Driscoll

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When it comes to numbers, churches tend to err in one of two ways: they either discount them as unimportant or they put too much emphasis on them.

The reality is that numbers are important, and though they aren’t the only sign of a healthy church, they are an important measure.

For Mars Hill, numbers are a key measure of our health. For us, it’s all about the numbers, if by “numbers” you mean the number of people getting their sins forgiven, getting their lives changed by Jesus, and going to heaven instead of hell. We’d like that number to go up. We’re all for that.

When numbers are viewed from this perspective, they are a good thing to desire to see grow. This is why I commend pastors who desire to see the church they pastor grow for the right reasons.

In my conversations with pastors around the world, many have questions on church growth. So, I thought I’d share eight principles I’ve learned about church growth.

1. BEGIN WITH THE END IN MIND AND KNOW HOW LARGE YOU WANT TO BE.

The following is a rough breakdown of reported (which may not be entirely accurate) church attendance. Admittedly, these numbers are a few years old, but, as a general rule, they do give you a rough idea of church-size barriers.

• Churches with 45 people or fewer = 100,000 churches or 25% of all churches
• Churches with 75 people or fewer = 200,000 churches or 50% of all churches
• Churches with 150 people or fewer = 300,000 churches or 75% of all churches
• Churches with 350 people or fewer = 380,000 churches or 95% of all churches
• Churches with 800 people or fewer = 392,000 churches or 98% of all churches
• Churches with 800 people or more = 8,000 churches or 2% of all churches
• Churches with 2,000 people or more = 870 churches or 0.22% of all churches
• Churches with 3,000 people or more = 425 churches or 0.11% of all churches

Lyle Schaller, considered one of the best church consultants in the world, states in his book, The Very Large Church, that the two most comfortable church sizes are under 45 people and under 150 people, likely making them two of the hardest thresholds to pass through, in addition to the 800 mark.

In The Tipping Point, Malcolm Gladwell states that 150 is also the maximum number of people someone can purposefully connect with, which explains why some people do not like bigger churches. It may also explain why John Wesley divided people into groups of about 150, the average hunter-gatherer village is about 150 people, most military units are under 200, and the Hutterites allow their communities to grow no larger than 150.

Understanding group dynamics like this is important in understanding that there are significant challenges that come with each phase of church size, and being aware of where you want your church to grow allows you to begin preparing for those growth phases more effectively.

Tags: Church Growth, Mark Driscoll, Structure, barriers

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4 Popular Perspectives on Church in the Last 50 Years (and How the Term “Missional” Fits In)

by: Will Mancini

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Tags: Church Effectiveness, Church Growth, Church Health, Missional, Will Mancini

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