Church Health

“A Healthy Church Will Always Grow” – Or Will It?

/ 4 minutes of reading

A friend of mine pastors a wonderfully healthy Small Church.

One of the ministries they have invested in is a partnership with a nearby halfway house for men who have recently come off of drug and/or alcohol dependency. Each week, faithful church members drive 8-10 of these men to and from church.

The people in the church invite these recovering addicts in with open arms and hearts. They befriend them in many ways, including inviting them into their homes for holidays like Thanksgiving and Christmas. Through this church, these men receive tangible evidence of the love of Christ during a particularly difficult time of their lives. Many of them come to faith in Christ.

This wonderful, Jesus-style ministry to “the least of these” is just one evidence of the compassion, health and outward-reaching attitude of this great church.

But the loving care they’re showing towards these men has not and probably will never add one single permanent member to the rolls of their church. And it certainly doesn’t add to their financial bottom line.

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Our Church May Have Reached Its Shoe Size – Now What?

/ 7 minutes of reading

If some churches have a shoe size, what do you do when your church reaches yours?

Sit back and take it easy? The temptation to do that is one of the main reasons many people (and by “people”, I mean me) feel very uncomfortable with the idea that a church can have a shoe size at all.

But a church doesn’t have to settle for less just because they’ve found themselves at a numerical size that works well for the kind of ministry God has given them – at least for a season. Maybe for longer than that.

And by the way, shoe size isn’t limited to Small Churches. In fact I’ve noticed that a lot of people who bristle at the idea of a shoe size for a church of 25, 50 or 100, are just fine with the church that’s stayed at 2,000 for a decade or more. Some churches have a bigger shoe size, is all.

In my last post I gave you 5 Clues Your Church May Have Reached Its Shoe Size. In today’s post we’ll follow up with the three foundational principles that have helped the church I pastor make sure we’ll never use our current shoe size as an excuse for settling, laziness or compromise.

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5 Clues Your Church May Have Reached Its Shoe Size

/ 6 minutes of reading

What happens when a church is healthy, yet the numbers stay in a holding pattern?

There are a lot of books, blog posts and seminars about how to assess and remove obstacles that hinder healthy growth. My church and I have been helped by many of them.

But is it ever possible that a church may have reached its optimal size? Is there a point at which pushing for greater numbers might be counterproductive to the life, health and effectiveness of a church?

And, if there is, how would we know that?

I struggled with that challenge for years. My story is detailed in The Grasshopper Myth, so I won’t go into it again, but one result of that struggle was that we realized our church is better, healthier and more effective at around 200 than we were at around 400.

200 is our optimal size (let’s call it our shoe size). For now anyway.

It’s not that we aimed for this size or plan to stay at this size. It’s just that this is where we seem to do our best work for now. And it may be that way for a long time.

But how does a church know what their shoe size is? And, if we have in fact reached that place, do we just sit and settle? What about growth?

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When Church Growth Numbers Blind Us to Deeper Truths

/ 3 minutes of reading

Numbers can be a great way for church leaders to gain objective information. They can help us quantify data, spot patterns and trends, and face harsh realities.

But information is not the same as truth.

Numbers can give us facts, but they can’t give us truth. Yet, ironically, numbers can tell us lies.

While giving us all the data we need, numbers can actually disguise deeper truths, keeping us on a dangerous path for far too long.

That happened to me and my church.

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23 Non-Numerical Signs of a Healthy Church

/ 3 minutes of reading

“If we don’t use numbers to determine if a church is healthy, what criteria should we use?”

I get that question a lot. Mostly from other pastors.

And no, they’re not being facetious when they ask it. They truly don’t know the answer.

Isn’t that… I don’t know… a little disturbing to anyone? Have we really become so obsessed with numbers that many, maybe most pastors really don’t know how to tell what a healthy church looks like, outside of crunching the numbers?

The truth is, I’m not opposed to taking church attendance or tracking our numbers. I’m in favor of them. Numbers can help us see things objectively that we might otherwise be blind to. But just like lack of numbers can blind us to some truths, an obsession with numbers can blind us to other truths.

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Why Don’t Small Churches Grow? They Do. Then We Call Them Big Churches

/ 6 minutes of reading

“Why don’t small churches grow?” That’s one of the most common search terms that leads people to NewSmallChurch.com.

So today I ‘m going to take a stab at answering it. But before I offer my answer, I’m going to do something that may surprise you. I’m going to challenge the premise of the question.

The presumption that Small Churches don’t grow is false. Small Churches do grow. Some grow numerically. Most grow spiritually. Many grow in both ways.

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Metrics That Matter: The Missing Element In Assessing Small Church Health

/ 5 minutes of reading

Small Church pastors are often told that if our church isn’t growing it’s because we’re not paying enough attention to the numbers.

That’s not true. Small Church pastors are very aware of the numbers – sometimes painfully so.

I’ll admit that Small Churches don’t use metrics the way bigger churches do. But it‘s not because the numbers don’t matter to us. And it certainly isn’t because we don’t want our churches to grow. It’s because of something no one ever talks about.

Metrics designed by and for megachurches don’t work in Small Churches. We need metrics to measure health that don’t presuppose numerical increase.

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We Followed the Steps – Where’s the Church Growth?

/ 4 minutes of reading

There are many churches who are following all the principles, but never break through the growth barriers.

There are no guaranteed steps to church growth or health. Because the church is people. And people never come with guarantees.

So, what’s a pastor to do? Here’s the only advice I know.

Stay faithful, no matter the results. Faithfulness doesn’t help us reach our goals. Faithfulness is the goal.

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#BestOf2013: The Myth of Inevitable Church Growth

/ 5 minutes of reading

A healthy church does not inevitably mean a growing church. I used to believe that it did. After all, I’ve read about the “truth” of inevitable church growth in every church leadership book written in the last 30 years. I even taught it myself.

I don’t believe it any more. It’s a myth. The reason I no longer believe that numerical growth is inevitable for a healthy church has to do with one problem that kept presenting itself…

The evidence stubbornly refuses to back it up.

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