The other day I came across yet another article in a seemingly
endless stream about church growth. We Christians in the United States spend a
lot of our time and energy on church growth. A quick Google search using the
term church+growth yielded 218,000,000 hits (and no, I don’t think Google
rigged the results to make it appear that the Church is "failing").
Articles referenced include “7 Reasons Why Churches Stop Growing and Decline”.
In counterpoint to these seven factors you can read “7 Things That Will Drive
Future Church Growth”, or, if seven is too many, you can consult “The Five Most
Important Church Growth Principles”. Yes, the American Church is obsessed with
growth.
But this shouldn’t really surprise us. American culture is
steeped in the notion that bigger is better. Growing up in Detroit I was
familiar with the phrase “what is good for General Motors is good for the
country”. I worked for many years for large multinational corporations and can
attest to their single-minded focus on growth as an indicator of heath, often
to the detriment of long term health and stability. Analysts pour over metrics
like year over year revenue growth, quarter to quarter income growth, and year
over year order backlog and punish a company’s stock for falling short of their
growth expectations.
Therefore, it’s just natural that American churches would borrow
the growth ethos from the business world and try to apply it to their
situation. Is our congregation growing? Why isn’t our congregation growing?
What kind of programs do we need to drive growth? If we move the service times
around to accommodate young families will that help our church grow? If we move
to a new location will we grow? Is our budget growing or shrinking? What kind
of stewardship campaign do we need to make our budget grow? If we bring in a
consultant will that lead to growth? Will bringing in a new minister help us
grow? You’ve heard them all. As with industry, growth has become the preeminent
indicator of congregational health, sometimes to the detriment of our long-term
health and stability.
But is growth the appropriate metric to use to gauge church
success? What if growth, rather than being a primary indicator, is a secondary
metric or even an artifact of something churches aren’t measuring? Could
focusing on a new set of metrics impact a secondary metric like growth? The key
question is, are we measuring ourselves against the mission given to us by
Christ or against a culturally-driven indicator of success?
I would like to suggest that the primary metric churches should
use is “lives touched”. Christian congregations are called to serve the people
in their community, but they do not measure themselves against this calling.
Using Canyon Creek Presbyterian Church as an example, “lives touched” can be
measured in many ways; standards like attendance at worship service, but also
the number of people outside the church who use our facility, the number of
people fed at Austin Street Shelter each week, the number of children in Sunday
school classes, the number of people who attended the annual refugee picnic,
how many shut-ins we visited, the number of classroom teachers supported at
Otto Middle School, etc. The list can become quite long and it would take
practical experience to determine which measure is most effective.
But the bigger question is, would increasing the number of
“lives touched” by a congregation result in an increase in church membership
and budget at a statistically significant level? I’m not sure what an
implementation of a “lives touched” metric would look like, but I’d like to try
it. Personally, I believe that if churches focus the considerable energy and
talents of the Christian community on being and doing what Jesus called us to
be and do, growth will take care of itself.
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