Demographics and the Church Growth Movement

Alan Hirch has posted a very compelling article on church growth and the modern (as in not post-modern) church ...

Back to our dialogue on The Forgotten Ways. Whatever we might say about movements, it must be said in the context of the decline of the church as-we-know-it in the West at the dawn of the 21st Century. The fact is that we face a real dilemma with the declining appeal of variations of church growth models, as well as other inhereted configurations, of the church. What I will propose here is a statistical model that highlights this dilemma and poses some real issues we face.

My take on a combination of recent research in Australia conducted indicates that about 10-15% of our population is attracted to what we can call the contemporary church growth model. In other words, this model has significant ‘market appeal’ to about 12% of our population. The more successful forms of this model tend to be large, highly professionalized, overwhelmingly middle-class, and express themselves culturally using contemporary, ‘seeker friendly’, language and middle-of-the-road music forms. They structure themselves around “family ministry” and therefore offer multigenerational services. Demographically speaking they tend to cater largely for what might be called the ‘family-values segment’—good, solid, well-educated, citizens who don’t abuse their kids, who pay their taxes, and who live largely what can be called a suburban lifestyle.

Not only is this type of church largely made up of Christian people who fit this profile, the research indicates that these churches can also be very effective in reaching non-Christian people fitting the same demographical description—the people within their cultural reach. That is, the church does not have to cross any significant cultural barriers in order to communicate the gospel meaningfully to that cultural context. This situation will look something like this…


Now, how does this apply in the US? Sally Morgenthaler reports the following statistics for the American scene. “The votes are also in about how much Americans love church.” She says… Despite what we print in our own press releases, the numbers don’t look good. According to 2003 actual attendance counts, adult church-going is at 18 percent nationally and dropping. Evangelical attendance (again, actual seat-numbers, not telephone responses) accounts for 9% of the population, down from 9.2% in 1990. Mainline attendance accounts for 3.4% of the national population, down from 3.9% the previous decade. And Catholics are down a full percentage point in the same ten-year period: 6.2% from 7.2% in 1990. Of the 3,098 counties in the United States, 2,303 declined in church attendance.

To intensify the problem we face in the new missional context we are finding ourselves in, George Barna predicts that “…by 2025 the local church [as we know it now] will lose roughly half of its current “market share” and that alternative forms of faith experience and expression will pick up the slack.” With these statistics in mind we can intuit that in America the current ‘market appeal’ of the contemporary church growth model might be about up to 35% (as opposed to 12% in Australia). But even if it is at this level of appeal, it is a decreasing one. Its time for a radical rethink taking into account both the strategic and the missional implications.
Firstly, when we analyze most evangelical churches, the vast majority of them, perhaps up to 95%, subscribe to the contemporary church growth approach in their attempts to grow the congregation in spite of the fact that successful applications of this model remain relatively rare.

Secondly, this is a strategic issue for us because various re-combinations of contemporary church growth theory and practice seem to be the only solution we have to draw upon to try halt the decline of Christianity. It seems to be the only arrow in our quiver—this can’t be a good thing. Church growth solutions so dominate our imaginations that we can’t seem to think outside of its frameworks or break out of its assumptions about the church and its mission. And that’s pretty tragic because it doesn’t seem to work for most of our churches and for the majority of our populations. In fact it has become a source of frustration and guilt because most churches do not have the combination of factors that make for a successful application of the model.

Missional issues:

So in Australia we have the somewhat farcical situation of 95% of evangelical churches tussling with each other to reach 12% of the population. And this becomes a significant missional problem because it begs the question, “what about the vast majority of the population (in Australia’s case 85%, in the US about 65%) that report alienation from precisely that form of church?” How do they access the gospel if they reject this form of church? And what would church be like for them in their various settings? Because what is clear from the research in Australia at least, is that when surveyed about what they think about the contemporary church growth expression of Christianity, the 85% range from being blasé (“good for them but not for me”) to total repulsion (“I would never go there”). At best we can make inroads on the blasé but we can’t hope to reach the rest of the population with this model– they are simply alienated from it and don’t like it for a whole host of reasons.

What is becoming increasingly clear is that if we are going to meaningfully reach this majority of people we are not going to be able to do it by simply doing more of the same. And yet it seems that when faced with our problems of decline we automatically reach for the latest church growth package to solve the problem. We seem to have nowhere else to go. Simply pumping up the programs, improving the music and audiovisual effects, or re-jigging the ministry mix, won’t solve our missional crisis. Something far more fundamental is needed.



Article:
http://www.theforgottenways.org/blog/96