Category Archives: Church
Getting Your Church Unstuck
Follow American church-life today and there is one word that keeps popping up – DECLINE. Every major denomination except one – (the Assemblies of God, whose aggressive church multiplication strategy is making a great impact) – is experiencing a decline. And even the positive note of big churches getting bigger is dampened by decline in belief/discipleship metrics among Christians – like belief that the Bible is the Word of God, or that marriage is between a man and a woman, or that adultery is a sin. Books and blogs and doctoral dissertations are filling up the shelves about what’s wrong and how to change it. Reading many of them myself and looking forward to reading more. Let me suggest a resource if you’re in this battle to stop the decline in your own church or if you’re planting a church that you don’t want to stall:
Tony Morgan’s FREE E-books The Leisure Suit Trap: 8 Reasons Your Church is Stuck and Hanging Up the Leisure Suit: How to Get Unstuck. These can be read in an hour and give practical helps that you can put into action right away. Follow Tony’s Blog for other helpful thoughts on organizational effectiveness, systems, etc.
A few other helpful resources for revitalization:
- Comeback Churches by Ed Stetzer and Mike Dodson. Research based on 300 churches that turned it around.
- We use this graphic from Comeback Church to help diagnose a church’s need for Revitalization.
- And also this graphic from Tony Morgan about the why behind churches in decline.
Church Growth vs. Kingdom Growth
“what’s good for my church numerically may not be best for the kingdom – but what’s good for the kingdom is always best for my church.”
Challenging post by Bob Roberts. I actually got to hear Bob teach this while I was a Southwestern Seminary. His books Transformation, Glocalization, and The Multiplying Church (I blogged about this book here) have been very influential in my thinking about ministry.
What about the health factors in ministry that might shrink the church numerically. Bob mentions a few:
- church planting can impact the size of your local church. That isn’t bad – it’s good. We’ve helped over 20 churches get going all around us. There are over 10,000 people in those churches combined – but I doubt seriously if we’d ever run 10,000 at our local church.
- loving other people radically can hurt your church attendance. People want lost people to find Jesus – but they want nice, acceptable, like us lost people – I’m so glad Jesus wasn’t that way. We must go after the ostracized, the neglected, the marginalized – these are the ones that Jesus went after.
- being serious about making disciples will actually hurt your “church attendance” at times. We live in a very consumeristic culture…being a disciple isn’t going to church – and it’s not just feeling good about life and all your dreams coming true.
Read the entire post here.
What are other markers of Kingdom Growth?
Lane Corley 
