Church Growth Principles

6 Foundation Points for the Church

/ Dennis Griffith / 1 Comment

According to Dann Spader and Gary Mayes there are six foundational aspects of ministry crucial to cultivate an environment for (healthy) church growth.  While the culture has changed quite a bit in the twenty years since Spader & Mayes published their thoughts, their points are still valid.

1. Create an atmosphere of love

Jesus’ insight, “By this will all men know that [we] love one another,” (John 13:35) has never been more true.

2. Build a relational ministry

Building relationships with people was an intentional, aggressive agenda for Christ. “He spent time with his disciples” (John 3:22). He lived by the principle that people respond when we reach out to them.

3. Communicate Christ clearly

In a world that knows only caricatures of Christ, people need to know him as he really is. We must present him and his message of life and grace as he gave it, so that people might build a real relationship with the living Savior.

4. Build a healthy ministry image

What kind of vision do the people in your ministry have for the work to which God has called them? How confident are they in his ability to accomplish the task he has entrusted to them? Cohesiveness, commitment to the cause, receptivity to change, and teachability are all related to a healthy group image.

5. Mobilize a prayer base

Our task is to effect spiritual life change. This kind of spiritual work is not accomplished by human means. As we move into the arena of prayer, God moves into the arena of our lives.

6. Communicate the Word

Research has shown that even our most regular church-goers have some biblical illiteracy. We continually need to evaluate our teaching to insure God’s Word is being taught accurately

Again, while I believe all these points are valid they are not equally important. Nor is this list sufficient.

I think I would appreciate them more if they were reordered.  In particular #4 may be a practical truth but I would put it last.  In fact, I suspect #4 would be best described as a consequence of faithfully and effectively doing the other five.  To list it higher, even as high as the authors do, suggests that marketing and branding is more important to the health and success of the church than prayer and biblical literacy among the church members.  But then one must remember that when these authors wrote this book Marketing the Church was the “new” rage, so the these guys are in places merely reflecting their times.

That said, I suspect the absence of #4 in a congregation may serve as a caution flag.  If #4, as it is described above, is absent it may be like a warning light on a dashboard that tells us to “Check Engine”. Something is amiss: One or more of the other points are not functioning properly in a particular body.

These insights were originally published in in the book Growing a Healthy Church.  

Is Church Growth a Biblical Expectation?

/ Dennis Griffith / 2 Comments

I was intrigued by the insights of Jay Childs in an article he wrote for Leadership Journal.  The article, titled Church Growth vs. Church Seasons, focuses on the American fascination with large numbers.  After telling some of his own story, Jay makes three primary observations:

  1. Our Situation is Not Unusual
  2. Non-Stop Numerical Growth is NOT a Biblical Expectation
  3. Healthy Churches Go Through Life-Cycles of Growth, Pruning, Decline, Blessing

While I appreciated the whole article, it was the insights of the second point that most resonated with me:

Ever since eminent missiologist Donald McGavran first published his seminal thoughts on church growth, American churches have often fixated on numerical growth. The basic assumption seems to be this: all churches should be growing numerically, all the time, and something is wrong if your church isn’t.

But as I’ve searched the New Testament and read countless other books on the subject, this assumption seems to be alien to the Bible. There is simply no biblical expectation that a local congregation will continually grow in size, uninterrupted. That seems to be an American presupposition forced onto the Scriptures.

If anything, Jesus told us to expect the opposite. He did promise that the gates of hell would not stand against the church, but he also commended the church in Philadelphia for standing firm though they had “little power.” He never criticizes any of the seven churches in Revelation for not accumulating numbers. He does scold, however, for moral and theological compromise.

Lesslie Newbigin writes in The Open Secret: An Introduction to the Theology of Mission, “Reviewing the teaching of the New Testament, one would have to say, on the one hand, there is joy in the rapid growth of the church in the earliest days, but on the other, there is no evidence that numerical growth of the church is a matter of primary concern. There is no shred of evidence in Paul’s letters to suggest that he judged the churches by the measure of their success in rapid numerical growth. [Nowhere is there] anxiety or an enthusiasm about the numerical growth of the church.”

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