I’ve spent 3 days away finishing drafts of my dissertation.  They are off to the editor and to the professor.  I was not going to post this week because technically I’m on vacation until Monday, but I just couldn’t let these two posts go without commenting.

A couple of days ago, my friend Steve Addison, an Australian, had a post entitled Southern Baptist success?  Maybe.  He states:

I keep bumping into church leaders of different persuasions whose goal it is to see their church plants grow to 500+.

If you want a case study of how it’s done, try the Southern Baptists. I’ve just finished a 1994 article by Roger Finke that shows between 1920 and 1990 the average size of a Southern Baptist church soared from 115 to 396. Impressive.

The other trend he noticed was the dramatic increase in seminary trained professional clergy. Before 1950 the Southern Baptist seminaries produced 10,000 graduates. From 1950-90 the number grew to 60,000.

The Southern Baptists heritage was all about small churches and lay leadership. Today it’s professional staff and large churches.

Bigger churches. Trained clergy. Sounds like a recipe for success.

Maybe.

I commented on Steve’s post that the irony is that 1950 was the year Southern Baptists started our trned downward, increasing at a decreasing rate to the point that membership has declined this year.  And the trend in a continuing decrease unless something drastic is done.

Correlation?  Maybe.

We’ve trained people how to do weddings and funerals and run a church.  What we haven’t taught them to do is release people to do ministry, to reproduce, and to consider God’s kingdom before the church’s (or pastor’s) kingdom.

Which brings me to the second post I want to highlight.

Bob Roberts blogged this week about How DFW got the Buckle on the Bible Belt.  He states:

People sometimes make fun of Dallas-Fort Worth being the buckle on the Bible belt. It isn’t anymore. It’s unbuckled. The stats are in and church attendance is around the 17% mark - in northeast Tarrant county where I live it’s probably more like 9%. We think because we see churches and some of them big that we are churched. We are not. A lot of the shelves (pews) are empty in those stores! The ones that are full are often filled with people looking for a different kind of church - not Jesus! If we were “churched” anywhere near what we were just 35 years ago at a minimum we would have to double the number of churches out here.

For some pastors that would freak them out - more competition! We need to shift our mindset from one that says “I pastor a church to reach this community . . . ” to one that says “I pastor a church to create communities of faith in this community all over.” One thinks like a preacher/pastor the other a missionary/mobilizer.

And I thought DFW was supposed to be the most churched area in the country!

I heard an interesting statement last year at a missional leadership conference by a Canadian Southern Baptist.  He said, when churches go mega, the kingdom decreases.  Why?  Because they kill a lot of small & medium-sized churches.

Maybe instead of growing tall and increasing overhead, churches should reproduce and increase the kingdom.

At my last doctoral class with Len Sweet last week, he posed a question to us that went something like this: Provide for me the metaphors that will describe how we measure success in the church in the future. We are prone to measure success by how man and how much. And we determine who is a great leader by how many and how much.

So today, I want to share with you some of the metaphors we listed (and some I came up with afterwards), of things we can count as a measure of success. But I need to issue a warning. You will have to think about these and you may push back unless you realize the metaphor. So don’t react…Ponder… Continue Reading

I’m finally feeling like I am over this Spanish Flu bug. So I have another Lesson from Spain. We have to redefine success.

One of the things that I heard while sitting around the coffee/cola table with these missionaries is that we have to understand that how success is viewed needs to be redefined. When these missionaries from Western Europe look around at their work, they are not seeing 10,000 churches a month being planted like those in Asia. They are seeing 2-3 people per year coming into a relationship with Christ. Do you know how disheartening that is to tell people back home? When you come home on furlough and people ask how many churches were planted or how many people came to Christ this past year, or something like that, and you know you have worked your hardest, been obedient to God and yet you are not seeing the astounding numbers or the expected numbers that other missionaries are seeing in in other parts of the world, there is part of you that feels like you are a failure. That is because we in the States are intrigued and in love with numbers as the defining aspect of success. Sadly, if that was the case, Jesus and Paul could be described as failures.

The reality is that Western Europe needs people who are willing to do the hard work of preparing the soil. They need people to understand that in a land where the gospel seed has not been planted, you can’t reap huge numbers. You cannot and will not for some time see huge explosions of churches and hundreds of thousands of people being saved - except for an outpouring of the Holy Spirit which can and does happen. The soil hasn’t been freed of the rocks and thorns and hard ground.

Sadly, in a world where success is defined by largeness and not obedience, many don’t really understand the context in which those wonderful men and women who spend their lives in Western Europe are working. People in the states don’t see “success”, and the missionaries struggle themselves to feel like they are accomplishing God’s work.

So church in America, we need to rethink success. Because it’s become this way here.

Let me share a note from Bob Roberts new book, Multiplying Churches (page 25):

I have a vision and a dream. Let’s start a thousand churches over the next ten years, each one running a minimum of two thousand members, and in just ten years we will turn America upside down with the gospel! That would work, right? Wrong - that scenario just happened over the past ten years, and there are fewer people in the church today than ever before…Thom Rainer, author and columnist, wrote:

I am by nature an optimist. I have seen the hand of God too often in my life to live in a state of despair and defeatism. However, the state of evangelism in the American Church is such that I do have my moments when I wonder if the Church is headed down the path of many European congregations: decline and death. The facts of a 2004 research project I led are sobering.

In Delaware, we are seeing much of the same responses as those in Western Europe. I was having a discussion last week with our state Church Multiplication missionary, and he noted to me that Delaware was more like the Northeast than Maryland. Delaware takes time to be able to engage people in a discussion about them considering Christ - at least a discussion where they will continue to talk with you and not just ignore you after the conversation. The work is hard and success is seen in small ways, not large numbers. We don’t have 1000’s coming to Christ every year. People are not open to talking about the gospel. People don’t have a lot of interest in Christianity. It’s ok if you embrace it, but they have other issues to worry about other than the church.

We are going to have to wake up to the post-Christendom that is moving in on the US, and to transition our thoughts and feelings about the largeness of Christianity and the rules of success.

At our church, we use this measure for determining success: Have a I made another person’s life better today. Did the person I met on the street or in the restaurant or wherever, is their life better after I met them?

What is success to you? You define success by what you measure…