PAUL NIXON’S FAVORITE FORMULAS FOR CHURCH ASSESSMENT

When I work with congregations, I come loaded with all sorts of formulas, which arise from the composite trends in the many other churches where I have worked.   Sound formulas allow me to process a church’s situation and its possibilities faster.   Here are four of my favorites.  (I should warn that there are plenty of contexts that require us to adjust these ratios a little, this way or that.  But these numbers represent a good starting place for some of you who are just wading in to the work of coaching and consulting with local churches.)

THE DEMOGRAPHIC TIPPING POINT

 

Being a compulsive statistics nerd, I spent far too much time studying the Electoral College map over the last six months.  In October, I was reading the polls on my i-phone twice a day.  When asked to predict the election outcome the day before November 6, I got it right except for Florida.  The major reason that I felt Obama would win the election finally was a steady demographic shift that has been ongoing for most of my life.  Basically every four years, non-Latino white people represent about two percent less of the electorate from the previous presidential election.   This is just something that we statistical nerds have quietly noticed.

WHY DO SOME NEW CHURCHES GET LABELED AS FAILURES?

Early in their lives, some children and some young churches get labeled as failures. Once so labeled, there is almost no chance of their fulfilling the dreams that once surrounded them. In the world of new churches, once we label them as failed, we may quickly pull all resources and close a project, effectively saying to the people gathered, "Thank you for your time. Don't call us we'll call you. Here is a list of other xyz churches in your county. Have a nice life." Many of these folks were taking intentional personal risk to trust anything related to organized religion. By our actions, we are then insuring that they will never go near any church again in their lives.

TOO LATE FOR TWEAKING

A quarter century ago, as a local church leader in my 20s, I was already forced to rethink the ministry paradigm that worked in my childhood. I would attend workshops offered by the national church, the conference, the teaching church or the independent writer/gurus - and the question was always very simple: "What will it take to make church - as we know it - attractive to and effective with baby boomers?"

A NEW COACH ON OUR TEAM

Bishop Robert Hoshibata recently appointed the Rev. Beth Estock as a coaching consultant to The Epicenter Group: the third full-time person on our ministry team, and our first fulltime "associate pastor"!  Beth is coaching church planters and transformation leaders, especially in the areas where conventional church is failing to engage the population.  She also will lead several leader development clusters (perhaps the fastest growing dimension of Epicenter's work).  I am delighted to add Beth to our team for the following reasons:

THE POWER OF AN MRI

 

One year ago this week, as my hosts in the Philippines were driving me from church to church in the Cavite province south of Manila, I experienced chest pains.   Given my family history of early onset heart disease, this troubled me. On Palm Sunday 2011, I preached at Puno United Methodist Church in Quezon City.   Before worship, their pastor prayed over me and assured me that I would get home safely. After worship, a physician in the church examined me, and concluded that I might have pericarditis - exactly in line with my symptoms. She gave me a prescription, and my journey continued, with considerable discomfort for another three weeks.

HOW TO AVOID GETTING STUCK IN 1999

In September of 1999, we launched worship at the Soundside Campus of Gulf Breeze United Methodist Church with 590 worshipers the first Sunday.   We worked Charles Arn’s 1990’s check-list for how to start a new worship service as if it were Bible, and we had a good result.  September 16, 1999 remains one of the most thrilling days of my whole life.  We did a lot of things right and a few things wrong, but God was very good – and we added hundreds of new folks to active participation in an organized Christian faith community in the year that followed.

WHAT I AM LEARNING ABOUT "PARACHUTE-DROP" CHURCH PLANTS

When I worked as a new church developer for a United Methodist region a few years back, the one thing I said I would never do would be to try to plant a new church as a parachute drop: as a stranger and alien in a community. In the late 1990s and early 2000s I had helped establish two new faith communities in a place where I had lived and networked for several years. Dozens pitched in to help with both projects, and I lost sleep over neither.   Today (a decade later) these two faith communities together gather 1200 in worship on most Sundays.

MY CALL TO ACTION

I was sixteen years old, traveling with my church youth group in the New Mexico mountains: listening to an American missionary talk about his work in Korea. Blah, blah, blah the speaker went on. Calling us to action. It meant nothing to me. But it just so happened, as I zoned out from whatever he was talking about, that the Spirit of God started chattering in my soul. I experienced that night what my faith community confirmed to be a "call to ministry." I had no idea what I was getting into, but the sense of God's calling that began that night, has guided and motivated me now for more than 33 years.

WHEN COMMUNITIES GET LOST

Recently, a group of us in Virginia gathered with one of our clergy peers, Jan Holton from Yale Divinity School, to think about the nature of community.

During the time of the "Lost Boys of Sudan", orphans of war wandered for hundreds of miles as refugees in east central Africa.   Along their meandering journey, they would sometimes run into wild animals, specifically lions. They learned that their only hope of defense against a lion was to put the small children in the center of a human circle, and for the older children to surround them facing outward, in order to create the perception of something that was bigger than the lion.