HOW FAST SHOULD A NEW CHURCH GROW?

As the guy who has coached the fastest growing new church in the UMC for the last four and one half years, I should add that I have also coached some of the slowest growing new churches.  In a few cases, new church projects just fail to take root, and we need to close the project, making a note of lessons learned.  In most cases, however, where excellent church plants grow slowly it is because they are relating to a different audience than the fastest growing new church mentioned above.

By now, all of us have heard about the red and blue thing going on in America.  And we all know that in the red state regions, it is a lot easier to gain a critical mass and grow a conventional church than in the blue state regions.   But we may not understand how much easier, and we may not understand how deeply the blue zones are creeping out across the land, especially into our urban areas.

   

In the blue zones, we see some of the largest churches in the country (almost universally very conservative theologically and/or non-denominational).  But if we are planting a ministry in those areas to relate to people in the emerging cultural middle of young adults, or on the cultural left, we may see a vastly slower growth of our ministry.

In the red zones, denominations can still grow big churches and, often, quite fast.   Been there, done that personally.  More recently, Embrace Church in Sioux Falls, The Gathering Place near Birmingham, Alabama and Impact Church in Atlanta have tapped in to similar dynamics to the community I worked in northwest Florida in the late nineties.  These churches are not evangelical right.  They do, however, love Jesus and try to follow him with their whole hearts.  (As does just about every thriving church in the universe - blue, red, right, left or middle.) Put the same pastors that will grow a church to 1000 in red-zone Missouri in a decidedly blue place and they might work five years to get 100. 

The difference is that stark.   In a blue zone, few alums of childhood church experience are shopping for a church in adulthood.  Furthermore, the diversity of beliefs and cultural backgrounds makes them hard to weave into a single flock. Those who are most open will almost inevitably end up in a non-denominational church. To those of you who watch church planting trends, this is no news. So - will mainline denominations like the UMC decide simply to double down in the red zones of the USA - where we can continue to find success doing what we understand for another generation or so?

 

Or will we faithfully work the whole nation that is our field of ministry?  Will we pay attention to thriving ministry as it is emerging in the blue zones, where the numbers are much smaller?  Further, will we create ways to give planters a longer run at gathering the first 50 or 100 people in the blue zones, and celebrate when they hit these marks?  If we are not careful, we could end up proclaiming some of our most innovative home missionaries as failures because they did not produce red zone numbers or get anywhere close to financial sustainability for a full time pastor in three years.

   

Path 1 is a movement to plant 1000 new faith communities in America in four years. A few of these will explode with a LOT of people.  Most of these will struggle in the early years, even when the planters do almost everything well.  We had best go in wise to reality, and ready to stick it out.  Or we shall be pulling the plug on a lot of great faith community projects in the next few years.

If there is one thing that we need to do immediately it would be to reduce the cash outlay per new project in the blue zones.Cut the costs dramatically, work with more lay planters and bi-vocational pastors in the early years, and we will be able to stay with the plants long enough to see fruit.