CHURCH BUILDINGS AND THE MISSION OF THE CHURCH

This comes to us from Thom and Sam Rainer and is posted on Dr. Steve’s blog, THE OUTWARD-FOCUSED CHURCH.

 8 Things the Unchurched Think About Your Church

by Thom S Rainer and Sam S Rainer

FROM CHURCHLEADERS.COM

What do the unchurched say about church buildings? Thom and Sam Rainer researched the answer.

The e-mail in our inbox began with a simple question: “What do the unchurched say about church buildings?” Asking the question was a group of church builders, including Cogun, Aspen Group, and The Cornerstone Knowledge Network, who wanted to convey to pastors what features, if any, of a church building help or hinder unchurched people in coming to church.

A study of this nature had never been completed, but our team knew based on a previous study that 42% of those currently attending a Protestant church were unchurched prior to their decision to attend that church. With such a large portion of congregations consisting of people who are new to church, could the actual church building have anything to do with attracting or pushing them away?

Recognizing this tangible aspect of how the unchurched view the Church is crucial to reaching them for Christ. So our researchers began the task of interviewing more than 350 people of different age groups from 45 states. The interviewees were all formerly unchurched and had recently joined a local body of believers. These are the important points we discovered about church facilities.

1. The church facility plays an important role in attracting the unchurched.

Each church body’s unique situation calls for a different type of style, venue, and size, but in short, attractive, organized, and well-maintained church facilities help attract the unchurched.

2. The church building is not the primary motivating factor for the unchurched.

While the appearance of the church building is clearly important, it is not the primary reason the unchurched choose to attend. They go to church due to feeling a void in their lives or because someone invited them. Therefore, the main factors are still the work of the Holy Spirit in their hearts and the obedience of churchgoers to the Great Commission in inviting their unchurched friends and neighbors.

3. The worship area is the unchurched’s favorite part of the church.

The formerly unchurched group we interviewed declared the worship area to be the most important part of the church building. Our respondents ranked beauty, comfort, and worship setting as the three key components of a worship area. Therefore, an attractive, comfortable, and worshipful sanctuary is extremely important when drawing and keeping the unchurched.

4. The unchurched blame poor finances for unattractive buildings.

Churches that did not have adequate or attractive buildings were perceived by the unchurched as underfunded. But the credit for attractive facilities was given to the leadership of the church. Church leaders need to know that pouring more money into their buildings is not a solution in itself. However, if little financial care is allotted to the church facilities, the formerly unchurched see lack of money as a major hurdle to their attendance.

5. A “third place” area draws people to a church building.

A “third place” area is a social gathering point, such as a coffee shop, outside the usual community environments of work and home. As the importance of these gathering areas grows in our society, churches that provide places for the community to socialize throughout the week are much better positioned to reach the unchurched people in their neighborhoods.

6. Church gyms are not appealing to the unchurched.

Many pastors hear their members saying that building a gym will help attract the unchurched in their community. Our research, however, found the exact opposite to be true—one of the church areas considered least important to the unchurched was a gym. In general, gyms or fitness centers serve their current membership and have little effect on attracting the unchurched.

7. The church building is rarely a cause of conflict.

Our research dispelled the axiom that church facilities or building programs are major instigators of church conflict. We found little to no conflict directly attributed to the church building. Additionally, the formerly unchurched people we interviewed perceived little conflict surrounding the church facilities.

8. The church building aids evangelistic efforts.

A building is certainly not a necessity piece in obeying the evangelism imperative, but appealing church facilities can increase a newly churched person’s comfort level in inviting others to church. This invitation plays a huge role in the process of seeing people come to Christ. Our research demonstrates that the most evangelistically successful churches have facilities that people perceive as attractive.

Pastors and lay leaders can learn valuable lessons about their church building by viewing it through the eyes of the unchurched. Invite someone from the community who has never visited your church and ask them to write a step-by-step narrative of their experience in your church building and worship service. You may be surprised at what they say about your signage, seating, navigation, and other aesthetics. What’s more, they may give you some fresh ideas on how to better draw visitors to your church.

Thom S. Rainer is the president and CEO of LifeWay Christian Resources. He was founding dean of the Billy Graham School of Missions, Evangelism, and Church Growth at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. His many books include Surprising Insights from the Unchurched, The Unexpected Journey, and Breakout Churches.

Sam S. Rainer III serves as a pastor at Sarasota Baptist Church. Sam is the co-author of the recently released book, Essential Church?: Reclaiming a Generation of Dropouts. He also serves as president of Rainer Research, a firm dedicated to providing answers for better church health. He is a frequent conference speaker on church health issues. Sam enjoys hanging out with friends and family in the Florida sunshine.

Copyright © by Outreach magazine. All rights reserved. Used by permission.

FIVE MAJOR TRENDS FOR CHURCHES IN AMERICA

NOTE FROM DR STEVE-Thom Rainier is not as famous as George Barna, but I have found him to be an insightful and accurate student of the church.  He has shared some thoughts that I would appreciate your feedback on.

Discerning future trends can be difficult if not risky. If we miss a trend, we risk missing opportunities because we had our resources directed elsewhere.

I am thus careful when I do trend projections. I am especially careful when I am projecting trends that will have a direct impact on the churches in America.
The Basis for the Trends

The trends that follow were not created in a vacuum. Most the information is based on studies we have done at LifeWay Research. But much of this research provides us information and facts about today’s realities. It does not offer certitude for future trends.

The process is analogous to weather forecasting. We can see all the ingredients that will likely cause a specific outcome. But those factors can change, so we can never say that we are 100 percent certain.
Five Major Trends

Because most of the research that is the basis for these trends was related to American demographics, we must not extend the projections beyond our nation’s borders. Nevertheless, it is possible that some of the research could have implications beyond American churches.

1. Our nation will see the emergence of the largest generational mission field in over a century. According to our current research, the Millennial generation—those born between 1980 and 2000—will have a very low Christian representation. Our estimates now are that only 15 percent are Christian. With a huge population of nearly 80 million, that means that nearly 70 million young people are not Christians.

2. The dominant attitude of this huge generation toward Christianity will be largely indifferent. Only 13 percent of the Millennials rank any type of spiritual matter as important to their lives. They are not angry at churches and Christians. They simply ignore us because they do not deem us as meaningful or relevant.

3. Senior adult ministries in churches will experience steep declines. As the large Baby Boomer generation moves into their older years, they will resist any suggestion that they are senior adults, no matter how senior they may be. Unfortunately, many churches are slow to adapt to new realities. If they do senior adult ministry the way they’ve always done it, it will be headed for failure.

4. The large Boomer generation will become more receptive to the gospel. Our data is anecdotal for now, but we are seeing indications that the Boomers may actually become more interested in spiritual matters in general, and Christianity specifically. If so, this trend will be counter to other trends, where adults tend to become less receptive to the gospel as they age. The Baby Boomers have tried it all and found no joy. They may likely turn to the hope of the gospel.

5. Family will be a key value for both of the large generations. For the Millennials, family is their most important value. Nearly 8 out of 10 Millennials ranked family as the important issue in their lives. They told us that they had healthy relationships with their parents who, for the most part, are Baby Boomers. Some churches say they are family friendly, but few actually demonstrate that value. Churches that reach both of these generations will make significant changes to become the type of churches that foster healthy family relationships

The Opportunity to Respond

We believe these trends may indeed become reality. They admittedly do focus only on two generations, but these two groups are the largest two generations in America’s history. They cannot be ignored.

Trend projecting is a meaningless exercise if it fails to engender action. Ultimately each local church must determine where God is leading the congregation. In the case of the five trends noted here, the opportunities seem significant. May the response of Christians and churches be nothing less than radical obedience.

Thom Rainer is the president and CEO of LifeWay Christian Resources. © 2010 ChurchCentral.com

11 QUESTIONS WE ARE ASKING

Each Tuesday, Dr. Steve publishes an in-house on-line newsletter for those who serve in leadership roles in the Church of God of Landisville.  These are the 11 questions he is sharing with them today, challenging to be reflecting on the “answers” during his sabbatical.  As a part of the church family, or as a friend of the church–what answers would you offer?  Post them as comments or email them to him at sdunnpastor@coglandisville.org.

11 Questions Church Leaders Should be Asking

January 23, 2011 in Growing Strategies,Leadership by Tony Morgan.

A friend in ministry recently asked me what questions church leaders should be asking. I thought about the types of questions I try to help answer when I’m working with them in the church consulting or coaching relationships. Here are the first questions and some bonus thoughts that came to mind:

1. When was the last time I heard from God? Am I doing what he called me to do? This is the “Acts 6″ question. Acts 6 is a great reminder that it’s possible to be doing the ministry of God without doing the ministry God has called us to do.
2. What should our church be known for in this community? For a moment, ignore anyone who attends your church. What does the rest of the community know about your church?  That’s a better reflection of whether or not you’re really accomplishing your vision.
3. Are we really focusing our time, money, leadership, prayer behind the things that will produce life change and community impact? If not, there’s a good chance that “fairness” is driving these decisions. Fairness never produces revolution.
4. Is our church growing both spiritually and in numbers? Churches that are stuck and not bearing fruit hate this question. As I’ve shared before, I don’t believe healthy churches are necessarily big churches, but healthy churches are growing churches.
5. Is there a clear path to help people take steps in their faith with the ultimate goal of them becoming fully-devoted followers of Christ? Having a vibrant Sunday worship experience is only one component of that. I’m amazed at how many churches haven’t really established a discipleship strategy beyond Sunday morning.
6. Have you taken the time to identify what a fully-devoted follower of Christ looks like? Most churches haven’t done this, so they end up just “doing church” without any intentionality of purpose or process.
7. Are you empowering the people of God to do God’s work? This is the “Ephesians 4:12-13″ question. Declining churches pay people to do all the ministry. Growing churches challenge people to use their gifts.
8. Are you developing leaders? This includes both spiritual discipleship and leadership mentoring, and I think it’s what’s going to distinguish the churches that last longer than one generation.
9. Is my community any different because of my ministry? We may need a whole new set of measures to confirm whether or not our churches are really making an impact.
10. Do believers see their ministry happening only at the church or have they become missionaries to their families, their neighborhoods, their workplaces, their schools, etc.? Honestly, I’m really tired of Christians thinking God saved them to go church on Sunday and then eventually experience Heaven. Our purpose is much bigger than that.
11. Do I have the right leaders around me to accomplish the vision? Read Exodus 18:18-23. This isn’t some new business leadership principle. This is biblical advice that’s been around for thousands of years and still applies today.

SPIRITUAL HEARING

Blake Collins publishes a delightful and insightful blog called The Church Whisperer.  I found this post recently that is worth being ready by every church leader and every disciple committed to being faithful to God’s mission.

Hearing God Speak through the Noise of My Brother

5 05 2011

Now Thomas (also known as Didymus), one of the Twelve, was not with the disciples when Jesus came.  So the other disciples told him, “We have seen the Lord!”  But he said to them, “Unless I see the nail marks in his hands and put my finger where the nails were, and put my hand into his side, I will not believe.”… Then Jesus told him, “Because you have seen me, you have believed; blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed.”  John 20:24-25, 29

The ears and the mind are necessarily connected.  That is because hearing requires much more than just ears.  When we were children, we could hear the wind blowing through a sea shell but we thought we were “hearing the ocean”.  We could hear just fine, but we could not discern very well.  Now, as I get older (alas), I am finding that my ears don’t always hear very well.  I can be sitting with you in a crowded restaurant, trying to hear what you are saying and my “discernment” has to kick in so that I can make up for what my ears cannot hear.  I suppose that balance shifts more and more with time.

Interestingly, our Spiritual hearing works in a similar way.  When we are young (spiritually), we don’t discern all that well.  We may hear God’s voice, but we hear it along with all the noise and may not have the spiritual maturity to discern that which is God and that which is other.  I believe we develop that discernment over time, with the help of the Spirit.  I also believe this spiritual skill is critical to our life together in the church.  Wasn’t that the point of Jesus’ lesson to Thomas in John 20?

Thomas’ brothers came to him, filled anew with the Spirit and sharing testimony of Christ’s appearance, i.e., the transformation which had happened in their lives as a result of the resurrection.  Thomas heard their testimony, but he missed the Spirit in it.  He could not (or would not) hear it.  He wanted to hear it directly from Jesus.

Not surprisingly, Jesus showed him grace despite his disappointment in Thomas.  Here is an important implication of his words to Thomas in v.29: Thomas, you’re going to need to develop spiritual eyes to see the Spirit at work in your brother and spiritual ears to hear God’s voice in him in order to be effective in helping to start this revolution…that is how it will work in my church!

In the church, discerning the voice of God is a sign of spiritual maturity.  When we are spiritual babies, we may hear the wind in the sea shell and believe it is the ocean.  But as we grow older, we really must develop the “spiritual mind” to know the difference.  In order to be effective as leaders among God’s people, we must be getting better and better at discerning the voice of God in His people.  Despite their many flaws and despite the “noise” of their flesh, we must learn to listen and to discern and to recognize the Shepherd’s voice when we hear it…even through the thorniest of relationships with our most difficult brothers/sisters.  Our effectiveness as a leader depends upon this skill.

Will you listen closely today?  What unexpected message will God bring you through a brother today?

© Blake Coffee

Permissions: You are permitted and encouraged to reproduce and distribute this material in any format provided that you do not alter the wording in any way and do not charge a fee beyond the cost of reproduction. For web posting, a link to this document on this website is preferred. Any exceptions to the above must be approved by Blake Coffee.  Please include the following statement on any distributed copy: © Blake Coffee. Website: churchwhisperer.com

10 POWER PRINCIPLES IN CHURCH STRATEGY

#1 Programs don’t attract people; people attract people (Aubrey Malphurs)

#2 Think steps not programs; strategy makes the next step simple, easy and obvious. (Andy Stanley)

#3 Strategy is a missional map, therefore communicate it visually (Church Unique)

#4 As a whole, cluttered and complex churches are not alive. (Thom Ranier)

#5 Growing people grow people; consuming people consume programs. (Church Unique)

#6 Strategy as assimilation should not be confused with spiritual formation; one is about getting individuals into the body of Christ, the other is about getting the life of Christ into the individual.

#7 Strategy connects programs and events vertically with the mission and horizontally with one another. (adapted from Bill Donahue)

#8 The fewer specials you have the more you sell. (An executive chef  said this in an Auxano Vision Pathway, talking about church strategy.)

#9 Churches need strategy because mission and values alone are not enough to remove competing pictures of the church’s future. (Church Unique)

#10 The two biggest reasons people don’t get more involved are 1) they don’t know how and 2) nobody invited them. (Auxano survey work)

This list comes from Will Mancini’s blog The Clarity Evangelist (see blogroll). I would be interested in your reaction or response. – Steve

BOTHERED BY CHURCH BUSINESS

From Steve: I periodically hear objections about “running the church like a business,” yet my experience is not that being business-like itself is unspiritual (or on the other hand, superior), it is the ATTITUDE with which that business, particularly the business side of the church, is carried. NICOLE EUNICE is the Director of Women’s Ministry at Hope Church in Richmond VA. She recently published this observation in Christianity Today.  I felt it would be helpful to all of us.

I’ll admit that I like to pull a Scarlett O’Hara when it comes to the less attractive side of church leadership, like getting the parking lot paved or turning in a budget. “Fiddle dee dee!” I shrug. “I can’t think about that now! I’ll think about that tomorrow…”

I think the business of church can be excruciating. What do you get when you take a room full of over-committed volunteers, mix in some underpaid staff workers, and toss in hundreds (or thousands) of church-goer expectations? How about business leaders who are used to managing corporate dollars combined with under-resourced and over-ambitious “kingdom” plans? Welcome to church business.

The ministry-minded among us tend to be jazzed by relationships, not regulations. We look upon tomes of policy with disdain, fearing death by legalistic rules and passion-less programming. But it’s a fair argument to say that avoiding this church business is not being a good steward of the resources that God provides each of our communities.

We do have to make sure the plumbing runs and the paychecks get cut. We need lights and A/C and erosion control. But church business can take a toll.

I talk to pastor’s wives, whose eyes betray the battle scars their family has endured at the mercy of “business.” I consider my own experiences helping raise a new church from its infancy, and recognize that nothing has the power to fracture and divide a community like the need to get something accomplished.

Generally, we church leaders tend to agree about the essentials of the faith. If I chose to begin teaching polytheism or swore off Jesus’ deity, I believe the “business” of church would be unanimous about my removal as a teacher. But when it comes to business, there is no go-to Scripture to consult, no theological treatise to quote.

On bad days, it feels like God is pulling his own Scarlett, leaving us church folk on our own to wrestle through these decisions. But in reality, I wonder if he’s left it up to us as a test of our own strength of community; stretching the bonds of unity in the essentials and of love and compromise with each another in the non-essentials.

The stories passed among leaders of battles lost tend to stick more than the victories won. Rarely do I hear about the celebration of a leadership team who decided without fanfare to approve the budget. What sticks is the ugly. The times when teams can’t agree and bitter strife is the result. Those are the things that fracture, that divide, the arguments that make us wonder if we are anywhere near what God intended for us as the body of Christ.

Acts 2 is the highly quotable passage about the early church, that utopian place we all long for. But by Acts 15, there is strife and disagreement between Paul and Barnabas over a fellow leader, John Mark, that ultimately causes them to part ways. I take great comfort in their later reconciliation (2 Ti 4:11). I am glad God gave us that slice of reality in his Word, knowing that despite sharp disagreements about the business of the early church, there is still unity of faith in the end.

The business of church can seem so regular and mundane that we forget the need to invite God into it. When ministering at a dying person’s bedside or counseling a couple through a crisis, prayer is rarely forgotten. Yet I’ve found that the more “ordinary” things of church leadership engage a part of me that wants to take charge, to control, and to manage outcomes on my own—a sure sign that my flesh is at work. When we find ourselves locked up in the business of church, we must be on guard against all kinds of evil—pride, stubbornness, close-mindedness and selfishness. We must draw near to God who promises to set our hearts straight and renew our minds. Only the power of God’s spirit can work us into that place with one another and enable us to embrace the business of church life

WISE COUNSEL REGARDING VOLUNTEERS

Tammie Gitt is a youth worker for the Churches of God and a student in the MACD (Master of Arts in Church Development) program at Winebrenner Seminary.  She has written an excellent article that I am re-posting here:

This article about the cancellation of a volunteer-driven event in our community prompted quite a few thoughts about the relationship between volunteers and the organizations with which they serve.

For organizations

Communicate the need for new volunteers long before there’s a crisis.

Communicate that need in variety of media.

Know what you need from volunteers.

Be prompt in returning inquiries from potential volunteers, offering specific information about what they will be asked to do and when.

Don’t be so desperate for volunteers that you say yes to anything.

For potential volunteers

Don’t wait for announcements. If you support an organization by attending its activities, see how you can be involved.

Be patient when waiting for responses from the organization.

Know what talents/skills you can bring to the organization.

Don’t be so desperate to serve that you say yes to anything.

I’m sure there’s more. I’m sure I could go into a little more detail about some of these and I might do that in future posts. What tips do you have for organizations or for potential volunteers?