This post from Al Stewart clarifies a few things about local church outreach strategy and contains a helpful challenge.
Whatever it is that you believe is your corporate means of reaching out and gathering in; is that actually happening?
ht: Mikey Lynch
Any church or ministry needs to have a growth dynamic. What I mean by that is you must have something about the church or the ministry that will bring you into contact with people.
I know people who are theologically astute will say, “We preach the gospel – that will be our growth dynamic.” This is certainly true, in that it will be your spiritual growth dynamic. Without gospel preaching no one will be saved, there will be no real spiritual fruit or growth.
However, at a human level we need to have some reason why people will either come to our meetings or ways in which we will contact people. For example:
• You might choose to build a church or a ministry on the growth dynamic of having brilliant children’s ministry which will then connect the church with children and then ultimately their parents; or
• You have a brilliant youth ministry; or
• You have strong links to an institution which will just generate people, such as a school or a university; or
• You may have a growth dynamic in that you have the most brilliant preacher in your part of the city and people will travel to hear him preach; or
• You may have a growth dynamic of being or having the most friendly and lovable minister around and people will join because they love the particular minister; or
• You may be a gospel community where it is the quality of relationships that people have which are attractive to bring people in; or
• You may be a particular denominational association e.g. the brand out the front of the building can bring people along because of the way the denomination is thought of; or
• There may be an ethnic specific church, e.g. a Chinese church, or a second generation migrant church etc.
Each one of these will bring people into contact with your network and will allow the opportunity for them to hear the gospel and be followed up. However working with the relational networks of the people in our congregation requires absolute and pro-active commitment. In my experience only about 10% (or less) of the people in any church will be gifted evangelists, the other 90% will exhaust the list of people who could be invited to something very quickly. Trying to grow a church through simply working the networks will be very hard work. I am not saying it is not possible but it will require deliberate planning.
Each growth dynamic has a limiting factor built in. For example, the denominational brand name will be good in some areas and not so good in others. In Sydney the Anglican brand name is strong in some suburbs and not so strong in others. Socio-economic factors play a big part, as well as the family life cycle as suburbs begin to age. It will appeal to some particular ethnic groups and clearly not others.
You may have a growth dynamic of appealing to young families or middle class professionals. This will work in a particular suburb or demographic, however if the suburb changes and the church is not able to change the growth dynamic it will mean a long slow decline for that church. An obvious example is there were churches that were booming in the 50’s and 60’s in white anglo suburbs with high numbers of young families, but with subsequent migration over the coming decades, the churches’ growth dynamic wasn’t changed and they disappeared as the demographics of the suburbs changed. Also school and children’s ministry will decline over time as a suburb ages.
The gospel community growth dynamic is very powerful in terms of drawing people in and growing strong communities but it does have the limiting factor that the very thing that makes the community attractive means it can be difficult to plant new gospel communities. That is, the strength of the relationship bonds formed in the group. The limiting factor on the friendly minister seems to be around the 150 mark, which is the maximum that any average person can truly know and minister to. Similarly, the limiting factor on the great preacher is the size of the building. (It’s interesting to watch ministries built around great preachers who are experimenting with how to use technology to maintain multiple campuses etc).
The point of this little article is to urge pastors/leaders to work out what is the growth dynamic of their church or ministry and to be deliberate about trying to use that growth dynamic. Some churches have no obvious growth dynamic – and it shows. The denominational label may have ceased to work and they have not yet worked out how to appeal to their suburb particularly. For others there is no particular group that they are trying to reach. or the networks in their churches are either exhausted or people don’t have confidences to invite their friends. So no growth dynamic leads to no growth and no opportunity to preach the gospel. We need to work out who are we trying to reach. The point being, to reach everyone means we are actually trying deliberately to reach no one. Or to put it another way, you will inevitably appeal to a group of people by default – the group who are there already.
mgpcpastor's blog 