Most people think the main sign of a ‘successful’ church is a sizeable, preferably growing congregation on Sundays. In such congregations it is not uncommon to hear comments like ‘There’s a good crowd here again today’ or ‘We seem to be getting quite a few new people these days’. However, as they say-
We’ve seen this movie before!
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It’s Sunday morning, church is in, quite a crowd. Some upbeat praise songs have been sung, some prayers said. The congregation waits for the sermon. It’s a visiting speaker today, a man from interstate who the authorities have tried to get banned because he tends to rock the boat. He stands and goes to the lectern and after a lengthy and pregnant silence he starts to speak.
“Hear this Word, this lament I have concerning you.
I hate! I despise your religious gatherings;
your church services are a stench to me.
Even though you give money in the offering plate, or on-line,
I will not accept it.
Though you give offerings for special causes and occasions,
I will have no regard for them.
Away with the noise of your praise songs!
I will not listen to the music of your keyboards, drums and guitars.
But let justice roll on like a river,
righteousness like a never-failing stream!
Then the visiting preacher sits down. Stony silence!
Those of course are the words of God through the prophet Amos (with some modernising 21st century tweaks from me), delivered to the Jews of the northern kingdom of Israel in the 8th century BC (Amos 5:21-24).
Amos makes it quite clear that what God considers to be a ‘successful’ ‘church’ can be very different to how congregational members and church leaders might think. In fact, God is not necessarily at all impressed with ‘Quite a crowd of people here today’– thinking, or great music, slick services or special religious festivals.
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This is the second in a series of posts dealing with what I call the ‘Elephants in the Mission Operations Room’. These Elephants are the roadblocks that loom large on the road to effective local mission yet seemingly no one want to talk about. The first one of these I posted is the ‘Cultural Intelligence Deficit’; (See HERE) that is the chronic failure, deliberate or otherwise, of church leaderships to ‘read the cultural room’, that is the cultural landscape of today, now inhabited by a majority non-churched, church alien, neo-pagan population, which forms the stage of the contemporary missional challenge. The second Elephant, addressed here, is what might be called the ‘Success Delusion’.
There is a widespread lack of preparedness on the part of many leaders to consider something different in terms of missional strategy. In many cases, this is because they allow themselves to be lulled into a false sense of security by some limited missional success, their own or that of others.
Real missional success does and will occur, particularly in the harvesting of the ‘low hanging fruit’—that is, largely those in the community who have some affinity with the traditional church for some reason. That however, is a rapidly shrivelling orchard, and reality is still defined by the decades long catastrophic negative trajectory of ALL of the key indicators of missional effectiveness. These warn us against being seduced by occasional localized reports of success.
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It’s not uncommon to be told about a particular church that it is very ‘successful’. The story often contains accounts of growing attendance, thriving youth groups, new families, etc. Such churches are often held up as the ‘model’ we’re all to copy.
Where such a story is true, we should rejoice at the great work being done in the advancement of God’s Kingdom, particularly in these times of falling church attendance. Perhaps, however, before we become too enthusiastic, we should apply some critical analysis to the reports. The reality is that reports of such alleged ‘successes’ can often be illusory, frequently a result of a lack of critical analysis, tragically a commodity rare in church circles.
In the case of any claimed ‘success’, it should be asked if there are particular local circumstances that facilitate growth that aren’t usually present in other areas and can’t generally be replicated. This is important given the need for new churches or forms of church that can be multiplied rapidly. Such multiplication is essential if we’re to reverse the significant decline trends. However, ‘special circumstance’ churches are not by definition easily replicated in the absence of their special circumstances, and do not provide a general template to be followed for Kingdom growth.
A fairly common example of alleged growth, which is greatly facilitated by special local circumstances, is the claimed missional ‘success’ of a ‘Greenfield’ church plant in a population growth area where the growing number of ‘bums on seats’ looks good. However, if the inconvenient question is asked—Where did all these new members come from? —it’s often the case that the vast majority were previously members of other congregations before moving into the area of the ‘Greenfield’ site and have, in fact, been lost by their church of origin. This is not Kingdom growth but rather an example of what we might call, the Transferee Mirage.
The Transferee Mirage is another Elephant in itself, which will be addressed at another time. However, briefly, the Transferee Mirage is numerical growth that is not the result of missional activity, but the result of people moving from other congregations. This may be from a local church, another denomination, from interstate, or even because of immigration. The latter is a significant contributor to numerical church growth in the major Australian cities. This may be church growth but is not Kingdom growth as the new members are lost to their former church.
A current example of the Transferee Mirage is a medium sized church which has experienced steady growth post-Covid. It has a large youth group and there are plenty of families turning up on Sundays. To anybody walking in it looks like a ‘successful’ church. However, few (well under 5%) of the new members are unchurched/de-churched members. i.e. there is ‘church growth’ but little ‘Kingdom’ growth. Further, to get the real (Net) ‘Kingdom Growth’ figure it is necessary to subtract from the number of unchurched/de-churched new members those who have left and NOT joined another congregation.
Another example of the transferee mirage could be seen at a welcoming lunch held by a church for recent arrivals. As a result of COVID-19 restrictions, the invitation to the lunch covered people who had arrived over a long period of time, when such lunches couldn’t be held. There were about forty people there. In conversation during the lunch, it came to light that only one person was NOT from another congregation. That is there were many new members, but virtually all Transferees.
Then there is the (real) example of the large Anglican church with a thriving and growing youth ministry held up as a great ‘success’—until one puts it in the context of the diminishing, even closing, youth ministries of the surrounding churches from which the ‘successful’ church has ‘poached’ its growth. This is an example of the Transferee Mirage on a local scale, and again not Kingdom growth.
Another frequent area of often illusory ‘success’ is that of special in-drag outreach events, such as an evangelistic men’s or women’s dinner with a celebrity speaker. Large numbers of attendees and a well-run event can leave the ‘Christians’ with the illusion of missional success. However, critical analysis usually reveals little or no gospel fruit (i.e., how many invitees subsequently became an ongoing member of any Christian fellowship) in return for what is often a large investment of resources for little, if any, Kingdom growth.
It may be that a certain church evidences ‘success’ because of a particularly charismatic, energetic, and visionary leader, what might be called a ‘rock star’ minister. However, such leaders are scarce, so repetition of their ‘success’ is limited and not a growth model for the church generally. Rock stars are not very common!
There is an unhelpful susceptibility of many local church leaders to claim ill-founded success in the absence of critical analysis. One example of this were the frequent assertions that on-line attendance at streamed services during the COVID-19 crisis were larger when compared to pre-COVID church services. Such claims would appear to be highly problematic because the metric generally used to reach that conclusion is the number of views of cyber services on church websites. Clearly, as my polling confirms, many people viewed multiple websites on the same day, so more than one church can claim them as an ‘attendee’. Further, such views are often fleeting. Measuring such is not anything like a measure of attendance and can lead to an illusion of success!
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It must be said that some real success does occur and must be celebrated; however, this is usually little and isolated, and it is not legitimate to argue from such a particular case to a general conclusion of missional effectiveness. The reality still is, despite such alleged success, that the missional Emperor has no clothes on. The big picture remains that, as well as the ongoing decades-long general reduction in attendances, the percentage of the unchurched and de-churched new members is still declining in congregations.
It is not uncommon to see the highlighting of churches claiming to show real growth that are put up as models to follow. However, critical analysis will show that they are mostly all examples of the ‘Success Illusion’. This is only one of a range of ‘Elephants in the Missions Operations Room’ that are largely ignored. Until they are addressed, the, at least quarter century long, dismal missional failure of the institutional Church can only continue.
We must indeed seek to establish large numbers of new ‘successful’ fellowships. However, real success in terms of our need for significantly increased missional fruitfulness will only come through the creative envisioning and creating of new forms that can easily be replicated, and thus will be low cost and small.
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The full range of ‘Elephants’ are described in the book ‘Quantum Mission – Something Completely Different for a Kaleidoscope World’. See HERE
unbounded church 