Missional Mathematics and the Pagan Challenge

A report prepared for ‘Exponential Australia’ with the title ‘Growth, decline and planting by Australian Churches’ was recently released which, regarding the ongoing decline of the Australian (western) church doesn’t paint a picture much different from the depressing one documented by many data releases over the last 20 years, in many articles on this site over a similar period, and in my book ‘Quantum Mission’.

However, it does highlight some key issues as listed below, that should be given significant attention as a matter of urgency, one in particular.

1. Square Wheels

According to Dr Ruth Powell, Director of NCLS Research which carried out the research for the report-

‘The news is not good for churches whose response to major social change is to double down on what hasn’t been working for decades”.

This a good description of what Alan Roxburgh has called, the ‘Frozen Imaginations’ in churches which persist in reinventing what I call ‘Square Wheel’ strategies for mission to local communities. That is, evangelistic strategies analogous to the design of a bicycle that had ‘Square Wheels’ and so didn’t work the first (or subsequent times) they were tried, but nevertheless continue to be used.

A major reason for missional failure is this doubling down on approaches to local mission that ‘haven’t been working for decades.’

2. Decline

According to the report, 69% of churches declined in attendance between 2016 and 2021, this compared with a 50% decline between 2011 and 2016.

The figures for churches that grew in attendance in the same time periods are 18% and 31% respectively.

It must of course be recognised that the Covid pandemic over 2020 and 2021 will certainly have had a negative effect on church attendances, although it is hard to know exactly the degree of it. However, it is the case that the decline trends were well in train prior to Covid.

One doesn’t need to be a Nobel Mathematics Laureate to see that this is a crisis for the Church, yet it is difficult discern any significant sign of a crisis response by the majority of church leaderships.

3. Turning Inward

Again, according to Dr Powell ‘there are signs that churches are turning inward.’  This should be of great concern because, if there is to be any hope of reversing trends of decline, the very opposite of this attitude of retreat, that is turning outwards, needs to be the case.

4. Church Planting

The most common potential remedy for church decline that is often pointed to is ‘Classic Church Planting’ (CCP). By this I mean the establishment of new churches, commencing with anywhere between 20 to 50 people. These can be planted by existing churches or are sometimes independent stand-alone new initiatives.

As I have written previously, in the context of the steep decline trends this has always been a vain hope, and it has always amazed me that anyone should think otherwise. One of the main reasons is that Classic Church Planting (CCP), in both financial and human terms, is very ‘Resource Heavy’, and something even the largest and/or best resourced churches cannot do very often. This is now a critical issue in the light of the essential need for multiplication.

5. Multiplication

Tim O’Neill, Director of Exponential Australia, which commissioned the report and who expressed shock at its findings, is quoted as saying that Christians must face the “sobering” reality that “Only 1 per cent of churches were planting a new church in Australia even before Covid in 2019. That’s half the rate of planting previously.”

He estimates that 5 per cent of churches close each year, meaning that, given the 1% per year planting rate, the number of churches in Australia seems to be decreasing by 4 per cent each year. This means that, even to stand still, if we persist with a CCP strategy, it needs to grow by 5 times its current rate.

Which brings us to the major problem with CCP, that is its miniscule multiplication rate.

The problem of Missional Mathematics can be summarized by this quote from ‘Quantum Mission’.

‘A simple mathematical analysis of church attendance and population trends over the last twenty years and more indicates that just to match population growth for any significant population centre or region, there would have to be a large annual increase in the number of standard sized congregations.

As an example, we can use the large Anglican Diocese of Sydney. Even just to stand still against population growth, the diocese, would have to create (around) twenty or more additional, fifty (new attendee)-strong, congregations EVERY YEAR (even this requires the improbable assumption that none fail). To emphasise this, it’s the equivalent of approximately two new, fifty-member-strong, congregations a month! It should be emphasised that these new members would have to come totally from outside the existing congregational cohort, i.e., they must be unchurched/de-churched new members.

There is no possibility that this can be achieved by multiplying standard-congregation-sized fellowships, or by Classic Church Planting, neither of which, given the numbers required, can be afforded. It should be emphasised that strategies for effective mission in twenty-first-century culture need to enable the rapid multiplication of Christian fellowships.’

This is the MOST important issue covered by the report, for the key to any hope of reversing decline trends is a rapid multiplication of Christian fellowships. This simply a question of mathematics, and impossible to achieve with CCP.

A Reality Check

My personal response to the data provided by the report is, ‘Why would anybody be surprised?’

For a quarter of a century at least, survey after survey, data release after data release, census after census, have shouted out the developing crisis in terms of the Church’s dismal missional effectiveness. Yet with a deafness (deliberate or otherwise) to the few voices calling out the nakedness of the missional Emperor, and a blindness to the reality of an ever-rotating kaleidoscope of cultural tribes undergoing tectonic change, we have continued along the same now decades-long road, strewn with ‘Square Wheel’ missional failures.

It has been evident for a long time that the missional crisis requires ‘Something Completely Different’ but that has still not eventuated on any significant scale.

The bottom line is the reality that neither the inflexible ‘SIC’ (Sunday-centric, In-Drag, still Christendom) form of the local/parish church or Classic Church Planting strategies (with their miniscule reproduction rate) can achieve the enormous task of reversing the trends of church decline, and very importantly, the decline of the gospel influence on western society.

Part of the Reality check needed is to grasp the fact that Church missional challenge is one it has not faced for 1500 years, i.e., that of Pagan mission. For this, the vehicles for 21^st century missional strategies need to be a wide variety of-

‘Context-shaped, small, low cost, very flexible, reinventable, easily multiplied, missional communities, embedded in the ‘Live, Work and Play’ spaces of the unchurched and de-churched, largely led by lay people, and varied in shape, form, style, location and meeting times.’

To repeat and to emphasise. It is essential to grasp that neither the standard Sunday-Centric church platform or Classic Church Planting can get anywhere near the multiplication rate required to reverse the catastrophic trends, much as we might be wedded to either or both of them.

When will it be I wonder that the Church will actually seriously engage in some Mission Mathematics, truly acknowledge its dire predicament, and seek to develop the completely different strategies that just might work instead of persisting with those that clearly, and chronically, don’t? We must pray that this is the case.

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A deeper diagnosis, analysis and possible response can be found in

 ‘Quantum Mission- Something Completely Different for a Kaleidoscope World’

 (Click here for more)