INSIDE STORY: What will it take to grow the church?

Sometimes, the news really isn’t all that new.
Take this headline about the shrinking church in America.
It’s alarming. It’s discouraging. It’s certainly worthy of bold type on the front page.
But is it surprising? Not really. Not to anyone who has been paying attention, anyway.
Just 13 months ago, The Christian Chronicle completed a yearlong project called “Are We Growing?” in which our staff lost track of how much space we devoted to the crucial subject of growth — and decline — in Churches of Christ.
The basis of that project, which drew responses from literally hundreds of readers, via e-mails, letters and personal conversations with Chronicle staff members, was that between 1980 and 2006, the U.S. population grew at a rate 20 times faster than the church.
Of course, with the release of the 2009 statistics, the numerical outlook seems even worse. Rather than a miniscule church growth rate that fails miserably to keep up with nation’s rapidly rising population, we now have no growth rate at all.
We have a decline — a fellowship hemorrhaging members and churches.
While a few readers have accused the Chronicle of advocating numerical growth over spiritual growth, most have understood the true nature of our reporting. That is, to use the numbers as a starting point for examining deeper issues and challenges facing the nation’s nearly 13,000  a cappella congregations.
As we wrapped up the “Are We Growing?” series, we respectfully urged church leaders and congregations nationwide to take seriously the charge that Jesus himself gave us to “go and make disciples of all nations.”
 
We also editorialized on the lessons learned in that reporting process. Given the latest news, those lessons bear repeating:
• We must become more diverse if we are to reach our culture. Our congregations remain mostly white and have become more affluent. Reaching our society for the Lord will require creative approaches to win souls who may be a different color than we are or speak a different language than we do. We must remember that Jesus loves all the children — red and yellow, black and white.
• We must make the eternal faith relevant to the young people who grow up in our congregations. Doctrine is important, but the young won’t stick around churches mired in internal squabbles and their own way of doing things. A right understanding of Scripture is essential, but the young want more than words. They want to serve, not to simply sit in the pews and follow rote orders of worship. The answer for keeping our young in the church is not contemporary music or flashy sermons, but churches with a real compassion and heart for sharing Jesus with a lost world.
• We must plant new congregations outside the Bible Belt, in places where most folks have never heard of us. And we must be willing to try new approaches to reach a new generation, not sacrificing biblical teaching but perhaps adapting the Acts 2 model of church to include settings such as house churches or groups of believers meeting in coffee shops or parks. We must remember that church buildings are a creation of the modern church, not an ancient pattern.
• Most importantly, we must pledge our allegiance anew to our first love. We must remember that God so loved the world that he gave his only son to die on a cross so that we might have forgiveness from our sins. We must never stop telling that incredible, true story of love and sacrifice. Only then will more people know Jesus and the church grow and prosper.
As we were reporting on the 2009 statistics, an unrelated e-mail — just four short lines of type — arrived from John Scott, senior minister of the Saturn Road church in Garland, Texas.
He intended the information for inclusion on our Across the Nation page, but it seems relevant here: The Saturn Road church baptized 176 people last year — the fourth straight year that the Texas church has immersed more than 150 souls into Christ.
I immediately replied back to John to find out the secret to Saturn Road’s soul-winning success.
“Our message is timeless, but our methods must be fluid,” John said. “For instance, I am all for using the latest technologies in order to better deliver the message. However, at Saturn Road, our leadership has not felt the need to abandon a cappella singing in order to reach people. In my humble judgment, it still comes back to being able to build healthy, biblical friendships both inside the church building and, just as important, outside our walls. We simply have to build more bridges and fewer walls.”