9 Common Tactics for Church Growth — Good, Bad and Ugly

The Church has fallen on hard times. This is widely documented — no need to go into detail.

It’s hard to blame the world. The world was here long before the Church. Reaching the world has always been the challenge, yet we remain surprised that the world is not lining up at our doors, wallets in hand.

Today, however, after some mid-century prosperity, we’ve forgotten that the Church’s mission is to reach out. It is not the world’s job to embrace the Church. It’s our job to embrace the world.

We typically greet the challenge with a number of tactics. Some show initial success and then fade. Some are the foundations of long-term ministry. Some are a mixture of frequently used bad ideas. All the ideas below represent actual ministry tactics — for better or worse.

  1. We can pretend to be someone else.
    We can figure what the community wants and pretend to be the answer. You might gain some currency in your community but it is most likely temporary. Community interests change and will probably change just as you are getting the hang of yesterday’s priority. In chasing public demand, we often forget who we are and what we are about. We start to look for best ways to meet demands and that often means abandoning our mission. Religious social services, which routinely deny their connections to the Church so as not to jeopardize government subsidies are a prime example. Services are provided. The Church is buried.
  2. You can scale down ministry.
    This is a frequent road traveled by struggling congregations. It never works. When a congregation decides to go “part time” in its ministry, it projects failure. Any part-time solutions should from the beginning be approached as temporary measures. Clergy chosen for part-time ministries must be missionaries. They rarely are.
  3. You can hire more help.
    You want to reach families so you hire a youth minister. You want to tend to the elderly and sick so you hire a visitation pastor. Soon you have a budget that is out of control and threatening the congregation’s ability to conduct any ministry at all. This avenue is taken by individual congregations, regional bodies and even national denominations. Hiring someone and creating an additional monetary challenge may make us feel like we are addressing needs. By the time results are measured, the newly created positions are secured by custom whether or not they proved effective.
  4. You can copy the equally challenged.
    Churches are great at copying one another’s ministry ideas. However, they often copy before the results are tested. Result: failure is replicated. Individuality and creativity are lost. The church becomes less meaningful.
  5. We can form alliances to pool resources and diversify our talent pool.
    This idea needs more testing in the church. It is somewhat foreign to church structure which traditionally focuses all energy and resources on one leader and many followers. This worked well for the church when small, homogenous communities were the norm. The world is changing faster than the Church seems to be able to adapt. We need each other now more than ever.
  6. We can employ teamwork.
    This sounds like something churches would embrace but it actually hasn’t worked very well. We are all protective of our own territory in the church. The structure for alliances is fostered in theory but rarely used. Church bodies have congregations, social service agencies, missionary outreach, seminaries, schools and church camps. All are looking to the same membership to provide support, but often the major sources of support — individual congregants or congregations — have very little interaction with arms of the church. Congregations hope that members will remember them in their wills, but you can bet the regional offices, seminaries and social service agencies with funded development offices want a big piece of the same pie. Interaction in the church suffers. Congregations are the financial losers. The others, recipients of occasional windfalls, slowly erode their long-term foundation of support.
  7. We can become predators.
    This is a very real dynamic in today’s church. We don’t help struggling congregations when help is first needed, we wait for years as downward trends continue — and almost all congregation’s are experiencing downward statistics. Our inability to support one another in ministry forces congregations to close. The dice are rolled to divide assets. We need to find ways to help the weakest among us so that we can all be stronger. Survival of the fittest may work in nature, but it is not the foundation of the Gospel.
  8. We can live beyond our means.
    This tendency in the church has created predatory ministries. The terrible lessons are being learned slowly and at significant loss. When those with hierarchical power operate on deficit budgets, they jeopardize the ministries of their supporting congregations. It becomes easy to find fault with them and force them to close in ways that guarantee assets are turned over to them.
  9. We can return to our roots.
    We can study the evangelism techniques used by Christ and the apostles. There are good lessons in the scriptures. Why is it that this is often the last place we turn for help?