Recently a reader, Glory Bee, asked these questions:When did the church in general start to decline in membership? I'd almost have to say with the baby boomers who suddenly questioned authority. Do you think that the revitalization of a church has to consider reaching out to all ages? I often think that it's great to get people back to church, but if we can also get their children and grandchildren to come, that we are planting for future generations. I am interested in your thoughts.Church decline is a complex phenomenon. We need to remember that, historically, there have been other eras of church decline. It's not unique just to our time. While our situation is difficult now for many congregations, the Church is still here, just as Jesus promised when he said that the gates of hell would not prevail against his church. So, yes, this is difficult but it is no time for despair or giving up.
Those who are old enough to remember the old Ed Sullivan TV show will remember the guest who did the spinning plates performance. One by one he would start plates spinning on the top of tall poles. After awhile some of the plates would begin to slow to the point that they were almost ready to crash to the floor. The audience would begin to gasp audibly as they saw a plate about to fall. The performer would then run to get that plate spinning again before it crashed and then he was on with getting more plates started. I think that image gives a good picture of churches throughout the ages.
The life cycle of churches is such that every one of them reaches a point where someone needs to get them going again before they crash. What's shocking right now is that so many of them need jumpstarting at the same time.
In answering your questions, first off, let's define church growth. Churches grow in three basic ways by (1) conversion growth, (2) transfer growth, and (3) biological growth. Conversion growth happens when first time believers have been converted and become part of a church. Transfer growth happens when a person moves from one congregation to another. While that movement means growth for one church, it also means loss for another. In the eternal scheme of things, transfer growth really isn't growth because no one is added to the Kingdom of God as people change churches. Biological growth is new people added to the congregation by the birth of children. Keep these three kinds of growth in mind as we discuss what has caused the broad-scale decline we see today.
While there are many causes for church decline, World War II set in motion a sociological dynamic that has impacted all churches over the past 50 years or more. After the war, couples made up for lost time by starting or continuing their families in such great numbers that a Baby Boom occurred. Although the Baby Boom was more short-lived in some other countries, here in the U.S. this focus on family and having children continued clear up to 1964.
Following World War II, the big source of church growth up to 1964 was biological growth. Church buildings were bursting at the seams. Many of the congregations even built additions to handle all of this influx of children.
Conversion growth was also occurring because raising children in the church was seen as a highly positive thing by the majority of parents. But, this conversion growth wasn't generally coming about because of active efforts by churches. Most conversion growth was a bi-product of this era of child-bearing. One unfortunate result is that church leaders "forgot" how to reach out and bring Christ to their communities. Why would they need to when all of these people were just walking in the doors. Church ministry became very focused on serving the members and their needs.
All of this worked until the Baby Boomers started coming of age and began leaving home. When my own congregation started experiencing some decline problems in the 70's and we were trying to understand what happened, one of the members explained it by saying, "All of our children moved away."
That certainly was true. Most of them did move away. But what was lacking in their understanding was the awareness that there were many unchurched young adults in our community that we should have been reaching out to. That's how much this one congregation had become entrenched in seeing church ministry as ministering to our own, and waiting for new people to walk in the door on their own volition.
I'll pick this up in Part Two. In the meantime, if you are interested in learning more about all of these dynamics, I recommend these books:
- Church and Denominational Growth
by David A. Roozen and C. Kirk Hadaway
- The American Church in Crisis: Groundbreaking Research Based on a National Database of over 200,000 Churches. Both of these books discuss what (and what does not) cause growth or decline.
Readers, I welcome your comments on this blog post or either of these books. Click on Comments below. Share your wisdom, voice your struggles, or ask a puzzling question.
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