Continuing to reflect on Thom Rainer’s 14 Predictions for 2014, Part 1 and Part 2.
5. Greater number of churches moving to a unified worship style. For years a noticeable trend was churches offering different worship styles. The most common was the offering of two services: traditional and contemporary, though the definitions of each were elusive. In the next year we will we see a reversal of that trend, as many of those same churches decide to move to one common worship style. (70%)
I have to say that I don’t see this happening in the Churches of Christ. We seem to be headed in the direction of multiple services, with one instrumental and one a cappella. Of course, although other denominations have “worship wars,” they don’t have the doctrinal concerns that Churches of Christ must wrestle with.
6. Increased emphasis on high-expectation church membership. For decades American congregations as a whole lowered their expectations of church membership. One could be on a church roll in many churches and not even attend worship services for years. We will see a gradual reversal of that trend in 2014 as more churches move to higher-expectation membership. (70%).
Wow. This could change quite a lot. I mean, church consultants and ministers and elders have long prayed and discussed how to reverse the trend, so that we could have greater commitment from our members. But to actually see it happen, well, that would be something …
In part thanks to church growth “experts,” many congregations have sold themselves cheap — encouraging a consumeristic mindset among the members. The idea was to provide the most value for the dollar invested, as though the church Christ died for should sell itself like Wal-Mart.
On the other hand, “high expectation” is a vague term. If the expectation is that the members engage in pointless exercises — a second Sunday night worship service, for example — we have burdensome expectations but not high expectations. Expectations don’t become “high” until they are targeted toward honest-to-God Christian mission.
7. Increased challenges for congregations to build and acquire land due to restrictive governmental policies. American churches will experience more frustration with governmental authorities as they seek to expand, build, and acquire land. Part of the reason will be due to the authorities’ concern about traffic and congestions. Another part is the underlying concern of losing a property tax base to a nonprofit organization. In a few cases there will be outright animosity and prejudice against Christians and churches. (80%)
This is not much of a problem for Churches of Christ — yet — because we’re largely in the Bible Belt. Southern zoning laws and city officials are generally easy to work with for churches.
But there are communities where this has become a very serious problem for churches. We’ll see some more litigation over the question, maybe even some Supreme Court decisions, as the First Amendment conflicts with the power of the cities to regulate zoning.
8. More large churches will function like mini-denominations. These churches will have multiple locations. They will have one senior or lead pastor, and several other campus pastors. They are more likely to fund their own missions priorities, even if they are also contributing to a denominational missions fund. Many of them will write their own small group literature. Some will have their own church planting strategies. (70% confidence factor)
Fess up. How many of your Church of Christ congregations have used materials and ideas borrowed from Saddleback or WillowCreek? How many use Andy Stanley’s materials? The reality is, that Church of Christ publishers have been largely supplanted by evangelical publishing houses, which are increasingly reliant on megachurches for talent and materials.
This is not a terrible thing, but there are times that we find ourselves mesmerized by the hope of growing like Saddleback, even though our congregations are not situated in similar neighborhoods or cultural milieus at all. We hope for easy fixes and cookie cutter ideas — like baseball diamonds — when the real problem is often deeper — such as a failure to preach and live Jesus.
Even at the shallow end of the pool, we rarely will turn over enough authority to the staff to let them run small groups the way Saddleback does, nor would we allow the preacher to insist that members be truly involved as Saddleback does. We aren’t even willing to follow the cookie cutter ideas, and yet we pretend that, if Saddleback can pull it off, so we can we. We just need to buy the next book or DVD series …
Number eight is nothing new, but a phenomenon which continues to grow. It’s all about branding. It follows the franchise model, where the mother ship has a good reputation and name-branded franchises replicate the model and draw customers based on reputation. Think McDonald’s.
The reason the larger CoC’s are not moving toward a common worship style is that they are about 15 years behind the curve. They are still on the previous step, trying to please the old guard and the new generation at the same time. After the old guard loses influence, the move to a single style will take place.
I really doubt Rainer’s prediction about “higher expectations”. There may likely arise a stream of smaller missional organizations, but they are likely to be more like parachurch organizations. American megachurches tend to grow based on high production value, which feeds consumerism. I do not know of any large organization or culture which arrived at a consumerist and specialist lifestyle and ever changed back.
Charles,
I agree with much of what you say, except studies show that megachurches, on the whole, are less consumeristic and more demanding of their members than smaller churches, on the whole. I was surprised, but it’s a recurring conclusion. Perhaps the conclusion to draw is how very consumeristic smaller churches are!
Small churches may not offer reserved seats and coffee shops, but they do offer theology custom designed to suit the members’ tastes, not to mention a guaranty that favored traditions will not be taken away. It can still be all customer-driven rather than the Kingdom focused.
On a less cynical note, many large churches are in fact heavily involved in community service, and I think that trend is growing. This can be true of smaller churches, too, of course. And I can’t help but notice the adoption movement within evangelical churches as well as many other good works that churches were not involved with 10 or 20 years ago. Church planting is new phenomenon that many churches are heavily committed to. I’m less impressed with our commitment to short-term missions (tends to be for the kids rather than the mission itself). And I see churches being much more committed to disaster relief — some having formal programs and others just being ready to volunteer to help when needed.
In short, yes, we are very consumeristic and very willing to serve others — both are trends and at some point one or the other will come to define a given church. The good news is that ministers are increasingly aware of having succumbed to consumeristic demands, are increasingly sensitive to the need to be outside the building serving others. The bad news is that change is really, really hard and very slow coming.
Hopefully CoC and Calvary Chapels (where I go) will stay away from Saddleback and Willowcreek,.
I have connections to a local megachurch (5000+) with a strong missions emphasis, and I would suggest that missionality may not really decrease religious consumerism in the megachurch model. Time spent serving others is never presented by a church as an alternative to the high-production-value meeting– but rather as an addition to it. No one suggests reducing church attendance to free up time to serve soup to the homeless. The mega-church does (as you have noted) enjoy considerable economies of scale, that is, expense-per-member is low. But consumption is what generates the cash. In fact, one thing I have noticed is that much of the missional work is funded by individuals (missionaries raise their own support) while the organization concentrates its cash on the building and what goes on inside. I do not doubt that some preachers see this issue and are concerned about it, but as long as consumerism drives cash flow, it is going to take broad revolutionary change to alter the track. By revolutionary, I mean a willingness to take a direction which is against the megachurch’s own self interest.
Sadly some of the world’s largest mega-churches subscribe to the prosperity gospel. A make-it-take-it congregation in Seoul boasts a membership of over 100,000(this church I believe is part of the Word of Faith movement)!!!
My Church of Christ congregation is doing Saddleback’s Celebrate Recovery program, which has reached a lot of “those people” that never would have darkened the doors of the church building otherwise. I guess the counterargument would be that we could do a recovery program without the Celebrate Recovery brand, but the truth is that brands attract. And it would be a WHOLE lot more work to build one from scratch.
Rachel,
Thanks for mentioning Celebrate Recovery. I’m a fan. But it should not be thought of as a church growth strategy. (And I’m not saying that you are doing this.) Done right, it’ll be done in coordination with other congregations, so that there are CR offerings most nights of the week in town. Those addicts that seek a church home may well prefer another congregation, and there can’t be competition among the churches.
Church growth will occur, I think, the less you think of it as about growth and pour yourselves into helping the clients recover — but this is because the church is transformed to be willing to work with churches of other denominations and the members learn to pour themselves into the lives of broken people — and the spiritual formation that occurs makes the church more attractive because it becomes more like Jesus.
And this is another good reason to use the CR “brand,” because it forces you to cooperate across denominational lines and to study at the feet of the experts from other denominations. It’s a great, great program.
Churches of Christ that refuse to use the brand to preserve their pristine refusal to associate with “the denominations” look very much like the Pharisees who criticized Jesus for eating with sinners. Indeed, the temptation when you drop the brand is to compete with the other churches, which feeds the consumeristic attitudes that are destroying the American church. And it reveals a heart that’s more about church growth than healing brokenness, which ironically enough, hurts church growth.
Yes; I agree completely. The implementation of CR at our congregation hasn’t been without its critics. The “it’s Baptist” objection is definitely one we have heard a lot. Another one is, “Where are all these people who come to CR? We aren’t seeing them in the pews on Sundays and Wednesdays.” Definitely an attitude of consumerism — numerical results and money in the bank account — rather than one of, like you said, healing brokenness. Which, like you also said, promotes growth of churches — just maybe not our “brand” of church.
I truthfully don’t like to bring the CR folks from our open, grace-filled recovery meetings into our more legalistic, pretentious church environment. It’s sad but true. And our experience has been that the ones who do come to visit our services are not generally warmly welcomed and do end up going somewhere else. And that’s ok (that they go somewhere else, not that they don’t feel welcomed).
I’m changing the subject, but also in regard to #8, wouldn’t most Church of Christ congregations see the multi-site model as a threat to autonomy?
Rachel,
May I suggest an additional service for the CR people? It might not need to even be on Sundays. There are reports of priests who have said mass after the AA meetings in their churches on weekday mornings.
There are denominational churches that have seperate services for prison inmates that are in a half way house. They are brought by bus under supervision to those churches and the members, teachers, preachers, volunteer their time and talents and even bring food and desserts for them to enjoy after the services. This provides the big benefit for many of just having a conversation in normal english with outsiders that helps them become acclimated to the outside world and its modern ways before being released.
We don’t have to go far or spend a lot of money to do good works.
Ministry to those in prison and similar circumstances may be the most ubiquitous opportunity provided to us to share the love of Christ with those in darkness. A hat tip to Kairos and others doing this work. Here in Texas, there is a huge prison population, with many of the units in rural areas. I have been blessed to see small-town folks ministering to people who are about as different culturally from them as one could find.
R. J. , In all fairness to the Korean church, we have CoC friends who visited there and were blown away by the Church and their dedication. In all the years I have followed them I have seen nothing alarmingly wrong.
Who would have thunk… large fast growing churches are heavily involved in mission and service projects but small barely growing churches do little of either. How can this be? 🙂
Rachel,
While there are multi-site Churches of Christ, I’ve not seen the autonomy objection raised — but maybe that’s because the conservative publications I read tend to come from east of the MS and the multi-site churches are largely to the west (that’s my impression).
In fact, I think multisite is either much closer or further from the biblical model, depending on where the sites are. When the multiple sites are in the same city, then the church is pretty close to the First Century model — taking into account cultural shifts and all. The early church generally had one church per city, meeting separately in homes but occasionally as a whole when space allowed (as was the case in the Jerusalem, for example). The entire city had but a single eldership.
But when multi-site churches go to multiple cities, I think they create issues not only of autonomy but forget the proper relationship of the church to the city where it exists. That is, the church should serve the city —
— and I am repelled at the thought of a church hopscotching from city to city just to “convert” the wealthy white people, picking the low-hanging fruit, and feeling no urgency about the city where it was founded. That makes them just a new form of denomination, competing with the rest like a Wal-Mart. They aren’t really like the early church until they go multi-site into the poorest, most oppressed areas of town to serve the people where they already are.
Jay,
I love that last sentence. Thank you.
Our prisons are full way above the amount allowed by law and those inside need our help. We have more in prisons in the USA than all the rest of the world combined. We will not find a more receptive audience than these.
Interesting that the ones closest to Jesus all served time. Their singing sure got a lot of attention.
Anyone that will come and bring hope will receive an applause and those will go back and join with the church that gave them the truth and encouragement they needed.
All inmates are not poor, some very wealthy, and many will be big contributors to those showing compassion when released.