Change Your Church or Die

Ken Hemphill and I are batting around the idea of working on a new book and conference: Change Your Church or Die. The book will center around six key changes taking place in churches and how to navigate them. In addition, we will explore a classic business model of change and what is wrong with it. Topics to be covered include:

• Changing a Sunday School church to a Home Group Church
• Introducing contemporary music in a traditional church
• Moving toward missional
• The changing face of children's ministry
• Reaching people under thirty
• Using technology to accelerate growth

We would like to get a little feedback up front. Any feedback would be appreciated. What are we missing?

Here is an excerpt:

Something is changing in the American church. Maybe it is the environment. Maybe it is the church itself. If it is not corrected it could kill us.

I have been traveling and working with church leaders full-time over the last 15 years. My current account with American Airlines shows 2,155,306 lifetime miles. I’ve seen a shift in things in the last few years. The crowds are both smaller and older.

I’m not the only one noticing this. Number crunchers and statisticians have been reporting the news for some time. And it keeps getting worse. Here are some recent headlines:

• SBC baptism, membership numbers fall.
• Southern Baptists Have Fewest Baptisms Since The 1950s And Are Losing Members.
• Southern Baptists Experiencing Accelerating Decline in Membership.
• SBC 2011 Statistical Realities—Facts Are Our Friends But These Are Not Very Friendly Facts.
• Baptisms in SBC down to lowest number in 64 years.
• From 1950-2011 Southern Baptists baptized an average of 379,711 people annually. Only twice during that time did the numbers dip more than 10 percent below that average. But in 2012 the decline was 13 percent off the average — the worst drop in 62 years.

What others have reported statistically I have seen viscerally. I’ve seen it in the empty pews in churches and in the long faces of her pastors. My own personal income has seen a dramatic drop, reflecting the drop in income in the churches as I serve. It is time to sound the alarm. The ship is taking on water. If we don’t change we will die.

Not that the capital-C Church will die – God’s kingdom is everlasting. And the church is seeing unprecedented growth in many places – especially overseas. Even here in America we see churches that are exploding in growth.

I just received Outreach Magazine’s annual top 100 edition. This is the addition where they report the nation’s top 100 fastest-growing churches and top 100 largest churches. The top 100 churches average in size 6000 in attendance. They showed a combined gain of 105,657— a 28% increase. The fastest-growing – capital NewSong Church in Anderson, S.C. — grew by 7,072 in attendance in one year. The list is made up of a variety of churches. The youngest – Destination Church in Colonial Heights, VA— was started in 2011. Traders Point Christian Church in Indianapolis, IN was founded in 1834. There is a new generation of churches that are either starting or re-inventing themselves that is exploding in growth.

The multi-site movement is what makes this movement especially exciting. I predict the multi-site movement will change the church scene as much as franchises changed the world of retail. 30 years ago retail was dominated by mom-and-pops. Today is dominated by franchises. Today church world is dominated by local, one-site churches. 30 years from now church world will be dominated by a handful of multisite churches that have thousands of locations each. You can decide for yourself whether or not this is a good idea. I am not saying it is good or bad, I’m saying it’s coming.

These fast-growing, multi-site churches demonstrate that rapid growth is possible in North America.

Overseas things are even better. There is a movement in China called T4T. The rapid growth of this movement has created a desperate need for theological training of its leaders. It has grown so rapidly that there are people overseeing large networks of house churches who have only been Christians for a few months. I have a friend who went to do some training two months ago. He and three other men trained 120 house church pastors. Two months later he received an email reporting that these 120 groups have won 3000 people to Christ in the last two months. It is just like the book of Acts.

But here at home things are quite different. With rare exceptions our churches have gone from plateaued to gently declining.

Three years ago, Ed Stetzer predicted membership in Southern Baptist Churches would look like this between now and 2050:

It is looking increasingly like this prediction will come true – unless we change. We will change or we will die.