Rainer on Healthy Churches

Five Warning Signs

What were some of the warning signs my team saw? Though the list is not exhaustive, these five issues were common. Some of the churches had one or two on the list; some had all five.

1. The church has few outwardly focused ministries. Most of the budget dollars in the church are spent on the desires and comforts of church members. The ministry staff spends most of its time taking care of members, with little time to reach out and minister to the community the church is supposed to serve.

2. The dropout rate is increasing. Members are leaving for other churches in the community, or they are leaving the local church completely. A common exit interview theme we heard was a lack of deep biblical teaching and preaching in the church.

3. The church is experiencing conflict over issues of budgets and building. When the focus of church members becomes how the facilities and money can meet their preferences, church health is clearly on the wane.

4. Corporate prayer is minimized. If the church makes prayer a low priority, it makes God a low priority.

5. The pastor has become a chaplain. The church members view the pastor as their personal chaplain, expecting him to be on call for their needs and preferences. When he doesn’t make a visit at the expected time, or when he doesn’t show up for the Bible class fellowship, he receives criticism. In not a few cases, the pastor has lost his job at that church because he was not omnipresent for the church members.

Where Do We Go from Here?

The bad news is that few churches recover if the patterns above become normative. The church is a church in name only. It is self-gratifying rather than missional. It is more concerned about great comfort than the Great Commission and the Great Commandment.

The good news is that a few churches have moved from sickness to health. The path was not easy. It first required that the congregants be brutally honest with themselves and God. It does no good to speak glowingly of a church that is unhealthy and getting worse.

Many of the turnaround churches we consulted then moved to a time of corporate confession and repentance. They confessed to God their lack of obedience and their selfish desire for their own comfort.

And still other churches made an intentional effort to shift the ministries and the money of the church to a greater outward focus. This step can be particularly painful since a number of church members often protest with vigor that their needs are no longer being met.

Honeysett on Training Leaders

Is your church a place where the following are normal expectations:

1. Leaders of all activities (especially home groups) being carefully and regularly nurtured and trained
2. That the Lord will regularly raise up future full time leaders who will initially be identified, encouraged, trained and released to exercise embryonic leadership gifts in your church
3. Evaluation of future possibilities for winning the lost and extending the kingdom in your area. Leaders and congregation praying for God to fulfil the needs exposed by your evaluation
4. Honouring and equipping embryonic leaders, through current leaders being freed to give enough time to their development

If the answer is no to most or all of the above you should anticipate that you will face a significant stall in the coming few years. There is every possibility that you will cease to be missional. Reasons for this may include:

1. Your congregation not valuing leadership or wanting to be led. This may indicate certain theological convictions about leadership, but is more likely to show that a majority of the congregation have moved into maintenance mode in which the meeting of their spiritual needs assumes a greater priority than making disciples
2. You will be very likely to search externally for your next pastor (or the one after that) only to find that traditionally reliable sources have dried up
3. You will discover that you have contextualised yourself in the past and refused to adapt to reach a different world. This makes your church inherently unattractive for potential next-generation leaders who are asking the question “where can I work with a congregation that wants to be equipped for building the church and winning the world?”
4. Your church culture assumes that wherever leaders come from, it isn’t your church. If you ever have an embryonic leader the governing paradigm is that you send them to be trained elsewhere and buy back in fully formed. Therefore you have lost any internal base of training and development skills. Therefore the emergence and development of leaders in your church for your church (and the wider church) becomes much more unlikely precisely because it is abnormal. God may have his hand on a person for leadership, but human obstacles may well prevent them from exploring his call
5. You, personally, didn’t make passing on leadership a priority

The foundational issue underlying the emerging leadership crisis in UK churches is one of mindset at a local church level:

1. The average local church is not producing any leaders
2. It is rare to find local churches freeing up significant amounts of leadership time for developing embryonic leaders
3. Only a tiny percentage of churches devote any time to training elders, deacons, home group leaders, evangelism facilitators or Sunday School teachers

Questions any leader should be asking:

1. Are you allowed to step back from being the all competent doer-of-everything, to take a strategic view and invest in key people for the future? If not, why?
2. Do you train elders, deacons and home group leaders in your church? If not, why?
3. What training and resources that you currently don’t have would make that a practical and achievable possibility for you?
4. Who are your 20 (or 10, or 5) most likely potential leaders for 2020? What would you have to invest in them to allow their ministry to take off?
5. What would this require in terms of time, energy and resources? Why are the necessary resources not devoted to this in your church? What else would you have to sacrifice to make it possible? Would your congregation allow you to make the necessary sacrifices? If not, why?

At this moment in evangelicalism in the UK, the development of missional leaders in our churches for our churches is the number one key priority for the health of the church nationally. Neglecting it is an unaffordable luxury. Devoting energy elsewhere while neglecting this is likely to prove a terrible false economy, because if our churches lack biblical leaders in 15 years time – and at current rates of progress very many will – then at that point all other ministries of the local church that depend on biblical leadership will also take a fatal blow.

Marcus Honeysett on Church Growth

The growth of the Kingdom of God involves constant change, by definition. A church that wants to be in exactly the same place in 10 years time is extremely complacent. It will atrophy. Leaders the the people who mainly expect to receive and shape God-given vision and direction for where the church and its mission should be in the future.

However all churches tend towards liking stability and predictability in their organisational life. Change is the biggest threat to the security. Therefore being able to lead through change is critical to church and kingdom growth.

I can think of 6 reasons why change might be necessary in a church:

1. Some area of church life, activity or witness is not as good as it could be. Some things may need to stop to allow the capacity to develop new ones

2. The church has distanced itself from the present. Any church that deals with the realities of its surrounding culture by withdrawal or avoidance is doomed to never speak the gospel to that culture. Far too many churches in the UK have decided that their ideal era is some time before the present. Every year that passes makes them a year more out of touch

3. The church has a wrong view of itself. For example they have become the inward looking pastoral community rather than a biblically outward looking missional community

4. Problems arise that need fresh solutions

5. A church becomes structurally set up to run favourite activities rather than to facilitate all the believers in living out gospel vision

6. Comfort has replaced kingdom growth. The church has become satisfied with the unchanging status quo

Whether a church develops for future gospel extension or concretises itself in the past will largely be decided by whether leaders are allowed to lead for change, and how they lead for change.

Thom Rainer on Evangelism

Seven Characteristics

It is inevitable that, when we do research on evangelistic churches, we learn about one or more members in the church who, to use the book title by Charles H. Spurgeon, embody the traits of "The Soul Winner." Oftentimes one of those members is the pastor. But we have also seen many laypersons who are themselves soul winners.

In our interviews with these people, or with those who tell us about the soul winners, we began to discern some clear patterns. We called those patterns “the seven characteristics of highly evangelistic Christians.”

1. They are people of prayer. They realize that only God can convict and convert, and they are totally dependent upon Him in prayer. Most of the highly evangelistic Christians spend at least an hour in prayer each day.

2. They have a theology that compels them to evangelize. They believe in the urgency of the gospel message. They believe that Christ is the only way of salvation. They believe that anyone without Christ is doomed for a literal hell.

3. They are people who spend time in the Word. The more time they spend in the Bible, the more likely they are to see the lostness of humanity and the love of God in Christ to save those who are lost.

4. They are compassionate people. Their hearts break for those who don’t have a personal relationship with Jesus Christ. They have learned to love the world by becoming more like Christ who has the greatest love for the world.

5. They love the communities where God has placed them. They are immersed in the culture because they desire for the light of Christ to shine through them in their communities.

6. They are intentional about evangelism. They pray for opportunities to share the gospel. They look for those opportunities. And they see many so-called casual encounters as appointments set by God.

7. They are accountable to someone for their evangelistic activities. They know that many good activities can replace Great Commission activities if they are not careful. Good can replace the best. So they make certain that someone holds them accountable each week, either formally or informally, for their evangelistic efforts.

The “Secret” of Evangelistic Churches

The secret is really no secret at all. Ultimately, evangelistic churches see more persons become Christians through the passionate efforts of highly evangelistic Christians. More than any programs. More than any church events. More than anything else, we are the instruments God has chosen to use.

Sometimes we ask the question "What is my church doing to become more evangelistic?" But the better question is "What am I doing to become more evangelistic?"

Charles H. Spurgeon was right. We need more soul winners.

We need more highly evangelistic Christians.

Brister on Church Growth

21 Questions I’ve Been Asking (Myself) Lately
Several of you will find these questions familiar, but their familiarity does not minimize the piercing factor for this pastor. I wanted to put them out there in case others might find them helpful.

1. If our church would cease to exist in our city, would it be noticed and missed?

2. If all the pastors were tragically killed in a car accident, would the church’s ministry cease or fall apart?

3. If the only possible means of connecting with unbelievers were through the missionary living of our church members, how much would we grow? (I ask this because the early church did not have signs, websites, ads, marketing, etc.)

4. What are the subcultures within the church? Do they attract or detract from the centrality of the gospel and mission of the church?

5. Is our church known more for what we are not/against than what we are/for?

6. What are we allowing to be our measuring stick of church health? (attendance vs. discipleship; seating capacity vs. sending capacity; gospel growth, training on mission, etc.)

7. Are the priorities of our church in line with the priorities of Christ’s kingdom?

8. If our members had 60 seconds to explain to an unbeliever what our church is like, what would you want them to say? How many do you think are saying that?

9. If the invisible kingdom of God became visible in our city, what would that look like?

10. In what ways have we acted or planned in unbelief instead of faith?

11. As a pastor, is my time spent more in fixing people’s problems or helping people progress in faith through training/equipping them for ministry?

12. Are the people we are reaching more religious or pagan?

13. What can we learn about our evangelism practices by the kind of people are being reached with the gospel?

14. What will it take to reach those in our city who are far from God and have no access to the gospel?

15. What percentage of our growth is conversion growth (vs. transfer growth)?

16. How many people know and are discharging their spiritual gifts in active service and building up of the body of Christ?

17. How many people do I know (and more importantly know me) on a first name basis in my community and city who do not attend our church?

18. Am I using people to get ministry done, or am I using ministry to get people “done”?

19. Is the vision we are casting forth honoring both God’s heart for the lost (builder) and God’s passion for a pure church (perfecter)?

20. If money and space were not an issue, what is one thing we ought to dream for God to do in our midst where it is impossible for anyone to get the credit except for the omnipotent hand of God?

21. If being a church planting church is comprised of disciple-making disciples, then how are we doing?

Tim Chester Reviews "The Vine and the Trellis"

A summary of the book:

?Vine work is about the ministry of the Word of God, by the power of the Spirit. It is the ministry that sees people converted, changed, and made mature in Christ. Trellis work is all the other things we do in our churches that hopefully support that vine work, but which actually aren?t vine work in themselves.? The authors of this book don?t dismiss ?trellis work? ? all the institutional and structural stuff of church. But they argue we need a refocus onto ?vine work? ? making disciples.

There?s a lot of good stuff in this book. I particularly love the key principles elaborated of chapters 2 and 12:

Ministry mind-shifts

1. From running programs to building people

2. From running events to training people

3. From using people to growing people

4. From filling gaps to training new workers

5. From solving problems to helping people make progress

6. From clinging to ordained ministry to developing team leadership

7. From focusing on church polity to forging ministry partnerships

8. From relying on training institutions to establishing local training

9. From focusing on immediate pressures to aiming for long-term expansion

10. From engaging in management to engaging in ministry

11. From seeking church growth to desiring gospel growth

Summary Propositions

1. Our goal is to make disciples

2. Churches tend towards institutionalism as sparks fly upwards

3. The heart of disciple-making is prayerful teaching

4. The goal of all ministry ? not just one-to-one work ? is to nurture disciples

5. To be a disciple is to be a disciple-maker

6. Disciple-makers need to be trained and equipped in conviction, character and competence

7. There is only one class of disciples, regardless of different roles or responsibilities

8. The Great Commission, and its disciple-making imperative, needs to drive fresh thinking about our Sunday meetings and the place of training in congregational life

9. Training almost always starts small and grows by multiplying workers

10. We need to challenge and recruit the next generation of pastors, teachers and evangelists

Making a start

Step 1: Set the agenda on Sundays

Step 2: Work closely with your elders or parish council

Step 3: Start building a new team of co-workers

Step 4: Work out with you co-workers how disciple-making is going to grow in your context

Step 5: Run some training programs

Step 6: Keep an eye out for ?people worth watching?

Cole on Leadership Reproduction

Disciples - Leaders - Churches - Movements. If you can't produce one, you won't produce the next.