Matt Smay

This week Hugh and I attended the Exponential – National New Church Conference and had some great conversations with leaders from a wide variety of ministries. This year, the missional track had significantly more stage presence than in previous years. Alan Hirsch and Neil Cole represented the missional track and spoke during main and breakout sessions with standing room only in each of their breakouts. Alan gave us the opportunity to share our story during one of his sessions, which created a flood of interest towards The Tangible Kingdom and the MCAP. We spent a majority of our time hanging out at the Leadership Network table - selling our books and connecting with church planters and denominational leaders. Here’s a list of the various conversations that stood out to me:

• Should missional churches avoid being attractive?
• What, if any, are the distinctions between house church, missional church, attractional church, and organic church?
• How do we define incarnational community?
• Are there examples out there of people starting movements of incarnational communities?
• What are some of the alternative funding strategies available for church planters?
• Most rewarding of all, listening to church planter’s describe their journey.

Perhaps we’ll see you there next year!

I’ve had several conversations lately with leaders in declining churches that outline a similar story. As with many things in life, churches don’t tend to end or collapse overnight - there’s often a steady and gradual process. We can learn a few things from these common stories:

• Church leaders often look in the wrong places for help. I consistently hear of church leaders that start looking to mega-churches for programs that might help ease their decline, or even create new growth. I have nothing against mega-church programs, but often small churches try to implement one aspect (maybe the curriculum) of a mega-church program without considering the enormous infrastructure that accompanies these programs (staffing, advertising, buildings, marketing, budget, atmosphere, etc…). And there’s one very important distinction between mega-churches and most others - people are still visiting mega-churches in droves, which is not common for smaller, community based churches. Therefore, church leaders should consider looking to the successes of churches that are similar in size, staffing, and most importantly - have overcome similar challenges. For example, doubling a church 2x’s over from 75 to 300 is entirely different than multiplying from 1000 to 4000.
• Usually the decline of a church takes years - even decades. In this period of slow decline, church leaders often hold onto the wrong staff and programs, which further entrenches the church. For example, it might be tempting to hire a new worship leader, keep a long-time staff position, or hold onto the youth pastor (overseeing a small number of teens), but this often comes at the expense of other staff (especially children’s ministry staff). Once a church loses it’s young families, it’s almost impossible to get them back. Since there’s typically a natural affinity or homogeneity between people, in which like tends to attract like, the more young families in a church, the better the odds that the relationships among those families will create a natural momentum and gravity. Therefore, it’s important to always be investing vital resources towards future generations to help keep a church young - thereby, avoiding the loss of an entire generation (a common sign of a church in decline).
• Most church growth happens relationally, even if it’s supplemented by programs. A declining church in most instances loses it’s relational touch with the outside world. In periods of church growth there’s usually something in a church’s DNA that directly links the people of church with people in culture. This is why there are programs out there that can help facilitate church growth - when the programs serve to bring added value to commonly occurring relationships. Some examples are day-cares, food and clothes banks, schools, sport teams, festivals, camps, small groups, etc…
• Not appropriately balancing risk is a common theme among declining churches. Whether a church takes on too much debt to expand the building, or fails to risk at strategic moments can signal the beginning of the end for a church. Maintaining the status quo or simply surviving is not a very inspiring value. The average church attender is often looking for something bigger than themselves to participate in, and a church with a vision for it’s future and a viable mission is invaluable.

As we approach the book launch of The Tangible Kingdom on April 18, Leadership Network has been sending out pre-release copies to leaders and bloggers to get some early reviews of the book for publicity purposes. I’ll be posting links to some of those reviews as I come across them.

If you’re interested in what others are saying about the book, the review by Nick Howard and posted on his blog theosyllabic is highly encouraging, especially considering he articulates many of our motivations for writing the book in the first place.