Goalposts for Congregational Growth
This is the second of several longer essays on church size dynamics in a Post-Covid19 world. In each, I’ll be sharing research and interacting with some growth models I think helpful.
Photo by Debby Hudson on Unsplash
My last article on church size focused on one problem.
Churches of any size might find a growth conversation difficult because they really don't have any idea what game they are actually playing.
Different traditions name church sizes in different ways. I shared a few different articles that tried to create proper size categories. They are either sorted by size breakdown/averages or size culture. They are either outdated (culturally) or not behavior-based. Any conversation about growth and ministry sustainability gets difficult because we can’t set a goalpost around what measurable growth looks like.
But back to our problem...
We define growth in a large (and generic) sense in the Christian church. We say "We want to reach the world for the gospel!!!" all while struggling to pay a part-time youth minister a living wage. Yes, the great commission calls us to go. In the book of Acts, we read how the message of Jesus should (and is ) spread throughout the world. Call it Western Ambition, but often we act like it’s one church's assignment to do the whole job. I don't think that's what Jesus intended.
What if the Great Commission is significantly more granular than that?
This means local congregations remissioning themselves to their context. This affects leadership, worship style, discipleship, formation...everything.
Here is a bit of what I wrote our problem about in the last article;
The median-sized church in America currently has 65 people in attendance. The Louisiana Conference of the United Methodist Church, of which I am an elder, is made up predominantly of churches under 100 in average worship attendance (and around 75% of our churches worship under 40). These "normal-sized" churches are full of good people, and many of them are finding it necessary to have conversations about resources, energy, and what it means to be a viable congregation. They need goalposts. Tangible, focused, and appropriate to who they are.
To find goalposts, we really need to understand and agree upon church size in a post COVID-19 world. That gives us the playing field upon which we are working on. It also helps leaders understand what really matters depending on the local context. Goalposts inform stewardship decisions. What the church of 65 might find helpful is radically different from a church of 300 which used to be 700.
To define our goalposts we need to do a few things. The first is to figure out the field of play. Once we know that, we decide the rules of the game. Only then can a team work together with an agreed-upon idea of what work needs to be done. Depending on the size of your church, the way you do this might be different, but I think understanding the strategy behind this isn't just for growth seasons, but the overall health of the local church.
So let's dig into this in a practical way.
1. What is your mission field?
Remember the whole "We want to reach the world" thing? Let's flip that into "we want to reach our neighborhood" instead. But depending on the size of your church, the resources you currently have, and the community or region you live in...that neighborhood will look different. Are you in a rural area? Maybe your church is in a mid-sized city of 75,000. You could be in a large city, but a smaller church. All of those factors will come into play.
I've found the best idea for defining the mission field comes down to your current church size and the size of your community. If you live in a rural area, and your county has less than 30,000 folks or so, you probably have a wider reach than you initially imagine. The town might have 5,000 but folks are willing to drive throughout the region. You could be a mid-sized church in a larger city of 150,000 or more. In that scenario, it might be helpful to think of defining a smaller geographic region.
Leadership needs to gain an accurate idea of the geographic region your church is likely to reach. I find that small churches (sub-50) and larger churches (500+) often benefit from a larger radius. Especially if the small church isn't in a large city. Mid-sized churches in a decent-sized city (30,000 or more) do a better job when they define their mission field as smaller.
Think about these boundaries.
• School System
• Census Block
• Defined regions of a city.
• Population of a town/city
• Portion of a county
• Entire County/Parish (#Louisiana)
Whatever region you pick there are two rules. The first is it needs to have a countable and defined population number. The second is once you pick it, you need to stick with it. The population will be an important number you measure things against for months and years.
2. What is your missional saturation number?
Years ago I had a conversation with a friend and mentor and he began explaining to me the idea of taking average attendance and diving it against the population of a community. It gave you a percentage metric of a portion of the population you were reaching. My friend explained to me that churches with a higher than 10% missional saturation number were truly remarkable. Many healthy churches were in the 5-6% range. (All of this information was collected pre-Covid and in the early-mid 2000s.)
Average Attendance ÷ Mission Field Population = Missional Saturation Number
Or
65 ÷ 2,500 = 2.6%
At first, 65 in worship might seem to be a tough number to swallow. But 65 is the normative-sized church in America. In a defined mission field of 2,500 people, it gives a saturation number of nearly 2.65%. According to my post-C19 research, this is an extremely strong missional saturation number (for mainline churches). Many of the churches and regions I have researched are struggling to hit a 1% saturation number. I'll go more into the idea of missional saturation in a future article, but the important thing is understanding the calculation and process.
3. Who is on your team (and how will you count them)?
My Mom is a Texan. And like most Texans, they are proud of Texas. I remember the apocryphal story of William Travis drawing a line in the sand at the Alamo to define who was with him (or who wasn't). Great story and an important piece of knowledge for a leader.
Many people struggle with the idea of metrics because they collect the data, but don't ever do anything with it. Average worship attendance and total church membership are the two data points most folks collect. But worship attendance is always changing (especially now). Rarely do churches clean their membership rosters either. There are also scores of people who no longer live in a community, but family members want to keep them in the roles for the sake of sentimentality. This doesn't help the church understand engagement or health. We instead look at the attendance average from year to year and celebrate or get anxious.
Let me tell you about a different metric. One I think is significantly more helpful AND actually helps churches understand their health.
Active Adults
I did a whole podcast episode recently on the metric, you can listen to it here. But to calculate the active adult metric, you need to look for objective data points in your ministry. I usually suggest giving, serving, and discipleship attendance. Each of these data points can give you an indicator of someone's engagement in the church. If any adult does ANY of the three of these (or a combination), they are counted as an active adult. And using a modern church database, you can usually set up a recurring filter that will give you this list at any time.
The wild thing is most churches have around 30% more active adults than they have worship attendance. This means some churches are living between two different size cultures in the difference between worship attendance and active adults. You might only have 90 in worship, but you have 145 active adults. That difference is strong enough to change the strategy you are building.
I believe active adults is the metric above all. More than worship attendance, membership, and any other count inside the local church. It is the number we need to base everything else off of. Nothing else has the ability to help us understand congregational engagement more than the active adult metric (and the objective counts inside it).
4. What Goals Might You Set
This is where we begin to de-mystify growth. You hear from some older folks in the church "We need more kids!!!" but in your mission field research you learn only 15% of your population is under the age of 18. And your church with 19 in attendance has 5 kids and youth. At this point, you are already breaking the average for the community!
When we understand our mission field and our active adults (rather than worship attendance), we can then calculate our missional saturation number to understand what growth CAN look like. It helps set an accurate picture.
Let's case study this real quick.
Your worship attendance is 56 in a school system/zone of 9,000 people. This gives a missional saturation of .62%. You do the work to discern and define your active adults and find out you have 83 active adults. You rerun the missional saturation number and get .92%.
Your goal for one year is a missional saturation of 1.25%. This means adding 30 active adults to your church for a total of 113 active adults. At this point, you can strategize in multiple ways you might reach this goal. And it removes the anxiety for congregations that need to grow in order to find missional and operational stability. Clear pathways and objectives can be developed.
I started off this article wanting to establish a clearer vision of what the normal-sized church can do regarding growth. I've both used AND taught this approach in local churches and we nearly always find the strategy demystifies growth. Digging into these 4 areas will help you and your leadership have the necessary information to make future plans.
My next article will be digging into church-size culture and how we might understand it in a post-C19 world. But until then, let me leave you with a few things to think about.
1. How many active adults do you have in your church? Do you have a system to count them every 6-8 weeks?
2. What anxieties do you hear in your congregation about your current size and resources?
3. What is your mission field? Are you actively trying to reach it or just assuming it will happen?