Leadership Journal

In a market economy, the company with the best product, price, and service gets the customer. Such is the nature of competition.

Few put it in such crass terms, but increasingly, the American church also operates in a highly competitive environment. Gone are the days of denominational loyalty. Many people today church-hop till they drop. One church member who decided to attend elsewhere brazenly said, "My wife and I want to be in a larger church that doesn't need us to be involved so much."

Where does all this leave pastors? Just ask the person who may feel the competition most acutely—the pastor of the small church located a few miles from a megachurch.

Leadership did just that. We invited Craig Brian Larson, a bi-vocational pastor who serves Lakeshore Assembly of God in downtown Chicago, Illinois, a congregation of thirty-five, to talk about ministering in a small church in a highly competitive church market. We also invited to the discussion well-known church-consultant Lyle Schaller, author of The Interventionist (Abingdon), and large-church pastor Kent Hughes, who serves College Church in Wheaton, Illinois, and who wrote Liberating Ministry from the Success Syndrome (Tyndale).

Larson, Schaller, and Hughes gave Leadership an earful about what this new competition requires of today's pastor.

Most pastors say, "We don't compete with other churches for members; we're interested only in the non-churched."

Lyle Schaller: Forgive me, but that's not quite the real world. In 95 percent of churches, the majority of new members received last year into fellowship identified themselves as Christians when they walked through the door the first time.
Kent Hughes: Only a small percentage of our new members are conversions in the historic sense of the word. We know we're reaching only a small section of the non-churchgoing community.

So pastors do compete for other Christians.

Hughes: You can grow a big church by winning at musical chairs. Dissatisfied church attenders, upset with their pastor, like something you do better, and your church grows. In that sense, we do compete.
Before coming to College Church, I was a small-church pastor of a congregation five minutes from First Evangelical Free Church in Fullerton, California; Chuck Swindoll's ministry was well on the rise. Then there were Eastside Christian Church, the Crystal Cathedral, and Calvary Chapel spin-offs. I'd pour my life into a young couple, only to hear them say a few years later: "Pastor, we love you. We love this church. But it doesn't have a youth program." And they would be off.
Today, I'm on the other end of that: College Church has a terrific youth program that can—I hate to use the word—pirate young people from other churches. In a sense, the rich get richer. I mourn the sociology of the whole thing.

Brian, as a pastor of a smaller church, how do you feel this competition?

Brian Larson: In the fall a young, single man who had been attending the church ...