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 for six months, said, “I’m looking for a Christian wife.” I said, “That’s a legitimate pursuit.” To which he replied, “I’m probably not going to find her in this church. I’m going to go to another church.” I gave him my blessing: “I want you to find God’s purpose in that area.” I didn’t fight him, but, boy, I sure felt the dynamic of our not being able to compete. Many Americans today in urban areas prefer a larger church. Schaller: I don’t run into many people who say, “I’m picking a big church deliberately.” They say, “I’m at this large church in spite of the fact it’s big. But I want community, and I found it in a Saturday morning Bible study.”
Can the smaller church compete in this environment?
Larson: The vision I’ve been trying to plant in our church is that we follow Christ together in authentic community. Recently the son of a woman in our church died. I said to our church, “This is where the rubber meets the road. Are we going to love her? Are we going to help her through this tragedy?” A week later, this woman told me, “Out of the entire church list, only two people did not contact me or come to the wake or funeral, or call me. And the two that didn’t probably didn’t hear about the news.” That felt good. I don’t sit around wringing my hands, saying, “How can I compete with Moody Church or the strong Vineyard church in downtown Chicago?” Even if our church can’t provide a single program, we can offer authentic community. Schaller: Brian, you pastor the most popular-sized church in the country. A recent study of 116,000 churches showed that thirty-five was the most common number in attendance. Thirty-five is an ideal number, whether an adult Sunday school class, a Bible study, a music group, or a small church. When somebody experiences a loss, then thirty-three of thirty-five can rally and support the person. Thirty-five people at worship is as big as a church can become with members still spontaneously feeling a sense of belonging.
Doesn’t that create a double-bind? As soon as Brian’s church starts to grow, it loses the very thing that attracts people to it.
Larson: Added to that, there’s a no-man’s land between 35, when you begin to lose community, and around 150, when you can offer a few programs. Schaller: Recently I’ve been asking younger adults why they picked the church they did. For many, the church they chose was their second, third, or fourth choice. They moved to the community, attended elsewhere for a while, then chose a different church to settle in. Why? Some boil it down to community—”I feel a sense of belonging.” Every member of the family needs to feel that or they move on. Others say, “This church speaks to where I am in my spiritual journey.”
So who are churches competing for?
Schaller: For the folks who have moved from one stage of their spiritual journey to another. If their church no longer speaks to that stage, they feel free to go to another. I suspect that a lot of people wish that College Church could offer everything it does now and be a fourth of the size it is. Hughes: I hear that all the time: “We’re too big, and, Pastor, we need to do something about it.” People would like to have everything we offer and at the same time have the church be around three hundred.
If people don’t see something they want this week, they’re not going to return the next.
What is at the root of this new competition?
Schaller: Our society is much more competitive today than it was forty years ago. More farmers have failed in the last twenty years, for example, than failed during Depression years. Failure is a product of increasing competition. Another cause of competition among churches is the success of ecumenism. Until the mid-sixties, the focus in churches was on what was distinctively different about them. Then came the ecumenical movement and Vatican II, which essentially said, “Instead of focusing on what separates us, let’s focus on what we have in common.” I’m convinced people took that literally. People today say, “I’m Catholic, but even though that’s a Protestant church, I could go there.” According to Catholic scholars, more than 15 million of the 62 million baptized souls have left the Catholic church; half of them are in Protestant churches.
Are you saying that cooperation isn’t a worthy goal?
Schaller: I believe cooperation among churches works with issue-centered ministries—social justice, social welfare, etc.—and a variety of training programs. But when it comes to the worshiping community, cooperation does not work. The spiritual journey of the individual is developed best within the confines of a single worshiping community. But today, we have folks who go to church A for this, church B for that, and church C for something else. One consequence is a lot of two-church households. They buy their “groceries” over here except when there’s a “sale” at another church. They drop their kids off at one church for youth group but attend another for worship. Hughes: The great tragedy is that they are, in a sense, churchless Christians without discipline, without the regular benefit of the Lord’s table and ordinances, with a kind of anonymous commitment. People rationalize what they’re doing by saying, “We’re members of the universal church.” That is a sign of a defective ecclesiology; the New Testament knows nothing of polygamous Christians. There needs to be a reassertion of the doctrine of the church, and that may go the other way from growth. People cannot come to maturity without the discipline of a commitment to the local church.
How do pastors combat this “defective ecclesiology”?
Hughes: I’ve said things about it from the pulpit, but doing so sounds cranky. We’ve actually considered sending leaders to some people to say, “You need to consider what you’re doing.” I don’t know if they’ve ever thought about the consequences of being a churchless Christian. Schaller: Another response is to set up membership criteria. “If you want to be a member of our fellowship, with all the rights, obligations, privileges, then this must be your only church.” Today, the word church means “take your choice of location,” whether it’s a Catholic parish or an independent church or an Assemblies of God congregation. I think the word church has been captured by the Enemy. I now try to use “worshiping community.” The phrase conveys a gathered group of worshipers with responsibilities that go with it.
Is there any benefit to this new competition?
Larson: Competition has forced me to say, “Am I really seeking God? Am I hearing from God? Am I depending on the Holy Spirit every single moment of every day to lead me into fruitful ministry?” I don’t consider evangelism to be my gift, but I now think more strategically about evangelism: “There may be competition for this pool of transfer growth—people moving in—but there’s not a lot of competition for the zillions of people who don’t have a clue about life and eternal life.” Competition has also forced me to be a stronger leader. For example, to a first-time visitor, I say, “Let’s talk about our values and assumptions as a church because I want you to find the church God wants you in. It may be our church. It may be Moody Church. But here are the things you need to be making that decision.” Hughes: I wrestled with the whole matter of success, trying to define it from the Bible. I defined it as loving God with all my heart; faithfulness (by that I meant hard-working and creative); a foot-washing heart like Jesus’ in John 13; a holy heart; a prayerful heart; and a heart with a positive attitude. Brian as a small-church pastor, and I as a large-church pastor need to live by those principles. For both of us, success gets down to these fundamental things before God, whether we’re on the upside or downside of the numbers game.
But there seems to be a prevailing feeling that it’s not okay to be an average pastor anymore.
Hughes: I don’t think it’s okay to be an average pastor. Too often pastors define “faithfulness” as “just hanging in there.” That’s not it. Faithfulness is doing the hard thinking about what you’re about and why you’re doing it and how you’re going to go about doing it. This doesn’t guarantee numerical success—numbers may just be the result of where the church is located. In addition to being faithful to biblical principle, pastors must be creative, hard working, and know the winds of culture. If the average pastor is not doing these things, then I don’t think there’s room for that type of person today.
(First of two parts; click here to read Part 2)
1997 by the author or Christianity Today/Leadership Journal. For reprint information call 630-260-6200 or contact us
