The blossoming of a church depends on more than one kind of nutrient.

Why do churches grow? In the midst of all the conferences, seminars, and books on the subject, I sense that Christian churchmen are overlooking some very important matters. If we continue to ignore certain indispensable conditions, the result may be a short-range, artificial church growth that will explode like a tense bubble. To achieve long-range, real church growth, we must grapple with those underpinning aspects of church life that allow the people of God to outlive any one personality or method.

The conditions I am about to enumerate always surface as matters of discussion and crisis when a church approaches certain growth plateaus. Another term for these plateaus might be "growth ceilings"- points at which a church ceases to grow any further without some major effort.

Often a church appears to pause numerically as if it were wrestling with the practicality and desirability of breaking through to the next growth level. ...