The Everychurch Guide to Growth

How Any Plateaued Church Can Grow

Elmer L. Towns, C. Peter Wagner, Thom S. Rainer

• Publisher: B&H Books
• Year: 1998
• ISBN:
  9781433674945
• Topic: Teología y religión
• Subtopic: Iglesia cristiana

A growing church is a living church, but much of the attention in church growth today is focused on making big churches bigger. This encouraging new book shows members of small and medium-sized congregations how to revive and expand their ministries as well. Churches of every size tend to plateau in attendance and never break free of their self-imposed limitations or 'growth barriers'. This book gives detailed, practical instructions for breaking through those barriers to new levels of impact and service in the community. The EveryChurch Guide to Growth rallies church leaders and members to develop plans for strength and solid growth in the future.

PART 1

OVERCOMING SMALL CHURCH
BARRIERS OF 200 PEOPLE
BY
C. PETER WAGNER

 

 

---

C. Peter Wagner has never stopped learning since he began. He learned a scientific orientation to growth at Rutgers University, Camden, New Jersey, majoring in agricultural studies. After graduation from Fuller Theological Seminary, he ministered for sixteen years in Bolivia, directing the mission that is now called Andean field of SIM International. After a sabbatical back at Fuller in 1968, he became a lifelong friend and student of Donald C. McGavran. Peter was invited to teach at Fuller in 1971, and he completed a Ph.D. in anthropology at the University of Southern California. McGavran and Wagner made Fuller the world leader in the Church Growth Movement, and to know the movement, one had to study there.

Wagner has authored many of the foundational classics in Church Growth. His research has both deepened the movement in foundational studies and broadened the movement, especially in his research into new movements of the Holy Spirit in prayer and spiritual warfare.

C. Peter Wagner holds the Donald C. McGavran Chair of Church Growth and Missions at Fuller and is the Dean of the Colorado Extension of Fuller. But close to his heart is the work of the World Prayer Center in Colorado Springs, Colorado, where he is the director. He has been on the cutting edge, writing several volumes on prayer and spiritual warfare.

Peter is married to Doris, who was instrumental in leading him to Christ. She was an effective missionary with him in South America and has developed an extensive prayer ministry around the world. They have three daughters and six grandchildren.

---

CHAPTER ONE

Why Do Churches
Face a 200 Barrier?

Over 90 percent of pastors here in America and around the world have come head-to-head with the 200 barrier. Very few have overcome this challenge. The great majority, however, have treated this challenge as passively as never running a four-minute mile, never being invited to the White House, or never owning a Mercedes. Nice, but that's what other people do.

Though most pastors probably don't think about breaking the 200 barrier very often, they do think about it from time to time. The very fact that you have opened this book shows that, at least now, you are thinking about it. It goes without saying that if you are ever going to break the 200 barrier, you have already taken a good first step. By the time you read these first three chapters you will be well on your way.

Why a Section on the 200
Barrier?

Breaking the 200 barrier is the top agenda item of most pastors who have a heartfelt desire for church growth. It is not that important for all pastors, of course, because many pastors care little or nothing about growth. This book is obviously not for them. But why start a book on plateaued churches with the 200 barrier?

First of all, the 200 barrier is important because “expansion growth” is a part of the job description, either implicitly or explicitly, of those pastors who do care about growth. Expansion growth is a technical term describing the process of bringing new members into your local church. It is different from “internal growth” (helping believers mature in their Christian life), “extension growth” (planting new churches in one's own culture), and “bridging growth” (planting churches in different cultures). The chances are that you and your church members want to see your church growing in numbers.

Second, the vast majority of pastors everywhere have congregations of fewer than 200 active members. More than half of these pastor fewer than 100 active members. Because of that, some may well be asking why we do not start with breaking the 100 barrier instead of breaking the 200 barrier. That is a good question. The answer is that the same essential characteristics of this barrier are largely present in all churches with membership under 200. For years I have been doing a seminar on this challenging subject I now call “Breaking the 100/200 Barrier.” In the beginning I called it “Breaking the 200 Barrier,” but I soon discovered that many pastors whose churches had fewer than 100 members were staying away for the wrong reasons. Later on I will explain these numbers in considerable detail, but for now let me simply say that any church under 200 falls into the category of a small church.

Most practicing pastors, therefore, are small-church pastors. A considerable number of these pastors are asking: “How can my church become a middle-sized church or a large church?” This entire book is designed to give you realistic and practical answers to that extremely important question.

What I Hope to Do for You

In this section of the book, I hope to help you with five highly valuable pieces of information directly connected to your leadership and ministry.

1. I want to help you recognize that a 200 barrier actually exists. This is not some kind of a slogan or rhetoric for a sermon point or figment of someone's imagination. It is almost as inexorable as the law of gravity. As astronauts know, humans can be exempt from the law of gravity at certain times and in certain places. Likewise, some megachurch pastors may never have been bothered with a 200 barrier. But astronauts and megachurch pastors are few and far between.
2. I want to help you understand why that 200 barrier exists. This is not a mystery that has to keep you puzzled all your life. The reality is that certain predictable sociological, psychological, behavioral, and spiritual factors combine to make people actually prefer their churches to have memberships of under 200 active adults. You will soon understand what these mind-sets are.
3. Once you thoroughly understand the nature of the 200 barrier, I want to help you make a realistic assessment as to whether your particular church has a high probability or a low probability of ever breaking the barrier. This assessment is very important, because not every church can or will be able to do it. I refuse to engage in the kind of hype that implies that if you just do 1, 2, and 3 or if you get your spiritual act together or if you read this book, your church will certainly break the 200 barrier. A message like that puts you in the position of blaming only yourself if your church does not break the 200 barrier. In some cases the blame will clearly be yours, but not in every case.
   By the time you finish reading this book, you certainly will be well-informed, and you may honestly be saying to yourself, to your spouse, and to God: “No way! This church will never break the 200 barrier!” If that turns out to be the case, then your options are very simple. You can decide to stay where you are and be a small-church pastor for the rest of your life. This may well be God's will for you and your family. If it is, frustration will evaporate because you will thoroughly understand why the church remains the size it is, and you will be comforted to know that in most cases it is not because of anything you have done wrong. Be a good small-church pastor. The other option, of course, is to send out your resume and look up U-Haul in the yellow pages.
4. On the other hand, if you finish this book and find yourself saying, “Yes! We can do it!” I want to help you comprehend as thoroughly as possible the dynamics of what you will have to do to break the 200 barrier.
5. Finally, I want to provide you with some practical conceptual tools you can use to implement the process. I do not intend to give you some tried-and-true formula for growth, because I don't think any such thing exists. Breaking the 200 barrier will hardly ever be easy, but let's try to make it as easy as possible.

This Definitely Can Work

As I have led 200-barrier seminars over the years, I have received many responses from pastors who have tried what my colleagues and I have suggested, and it has worked. Here are some samples.

A Baptist pastor from West Virginia writes: “It has been just under a year since I attended your seminar. Some very encouraging things have happened in our church. I believe a great deal of our recent success can be attributed to the skills and insights gained in the seminar. For the first quarter of this year, our average attendance in morning worship was 289 compared with 197 last year. Our Sunday School has gone from 154 to 185.”

A pastor from Texas writes: “I just wanted to drop you a note to let you know how much your seminar helped us. We had been between 130 and 160 for over a year. We came home and began to apply some of the principles we learned at the seminar. I'm happy to report that we have broken the 200 barrier!”

I love this letter from a pastor in Oregon: “The church I serve was running 200 to 225 for three years until I attended the seminar. The seminar was so liberating to me—it totally changed my ministry philosophy. In the last two years we have grown to over 400!”

Looking at Small Churches

There are two principal ways of looking at small churches. One is from the point of view of maintenance, and the other is from the point of view of growth.

Both of these approaches are legitimate. Books on maintenance are valuable, and I will quote from some of them in my chapters. But my focus in this book is not on maintenance; it is on growth. I like what Rick Warren says about church growth: “Since the church is a living organism, it is natural for it to grow if it is healthy. The church is a body, not a business. It is an organism, not an organization. It is alive. If a church is not growing, it is dying.”¹ Well, maybe not exactly dying, maybe just surviving. There are churches in my rural hometown in upstate New York that have not grown for 100 years, but they are not dead yet. However, I can't say they are healthy.

In any case, many churches that are living organisms and should be growing have been plateaued at under 200 members for too long a time. In those cases, the major function of this book will be to help leaders identify and remove obstacles to growth. When it comes right down to it, that is all we can do. We don't grow the church, God does. Paul said, “I have planted, Apollos watered, but God gave the increase” (1 Cor. 3:6 KJV). Growth can happen as we increase our ability to diagnose the health of our churches and work on curin...