How to Hit the Ground Running

A Quick Start Guide for Congregations with New Leadership

Neal O. Michell

• Publisher: Church Publishing
• Year: 2005
• Print ISBN: 9780898694758
• eBook ISBN: 9780898697766
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Ministry

A practical and comprehensive guide and workbook for new church leadership to set up a sustainable foundation, for pastors, vestry, and in administrative roles.

The quick-start program described in this book is designed for the new rector or pastor who wants to "hit the ground running." It is also designed for principal lay leaders who will be instrumental in the transition to new leadership. The program takes the new pastor, vestry, or other leadership bodies from one month prior to the new leader's arrival through the first 18 months afterward. Organized in a user-friendly workbook format, this guide gives step-by-step suggestions on how the sometimes stalled and directionless period of transition in a faith community can be made dynamic and purposeful - a time of true congregational development.

Section 1

Understanding the Congregation

Chapter 1

Understanding Congregational Size Dynamics

For which of you, intending to build a tower,
does not first sit down and estimate the cost,
to see whether he has enough to complete it?

—Luke 14:28

Developing a congregation is simply the task of developing people; making disciples. However, there are really two levels of disciple-making: one is the micro level, the one-on-one process of helping a person grow in faith; the other is the macro level, that is, the process of mobilizing people. Most churches that get stuck often do so at the macro level. Clergy are trained in seminary to think theologically and to provide pastoral care to individuals; they are not trained, however, to mobilize people. They are trained to write theological papers and to conduct liturgy; they are not trained to develop ministries. This chapter provides a way of looking at the local congregation through the lens of congregational size dynamics to help leaders understand their church as a corporate entity. Groups of people when gathered together in various numbers relate to their leader and to each other in fairly predictable ways. Certain practices that make a group effective at one size will make it ineffective at a different size.

Although there are many factors that will affect a church’s growth, one of the most common is the ability or lack of ability of the pastoral leader to adapt her style of leadership to the size of congregation that she is serving. Often, churches will find their growth limited because of invisible but very real size dynamics that keep the church at that certain size. The church has gotten used to being a certain size and will perpetuate the practices that make them effective at that size; they have grown comfortable with their ways of relating to one another as a congregation. Although they may articulate a desire to grow, they often want to grow only while maintaining the current way of relating to the pastoral leader and to one another. Some churches will grow because they are able to adapt their system to mobilize the laity effectively. Other churches will plateau or decline in size to fit the comfort level of the system and leader that is in place.

This way of viewing the church as a system is theologically blind. These unseen limiters affect both “liberal” and “conservative” churches as well as “broad” churches. No church is immune. You may have the best theology in the world—from your perspective—but your church will be limited in its ability to grow because of its inability to change the way the leadership and congregation relate to each another.

Many times when church leaders first learn about congregational size dynamics, they get awfully excited. For example, they will write that their mission is to become a program-sized congregation. Attaining a larger church size does not constitute a valid mission. Lay people are not really motivated by growing their church larger. Mission is about reaching people with the good news of Jesus Christ; it is not about growing to a particular size. There is nothing intrinsically holy or salvific by being one size and not another. The real need is for churches to be good stewards of the gifts and resources that God has given them in fulfilling the Great Commission and the Great Commandments that Jesus gave his Church. Understanding congregational size dynamics is a tool for facilitating more effective ministry.

A Comment about Attendance versus Membership

Often when people talk about the size of their church they will say, “We have more than 400 members” or “250 families.” That is a particularly unhelpful statement. In my experience, most of our church membership rolls are terribly out of date. I know of one church that had more than 150 members on their rolls for whom they had no current address.

The number of baptized members listed in a typical mainline denominational church bears no real relationship to the everyday dynamics of that congregation. Most churches will have many more members listed than those who are actively involved in the life of the congregation. A church that has 650 members with 150 average Sunday attendance is vastly different from a congregation with 500 members and 350 average Sunday attendance. The larger membership church with the smaller attendance will generally have fewer financial resources, fewer leaders, and fewer programs—and effectively fewer people to minister to—than the church with fewer members but more people actually attending. Scratch below the surface of the first church and you’ll likely find many members who have moved away, died, or are no longer meaningfully connected to the church.

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Quick Insight: Is your Sunday attendance-to-membership ratio 25 percent or less (i.e., Average Sunday Attendance divided by Baptized Membership; for example, 400 Baptized Members divided into 100 Average Sunday Attendance equals 25 percent)? If so, your church is in the “red zone,” indicating that you’ve got your work cut out for you.

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We therefore concern ourselves with active participants rather than active or inactive members. Leaders may feel a need to be concerned about inactive members as a pastoral concern; however, the leaders who want to develop their congregation will be wise if they focus first on discipling and mobilizing the people who are actively attending before addressing their concerns about inactive people.

Realizing that the church has a large number of “phantom” members, the new pastor may be tempted to “clean the rolls” in order to begin her ministry with a clean slate. Don’t do that.

There are several reasons not to clean the church’s membership rolls in the first several years of a new pastor’s tenure. First, a large reduction in membership at the beginning of a pastorate sends a wrong message to the congregation that the pastor is more concerned about the number of members than about the members as individuals. Also, an initial first-year reduction in membership silently communicates to the congregation that the church is in decline. A further problem is that the new pastor might drop people off the rolls that need to be visited, hence sending the message that she does not really care for those who may have been hurt in the past. It is better to ignore the membership numbers altogether than to fix it early in the pastor’s tenure.

Sizing Up the Congregation

Why did our approach to congregational development change? Why did we begin to consider congregational size dynamics as a way of analyzing our churches? First, in the early 1980s, we began to notice that our denomination had been in serious membership decline for more than 15 years since its high membership mark in 1965. Second, more than two thirds of our churches at that time were either plateauing or declining. Third, clergy trained in the fast-growth 1950s were serving in the no-growth 1980s. They were not prepared for pastoring in this changed context. Fourth, we drastically reduced the number of new churches we were planting as a denomination and settled into a consolidation mode. Finally, we found that we were growing older as a denomination and not drawing younger families and individuals. So, a few forward-thinking people began to ask what was really going on inside our churches. Arlin Rothauge, former Congregational Development Officer for the Episcopal Church, and then Kevin Martin, then Canon for Congregational Development in the Diocese of Texas, helped Episcopal churches—as well as many other denominational churches—understand that this decline could actually be stemmed and that we could help lead our churches to greater health and growth through an understanding of congregational dynamics.

In 1982, Arlin Rothauge published a little booklet, Sizing Up the Congregation, which opened up a whole new way of understanding congregations from the perspective of size dynamics.¹ This booklet categorized churches according to numbers of active members and showed the dynamics of the relationships between the leader and the congregation. He suggested four sizes, as shown in the table below:

Name	Active members
Family	0-50
Pastoral	50-150
Program	150-350
Corporation	350+

Rothauge’s analysis helped congregational leaders understand the interplay between leaders and followers and evangelism.

In 1995, Kevin Martin did a little fine tuning of Rothauge’s analysis. First, he changed the basic subject group from active members to average Sunday attendance. Determining active members was difficult and led to analyses that simply did not fit Rothauge’s otherwise insightful paradigm. Second, he changed the numerical categories based on his observations of churches that he had worked with in the Diocese of Texas. Third, and most significantly, he observed that many churches had a difficult time moving from the pastoral to program size. In response, he posited a fifth size category: the transitional-sized church. Finally, he changed the designation of corporate-sized church to resource-sized. Designating a church as corporate, he reasoned, seemed a bit sterile and, well, corporate-sounding rather than pastoral, and the significant aspect of this larger sized church is that it has an abundance of resources. Martin’s size categories are as follows:

Name	Average Sunday attendance
Family	5-75
Pastoral	76-140
Transitional	141-225
Program	226-400
Resource	401+

So, let’s look at these size dynamics a bit more closely using Kevin Martin’s analysis.

The Family-Sized Church

The family-sized church has an average Sunday attendance of up to 75. These churches are typically located in smaller towns. They function much as a family does and are often made up of a couple of interrelated families in the leadership of the church. Not everyone in the church is a member of the extended family, but one prominent extended family is often at the center of influence.

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Closer Look: If your church resembles this size, notice whom people look at when they talk or whom people seem to discuss things with before a decision is made? You’ll probably find the matriarch or patriarch in this group.

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The ordained person in this size of church is not the head of the congregation (family). Instead, the ordained person functions as the chaplain to the congregation. The congregation expects only pastoral care from the pastor—counseling, prayers at appropriate occasions, hospital visits, weddings, funerals, and so on—but the real decisions affecting the church are made by long-standing members of the congregation. The true leader in this congregational family system is designated as the matriarch or patriarch. This person is usually a long-term member of both the congregation and the community and will typically have children and grandchildren in the congregation. The church is really a set of a few extended family units with a few other friends as well.

Although the vestry is the stated lay leadership circle, usually the vestry will defer to the matriarch/patriarch. It is not unusual to have a vestry make a decision only to have the same vestry reverse itself a month later after everyone has talked to the matriarch/patriarch of the congregation. Woe be to the pastor who serves a family-sized church who really believes that she is the leader of the congregation.

The strength of this congregation is in its stability. The weakness is its low expectations. Success for this church is in ke...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Table of Contents
• Foreword
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: How to Use This Book
• Section 1: Understanding the Congregation
• Section 2: Bringing About Change
• Section 3: Working with Leaders
• Section 4: Using Administrative Changes to Effect Healthy Change
• Section 5: Expanding Your Congregation’s Reach