Friday, February 1, 2008

barriers to growth

Some church leaders talk about invisible "barriers" when in comes to church growth. There is the barrier of 500 or 800 or 1000 people in worship attendance. The idea is that since so many churches get stuck at those levels and cannot move on, there must be some sort of barrier or ceiling that stops us.

I really don't buy into this theory. This is what I believe: Churches that are doing the right things will grow if there are people around to reach. Churches stop growing when there is a visible physical barrier that occurs.

Physical barriers might include: not enough parking, only one entrance to your property, not enough space for children in Sunday school, and not enough seats in worship. If you have been around Woods Chapel UMC for a while, you will notice that every time we have faced one of these barriers, we made a change to overcome it. Churches that are unwilling to make changes to overcome physical barriers get stuck.

Today, Woods Chapel is facing two barriers. The first is childrens Sunday school space at 10:10. We might as well send a flyer out to all the homes in the area that says, "We invite you to WCC. Great place, warm hearts, wonderful mission. Please come join us. Oh yes, but if you have children, please do not try to put them in Sunday School at 10:10."

We are looking at a bandaid repair of this problem as we work on finishing the second floor above the new foyer.

The second problem is worship space. Now, you might say, "well there is still room at 905 and 1115. We could pipe the service into the chapel for overflow." All of this is true, but remember, even if we fill the other two services, that only makes room for another 200 folks, and the chapel only seats 50-60. You may also want to keep in mind that it is hard to get the folks that love 10:10 to move to 11:15 or 9:05. How about you change to the 8:00 service? There is lots of room there.......: ). Ideas like these are only temporary solutions that simply prolong the inevitable need to face this problem.

We can apply bandaids to the problem, and we need some bandaids on the problem, but the long term truth is that we need a vision that will put more people in worship, or we will begin to die. As soon as we just sit back on our laurels, we become consumers. We become an inward focused body instead of an outward focused one. Inward focused churches are dying, even if they have a great location and nice stained glass windows.

So I hope that this helps you understand the challenge of vision for our church. We need to build a new sanctuary or go start a satellite or plant a church. When we stop making room for others, we truly become stuck and we will have forgotten our mission of connecting people to Jesus Christ.

It's a beautiful day in God's world, be sure to see the good.

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

Even if we decided to build a new sanctuary today, we could not get it built fast enough to alleviate the 10:10 crunch for at least a year plus. That is assuming funding is not an issue.

In my opinion, the kids are the driving force for the 10:10 service. It is just more convenient to get your child up and fed and ready for the later services than the 9:05. You are going to have a very hard time moving people away from that time period.

We have one service that is under attended, the Sunday night service. Clay and Kris have got this service to where it is 1st rate and people will be blessed if they attend. We should try to attract people to this service. People won’t change their service allegiance without a reason.

I would venture a guess that the best way to get people to that service is through the kids. If we kick off a large kids activity on Sunday nights, which would draw the parents right into the Sunday night service and your 10:10 crowding problem goes away for a while.

GB

Anonymous said...

Even if we decided to build a new sanctuary today, we could not get it built fast enough to alleviate the 10:10 crunch for at least a year plus. That is assuming funding is not an issue.

In my opinion, the kids are the driving force for the 10:10 service. It is just more convenient to get your child up and fed and ready for the later services than the 9:05. You are going to have a very hard time moving people away from that time period.

We have one service that is under attended, the Sunday night service. Clay and Kris have got this service to where it is 1st rate and people will be blessed if they attend. We should try to attract people to this service. People won’t change their service allegiance without a reason.

I would venture a guess that the best way to get people to that service is through the kids. If we kick off a large kids activity on Sunday nights, which would draw the parents right into the Sunday night service and your 10:10 crowding problem goes away for a while.

GB

Anonymous said...

Good comments, and certainly gives a lot to think about...but frankly, we just need more sanctuary space; double what we have. Yes, there are worship times that are under attended, and many of us need to plan better so we can get our children in 905 Sunday School. That said,most of the church is full most of the time, with no growth space.
This is a great blessing to have, you know. Let's get the ball rolling and kick off another building campaign.
Let's see if the congregation will support it.

terry said...

Maybe we need "children's Church" in the gym, where we have a VBS type set up. One station is the storyteller, one the "craft person", etc... maybe we do this once in the morning or even during the evening session, to even out services or attract children and their parents to another service.

Anonymous said...

I agree with last post -- bite the bullet and get started raising funds for a new sanctuary. Building Committee did address this & has a long-range plan for a new 1500-2000 seat sanctuary to be built to the east & south of our new narthex. Guess we're ready for it now!

FT

Anonymous said...

Those of us that have a weekly or monthly commitment to PTW need to double the amount per period and cut the remaining time in half for PTW. In the meantime, draw the next sanctuary and a plan to use the existing sanctuary space for something else. Then get a campaign going to fund the new project. Temporarily, some of us are going to need to change schedule; and for me, it is change teaching schedule as well. Is it possible to make 11:15 contemporary as well? sb