How does a Church Grow?

Dr. Howard Culbertson posted the following in his website:

Here are 14 lessons which John Slack learned in his church growth research with congregations of the Southern Baptist Convention. This is an example of what can be learned from demographics, spreadsheets, surveys, interviews, and historical studies by analyzing the information secured from various sources.

1. New units grow faster than established churches.
2. Aging within a church almost inevitably ushers in a “come-oriented” ministry in contrast to a “go-centered” ministry.
3. Older churches do not start as many new churches as do younger churches.
4. Churches and church planting drift upward on the economic scale.
5. The longer a church is in a community, the less like that community the church becomes.
6. Existing, established churches have normal plateau and ministry limits.
7. Only as a church effectively expands its discipleship base will it sustain infinitely reproducible church growth and church planting.
8. More baptisms and greater membership growth occurs in zones or areas that are farther from the existing church and its come-oriented activities.
9. The difference between so-called “responsive” and “non-responsive” peoples is not in the average number of baptisms per church but in the number of new units — churches — that are started.
10. Churches in resistant cultures tend to begin as or soon become cosmopolitan rather than community. In resistant cultures, community churches have far greater influence on the culture than do cosmopolitan churches.
11. As beginning models of church planting, training, and materials are repeated and age, they become hallowed — and almost “unchangeable” — patterns even when and if they are no longer relevant.
12. If a lost person or people group is illiterate and poor, the chance of their being evangelized decreases proportionately to the heights of their illiteracy and the depths of their poverty.
13. Training in most theological programs has become more academic than functional.
14. Bible teaching, including the Sunday School and other forms of discipleship, to be effective, must be done in the context of evangelism.

Slack, James B. (1998). “Strategies for Church Planting.” Missiology. Edited by John Mark Terry, Ebbie Smith and Justin Anderson. Nashville, TN.: Broadman and Holman Publishers.

I hope he doesn’t mind me reposting it here. I discovered the list two years ago when I did a research and still find it intriguing. Now if you are a student of missiology – try reading the list with contextualisation or inculturation in mind and you will discover something interesting.