Beyond the Plateau

First, let me state for the record that not every pastor will lead a mega church. Not every one will plant the next evangelical giant oak. Not every pastor will have a TV broadcast and multiple campuses. And you know what? That’s okay. Most of the churches in the New Testament were referred to as house churches, not the fastest growing church in Asia Minor. So, let’s understand that most pastor’s at one time or another will find themselves serving a small to medium church. And again, that’s okay. But for those who find themselves in a small to medium church with no growth, there is hope and there is help. 

The situation doesn’t develop the same way in every church, but the following is a pretty familiar scenario. After you’ve been in this place for a while, first one family, and then another leaves to find another church. You have some folks joining you, but they don’t seem to be outnumbering the ones who are dropping out. And so there you sit, like the majority of pastors across America. You are the pastor of a church that is either declining or on a plateau. Perhaps, you have watched the church stop growing or decline, or perhaps you inherited the situation. The issue is not so much, how did you get there? The real question is how does your church get off of the plateau, and how will you know it when it happens? 

One thing you need to know is that you are not alone. People have been researching and writing about this over-all decline in church attendance and what to do about it for at least fifty years. The Church Growth Movement, as it was called when it arose in the mid 1960’s, did a wonderful job of calling attention to the phenomenon and gave ideas on how to address it. Institutes and seminaries, such as Fuller Theological Seminary, and men like Donald McGavran, Peter Wagner, Lyle Schaller, Elmer Towns, and others did much to draw attention to the problem of non-growth. Later, the pastors of the successful large churches began to write books about how any church could grow just like theirs. We heard from godly pastors, like Rick Warren, Bill Hybels, John Maxwell and others. All of these men had been very successful pastors in their setting. Other mega church pastors begin to put their model into print, and before long, there was a model for everyone to choose from. We were convinced that if we could just fit our church into one of those models, our church would become just like it. Some of those churches were and still are successful in cloning themselves. To a scoffing outsider, it would appear that the church is like some kind of Jack-in-the-Box or McDonald’s spiritual fast-food franchise, where everything looks the same, tastes the same, and is predictable, no matter where it is located. Pastors located in places like Pandale, Dimebox, and Cut-n-Shoot, Texas (don’t look them up, but trust me, they’re there) discovered that the Willow Creek model didn’t work for them. 

In more recent days, the researchers and statisticians have written many of the books. Men, such as Thom Rainer, Ed Stetser, and others, have contributed greatly to our understanding of non-growing churches. Their research and statistics told them what other churches had done that had worked, which they, in turn, passed on to the pastor on the field. And with the exception of a select few, rather than suggesting some principles that can be adopted, adapted, and applied in any situation, they left the pastor to conclude that he simply has to do what others have done in order to be successful. The result is that the pastor of the small to medium church is still left to wonder, for the most part, how he can identify with the successful models. 

Generally speaking, the definition of a church on the plateau in the early days of the church growth movement was a less than ten percent growth in attendance over a ten-year period. Different authors have suggested different benchmarks, but that is a good average of the measurement that is used. Notice the emphasis was on attendance. It still seems to get the most attention. There are several ways to evaluate attendance. Some use Sunday School attendance, others use worship attendance, while still others add up the total participating in all ministries during any given week. 

Other numbers used to evaluate are baptisms, budgets, additions to the church, involvement in missions, or ministries. But in almost every case, the emphasis is a quantitative one. The detractors of the church growth movement readily call this fact to our attention. And with all due respect to those who quantify church growth in terms of numbers, perhaps the detractors do have a point. It just may be that, in an attempt to identify and define the growth of churches, that these well-intentioned quantitative measurements may be putting more pressure than is healthy on the typical pastor. I’m just not sure that growth in attendance is the only, or even the primary way to evaluate growth. After all, there are examples in scripture of the Lord even paring down the numbers, instead of increasing them. Gideon started with 32,000. God whittled that number down to 10,00. And finally, Gideon and was left with 300, whom he then had to divide into three smaller groups. The Lord only had 12 disciples, and one of them dropped out. Regardless of what denominational leaders and other pastors may say, numbers are not the only, and not even the most important element of church life. Attendance is not the only criteria to use in evaluating the growth of a church. 

. . . . . May God bless you as you serve Him. And remember, there are no insignificant people or pastors; there are no insignificant places or churches; and there are no insignificant assignments or ministries.