Pastors, wardens, deacons, parish councillors, elders and congregation members expend so much energy making sure that we structure our ministries in the most effective and efficient ways possible.
We spend so much time in prayer asking God to grow our churches and grieve when nothing seems to work.
It is absolutely right that we consider how best to use the resources God has given us. After all He gives his church all it needs, and so we must use them wisely.
But there are some very interesting findings about the structures we use and how effective they are in seeing the number of people in church grow. Here are three of the surprising findings that come out of growth patterns for the Diocese of Sydney over the period from 2001 to 2006.
1. It is church centres with memberships the range of 200-300 that experienced the greatest growth. That is; when you count all the members (adults, youth and kids) who attend a particular church site it is the churches of 200-300 that grew the most. This is not what I expected. Most Anglican churches attract about the same percentage of new people each year, but the churches in this size range held onto members better than both smaller and larger churches. It is a blessing that this is also the average size of Anglican churches in Sydney.
2. Staff deployment doesn’t seem to have much effect on growth. Churches utilising part time staff and those who didn’t employ part time staff grew at about the same rate. Churches where the staff specialized in ministry portfolios grew at the same rate as those whose staff did not specialize. This should save us much angst as we model the structure of paid ministry staff.
3. Churches that plant churches have a significantly greater growth rate than those that don’t, even without taking into account those who left to begin the church plant!
What does this mean?
Are there are some preliminary conclusions that we may draw about how we should minister in this Diocese so that everyone may hear the call of Jesus and be enfolded into the congregations of God’s people?
• the size that most of our churches are at, may be a good size to be.
• we need not feel a failure if our ministries do not grow bigger than 300.
• perhaps rather than thinking ‘big is beautiful’ we consider ‘back-filling’ in our parishes. By ‘back- filling’ I mean looking for other affinity groups in our own setting and beginning new ministries with and to them. The Kingdom may be far better served in a generation’s time having ten centres of 300 than one of 3000. Of course this will mean not being precious about other ministries commencing very near to us.
Feature Photo: Explore the Bruce
