Growing congregations are alike in at least two ways. They are good at congregational care--retaining people- -and they have given up what Stetzer and Putman describe as their personal “preferences” in order to attract visitors and enlist new members. Both are essential. Growing churches need to retain their members and friends even as they implement strategies to attract unchurched people as visitors and potential members.

The challenge for most churches is to make the changes needed for growth without losing the core congregational constituency and its financial support. While many pastors of growing churches lament the loss of members, they know this is inevitable and perhaps necessary. How to add more new members than they lose is a very real challenge in our mobile society as some churches need to add 10 to 20 percent a year just to stay even.

Pastor Dwight Gunter has led the Nashville Community Church of the Nazarene through a significant time of transition and growth without losing the core constituency of his church. His study of transitions without losing people is documented in his doctoral thesis at Nazarene Theological Seminary. He has effectively implemented a grow-withoutlosing strategy at Nashville Community. In recent years, the church has included a sub-culture of the Nashville population that would have otherwise been a threat to the congregation.

The growing churches I’ve visited are convinced that they are not the target audience. This may be the most significant distinction between growing and no-growth churches. Growing churches are willing to give up their “preferences,” or the way they like things done, in order to remove the barriers--often unrecognized--that keep unchurched people from attending and joining.

The worship wars are over in growing churches. Most of them have developed a blended, contemporary style of worship that attracts and retains people. Some churches provide alternative worship experiences as a way of reaching a niche group or retaining those who prefer something other than the primary worship service. In my visits to growing churches, I’ve deliberately sought out some of their senior members to ask how they’ve adjusted to new worship styles and innovative programs. For the most part, they are candid enough to admit that adjustment is necessary but that it’s worth giving up “preferences” in order to reach new people.

On the other hand, most churches act as if the members are the target audience whose preferences are to be satisfied. While they may say they want to grow the church, and consider themselves friendly a place for visitors, they are for the most part unaware of the “preferences” which neither help retain their own families nor are appealing to others.

Growth occurs when congregations are convinced that their target audience is the unchurched public on the outside. They know that their own vitality is dependant upon turning the church inside out, giving up their “preferences” and making the accommodations necessary to reach and retain new people.

The target audience is usually more specific than just the unchurched people in the neighborhood. For Pastor Jerry Moen at the Church on the Hill, the target audience is men between the ages of 25 and 40. He is proving that if you can attract men the women and children will follow. He knows that most men in this small town in Western Oregon are outdoorsmen. They love to hunt and fish. So, he sponsors an annual outdoor sports event that attracts more the 5,000 people each year. He knows how they dress, the music they like, and what they’ll respond to in church.

Some growing churches have identified several target audiences. The Grove City, Ohio, Nazarene church provides a Saturday night worship experience for its extensive ministry to bikers. For Spokane Valley (WA) Pastor Ian Robertson, seniors are a very important constituency to be served, not just a declining group to be placated. The Sunday evening service features traditional hymn-singing and testimonies. At Trevecca Community Church a new target audience is the inmates in jails and half-way houses. They provide transportation from half-way houses and conduct a worship service at a jail on Sunday evening.

Immigrants, the fastest growing segment of the general population, have become the target audience for many churches. The United States and Canada will soon look like Hawaii, New Mexico, California and Texas. These are states with no majority group, or as described by the Census Bureau, “majority minority” states. Churches are adapting to these changes in some very innovative ways. In the San Francisco Bay area, I met with a group of pastors who are working with the model of “one church with many congregations.” This is more than providing a place for different autonomous congregations to meet in one church building. These churches reflect the multicultural society forming in California where people who may be identified by their ethnic differences are at the same time constantly interacting with one another. These pastors provide ethnic-specific worship and social activities, recruit and train leaders from within these groups, while at the same time, involving them in a faith community that looks like the multicultural world around them.

Some of the fastest growing churches are among the immigrant minorities, particularly Hispanics, Haitians, Koreans and Carribbeans. While they are intentionally hospitable and inclusive, their appeal or target is their ethnic community. In African- American churches African-Americans are free to worship in their own style without having to accommodate to the majority culture. Minorities in any society are looking for identity and connection to their culture. The best place to find that is often in church.

The Brooklyn Beulah Church is the fastest growing and now largest Black Nazarene congregation. The congregation, which appeals primarily to Caribbeans, mostly from Barbados, has doubled in size to over 1,000 in attendance during the past eight years under the leadership of Pastor Wenton Fyne, a Jamaican immigrant.

While the church now includes the American-born children and grandchildren of immigrant forbearers, it has retained its identity as a haven for the Caribbean Diaspora in New York City.

African-American Pastor Dorzell King started one of the fastest growing new churches in the greater Kansas City area. The Risen Lamb International Church of the Nazarene is unusual for its balance of Black, white and Hispanic members and friends. Since Pastor King’s marriage is inter-racial, the congregation has become a place of refuge for many mixed marriage couples who are accepted without questions or uncomfortable stares. Risen Lamb’s target audience is people who want a multicultural community, but who don’t want to go to church where everyone looks and sounds alike.

The Miami Bethany Church of the Nazarene with over 1,000 men, women, youth, and children in discipleship cell groups is one of the fastest growing Spanish-speaking congregations in the United States. In 1995, with less than fifty members, Pastors Obed and Noemi Jauregui--immigrants from Cuba--began their ministry at Bethany, located three miles from the Miami International Airport in one of Miami’s poorest neighborhoods. They have intentionally targeted their immigrant neighbors from the Caribbean and Central America with a wide range of compassionate ministries, including emergency food and clothing.

After a few Hispanics began attending the GracePointe Church in Indianapolis, they decided to target the growing Spanish-speaking immigrant community in their neighborhood. Under the long-term leadership of Pastor Keith Robinson, GracePointe has recently reinvented itself. This older, traditional congregation has a new name and a new location. They’ve become intentionally multicultural and during the process have doubled their attendance. Spanish lyrics now appear on the screens along with English words as alternates between English and Spanish singing. Wireless headsets with Spanish translation are offered to those who don’t speak English.

Understanding the culture of a target audience is the key missional challenge in the United States and other Western societies with a long history of Christian influence. We know that the work of missions in other world areas is to learn how to cross barriers of race, language, and belief in order to communicate the Good News of the Gospel. We support and admire missionaries who give up their own culture in order to lead others to faith and Christian discipleship. In secularized, multicultural America, these same missionary strategies are needed if churches are to remain vibrant and growing.

In multicultural America, the target audience may be a language or racial group, or perhaps even an economically disadvantaged people, as it was in 1895 for the first Nazarene congregation in Los Angeles. Their mission statement, services, and activities were designed to welcome and help the poor as they were being led to faith and membership in the church.

A century later, growing churches like the Salem Fields Community Church in Fredericksburg, Virginia, are expanding by adding new worship “venues.” Salem Fields has grown from 50 to over 1,500 in attendance under the husband and wife copastor team of Buddy and Gaye Marston. They now have a full-time staff member in charge of venue development responsible for exploring and implementing opportunities for new worship experiences for affinity groups both on and off their main campus. They refer to their Hispanic ministry as an on-campus venue. Their new worship venues are not created to ease overcrowding but rather as a means to reach out to people groups that are unlikely to attend their primary Sunday morning worship services.

Some growing churches are reaching unchurched sub-cultures that are not necessarily defined by racial or language differences. Pastor Ron Salsbury has added a Country-Western weekend worship experience at the Pismo Beach, California, Community Church. He’s found an evangelism opportunity by tapping into a large population of country-western enthusiasts who are attracted to a worship experience with the kind of music they like. Pastor Gene Tanner provides Thursday night worship for students at Valparaiso University. He’s discovered that their interest in ancient symbols, liturgies, and a confessional fellowship make for an appealing weekday worship experience. Pastor Craig Coulter knows that many of the new people in his rapidly growing Oro Valley, Arizona, congregation come from traditions accustomed to receiving communion every Sunday. Rather than starting another service, he provides a communion table on one side of the sanctuary during the Sunday worship prayer time where communion is served, while others are kneeling at the altar at the front.

The Stillmeadow Church in York, Pennsylvania, which has more than doubled in attendance during the past 15 years with Pastor Bud Reedy, has a Saturday night service for people who are unlikely or unable to attend church on Sunday. The Saturday night services I’ve attended there, and other places, have a very different look and feel than Sunday worship. An intermission with refreshments was part of the Saturday night service at Stillmeadow--something they wouldn’t do in their Sunday morning services. Who knows how many people will never come to church if the only time worship is offered is on Sunday morning?

Growing churches are missional. They’ve given up their preferences, discarded comfortable but ineffective routines, and have agreed that the church exists for its non-members. They embrace, as well as challenge, the secular cultures of unchurched people in order to effectively advance God’s mission in the world.

by Tom Nees
director
USA/Canada Mission/Evangelism Department

1 Stetzer, Ed and David Putman. Breaking the Missional Code: Your Church Can Become a Missionary in Your Community. (Broadman and Holman Publishers: Nashville, 2006)