“Church is not working.” I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve heard or read the statement. The statistics would seem to confirm that things aren’t working. In 1959 about 41% of Australia’s population was in church on a Sunday. In 2016 it was 7%.
However, not everyone is lamenting the ineffectiveness of the church. Pentecostal movements are continuing to grow and multiply new churches. While these attract some of the people who decry the failures or irrelevance of their prior church, Pentecostal churches are also reaching unchurched people. Likewise mainstream denominations are planting new churches and a good proportion of these grow to viability by a combination of transfers and new believers.
Many of these newer churches are more-or-less contemporary versions of the established model – a weekend public worship service with music, prayer, preaching and perhaps eucharist – combined with weekday small groups and other activities designed to engage and serve both believers and those yet to believe.
There’s also increasing interest in small forms of church: micro churches, missional communities and house churches. These have shown almost viral growth characteristics in non-western settings. The results in western contexts are more patchy. Many of the proponents of small-form churches are those disillusioned with big-box formats.
When it comes to revitalising existing churches, it makes sense to look at what seems to be working and try to emulate it. When we say ‘emulate’, we tend to mean ‘copy’. We’ve all heard the war stories of well-meaning ministers who’ve tried to re-engineer traditional worship services into something more contemporary.
There’s also been a growing trend toward overlaying small-form church structures on larger churches: less about bible study groups and fellowship, more about missional communities. It’s not that contemporary worship or small church formats are necessarily ineffective – it’s more a case of a misnomer that form and structure will drive disciple-making.
In the late 20th century, the Total Quality Management (TQM) movement was in full swing, and a lot of consultants made a lot of money promising to re-organise Australian manufacturing companies to achieve the quality and efficiency of Japanese companies like Toyota. They advocated techniques and structures used by the Japanese: Kanban boards proliferated and production superintendents became team leaders.
While some companies made the shift and flourished, many simply had a new vocabulary for the same old process and practice.
Peter Drucker is credited with the statement, ‘Culture eats strategy for breakfast.’ The companies that benefitted from TQM already had a deeply-held commitment to excellence. The Japanese techniques and structure provided mechanisms to further enact that commitment. For the other companies, TQM was just another acronym on list of stuff they had tried but hadn’t worked for them. Churches with a deep commitment to making disciples can make good and thoughtful use of techniques like contemporary worship styles or structures like missional communities. But without a discipleship culture, efforts to implement new technique or structure will do little beyond consuming time and energy – and maybe keeping a consultant in a job.