Why basic, boring little churches may be the ones that grow the most Christians in the 21st century

Photo by Harry Miller on Unsplash

Have you ever been to a dead or dying church?

I’ve been to a lot of them. A couple of years ago, I took an offer to preach at a congregation in a fast-growing suburb of a Midwestern city.

When I arrived on Sunday morning, I found a big church building that seemed to be less than 30 years old. I passed through the front doors into a lobby the size of a gymnasium, but not one person was in sight.

I found the auditorium. It had four sections of pews that looked like they could seat 400 to 500 people. But as worship began, 20 people (or 30 by “preacher count”) huddled in part of one section.

I could almost hear the ghosts of the hundreds who once sang there.

…

My wife and I joined a dynamic suburban Church of Christ congregation the year we got married (2008). When we first started going to church there, it took three Sunday morning worship services to fit everybody in who wanted to be there. Membership topped out north of 900 (which is very big for a Church of Christ congregation outside the Bible Belt).

Today, that same congregation needs only one worship service on Sunday morning and half the seats in the auditorium are empty.

…

I shared this with a pastor friend who works at a nondenominational “megachurch” near us. He said that our free fall is not unique to us.

“Megachurches are bleeding members, too,” he said. “It’s just easier to hide.”

If the latest data is correct, dead and dying churches are becoming more and more common all over America.

The point of this post is not to ask: “Why?”

The point of this post is to ask: “What?”

A few weeks ago, the most experienced Christian minister I know gave me some insight.

If you follow this blog, you know that I produce a weekly podcast called ‘Minister in the Making’. Each episode is a conversation with my dad, Travis Irwin, who spent his entire adult life ministering to Church of Christ congregations. He has 50 years of stories to tell. I believe those stories hold a lot of wisdom for church leaders.

Dad’s longest ministry spanned 22 ½ years at the Steele Avenue Church of Christ in Ashland, Ohio. When Dad preached his first sermon there in August 1981, the congregation had about 150 members. When he preached his last sermon in January 2003, the congregation had more than twice as many members. In fact, the congregation grew so much in the 1980s and 1990s that Dad’s last project was to help raise money for a bigger church building and parking lot.

What happened to the Steele Avenue Church of Christ in the 1980s and 1990s is impressive, but it is more impressive when we contrast it to what happened to the larger Church of Christ fellowship during that same period.

In the 1980s and 1990s, membership in Church of Christ congregations went down by 12 percent in the United States. That means that if a Church of Christ congregation had 100 members at the start of the 1980s, it only had 88 members by the start of the 2000s.

But not the Steele Avenue Church of Christ. While most Church of Christ congregations were shrinking, it more than doubled in size.

What did that congregation do to have such a breakthrough in growth?

I’ll tell you one thing it did not do (and I was there): Change its style.

During its two decades of trend-busting growth, the Steele Avenue Church of Christ barely tweaked any of the “style elements” that many people seem to think are keys to church growth. For example, the Sunday morning worship service was the same in the 1980s and 1990s as it was in the 1960s and 1970s. Same order of worship. Same songs. Same song leaders.

The only changes the congregation made to its programs were getting new Sunday school and Vacation Bible School curricula each year. Once in awhile, the congregation tried new community service ideas or new fellowship activities. But even when those new ideas worked, the same “boring” old stuff served as the congregation’s “bread and butter.”

Same old style. And yet…hundreds of new members.

I asked Dad why he thought the congregation in Ashland grew so much.

He quickly gave all the credit and thanks to God, but then he gave an answer that seemed to focus on three things.

First, the Steele Avenue Church of Christ was all about “the basics.” Good, simple, solid Bible study and Bible teaching that stressed personal application in everyday life. In some ways, doing the “same old, same old” for 20+ years gave the congregation plenty of energy, space, and time to devote to the next two things:

Second, hard work. Dad said that the members of the congregation were the hardest working and most energetic people he ever met. Everyone pitched in and worked for the church. They worked for the church’s activities and programs, but more importantly, they worked hard at…

Third, taking care of each other. Members of the Steele Avenue Church of Christ went out of their way to take care of each other like family. Strangers who walked in door soon found themselves with 200 - 300 new best friends.

None of these things are sexy or splashy, but the proof is in the pudding. The Steele Avenue Church of Christ and its “same old, same old” doubled in size while congregations that tried the latest fads faded away.

Growing up watching my dad work with the Steele Avenue Church of Christ formed a hypothesis in me: Style (i.e. preaching, media, music, etc.) does not lead to strong, sustainable church growth. Nor does it contribute much to making members mature in their walk with Christ and with each other.

These days, conservative Christian traditions like the Church of Christ are bleeding members faster than at any other time in our country’s history.

There are two ways of trying to stop the bleeding that I doubt will work:

First, blaming the culture or the government. The growth of the ancient church of Christ in the face of violent cultural and political opposition is proof that Christianity does not need to control the culture or government to flourish and grow. Fooling around with the power of Hollywood, Madison Avenue, and Washington, D.C., keeps us from true power that is free and open to us in the living Christ.

Second, fooling around with the latest fads and styles because we think those are what will get people to come and stay at church. Christian churches all over America are disappearing in spite of funny preachers, fog machines and stage lighting, musical styles, splashy social media posts, and slick branding and logos.

The Steele Avenue Church of Christ of the 1980s and 1990s showed me that churches grow when they focus on the basics of life together in Christ: Bible study, communion, prayer, service, and simple worship.

“Religious-looking” things are important, but Jesus taught us to care about something that is even more important than religion: Each other. This does not mean elaborate fundraising drives, mission trips, and service projects that we badge and brand and splash all over church media.

It means having someone over for lunch after church, helping someone move, sending a card, taking a meal to a shut-in, or visiting someone in the hospital or nursing home. It means volunteering to be a greeter, clean the church restrooms, prepare Communion, serve at a funeral dinner, teach a children’s Bible class, or any one of the non-glamorous, thank-less, unseen jobs it takes to keep a church healthy and strong.

If we have God (we do) and we have each other (we can if we choose), then we have everything we need to grow healthy and strong churches of Christ.

Grace and peace.