📈 Church Growth — Unit 1: Introduction

Course Orientation

Welcome to Church Growth — a twelve-unit study, first taught a generation ago and now refreshed for our own day. Each unit preserves the original teaching and then adds a section, "Where We Are Now," that folds in what the last thirty years have taught the church about its own growth and decline. Each unit ends with a thirty-question exam and requires 90% to pass. A failed multiple-choice section locks for two minutes; for master's-level students, a failed short-answer section locks for fifteen minutes. The course awards a certificate of completion upon finishing all twelve units.

Reflect before you begin: find a Scripture on why church growth ought to take place, and on a sheet of paper draw a picture of a church.

I. The 1950s and the Franchise Model

During the 1950s Southern Baptists seemed to have the pulse of North America. In 1950 the denomination recorded a 4.7% increase for the year. That seemed to be our time. We were a rural, Southern, Bible-belt people; we had a high birth rate; and we seemed to be doing everything right. We used decisional preaching, personal evangelism, Sunday School, and revivals to record tremendous growth.

The model we used was the industrial, or franchise, model. You know what a franchise is. You go to a McDonald's, perhaps the world's largest franchise, and in any city you get pretty much the same thing; the local branches are not allowed to experiment very much. Every hamburger is standard the world over. Likewise, a Southern Baptist church in one place looked pretty much like one anywhere else. The strength of that model was consistency. Its weakness was that a uniform model cannot adapt when the world changes — and the world has not stood still.

II. Plateau and Decline

By definition, a growing church shows more than a 10% increase in membership over a five-year period; a declining church shows more than a 10% decrease over five years; and a plateaued church shows neither. By the 1990 figures, 35% of all churches were plateaued or declining. Among Southern Baptists, 52% were plateaued, 18% declining, and 30% growing. Like most of its churches, the denomination had plateaued; without its ethnic growth it would have been in decline like the other major denominations of North America. A plateaued denomination is simply a reflection of plateaued churches. The question on the table was, and still is: do we try harder, or try doing things differently?

III. Where We Are Now (2026): The Great Dechurching

A quarter-century into the twenty-first century, the verdict is in. The plateau deepened into something with a name: the Great Dechurching. About forty million American adults — roughly one in six — once attended church and no longer do, and most of that leaving came in the last twenty-five years, accelerating in the very years this course was first taught. That is more people than were gathered in by the First and Second Great Awakenings and all the Billy Graham crusades combined. For the first time in the eighty years it has been measured, more American adults stay home on Sunday than go.

But hear the good news. Most of the forty million did not leave in a crisis of faith. They left for ordinary reasons — they moved, the drive got long, a season of life changed — and no one came after them. About half of those who left say they would consider coming back. And the newest figures show the first uptick in in-person attendance in decades. The back door, which we will visit at the end of this course, turns out to swing both ways.

IV. A Global Picture, and a Posture

We must also lift our eyes from North America. While the church in the West has thinned, the church in the world has multiplied. Two of every three Christians now live in the Global South — in Africa, Latin America, and Asia — and the engine of that growth is not Baptist and not Western, but Pentecostal and charismatic. From fewer than a million believers in 1900, that renewal movement is now counted in the hundreds of millions and may pass a billion before 2050. The center of gravity of the faith has moved south, and across our old denominational lines. This course was first taught in a Southern Baptist seminary; its 1990 figures are kept as the historical snapshot they now are. But it now serves the whole church, and its lessons are meant to reach across denominations.

V. Pentecost and the Pattern of Awakening

We dare not speak of that Spirit-borne movement as one more method. Behind it stands not a technique but a Person. The growth of the church has always traced back to Pentecost. Three signs marked that day: a sound like a rushing wind, tongues as of fire resting on each of them, and speech in other tongues. But mark what kind of speech — it was a miracle of hearing. People from every nation heard the wonders of God in their own language, with no interpreter. It was Babel run backward: at the tower God scattered a proud people by confusing their speech; at Pentecost He gathered a people of every language and made them understand.

The Great Awakenings have often been partial recreations of Pentecost, and that same Spirit can fall on any church that will seek Him. The outward signs have varied — some wept, some fell, some spoke in tongues and many did not — but the constant was never a phenomenon; it was a Presence. The revival historian J. Edwin Orr traced these movements and found they all ran one road: first concerted, united prayer; then an outpouring of the Holy Spirit; and then — only then — people repented and believed.

VI. Korea, 1907

Around the turn of the twentieth century there were only a few hundred believers in all of Korea. When word reached the missionaries of what God was doing in Wales, they wished for revival and then talked themselves out of it: it would be too hard. But hearing that revival had broken out in India, they did the one thing the pattern requires — they redoubled their prayers, and turned the bitterest weeks of winter into a Bible school.

One evening a man leading some fifteen hundred suggested a short time of prayer first, and asked them not to take too long. One man prayed, and six rose to their feet. A second prayed, and a dozen stood. At last the leader gave up trying to manage it: "Apparently you want to pray. Well — go ahead and pray." And heaven opened. All fifteen hundred rose at once and prayed aloud together, each so lost in God he never noticed the man beside him. An Englishman present wrote to the London Times of a sound like a rushing wind and a power that the frightened missionaries could not control. When it had passed, nearly eighty thousand Koreans had come to Christ in that single year — and Korea has been a land of revival ever since. That little praying band in the Korean winter is one taproot of the very growth we now watch rising out of the Global South.

VII. The Third Answer

So the old question — try harder, or try differently? — is the right one, but it has never been the whole question. Orr would press a third answer no spreadsheet can give: fall to your knees and ask the Lord of the harvest to pour out His Spirit again. The methods will keep changing, as this whole course will show. The Spirit does not change — and neither does the way He has always come: prayer, then the outpouring, then repentance and faith.

Submit Exam & Check Pass Reset Unit