📈 Church Growth — Unit 5: Change and the Generations

Part One: Church Growth and Change

Can you imagine the members of a church protesting an invitation at the close of an evangelistic sermon? They did, in 1825. And it was not only the members who objected — many of the ministers did too. A new evangelist had come onto the American scene, and he was reaching multitudes by what his critics sourly called “New Measures.” Among these intolerable innovations were such things as praying for people by name, giving an invitation after the sermon, carrying the gospel into homes by personal visitation, allowing women to pray and testify, holding services on days other than the usual hours of worship, and preaching in a plain, informal manner — all of it crowned by the scandalous new notion of holding “revival services.” The man was seen as a radical and a troublemaker. And his “wrong” methods brought thousands to Christ. Hold that picture in your mind, because it tells you the whole truth about change in one stroke: change is nearly always threatening, and its results can nonetheless be tremendous. The thing the church fought as an outrage in one generation it defends as sacred tradition in the next.

Now lift your eyes to the highest example of all. In the last week of His life, our Lord stood with His disciples and they marveled at the Temple — its great stones, its gold, its courts, its ancient ritual and unbroken calendar. To them this was the house of God; this was how God did His work; it was the only paradigm they had ever known, and they could not see past it. But Jesus was looking through different eyes. He saw a new world coming and new forms with it, and He said the unthinkable: not one stone would be left upon another (Luke 21:6; Matthew 24:2). Everything they held dear was about to be shaken. He had already told them, “Behold, your house is left to you desolate” (Luke 13:35). The form they trusted was not the faith; it was a vessel, and the vessel was about to be broken so the wine could be poured into new skins.

History moves in such convulsions. There come seasons of great, chaotic, civilization-wide change — call it a C-Change — when, over the span of a few decades, the whole world is remade, so that within fifty years it has become a different place. There was such an upheaval around the time of Columbus: the printing press, the Reformation, the discovery of a New World, and suddenly no one saw the world the same way again. There was another in the middle of the nineteenth century, with the rise of the modern industrial nation. And a third began in the 1970s, in our own lifetime — so sweeping that our grandchildren will scarcely be able to imagine life as we now live it.

In a C-Change, every institution must change radically or die. Business felt it first, because business is driven by the bottom line and cannot pretend the world has not moved. Education has begun to feel it. Governments have been toppled by it. The one sector slowest to face it has been the non-profit — and the church most of all. Why? Because we are not always clear about what the marks of our “success” even are. Plainly put, many a church should have closed its doors decades ago, yet it continues on, kept alive by the gifts of kindly people who have never once asked whether the church is actually fulfilling its mission. A budget met and a building maintained can disguise a mission long since abandoned.

The cure is a hard and clarifying question, the kind the business world learned to ask when it had to reinvent itself: if we were starting this church from nothing today, what is the first thing we would do? What is the most important thing we should be doing right now? That question strips away the accumulated procedures — the way we have always done it — and drives us back to the process, to the mission itself. Most of what fills a church calendar is procedure. Only a little of it is mission. The re-engineering question forces us to tell the difference.

But here a word of mercy and wisdom is needed, or zeal will do real damage. People can only bear so much change at once. The research is clear and the experience of every pastor confirms it: about three to five significant changes are all a person can absorb at one time. Press past that, and people do not merely resist — they go on tilt, they shut down, they dig in. The leader who returns from a conference on fire and tries to change ten things by spring will not transform his church; he will fracture it. Wisdom is not in the number of changes you can see are needed — it is in spreading them out over time, so that your people can follow you through the wilderness instead of being scattered in it.

Where We Are Now (2026)

The third great upheaval, the one that began quietly in the 1970s, has now broken over the church in full. The internet, then the smartphone in every pocket, remade how an entire generation gathers, learns, and believes — and then, in the spring of 2020, the whole convulsion was compressed into a matter of weeks. The doors of the churches were shut by order, and overnight every congregation in the land became a broadcast. There has never been a more violent re-engineering forced on the church in so short a time.

And it asked the re-engineering question of everyone at once. Stripped of the building, the program, and the familiar Sunday machinery, the church was made to ask what was actually essential — and discovered, to its own surprise, that it had never been the building at all. Some churches never recovered their old crowds. But many rediscovered the very things this unit is about: that forms are provisional, that the mission is not the machinery, and that the people of God can worship and witness wherever two or three are gathered in His name.

The old wisdom about the limit of change proved itself in those same years. The congregations that tried to change everything at once exhausted their people, and a deep weariness has marked the church ever since. The leaders who endured were the ones who knew that even a season of necessary upheaval must be paced — three to five changes at a time — and who guarded their people through it rather than driving them. And the deepest word of all remains the one Jesus spoke on the Temple mount: the forms we cling to are not the faith. In a single generation we have watched the franchise model fall and the seeker model crest and recede; we will watch the present forms age in their turn. The stones came down exactly as He said, and the gospel went out stronger than before, for the life was never in the building. To change the form is not to lose the faith — and in a day of great change, the refusal to change can be the greater unfaithfulness. What does not change is the One who builds the church, and the mission He gave it. Everything else is a wineskin.

Part Two: Church Growth Through the Generations

See the handouts on the generations.

Every congregation is, whether it knows it or not, a gathering of generations — and each generation was shaped by a different world, carries different wounds, and trusts the church to meet a different need. Learn to see them, and much that looks like mere personality conflict turns out to be the friction of generations rubbing against one another in the same pews.

Consider the cast as it stood when this course was first taught. The oldest among us belonged to the GI generation, born in the first quarter of the century — the ones who came through the Depression and the war. After them came the Silent generation, born between the wars and the mid-1940s. Then the great wave of Boomers, born in the years after the Second World War, the largest and most influential generation the nation had seen. And coming up behind them, just then reaching adulthood, was the generation variously called Busters, the thirteenth generation, or Generation X.

Each carries a distinct role and a distinct gift into the life of a church. The oldest generation tends to be trusted with the church’s material stewardship — we instinctively hand them the care of the finances, for they are careful, faithful, and proven. The Boomers came to the church wanting dominion over its values; a wise church learns to harness that fixation on meaning and worth rather than fight it. And the younger generation behind them proved, contrary to its reputation, to be practical and pragmatic: once they could see what genuinely needed doing, they simply did it.

Now here is the principle beneath all the portraits, and it is the part that does not age: target outreach is not a modern gimmick; it is how the church has always grown. We simply used to call it the neighborhood church. In the middle of the last century we tried to plant a congregation in nearly every neighborhood, and it worked, because people’s lives were small and local — they rarely traveled far from home, and a church reached the people within a few blocks of its doors. Those congregations gathered people who lived in similar houses, earned similar livings, and shared a similar background. They were targeting all along; they simply did it unintentionally. A casual observer could tell at a glance whom a given church would reach.

So the practical counsel is this. You can begin to answer the question, “Whom are we going to reach?” by honestly examining whom you have reached — look at the past five years, and look hardest at the past twelve months. That will tell you, more truthfully than any mission statement, whom your church actually reaches. This does not mean a church cannot change, or cannot deliberately go after a group it has been missing. It means only that targeting is almost certainly happening in your church already — the single question is whether it is happening on purpose.

Where We Are Now (2026)

This material needs what no other has needed: a new cast, for the actors have all moved one seat down the row. The generation once written of as the young newcomers — Generation X — is now in its middle years, often the steady hands quietly holding congregations together. The Boomers have become the church’s elders, and they have proved its most loyal members through the upheavals of recent years. And two generations the first edition could barely see have since walked onto the stage: the Millennials, now well into adulthood with children of their own, and Generation Z, the young adults of this moment — with Generation Alpha, their children, close behind.

The youngest are the ones a growing church must now learn to see clearly, and they confound the easy stereotype. They are caricatured as disengaged from faith, and the picture is more complicated and more hopeful than that. They are not so much absent as different in how they come. They are weary of spectacle and suspicious of the polished, high-production service; what they hunger for is authenticity, depth, and real community. A great many will never be drawn by a brighter stage or a bigger screen — but they are quietly drawn toward the transcendent, the sacred, the honest, and the small enough to be real. About a third attend with some regularity, while nearly as many never attend at all, which tells us the field is not closed but genuinely open and genuinely contested.

And the targeting principle — the durable heart of this material — is more vital than ever, only the targets have moved and the map has changed. People no longer live in the small, local circles that once made the neighborhood church the natural unit; community has thinned, families are scattered, and the old assumption that you would reach the people within a few blocks no longer holds. So the honest question this unit always pressed is sharper now than ever: look at whom you have reached in the past twelve months. If the answer is only people exactly like yourselves, only the aging, only those already churched, then the targeting is happening by default and by comfort — and the youngest generation, and the great company of the unreached, are walking on past your doors. Target on purpose, or you will target by accident. That was true when the church reached its neighborhood unintentionally. It is doubly true now, when there is no neighborhood left to do the reaching for us.

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