Faith in Context

American Congregations Are In Decline Across the Board

American Congregations 2008 was released on Thursday at the Religion Newswriters Association annual meeting. My good friends Scott Thumma and David Roozen from the Hartford Institute of Religion Research are key players in this project which I participated in as a member of the steering committee. David wrote the report and Scott presented the study to the journalists. A number of other people also played essential roles, and we are all on the way toward a much larger study in 2010. It is part of the FACT series; Faith Communities Today.

The FACT series began with a major survey of congregations of all faiths in 2000 and so it gives the chance to see trends in local church life over the years. Most of these trends are currently going down hill. Most congregations report that attendance is declining, not increasing. Most congregations report that their finances are in worse shape. Most congregations report that spiritual vitality is down. More congregations say that most of their members are uncertain about the mission of their church. Many congregations have an aging membership, with fewer young adults.

Several other major studies in the last year or so have reported findings that show that a declining number of Americans are actively involved with organized religion. The fastest-growing segments are people who either have no interest in religion, including many who are very interested in spirituality, and those who are interested in less-structured religion such as nondenominational churches and informal groups that meet in homes, coffee shops, etc. This new study tends to confirm those trends and show the impact on the congregation's across the country.

There are exceptions to the general decline. Congregations with very strong leadership, a clear mission and a willingness to make changes in the way they do worship and ministry are able to defy the downward trends. Two other behaviors that correlate with growth and vitality include active hospitality extended to newcomers and strong support for volunteers.

You can download the report at http://fact.hartsem.edu/products/index.html. A more detailed version with a lot of additional information will be coming later in the fall.

How Congregations Respond to Newcomers

One of the most important aspects of a growing congregation in America is its immediate response after someone new attends church for the first time. Growing churches make contact during week or two after a newcomer visits and current methods of contact include mail, telephone, Email, personal visit and sending materials such as a brochure about the congregation, and audio cassette or CD or even a short documentary DVD about the congregation.

A key question tested in a recent survey is which method is most effective. The results are surprising, but illustrate how much more complex the question of effectiveness can be than it is usually assumed to be. In fact the data show that there is no real difference in the effectiveness of each approach is measured by itself. The proportion of growing churches that use each method is near 50 percent, while a little less than half report that they do not use each method. Nothing conclusive here; pick the one you like and go with it.

Wait a minute! If we look at the percentage of growing churches that use combinations of these methods, then a striking correlation surfaces. Growing churches that use ...

• none of these methods is 37 percent
• one method is 45 percent
• two methods is 48 percent
• three methods is 51 percent
• four methods is 57 percent
• all five methods is 65 percent

So the key is not finding which method is most effective, but the cumulative effective of using as many of the methods as you can.

This is just one of the hundreds of findings that will be published in September in the new report from the Faith Communities Today (FACT) series, American Congregations 2008. We looked at some of the page proofs today during the annual meeting of the interfaith Cooperation Congregation Studies Partnership in Chicago. CCSP is the consortium of some 40 denominations and faith groups that does the FACT studies. The main agenda item at this year's annual meeting is planning for the 2010 FACT Survey, a replication of the first major study of American congregations in 2000 which will result in a full decade of trends for hundreds of items.

Jehovah's Witnesses & Evangelistic Effectiveness

I have been asked many times about the effectiveness of the method widely used by Jehovah's Witnesses; going door to door "cold turkey" or attempting to visit people in their homes without any invitation or prior relationship having been established. The organization is not very public about its membership data, so it has been difficult to give a direct answer. I was glad to find out today that a French scholar has gained access to the data and has published some clear evidence on this question.

The worldwide growth rate for Jehovah's Witnesses last year (2008) was 2.1 percent, a decent growth rate although significantly short of the seven percent among the Assemblies of God, or the five percent among Evangelical Christians in sub-Saharan Africa or the 3.6 percent of the worldwide Seventh-day Adventist Church. More to the point is data on how many hours of evangelistic activity (going door to door or standing with literature on city street corners or in subway stations) must be invested per new convert.

It requires twice as many hours per convert in the U.S. and Europe as it does in Africa, Latin America and Eastern Europe. Even more to the point is the change in these data over recent decades. In 1980 in the U.S. it took 2,915 hours of evangelistic labor per convert, and by 2008 that had more than doubled to 6,120 hours per convert. In Canada it went from 3,342 hours to 9,082 hours per convert over the same period. In the United Kingdom it went from 3,511 hours to 7,074 hours per convert. In Italy it went from 2,540 hours to 10,121 hours per convert.

Clearly the "population seems to be more resistant to Witnesses' proselytism than used to be the case," comments Religion Watch in reporting this research. But even at the lowest rate (2,540 hours per convert in Italy in 1980) this seems a very inefficient approach. A key theological consideration: Is it good stewardship of the time and talent that God has placed in the church to use such an inefficient method? Jehovah's Witnesses believe it is an exercise necessary to salvation, so they may not be very concerned about the efficiency or effectiveness of the method. Most Christians do not believe that you can work your way into salvation in this way, so the stewardship issues become more pronounced when considering this or any methodology.

An argument could be made that perhaps this method should be used in the southern hemisphere, where it has a more effective rate. In churches with large numbers of people and small resources of other kinds, a labor intensive approach to evangelism makes more sense that in the context of the U.S. and Europe. But remember that the current data in these fast-growing areas is near the 3,000 hours per convert mark. How long will that continue to be good stewardship? Italy was at this level in 1980 and now it has one of the highest rates in the world. Does this method actually create resistance and eventually burn out its effectiveness?

My thanks to the staff at Religion Watch for picking up this research by Bernard Blandre in a French-language journal, Mouvements Religieux. I do not read French well enough to have found this unaided.

Gordon Cosby Steps Down from Church of the Saviour

You may be too young to know this name; Gordon Cosby has served as pastor of the Church of the Saviour in Washington DC for more than 60 years. He is now 91 and on the last Sunday in 2008, he preached his final sermon, sealing his retirement. The congregation is selling the church headquarters in the Dupont Circle neighborhood and considering Cosby's recommendation to not hire a replacement. Why? Because this is a man and a congregation who have embodied the servant-leadership of Christ better than any religious institution from the mid-20th century to the present.

Never more than 200 members, the church actually seemed to discourage growth. You can only join for one year at a time. If you do not re-apply each year, your membership automatically lapses. But, you have to attend the School of Christian Living one evening a week for two years before you can move from apprentice membership to full membership. No congregation has ever taken more seriously the path of discipleship.

What were the results? Hundreds of faith-based ministries have been started over the years, including a community health center, a residential treatment center for women with AIDS, hundreds of units of low-cost housing, a jobs program that placed 800 unemployed individuals last year, FLOC (For the Love of Children, a movement that revamped how foster care is done in DC), Alabaster Jar (a movement of artists who are people of faith and express faith in their art), the influential Wellspring retreat center, a small college, and Potter's House, what many consider the original Christian coffeehouse ministry which still operates in the Adams-Morgan neighborhood on Columbia Road in Washington.

Cosby has written almost nothing that is published. I treasure the few audio cassettes of his lectures to seminarians that I collected (by hand) in the early 1970s, as well as his Handbook for Mission Groups which is long out of print. (The Church publishes a current version, but more than half of his original material has been removed over the years to down-size it to reduce the cost of publication.) Yet, he is one of the most influential men in the Christian faith of the 20th century. His ideas about servant-leadership and incarnational witness have been widely adopted and are today taught and believed and practiced by many thousands of believers who have never heard his name.

Cosby taught, and the Church of the Saviour practices, the rule that one cannot be a member of the congregation without being a member of a small group that is actively involved in some mission. The two years of preparational classes equips prospective members to be involved in a mission group and when they join a mission group or call together a new mission group with at least two others, then they become members. He truly believes and taught his congregation to practice "the priesthood of all believers," rescuing it from the self-centered religion that it has become. In other words, it does not mean defining my own salvation on my terms, but serving "them," the lost, the suffering, the marginalized, as a representative of the all-compassionate Christ.

The life of Gordon Cosby puts the lie to all the pretensions of the vast majority of "Christians." He was born in a small town in Virginia, became a Baptist pastor and went to Europe as a military chaplain during World War II. When he came home he was struck by the insight that the followers of Jesus are at war with the forces of evil, but they sure don't act like it. So he planted a new church in the inner city of Washington DC and vowed to follow the life of Christ as literally as possible in the contemporary context. (I mean by that the important stuff, not wearing a beard or sandals.)

I had the privilege of some personal conversations with Cosby when I worked at The Gate urban ministry in the Georgetown neighborhood of Washington in the early 1970s. I remember walking away with the deep impression that no one I had ever met had so fully integrated well-informed social action with such deep, abiding, Bible-based faith. He was both deeply spiritual and very practical; he profoundly understood community organizing and Bible doctrines.

Cosby's last gift to his congregation was to see them through the process of becoming a number of congregations, although intentionally not a denomination. Although sometimes referred to as "the seven churches" (an allusion to the first few chapters of Revelation), I think there are more than 15 in the Washington area now, as well as several across the nation. Cosby never trademarked "Church of the Saviour" (probably impossible), so not every church with that name is necessarily rooted in his ministry. In fact, most of the churches that actually spun off from his original congregation do not use the same name.

Click here to see the Washington Post report of his last sermon.

Door-to-Door Evangelism

Some religions have a tradition of going door to door in search of people who they can share the gospel with and eventually recruit as church members. Internally, this practice has become controversial in some denominations as privacy has become a stronger value in American society and knocking on anyone's door without an appointment has come to considered bad manners. (How can one represent Christ rightly when one starts by behaving badly?)

For many years there has been strong data showing that this method and others that attempt to share faith with strangers are very ineffective. For example, Jehovah's Witnesses (JW) are required to put in several hours each week going door to door, but 95 percent of them do not have any converts in any given year. Another example, a Fundamentalist Christian group gets one convert per each 7,619 hours (per individual member) using this approach. The Later-Day Saints (LDS or "Mormons") have modified their approach to missionary work in recent years in view of the fact that most religious conversions in any faith take place within the social networks of the members. Their missionaries still have to put in some time doing cold-call door to door contacts, but they are also using TV spots to get leads for visits and encouraging more attention to members sharing with their friends, relatives, coworkers, etc.

Rodney Stark (who seems to be positioning himself as the iconoclast of the sociology of religion) and Laurence Iannaccone presented a paper at the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion meeting in October in Louisville arguing that there may be a marginal usefulness in organized programs of witnessing to strangers. Their paper argues that if a religious movement lasts long enough, its growth rate declines and eventually there is "network exhaustion." That is, all of the people in the social networks of their members who are likely to convert have already done so, or at least so many have done so that it is difficult to find potential members. They useJW and LDS growth data to support their theory that some movements "transcend the strong-tie barrier and grow through weak ties." They also say that a religious movement has to have a hierarchy with sufficient power to push people to do the difficult work involved in sufficient volume to actually continue to grow.

There are many difficulties with this paper by Stark and Iannaccone. (1) A single paper does not trump scores of previous studies. (2) This paper does not attempt to refute the primary finding that the most effective means of evangelism is among the social networks of members, it simply offers a rationale for continuing the cold-call approach despite this reality. If you hear someone referring to this research as an argument for door to door work and against "Friendship Evangelism," they simply don't know what they are talking about. (3) The JW data is suspect. The JW organization does not report reliable data and so any researcher who uses JW data is either getting it from more difficult sources (such as surveys in which people identify a JW preference whether or not they are actually adherents) or simply guessing. (4) There is plenty of evidence that LDS is reaching into new communities and has not come near "network exhaustion," so they are probably not a good source of data to support the theory proposed.

Bottom Line: The most effective kind of evangelism is still the informal sharing and demonstrated compassion of believers among their friends, relatives, coworkers, neighbors and acquaintances. Religious leaders who persist in promoting cold-call methods may have a variety of reasons for doing so, but that doesn't make it a good idea. If a congregation or movement feels that it is nearing "network exhaustion," it would be more effective to encourage their members to widen their networks (make new friends, get involved in new circles) than to adopt door to door canvassing as a key strategy. 

Internal Dynamics of Multicultural Congregations

A new book by a sociologist at Ohio State University gives a look inside multicultural congregations. Although the author uses data from the National Congregations Study (Mark Chavez), this is primarily a case study of one conservative Protestant congregation in Columbus, which is labeled "Crosstown Community Church." A key question: What evidence is there that this one case study is representative of the experiences of other, similarly multicultural congregations?

Nonetheless the findings in this study are very important as more American churches become multicultural and America becomes more diverse. At least one the denominations with more than one million members (the Seventh-day Adventist Church in North America) crossed over the threshold recently into having no ethnic majority group. Leaders are either in denial or feeling their way in terms of what this means for the future of the faith. Although its worldwide membership has a decidedly small White minority and its national churches are quite diverse in a number of places, those nations where this denomination has its best growth and greatest penetration are places where there is a dominate ethnic majority and relatively little diversity.

Korie Edwards book The Elusive Dream: The Power of Race in Interracial Churches(Oxford University Press) finds that "whites remain dominate, even in places that embrace racial diversity." This is a congregation that is primarily Black and White, with few Hispanics and Asians. White cultural norms are maintained in this congregation because when there is the threat of change away from White preferences, Whites are likely to leave. And a critical mass of Black members, because of their concern about maintaining a diverse congregation, support the White concerns.

This dynamic might apply to many issues, but worship style is a key issue. Members quote the New Testament idea of "decent and orderly" worship to theologically support a style of worship rooted in White cultural norms. The Whites in the congregation remain blind to their race privilege in this debate and evidently think that the decisive support of a key segment of the Black members simply proves that they are right in their culture-centric understanding of the Bible principle. This ignorance may be willful because they are generally unwilling to participate in organized conversations about race.

Of course, the weakness of this study is the fact that it is about a single congregation and we have no way of knowing how widespread these precise dynamics may be. There are undoubtedly quite different dynamics in other multicultural congregations and we can only guess at the percentages at this point or draw inferences from more broadly-based samples that touch on similar issues. Nonetheless, Dr. Edwards has done very important work in beginning to help us understand the reality of ethnic change in congregations, a topic that needs much more attention as America moves into its demographic future.

Religion and the Recession: A Test of Faith

Watch carefully. The response of religion to the recession will be an indicator of something else all together, namely the spiritual authenticity of particular denominations and religious institutions. The authentic spiritual response to this situation is to focus on the needs of hurting people and families in crisis; we are here to serve God as He cares for His creation and only secondarily to concern ourselves with the needs of our own organizations.

Unfortunately, a great many congregations, denominations and religious institutions will fail this simple test and their spiritual emptiness will be revealed for all to see. They will concern themselves first and foremost with balancing budgets, cutting back, encouraging believers to be faithful in giving and other essentially self-serving responses. A religious organization that cannot take the same position as Christ--willing to give its life for those it serves--fails the simple test of authenticity. It is revealed as less than a genuine agency of God.

It is not often that we have a sociological litmus test of this kind. The recession has provided a unique opportunity to see the real character of organized religion. Keep note: don't let this opportunity pass by. You may not have another opportunity for such clarity in decades.

Blogs as Marketing Strategies

With the current economic situation, many marketers are looking for less expensive ways to advertise and one medium they are turning to is Blogs. This trend is another indicator of the fact that the blogsphere has become a significant part of the total media picture. New research shows that nearly half of Americans read Blogs.

• 3% several times a day
• 5% daily or at least every other day
• 12% about once a week
• 27% once a month or less
• 53% never

Half of this half (about a quarter of the population) find Blogs helpful as they make decisions about purchases and report that a Blog has played a key role in some purchase they have made in the last year. So, if a marketer or idea/cause campaign could get its message into all or most of the relevant Blogs, it could influence up to a quarter of the population.

What does this mean for pastors, churches and ministries? Pastors, how many of your members are bloggers? Do you ever ask them to refer to some goal or theme that you are pursuing in their Blogs? Do you ask other pastors in other churches in your community or across your denomination or other networks to pick up on a theme and include links to your material? When you have a special event, do you ask Blogs throughout the community to include an announcement? Does your church or ministry have a designated blogger? Does this person network with other bloggers in relevant networks?

Source: Nov. 21, 2008, issue of Research Alert

Finding the Key Missional Tool

There continues to be a lot of debate about how the mission of Christ should be implemented in our contemporary social context in America. There are those who have tried marketing models from the corporate world and have successfully drawn crowds, but how are criticized for diluting the gospel. There are those who continue to advocate traditional methods as if Jesus spoke KJV English. Missional churches have tried to thread the needle, sometimes with about as much success as Christ's proverbial camel.

David Fitch is both a theologian and a church planter in suburban Chicago. His article in the current issue of Christianity Today (Sept. 2008) provides some extraordinary insight and honesty. "As we planted the first seeds of our church in this place, I was repulsed by the expectation to turn the gospel into something that could fit people's schedules or provide immediate, quick-fix spiritual benefits." He describes how his congregation has wrestled with this reality and outlines the innovative breakthrough that has, so far, eluded them:

We have often panned old methods of evangelism that make salvation into a transaction. We wince at any quick prayer that would reduce repentance and faith to a ticket out of hell. We believe this approach has trained people into all the wrong ways of knowing Christ. But ... we realized our members need a different kind of evangelistic tool. ... We have not yet pinpointed what a four spiritual laws diagram or bridge illustration ... might look like for our missional community. ... I believe any such tool must accomplish at least two things.

First [it] must lead the new believer in the back-and-forth motion between the bigness of God's salvation for the world and what he wants to do "for us" [individually]. ... This tool must ... allow the busy suburban family person to catch a glimpse of the world he or she is not seeing, instead of first appealing to the all-too-familiar "need." Like a mind-bender movie that helps us see reality in a different way, such a tool would unfold the big picture of God's "reconciling the world to himself."

Second [it] must function from within the context of the congregation's life, because it is only here that the words and pictures we share take on flesh and make sense. ... At times, we ... have thrown up our hands and said that such community is not possible in suburban life. Yet who is not blessed by a friend who takes the time to offer "a cup of cold water" in the desert that suburban life can become? These relationships minister the gospel.

He ends by saying, "We at [his congregation] have yet to arrive at this elusive evangelistic tool." Do you have any insights for him? Any experiments that shed some light on this search? I believe he has located himself right at a crucial point in all the innovation and experimentation going on in the church today. How do you see it?

What is a Community Organizer?

The concept has been around since the 1930s, but evidently many people have missed the definition. I have been asked by several to provide a definition and I see this question bandied about, although maybe not all of those asking it in the media are genuine about the question.

A community organizer is someone who builds community, brings people together, encourages them to understand and help their neighbors, and makes things happen. It is a profession. It has an established, proven discipline. It is based in a particular set of skills and a defined process, but involves several different major approaches. Community organizers work to empower communities that are marginalized by poverty or social injustice. They believe that poor and oppressed communities can solve their own problems and improve their quality of life if they are empowered to do so. Christian community organizers believe that true followers of Christ will give their lives to caring for others if they are encouraged and empowered to do so.

That is the simple definition. This the kind of professional that is necessary for any community to thrive and be truly just. Every community has powerful and relatively wealthy people who can make things happen. The powerful get elected to city council and the state legislature. The relatively wealthy belong to the Chamber of Commerce. But what empowers the other 99 percent of Americans who do not sit on the city council and do not belong to Chamber of Commerce? That is why community organizers are needed to help the rest of us get the things done that we value.

Up through the mid-1970s, the field of community organizing was dominated by individuals who were largely secular in orientation. From that time on, people of faith have become the largest number of active professionals. There was internal controversy on the topic from the late 1970s through the mid-1980s, but today the most widely accepted strategy for community organizing is based in congregations. Among believers it is most easily possible to find those unselfish enough to really serve the common good and the needs of the powerless.

If you want more information, I will gladly share my four-page complete bibliography on the topic. If you don't want to post your Email address in the comments section, you can find my Email address in my profile.