I know it is not so popular these days to talk about church growth, but I’ve never really cared what was popular or trendy, so here’s a post about the role of leadership in the growth of a local church.
1. The senior leader (the lead leader?) is the main reason a church grows or does not grow.
2. Don’t assume all growth barriers are spiritual and thus can be solved with more prayer and fasting. Many growth barriers are logistic, demographic, managerial, strategic, relational. . .
3. People skills grow a church to about 150. Ministry skills grow a church from about 150 to 800. Leadership skills grow from 800 to 2,000. But it takes a highly skilled functional team to grow beyond 2,000. Only 10% of pastors in the world lead their churches beyond 200.
4. Ministry skills and leadership skills are easy to learn if we are hungry and teachable and find the right mentors.
5. As long as there is one lost person in your community, your church needs to grow—even if growth is not the idea of the moment among the cool, relevant, missional, emerging, untucked shirt, goatee-growing, high-lighted hair, podcasting, blogging, twitting, tofu-eating, latte-sipping, save the planet, Pria-driving, $500 hole in the jeans-wearing, stay small, know-it-all religious pundits. If a church reaches people who don’t know Jesus—like it or not—it will probably grow.
*** Japan pix posted here ***