What does it mean when we say we're a growing church?  And what causes a church to quote “grow”?  Before we get too far into that question, let's do a little history lesson back in the '50s and '60s church growth was measured by the number of people who attended Sunday school. In fact, you can usually spot a church building from that area because they normally had more space for Sunday school than for worship. The foyers were small and the sanctuaries very large.  The architecture focused on beauty and symbolism, and did not avail itself to creature comforts.  

Over the years our success begans to be measured, not by the number of people who attend Sunday school, but by those who attended morning worship. So if you look at the structures from those times, you would note that sanctuaries were larger and the number of Sunday school rooms were limited.  Later, Buildings became more pragmatic.  So we started padding our pews and expanding our foyers.  We focused less on beauty and more on function. 

 During the '80s and the 90s our attention shifted from Sunday school attendance to the numbers of ministries the church had.  We wanted to become relevant, so we built multi-purpose buildings and we exchanged our organs and pianos for synthesizers and electric guitars.   Our goal was to provide something for everyone. When it came to buildings, we used the philosophy taken from the movie Field of dreams, “Build it and they will come”.  As a result, most of the contemporary minded churches were lured into building facilities they experience exponential growth.  Their strategy was to attract people by providing a great program and an amazing building.  The goal was to bring more contributors into the facility so they could help finance the ongoing building related expenses.   Some were fortunate enough to keep up with the mortgage payments, keep their staff, and to continue a pattern of growth.  But little did they know, seismic changes were ahead.

The sons and daughters who grew up with amazing children's youth and youth programs, fantastic church facilities, and multiple staff are no longer buying into their parent’s understanding of corporate style church. The attractive model of worship is no longer attractive to the young adults. For them the church looked a lot like Enron, or Wall Street, or Walmart. And weren't all that impressed with these industrial commercial types of approaches to church.  

Today people are not as likely to be loyal to anyone church.  They're more likely to give to a good cause than to give regular tithes and their offerings to a local congregation.  People are more likely to connect with a smaller group of friends to any one local church. You might say that they're more a incarnational than they are attractional. People are not connected to a church because of their doctrine or their denominational ties.  And people don't want to be burdened by mortgage payments and hefty utility bills. On the other hand, there are some things they do find attractive.  They want authentic, real relationships. They want to connect with their peers in informal small group settings. They want to learn and grow as Christians, but not so much through declaring the word as living life together.   
In his book, Missional Renaissance, Reggie McNeil suggests that we begin measuring our success in three ways. First, our ministry needs to move from internal to external.  Secondly, we need to move from program development to people development.  And thirdly, we need to move from church based leadership to Kingdom based leadership. 

We started this conversation by asking what is it that causes a church to grow and what does it mean when we say we're a growing church.  I'd like to suggest that we change the matrix maybe the better question is how are we going about making disciples? this question leads us to more probing measurements.  For instance, what would happen if we reduced the importance of counting morning worship attendance and weekly giving to questions like this:  What are the number of growing relationships we have with people who are not followers of Jesus?  How many venues does the church have for personal service within the community? Who are you personally discipling?  These are weighty, deep probing questions that cause us to shift our focus from being a growing church we would actually become a fruitful church.