Preaching And The Breakout Church: An Interview With Thom Rainer
Thom S. Rainer
is the newly-elected President of Lifeway Christian Resources, one of the world’s
largest providers of Christian products and services. Prior to his move to LifeWay
in October, Rainer was the founding dean of the Billy Graham School of Missions,
Evangelism and Church Growth at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville.
Before his election to this new position, however, Rainer visited with Preaching
editor Michael Duduit about his most recent book, Breakout Churches (Zondervan),
and what his research means to those who preach.
Preaching:
Talk to me a little bit about the idea behind Breakout Churches. Where
did the idea come from?
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Rainer:
I wish I could say the idea was my own. I think it’s the first book I’ve done
that has not been my own idea. I read the book Good to Great (by Jim
Collins) for the first time just picking it up off the shelf. Got it at Barnes
and Noble, read it, was mesmerized by it. Then the executive cabinet at seminary
was required to read it ; I again read it and was just totally fascinated by
the concept of companies that had struggled and broken out. Finally I got a
call from Paul Engle — who was my editor at Zondervan — and Paul had just attended
a conference with Jim Collins; he came away from that conference and he said
this is a perfect project for Rainer to do on churches. So I had already read
it twice, I had it in my mind, and he called me up and I said, “Well, that’s
a done deal as far as I’m concerned.”
So the first thing
I did was to get the research team together, tell them the concept even before
we had specific parameters. One of our research team was successful in making
contact with Jim Collins. He granted us a nice interview, gave us some good
ideas for research constructs and parameters, and I make it very clear in the
book and the interview that he was not responsible for the project but he was
gracious. Then when it was all said and done, Collins read my entire manuscript
and made some good changes, suggestions and corrections.
Preaching:
Explain what a “breakout church” is.
Rainer:
A breakout church, in simplest terms, is a church that has struggled in terms
of ministry impact in the community, statistical growth trends and their own
self-evaluation of their health. That struggle has typically taken place for
5 or more years, and then there has been a point where all of those things I’ve
just said have been reversed. Growth has gone from stagnant or declining to
positive. Ministry impact has gone from nothing to significant and the self-assessment
of health has gone up considerably.
The one thing that
I put in this that I originally did not plan was that the senior pastor did
not change during this process. I can thank George Barna for that — and I mean
positively. Barna wrote a book seven or eight years ago called Turn Around
Churches and he rightly came to a conclusion that the most common element
of a turn-around church was bringing on a new pastor. That is a reality. I wanted
to find the churches that turned around without changing the senior pastor.
So I put that into the parameters and that really narrowed the project significantly.