Preaching: What was the ultimate pool of churches from which you drew? Can you describe your study churches and your comparison churches?

Rainer: We ended up with a little over 52,000 churches — 52,333. When I say we ended up, I mean we had introductory basic data on those churches. We were able to get data on where churches were ten years ago and where they were today on about 52,000 of them. We could not get more refined data from all 52,000 of those but we began with those. 50,000 out of 400,000 is a pretty good start.

The first screen that we used on these 52,000 churches — it eliminated the most churches — was an evangelistic screen where we set certain parameters for a church being evangelistic; that actually eliminated a significant portion of 9 out of 10 churches.

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Preaching: Describe some of the characteristics that you found characterize those breakout churches.

Rainer: The number one characteristic that just jumps out is that a Breakout Church had a breakout leader. Prior to the church going through the process of breaking out there was some type of significant change in the heart, in the attitude, in the approach of the leadership. That leadership was typically a senior pastor but it wasn’t limited to senior pastor. It could have been others on staff and it also could have been key laypersons in the church. There was a heart desire that eventually said, “I am not going to be satisfied with mediocrity as a leader, I am not going to be satisfied with mediocrity in my church, and with these few brief years that God has given us I want to make a difference.” And so that heart change was common in all 13 of the church’s leaders. So we didn’t find a breakout church unless we also had a breakout leader.

The next thing that took place prior to the breakout, in the short term, would be called a “wake-up call” and the other that I put in the book was the “ABC moment,” meaning Awareness, Belief and Crisis. Once there was a leadership heart change, they began to look at the reality of their situation. The Rainer Group has done research on a pretty large sampling of churches and what we’ve found is that nearly 90 percent of churches — not the anecdotal 8 out of 10 but nearly 9 out of 10 churches — are either declining or growing so slow they’re not keeping up with their community. So there are a lot of churches that need a wakeup call.

Once these church’s leaders begin to have a desire to be someone different and to make a difference for the glory of God, they had a wakeup call. That wakeup call could have been something as simple as, “I’m going to review how our church has done numerically for the last 10 years” and some would say that’s an “oh, no!” moment. Some of them would walk out into the community and go to a convenience store – I can remember one story of a pastor doing that. He simply asked for directions to his church. He wanted to find out what they would say and two blocks away he found out that the convenience store owners didn’t even know where the church was located, much less that the church was making a difference in the community. I could go down the list of different kinds of wakeup calls but every one of them had a wakeup call that said, “I’m not making a difference and my church is not making a difference.”