Preaching And The Breakout Church: An Interview With Thom Rainer
Preaching:
In much church growth teaching there’s an emphasis on the need to develop your
vision statement and clearly articulate that. Your research shows that in these
breakout churches that’s not as significant an issue.
Rainer:
It’s not in the sense that some of the church growth literature would say. First
of all, let me be clear in my definition of vision: a God specific plan for
a specific church at a specific time. That differs from my definition of mission.
Mission is God’s purpose for all churches. A mission statement from one church
to another should look very similar. Whether it has Warren’s Purposes or whether
it has something from the great commission or the great commandment, there should
be similarity from mission statement to mission statement. But if you look at
a vision statement as a specificity of what a church should be doing at a particular
time, that’s obviously going to be different.
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Most of these breakout
churches did not have a vision statement per se, and the primary reason they
didn’t have a vision statement was because the situation was so dynamic. By
the time you captured it as an emphasis for a church and the people bought into
it, there was a good chance two to three years later that the vision was shifting.
So the very dynamic nature of vision would indicate that a vision statement
may not be the best approach. That is not to suggest that these churches did
not have vision. These churches had clarity of vision better than any churches
I’ve ever been around. It was the scarcity of vision statements, not the lack
of vision.
Preaching:
One of the other things that was interesting in the book was your comment that
the plateaued church is a myth.
Rainer: I
can’t find any church in America that has the same exact attendance five years
ago as they do today. It’s just as simple as that. And then there’s another
part to this: if we really want to look at a true numerical assessment, you
ought to look at your worship attendance, which has been the standard barometer
for about a decade now. Look at worship attendance five years ago, ten years
ago and today, then look comparatively to see how your defined community has
grown. If your community has grown 10 percent in 5 years and you’ve grown 3
percent, I would say that from an impact point of view that’s a declining church.
So I encourage churches not only to look at their absolute statistics but to
compare it to their community. Then I also encourage churches to find out how
much of their growth is transfer growth and how much of it has been conversion
or true kingdom impact.
But the original
question was: is there a myth of a plateaued church. I think we just need to
say declining or growing, whichever one of the two may fit.