Preaching And The Breakout Church: An Interview With Thom Rainer
So those are two
of the big issues that have come forth: the dominance of the expositional model
and the time spent in sermon preparation.
Preaching:
What are some things that have really surprised you in the breakout churches
study?
Rainer:
One is how few breakout churches we’re able to find. I know that I didn’t find
all the breakout churches in America. I know that 13 is not the total because
obviously I didn’t look at 350,000 churches, and even of the 52,000 I looked
at I was not able to get good data on all of those. But when it was all said
and done, I was surprised at how relatively few breakout churches we were able
to find.
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The second surprise
— that I have to say was a disappointment with my own prejudices and bias going
in — was that every breakout church went through some type of significant crisis.
That’s part of the ABC moment – Awareness, Belief, Crisis. And my preference
is to be an encourager and tell a leader of a declining church that if they
are going to go through a breakout that there’s a high likelihood it will precipitate
some level of crisis in the church is not what I wanted. Yet every one of these
churches had some type of crisis take place. One of them lost 2000 in attendance
within a few months and one of them lost 400 key families within a few months.
Conflict and crisis was common in these churches. They were moving and some
of the lay people got out of their comfort zone and some of them fought back
and there was conflict.
We saw that two
big words out there that are often embraced by churches, rightly so, are excellence
and innovation. And we found that excellence and innovation are important but
they’re usually the caboose and they’re not the engine. Sometimes unhealthy
churches embrace innovative ideas and try to become churches of excellence;
all they are doing is trying to innovate that which needs to be totally discarded
or trying to make that which is excellent which they don’t want there anyway.
The issues of excellence and innovation were important but they tended to be
more accelerators to what was going on than the drivers of what took place.
Preaching:
Were there any pleasant surprises?
Rainer: There
were a lot. If I could just sum it up into a single thesis it is that through
God’s power it is possible for most churches to be breakout churches. If we
looked at these churches before and not just after the breakout, very few of
us would have said that they are going to do what they did. I got great hope
from the fact that these churches made it through the breakout, made it through
the crisis, and now have a tremendous community and kingdom impact. The most
pleasant of surprises is the possibility that what happened in these 13 is,
in God’s power, a transferable concept.