Over the last several days, I’ve been sharing my thoughts related to continuing research that shows big churches are getting bigger. You can see the links to previous posts in this series at the bottom of this article. Today, I’d like to address “The Reach Factor”.
I get to work with churches across the country on a regular basis. Within those churches, there are ministries that combine to form a church. Not every church has “The Reach Factor”. And, it’s not unusual for every ministry within a church to share “The Reach Factor”. Many times ministries and churches lean towards “The Keep Factor”. That’s a completely different approach to ministry.
When churches value keeping who they have over reaching people outside the church and outside the faith, their thinking, language and actions tend to look like this:
- They program for people who already attend the church.
- They create environments that assume only Christ-followers will be present.
- They use insider language that’s confusing to people new to the church.
- They assume any growth that happens will be initiated by a heart-change outside the church rather than one inside the church.
- They never stop ministries because that might offend someone inside the church.
- They are slow to do something new because it might offend someone inside the church.
- They think it’s a choice between “going deeper” and “reaching the lost” when it’s actually both.
- They choose personal preferences over potential ministry impact.
- They make decisions based on who they’ll keep rather than who they’ll reach.
There are a couple of ways to know whether or not your ministry has “The Reach Factor” in play. One way to think about it is to pretend someone is just hired to fill a student pastor (or any other ministry role) at your church. If one of the key objectives in their first days on the job is to try to get people who have left the church to return, that’s a good sign your church or ministry is more about “The Keep Factor”.
Also, when I’m working with churches, I have them go through this exercise. I have them list every single ministry environment at their church. Then create two columns by that list. One column is called “Reach” and the other column is called “Keep”. They go through their entire ministry list and determine if it’s more to “Reach” people outside the church or “Keep” people who already attend the church. I’ve noticed that churches that aren’t growing tend to have an overabundance of “Keep” ministries. Healthy churches need to have “Keep” ministries to help people take their next steps toward Christ, but it’s not healthy when almost every ministry is a “Keep” ministry.
Oh, and one more test… How you emotionally react to this post is probably also a good sign of whether or not you have “The Reach Factor”.
From your experience, what are some other indicators that a church is more focused on reaching people than keeping people? I’d love to hear your thoughts.
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Previous posts in this series:
