Church and the future

Last night we got to thinking about the future of the church. At what point does church begin to become uncomfortable? At what point does size impact upon your vision and values? Undeniably developing gospel relationships is only possible in groups of certain sizes, so what is too big and when do you start planning for the next thing?

I was reminded of the S-curve of Church growth, a diagram is below. Churches grow, but as they approach capacity growth levels off, before they eventually stagnate and then begin to decline. Arresting a declining church is much harder than redirecting a growing church. The red dotted line on the graph below indicates a point at about 80% at which growth starts to slow. The church is comfortable and begins to lose its evangelistic edge.

The challenge at about 80% capacity is to launch, change or challenge the church so that it can begin another growth spurt, so that it retains its evangelistic edge and the growth curve looks more like this:

That change, challenge or launch can look very different. It can mean moving to a bigger venue thus increasing capacity and giving space to invite non-believing friends, it could mean increasing the number of services in the same venue, or it may mean starting a new church somewhere else.

The challenge of Acts is to depend on God and be bold not comfortable with the great news of Jesus Christ.